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- If I could spend an entire day roaming and eating around a single shopping center in the San Gabriel Valley, it would be Hilton Plaza.
- The strip mall is home to restaurants that specialize in everything from chicken burgers to congee and ramen.
- The porridge at Huo Zhou Wang may be in a category all its own.
The shopping centers of the San Gabriel Valley often act as points of reference that are more reliable than specific cross streets or even addresses. If someone mentions the strip mall with the Wushiland boba shop, the 99 Ranch Market and the dumpling restaurant with two names upstairs, for many, an image of the San Gabriel Square immediately comes to mind.
I grew up in the shopping centers of the San Gabriel Valley, their bright lights and maze-like parking lots serving as the colorful backdrop of my Chinese American childhood.
My mother once chased an unruly grocery cart that held me in its front basket as it rolled through the parking lot of the Victorian-looking strip mall at the corner of San Gabriel Boulevard and New Avenue. I remember racing my younger sister up and down the stairs of the Atlantic Place Shopping Center while we waited for a table at my grandmother’s favorite dim sum restaurant.
There were countless days spent as a child under the care of my uncle and grandmother, who brought us along to three, sometimes four strip malls in a day to find the various ingredients needed for that evening’s dinner, beauty products, the Hello Kitty pencil box I desperately needed and egg tarts.
Where to eat on a ‘Brothers Sun’ food crawl through the San Gabriel Valley with the Netflix series’ star Justin Chien and writer Byron Wu. ‘When it came to setting the show somewhere, I really wanted it to be the SGV.’
It was the same story for countless Asian Americans growing up in the San Gabriel Valley, where 13 of the 14 Asian-majority suburbs in Los Angeles County are located. These strip malls were a way for residents to create a stronghold in their communities, with restaurants, markets and other businesses that catered to an Asian clientele. Each center tells its own story, a gleaming display of resilience that often functions as its own ecosystem.
My current favorite, though, has to be the Hilton Plaza, a multistory strip mall adjacent to the Hilton Hotel on Valley Boulevard in San Gabriel. Built in 2003, the mall boasts a grand facade, with marble columns, a wooden trellis that lines the second and third floors of the complex and a fountain in three of the four corners of the center. The parking lot upstairs is a war zone I tend to avoid because of its sharp turns and car horns. Downstairs in the parking garage, the spaces are larger and the tempers milder.
The Hilton Plaza is a one-stop destination for soup dumplings, congee, chicken burgers, tea, potato noodles, hot pot, roast fish, nightlife and an outpost of one of L.A.’s most celebrated ramen restaurants.
Macho Burger
If you’re curious about the wave of chicken burger restaurants that have opened in the San Gabriel Valley over the last few years, Macho Burger is a good place to start. It’s a chain with multiple locations in California, with a chicken-centric menu of chicken burgers, extra-large fried chicken cutlets, chicken wings, fried fish sandwiches and beef wraps that look a little like a Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supreme.
Its red and yellow color scheme is reminiscent of the most recognizable American fast food chains, only the mascot is a cartoon character with buff arms and a sesame seed bun on top of its baseball cap. There is no ground chicken patty involved in the sandwich. Instead, a fried chicken thigh with a circumference consistently greater than its bun serves as the burger. The bun is a soft potato roll and the chicken has a thick, craggy crust heavily seasoned with black pepper. A few bites in and the chicken burger craze starts to make sense.
Huo Zhou Wang Porridge
It’s difficult to find congee that competes with the stuff my grandma Tina makes. Never one to embrace modesty, she’ll tell you this herself. But the porridge at Huo Zhou Wang may be in a category all its own. Each grain of rice remains intact, suspended in a rich, thick soup fragrant with ginger. You can order the porridge studded with dried scallops, prawns and clams. Or splurge on a bowl crowned with abalone.
The sole fish fillet is a favorite, with the soft, silky nuggets of fish nestled into the rice. There is no shortage of deep-fried delights to dip into your porridge, with fried rolls like mini coconut-scented doughnuts and red bean-filled sesame balls. And don’t overlook the complimentary side dishes, with a trio of roasted peanuts, kimchi and spicy, marinated radish that arrives mere seconds after you reach the table.
Liu’s Roast Fish
The dish in front of every party is a raised platter of fish, its head and tail hanging over the sides, its body submerged in a bubbling liquid that sputters all over the table. Faces are momentarily obscured behind extravagantly scented walls of steam. The fish on my table is typically black cod, with one fillet trembling in a “golden soup garlic,” and the other in “Lius homestyle.” The golden soup is savory and pungent with an astonishing amount of garlic. The homestyle is rust red, not nearly as fierce as it appears, humming with the flavor of mellow toasted chiles. You scoop spoonfuls of the fish and sauce over white rice, careful to avoid the bones. And before the fish, there are skewers, with cumin-rubbed mutton and spiced quail eggs you may want to eat by the dozen.
