New West never made it online, alas. Worth looking for if you're ever in a big library though. While your at it, you can poke around for Charlie Haas's cover story on California barbecue restaurants and Colman Andrews visit to every French restaurant in the state. It was a very good magazine - where Ruth Reichl got her start.

I'm late weighing in here, but this is Wayne Wang we're talking about. His 1980s films set in SF Chinatown, including Chan is Missing and Dim Sum, go deep into the culture in a way nothing had or has since, and are remarkably food-obsessed.

Before Wang became a filmmaker, he wrote an issue-length story for the old New West with Ruth Reichl that covered essentially every eating place in SF Chinatown, a survey still worth looking at 35 years later. Laying into Wang for his lack of knowledge of Chinatown is like bashing Scorcese for his ignorance of Little Italy.

The Fox Hills beef rolls aren't as good as they are in the SGV; less crisp, the beef perhaps less carefully braised. But they're great for Culver City.

It must be said however that the OP was looking for something not available in the Bay Area, and as good as Sea Harbour can be, it's not quite up to the level of Koi Palace. Shanghai #1, on the other hand, when you learn how to navigate the menu, provides an experience not available in Northern California.

Also their spamburgers. I could swear I once had a sashimi burrito there, listed as a special, but I never saw it again, and the counterpeople denied all knowledge of it. My personal Shangri La.

Garvey and Atlantic is kind of a dim sum epicenter. On the northeast corner you have Capital Seafood, which at least some people consider the best of the cart places. (The pastry-topped almond gingko soup is out of this world.) On the northwest corner is Empress Harbour, which has seen better days but is still formidable. Half a block north is Ocean Star, the biggest dim sum restaurant in town. A few blocks south is, as Mattapoisset notes, NBC (lesser than Capital, perhaps), and a few blocks past that is Elite, which is generally considered one of the top two in the SGV, if not the absolute best.

And if you suddenly decide that the institution of dim sum is too recherche, you are only a few steps from the old-school pan-fried dumplings at Mandarin Noodle House, the shrimp dumplings at Pearl's or the sea cucumber dumplings at Fortune Dumpling.

Madeo is one of the three Los Angeles places expats can bring themselves to praise, the other two generally being Vincenti and Terroni. For what it's worth.

A lot of Koreans hate lamb. It's just not a thing. For a treat, though, try the lamb-based ``bosintang'' at Yanbian. Which you will be dissuaded from ordering, but it's there.

Within five minutes of campus are Pie N' Burger, which tend to figure in discussions of best burgers in the U.S.; Abricott, a sandwichy lunch place with an interesting Asian twist; Wolfe Burger, which has seriously good chili for the chili fries; Cham, which has a very kid-friendly take on Korean bibimbap and ssam; both Slaw Dogs and Dog Haus, which are among the best hot dog places in L.A.; and better-than-passable neapolitan pizza at Settebello and the new Blaze. Pasadena is awesome for kid-friendly food - it's the other kind that can sometimes be hard to come by.

It was at one time the best Shanghainese place in the SGV. And then it wasn't. And then it kind of was again, although it didn't get much acclamation here, and then . . . I can't tell you, frankly. There have been four or five generations of shinier places.

But it is, or was, ground zero for the pork pump, and the vegetarian goose was good, and the braised fish head, and the fried fish with hair seaweed. But mostly the pork pump. Let us know how it is.

Nick's Taste of Texas is outside your range, in Covina, but Sunday breakfasts include exactly what you're looking for.

Sycamore Kitchen.

It used to run as an occasional special at Vietnam House, but if you're bummed out by Golden Deli it may not be your style.

Fish King is fine for what it is, and I end up there a lot, but the fish from McCall's - and even from random Mitsuwas - is consistently better.

I never quite recovered from Wonder Seafood's demise, and that was probably 25 years ago.

I suspect that the USDA bans direct importation, as it does so many worthwhile cured meats. I can't remember seeing any truly German charcuterie anywhere in the U.S. Black Forest-style ham is a specialty of Schreiner's, though - they cure and smoke their own - and it's probably as good as you are likely to get.

Grill on the Alley in Beverly Hills is the Urasawa of corned-beef hash. $19.75, which is an expensive breakfast, but there you go - like Urasawa, it's around the corner from Rodeo Drive.

Qilu was a very weird space. An enormous, totally empty restaurant; a long, elaborate menu of dishes from Tsingtao - and I would bet, one, maybe two people in the back cooking. The disconnect between ambition and execution was so extreme that I ended up going back three times just to make sure I hadn't just been ordering wrong.

Theoretically, Lawrence has Goan dishes different from anything else in L.A., but they seem to be rather indifferently prepared. I keep going back, hoping for something great - the chef was reputed to be the best Indian chef in town for years, at grander restaurants - but with little success. Maybe lightning will strike? I hope so!

As a non-Asian who spends an awful lot of time in the SGV, I've got to say: OG Taiwanese food, at least as it's presented here, is as off-putting as any cuisine on earth - often to the point of seeming intentionally so. The style of cooking is a cultural marker, an aggressive yet acceptable way of saying: We do this; you don't. I don't tend to agree with Mr. Dixit, but when he implies it is a political thing, he is on the mark.

Except in boba shops or porkchop rice restaurants like Sinbala, you almost never see non-Chinese - or probably non-Taiwanese - in specifically Taiwanese restaurants. It seems to be strictly a generational joint.

The original Sahag of Sahag's intended to open House of Basturma, but fell ill from what I understand and never quite did. HoB as it now stands is . . . ok, but not quite revelatory. The best basturma sandwich in the north Pasadena area is probably at Torino.

The moros were never knee-buckling; El Colmao was always the place to go for that. And the chicken and pork started to bite at about the time they started selling the bottled marinade - never figured out whether there was a connection. Still: not awful.

I would go to Sasabone, totally.

Sun Sui Wah was better, alas. Kirin was better still.

Interesting that he's namechecking El Bulli. According to Lisa Abend's book The Sorcerer's Apprentice, he left just a couple of weeks into his stage to go work in Las Vegas.

He has the basil out of season too - and it's always weirdly good. Always kept by the cash register.

That center hasn't been the same since Hainan Chicken closed down. Which suddenly makes me feel very old.

For what it's worth, the OAD dude was very, very active in the early days of CH. He was part of the contingent that split off to start egullet - in other words, an OG apostate.

Manresa is often discussed within the context of the world's most important restaurants at the moment, along with Coi and Alinea. Melisse is just the last fancy L.A. place standing...

10-year? He sometimes has some decent pecorinos, but the parmigiano reggiano tends to be middling. Unless there's a secret stash I don't know about.

I would bet everything I own that Ludo has never even heard of Taiwanese popcorn chicken.