I am ready to be home in Brooklyn. All this sunshine and sitting in the car is making me soft. I have gotten to eat a few truly spectacular things during this trip, though:
1.
The Boiling Crab is:
- A Louisiana seafood boil joint
- Run by an Asian family from Texas
- In a Vietnamese strip mall in Long Beach
- Serving a mostly Asian clientele
Does that blow your mind? It should.
The waiter lays a fresh sheet of waxed butcher paper on the table and ties plastic bibs around everyone's neck. The basic concept: you buy seafood by the pound, they boil it and toss it in a big plastic bag with your choice of sauce ("Rajun Cajun", garlic, lemon pepper, or "The Whole Sha-bang", which is all of the above). Then they dump the bags onto your butcher paper with a few wedges of lime.
Next: Time to get ugly. (Hopefully you and your compadres have already shed the shackles of modesty and decency, because if you haven't, that hymen's about to be broken.) We ripped into those sea creatures like a bunch of ravenous sharks. Peel, suck, dip, crack, munch. No utensils or manners required, though before they leave you to your carnage, the waiters are kind enough to place a roll of paper towels at every table.
Huge head-on shrimp are incredibly fresh, super sweet and meaty ("The most meat for the least work," as my cousin said). I find crawfish a little too cockroach-like to really enjoy tearing away their leggy armor, but everyone else seemed to love them. We preferred the Dungeness crab to the Alaskan King crab legs for the sweeter, more flavorful meat. But be careful with those sharper shell bits -- a cut on the hand or near the mouth means spicy, stinging pain for the rest of the meal. That said, don't resist double-dipping into that garlicky, spicy sauce -- after all, you and your dining companions are family now.
I even loved the sides. The sweet potato fries are the best I've ever had -- crunchy, sweet, not burnt, and totally addictive. And the corn cobbettes they drop in with the seafood soak up all that buttery, spicy juice. (What's in that stuff? My best guess: many sticks of butter, a chopped up head of garlic, a bottle of sriracha, a canister of Old Bay, and a liberal dose of magical oxycontin THC crack dust.)
After seven pounds of crustacean devastation, the carcass mountains get piled high. If you've done the job right, the sauce gets under your fingernails and into your eyebrows, staining the creases of your wrists. At the end of the meal, I had to soap up all the way to my elbows. A lunch there rides the razor's edge between totally awesome and totally disgusting. Which, of course, makes it totally awesome.
2.
Flan King -- What, you don't like flan? Yes you do. You just haven't met the right flan yet. And Flan King's flan is the most righteous flan in all of God's creation. Super creamy, but not too eggy, it's heaven from the tip of the wedge all the way to the back. There's no velvety mouthfeel like it in the world, and yet it's so thick, you can stand a fork upright in it. It's kind of like the silkiest handmade tofu you've ever had, only denser and more resistant to the tongue, but luxuriant and creamy once it does give way.
What's the secret? Some sneaky gelatin? Letting the custard settle so there are no air bubbles? Extra condensed milk? No egg white? A certain type of egg? I have a feeling I'll never know. But I know I have a new request for my yearly visits to L.A.
If I had any complaint, like a teeny-tiny-please-forgive-me-for-my-treason-great-Flan-King complaint, it's that it's too sweet. But if the Flan King made a half-sweet flan, heaven would be here on earth and I would have no reason to resist sin.
You can buy Flan King flan at farmer's markets around L.A.
3.
Lax-C Supermarket -- By the way, I hear that the cooks have changed at my former fave restaurant Ruen Pair, and it's no good anymore. This breaks my heart. Happily, the papaya salad (som tam) made in the parking lot at Lax-C supermarket is pretty good. The woman who makes it takes forever, and she's a little heavy-handed with the sugar for my taste, but she offers little preview cups of the sauce and she'll gladly adjust the flavor until you're satisfied.

Wash your som tam down with the other vendor's excellent coconut rice cakes (kanom krok), which are better than the ones in Thai Town, according to my Mae. Mae Ting's kanom krok are little hot, glutinous cups of coconut batter, cooked in a special cast iron implement til crisp around the edges. They're lovely, a tiny bit salty and not too sweet, and they're stacked to look like a tray full of bivalves. They must be eaten while hot or you will not understand why I told you to eat them. (Actually had these over Thanksgiving, but I think the review still holds.)
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