Shanghai Dumpling House
Some of the dumplings are made in a corner of the dining room, mere feet from the tables. It’s mesmerizing to watch the chefs stretch and pinch the dough around nubs of ground pork, their movements fluid and constant. The dumpling wrappers are on the thicker side, so engorged with filling that it’s possible to spy the soup and pork inside if you hold it up to the light. The restaurant is known for its salted egg yolk and pork dumplings, seemingly standard xiao long bao that, upon closer inspection, feature a sunshine yellow hue just below the wrapper. The pork filling is infused with the salty, buttery, almost cheesy flavor of salted egg, making them about five times more satiating than your average dumpling.
Potato Powder Love Noodle
Each order of noodle soup arrives in its own pot, its contents still roiling. The potato noodles that bob across the top are pale and round, almost too slippery to catch between your chopsticks. Depending on your order, the noodles may be tangled with ribbons of beef and bok choy alongside a handful of cilantro. There are knife-cut wheat noodles, and they are excellent. But you came for the potato noodles. It’s in the name for a reason. The noodles themselves are unlike any other, with a singular texture that’s at once chewy and bouncy, then seems to disappear on your tongue. There are fried mushroom skewers to round out the meal, and each order of soup or rice bowl comes with a free beverage.
Tsujita Artisan Noodle
There is a perpetual wait at the Sawtelle locations, with no limit to how long people are willing to linger for a bowl of noodles. The San Gabriel restaurant is far quieter, and I’ve yet to wait more than a few minutes for a table, even during peak meal times. The tsukemen is the same, the noodles remarkably thick and chewy and the broth intense, milky and rich with maximal pork. The char siu splayed over the top of the noodles are luscious slabs of pork belly that melt. The soft egg contains a glob of orange goo in the middle. It is the Tsujita you know, love and are willing to wait for, without the crowd.
Tan-Cha
This is a tea shop where the most popular drink on the menu is a concoction called the Tiramisu milk tea. It’s a robust black tea mixed with milk and topped with something called tiramisu puff cream, a thick, sweet foam that floats atop the drink. Without a bakery in the plaza, this is the place to go for a brown sugar latte with boba after lunch, or for a cocoa drink with cheese foam and crushed Oreos after dinner.
Tang Dynasty
I don’t know that I crave a single dish in Los Angeles more often than the stir-fried cabbage at Tang Dynasty. It’s an odd dish to obsess over, but I find its simplicity ever alluring. The cabbage is wok-charred, its edges curled, caramelized, a little smoky and sweet. It’s seasoned with just the right amount of what could be black vinegar, a slight tang permeating each wilted leaf. You can eat it alone or over rice, as the main attraction or as a side dish intended to offset the meat skewers that are likely to accumulate on the table.
Tang Dynasty is a restaurant that feels like a peaceful respite during the day and a roaring party when the sun goes down, with dishes and elaborately presented beverages that are meant to be shared. You can order a kaleidoscope of shots, the glass containers filled with pink peach wine, osmanthus rice wine and whatever other flavored low A.B.V. alcohol your heart desires. The skewers range from garlic vermicelli scallops to Taiwanese sausage. And the salted egg yolk crab is a must order, with the fried crab enveloped in a buttery salted egg sauce you can suck from every crevice.
Nice 2 Meet U hot pot
Tucked into the northwest corner of the first floor of the plaza, this hot pot restaurant can be a little disorienting. Are the platters of sesame balls, watermelon and sugar-dusted sweet potato fries on display just inside the front door part of the experience? What are those refrigerators at the back of the restaurant for? Nice 2 Meet U is an all-you-can-eat hot pot restaurant that’s part order-at-the-table and part serve-yourself. You choose one or two soup bases for your group, maybe the spicy beef tallow or the mushroom soup. They bubble side by side in a cauldron that sits atop the table.
Then head to the refrigerators to grab plates of noodles and vegetables and wooden skewers of meat and seafood. You cook the various proteins and vegetables in the boiling soup and build your own dipping sauce at the condiment bar from a selection of soy, vinegar, sesame, chile, garlic and onions. The dishes on display near the front of the restaurant are included, and you can partake in as many bowls of cucumber salad as you wish. Diners are charged for the soup base and then for each skewer and plate from the refrigerator with prices that range depending on the color of the dishware. It’s a stellar way to spend an evening with friends, plucking skewers of duck tongue and fish cakes from a steaming vat in the center of the table.
Where to start your SGV strip mall journey
Hilton Plaza, 227 W. Valley Blvd., San Gabriel.
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