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Eating Dim Sum at Atlantic Seafood

The first thing you notice as you enter Atlantic Seafood Restaurant in Monterey Park is a pair of stylish wine racks. That's one of them in the photo above.

At lunch, though, you're more likely to find pots of tea on the tables than wine, because people are there to eat dim sum, which is served from rolling carts (above). 

The takeout dim sum menu lists 67 items, not counting the chow fun, noodles and fried rice that are available at lunch. On any one day, you won't see all of these, but there are still plenty of choices.

Like soft, creamy eggplant stuffed with shrimp paste (above).

And cilantro sticky rice with sliced Chinese sausage wrapped in lotus leaves (above). 

Fried spring rolls (above) are filled with diced shrimp. Behind them are steamed shrimp dumplings and, at right, shiu mai.

White turnip cakes and crunchy, translucent water chestnut cakes are fried to order on this cart.

Lots of tempting buns pass by. These chewy sticky rice flour buns are filled with pork.  

Sometimes you just want something simple, like Chinese broccoli perfectly cooked so that it is bright green and still crunchy. At this restaurant, the stalks are cut into shorter lengths to make them easier to eat.  

For dessert you could have an egg custard tart or perhaps one of these sugary buns.The woman pushing the cart said they were filled with sweet bean paste. But that wasn't the case. Inside was intensely sweet and runny yellow custard.

Atlantic Seafood has room for more than 400 diners. And there's plenty of food to satisfy them. Aside from dim sum, the menu lists 234 dishes, among them house specials such as as stir-fried saffron mussels with sugar snap peas, fried chicken stuffed with shrimp paste, clams and vermicelli in spicy wine soup and live seafood.

You may have trouble spotting the restaurant, because you won't see signs from the street. Look for it inside Atlantic Times Square, the large new shopping, entertainment and restaurant mall on Atlantic Boulevard in Monterey Park. It's on the second floor, next to a Japanese restaurant. 

Atlantic Seafood & Dim Sum Restaurant, 500 N. Atlantic Blvd., Suite 200, Monterey Park, CA 91754. Tel: (626) 872-0388.

Eating at the Beach in Oxnard

What's not to love about cranberry bread pudding with vanilla bean ice cream (above), or a fruity Bellini with a raspberry floating on top?

These started and ended lunch at the new Coastal Grill at the Embassy Suites Mandalay Beach Hotel & Resort in Oxnard. 

Opened in April, the restaurant is part of the resort's two-year, $17 million renovation project. Along with fellow food, wine and travel writers, I went there to taste from the menu introduced by executive chef Tim Hulbert.

With the Bellinis, we sampled one of the grill's appetizers, skewered Spanish sausage with pineapple and Hawaiian bread cubes (above), then toured the premises before lunch. 

The resort gets many visitors from Japan, Germany and England, to whom typical California food must seem exotic. Take, for example, Baja spring rolls (above) stuffed with chicken, corn, black beans and pico de gallo and accompanied by tomatillo salsa and a Southwest dipping sauce.  

Hulbert's triple-stack quesadilla (above) layers chicken, cheeses and red and green bell peppers. On the side are guacamole, pico de gallo and sour cream.

Wines accompanied each course. The best pairing, in my opinion, was A to Z Wine Works' 2012 Oregon Pinot Gris with the first course, lobster bisque (above).

Gazpacho (above) arrives with chopped vegetables in the center of a large white bowl. Then a puree of the same vegetables is poured into the bowl at the table. 

Hulbert fries zucchini and bell pepper slices along with calamari rings (above)  to lighten this popular appetizer. 

His oven-roasted chicken (above)  and grilled California halibut are fine, but what really gets attention is what he puts underneath--crisp-tender green beans and tri-colored Israeli coucous seasoned with onion and garlic and mixed with dried cranberries.

The halibut (above) gets a typical California topping--pesto and lime sauce. And probably no Californian has missed out on an Asian chicken salad. At the Coastal Grill, the chicken is tossed with greens, tangerine segments and a soy and sesame dressing. 

The hotel is at the edge of a broad, uncrowded beach, a good place for a walk to work up an appetite. The lush landscaping (above) makes you think you have escaped to some tropical getaway, although you have driven only an hour from Los Angeles. 

A Turkish Feast at the Anatolian Festival

I'm sitting in Topkapi Palace. From there, I can hear the strains of a Turkish marching band outside and, later in the afternoon, the call to prayer from a mosque next door.

This isn't Turkey, though, it's the Orange County Fair and Event Center in Costa Mesa, transformed for the Anatolian Cultures & Food Festival. The four-day event was an opportunity to experience everything Turkish.

The entire site, including the food stands (at top), had been set up to recreate Turkish architecture and historic sites. The food wasn't simulated, though. It was the real thing, some of it straight from Turkey.

These women, rolling out the dough for flatbreads, could have been working and gossiping in some Turkish village.

You could find meat such as this, cooked on a vertical skewer, almost anywhere in Turkey.  

These huge containers hold a popular street food called tantuni. The spiced, diced meat is eaten wrapped in a flat bread called lavas. 

Gaziantep, considered the culinary center of Turkey, sent this man to make katmer, a package of sheer dough filled with pistachios, thick cream and sugar. It sold out so quickly that by the time I tried to buy some, it was gone. In Turkey, newlyweds eat this alluring pastry at their first breakfast to represent the sweetness they hope to find in their marriage. 

Gaziantep is renowned for baklava (above), some of it colored green with pistachios. The Gaziantep booth offered little boxes with individual bites of the famous baklava of Imam Cagdas, a restaurant in Gaziantep, and sold packages of intensely flavored local pistachios.

Komagene, a Turkish chain that as yet has no American outlet, served spicy, sweet chee kufta in a romaine leaf (above). This meatless tartare, composed of bulgur ground with walnuts, almonds and many seasonings, could be a big seller here. 

Another delicious bulgur dish was kisir, sometimes called Turkish tabbouleh. 

Food columnist and cookbook author Faye Levy (Feast from the Mideast) gave an overview of Anatolian cuisine in an area set aside for talks and cooking demonstrations.

Vegetables cooked in olive oil is a menu category in Turkey, she said, and a specialty of Izmir, where the cuisine is influenced by Greece. The Veggieland stall served only such vegetables, among them stuffed eggplants (above) and green beans with tomatoes.

Manti, or Turkish ravioli, showed off the fine handwork of Turkish cooks. The tiny morsels of meat-stuffed pasta were topped with tomato sauce and yogurt.  

Baklava wasn't the only sweet. Another was lokma (above), fried dough balls to munch on with tea.  

Coconut-coated carrot balls were composed of pureed carrots mixed with crushed cookies, sugar, cinnamon and walnuts. 

Other desserts included bread kataifi, small syrup-soaked semolina cakes called sekerpare and Noah's pudding, a mixture of barley, rice, beans, dried fruits, walnuts and coconut.

Cones of "sticky" ice cream from Maras attracted long lines of customers. Also popular were snow cones flavored with Turkish style syrups (above). 

Some 400 volunteers worked for two weeks to set up the festival, which included music performances, folk dances and displays of Turkish arts and crafts.  If you missed it, that's a shame. But you can still find information on Turkish cuisine and recipes on the festival website.

Wined Out but Eating Well at the L.A. International Wine Competition

Never have I eaten so well, and drunk so poorly, as at the Los Angeles International Wine Competition last week in Pomona.

The wines were fine. That wasn't the issue. I sat in as an observer on a panel (at top) judging 93 of them in a single day. Drinking that many would have been suicide. And if I liked a wine a lot, too bad. All of my tastes went into a spit bucket.

You can read the details of the judging and learn about related events you can attend in my story today in L.A. Weekly's Squid Ink.

Mercifully, at lunch the drink set out at each place was iced tea. During dinner, we could drink as much as we wanted from displays of last year's winners (above), and bottles were passed non-stop at the tables. The downside was, after dealing with so much wine during the day, I wasn't up for more.

The food was wonderful, though. The Squid Ink article describes what the judges ate for lunch. For dinner, we were almost overwhelmed by dish after dish prepared by Chef David Teig and his crew (above). Teig is in charge of McKinley's Grille at the Sheraton Fairplex Hotel & Conference Center, where the judging took place.

This salad combined gorgeous heirloom tomatoes with cheese and microgreens.

Spicy grilled octopus came with Anaheim chiles, fresh peaches and mint.

Here's a bowlful of asparagus, fresh morels and cheese.

Farm-raised squash and farm bacon accompanied king salmon (above), appropriate because we were eating outdoors in McKinley's Farm at Fairplex, site of the L.A. County Fair.

Meat eaters tucked into ostrich (above) and chicken.

Dinner ended with a choice of Moscato snow cones drizzled with port wine or hoja santa custard ice cream topped with saffron honey. Why choose? I had both--and caught the last trolley back to the hotel. 

Bargain Dim Sum at Ocean Star

If you're looking for a bargain, go to Ocean Star Restaurant in Monterey Park on a weekday.

Then you can take advantage of lower than usual prices for dim sum--40 to 50 cents a serving less than on weekends. My group of five ordered liberally and wound up paying only $9 each, including a substantial tip.

The dim sum is first rate, not bargain food, and it's sent around the room on rolling carts (above).

The servers are friendly, like this one, who posed while a co-worker egged her on.

This cart of sweets caught my eye (above). They're not all desserts. Some contain chicken or barbecued pork in buns with sweet yellow topping. 

These tender rice wrappers are filled with shrimp. 

These chewy buns contain shrimp too, but the shrimp are dried, and the flavor is intense.  

Here is our table when we were well into lunch.  Dishes that came later included fish paste in wedges of green pepper, crisp-skinned roast duck, steamed pork dumplings with ruffly edges, sesame balls filled with sweet bean paste and egg tarts. Those are chicken feet in the center container.  

On weekdays, the crowds that notoriously swamp dim sum restaurants on weekends are absent, and it's easy to get a table. Maybe it's always easy to get a table, because Ocean Star is a huge restaurant, with room for 800 or more customers. Even the reception area is big enough to house a small restaurant.

Ocean Star Restaurant, 145 N. Atlantic Blvd., #201-203, Monterey Park, CA 91754. Tel: (626) 308-2128. 

Spicy Rice Cakes in a Garden Setting

This isn't your usual pasta. As a matter of fact, it isn't pasta at all, but rice cakes in a red sauce with seafood and vegetables.

Like a picture, it has a frame, golden slices of kabocha squash. 

The place where you can eat this is Cafe Scent, a Korean coffee shop with a long menu of snacks, main dishes and sweets.

This dish is a fusion version of tteokbokki. a rice cake stir-fry that often is very spicy. At Cafe Scent, the sauce is lighter and less spicy. Along with shrimp, squid and a single mussel, the mix includes mushrooms and red and green bell peppers. On top is melted mozzarella, like a pizza.

Cafe Scent gets its name not just from aromatic dishes like this but from its other specialty, flowers. The shop deals in wedding bouquets, gift baskets, floral decorations for events, table centerpieces and the like. 

It's cute and cozy with two rooms, one rather dark. The other (above) is lighter and more gardenlike.

Cafe Scent, 3680 Wilshire Blvd., #PO3, Los Angeles, CA 90010. (The entrance is around the corner on Serrano Ave., south of Wilshire.) Tel: (213) 383-9440.

A Stinky Dish at Tasty Garden

Eat this if you dare. It's steamed ground pork with stinky salt fish on top.

One place you can get it is Tasty Garden in Alhambra. The pork mixture is mild. The fish is anything but mild. It's extremely salty and as pungent as the smelliest cheese. If you're sitting downwind, you'll be overpowered. 

But devotees, like my friend Billy, love it. When I eat Chinese food, I leave the ordering to him.

We started with a much more palatable dish, French style filet mignon (above). French here must mean from France by way of Indochina, because the steak is spicy enough to merit a red chile on the menu, and it's cooked with basil.  

Still another dish in the same vein, Vietnamese style shrimp (above) is also cooked with fresh basil. It's slightly sweet and spiced with black pepper. 

And look at these clams (above). The golden flecks aren't bread crumbs but dried garlic. 

Still more seafood--pan-fried fish fillet in black bean sauce (above).

We switched from seafood to chicken on fried noodles with Chinese broccoli (above).

But we wanted still more vegetables, so here are stir-fried green beans (above).

Tea doesn't come with lunch. Drinks are extra, which means you can try Hong Kong style ice coffee with milk tea. A couple of these, and you'll be wired for the rest of the day.

Tasty Garden has several outlets, with two more set to open in Rowland Heights and Irvine. However, Billy says the Alhambra location has the best chef.

Tasty Garden, 288 W. Valley Blvd., Alhambra, CA 91801. Tel: (626) 300-8262.