One of my favorite things in the world is exploring different cultures through food. Last weekend I went to Smorgasburg Los Angeles, which is a multicultural food market located on The Row in downtown Los Angeles. Smorgasburg features a wide variety of small food businesses, from spam musubi and fruit tanghulu to a rare type [...]
One of my favorite things in the world is exploring different cultures through food. Last weekend I went to Smorgasburg Los Angeles, which is a multicultural food market located on The Row in downtown Los Angeles. Smorgasburg features a wide variety of small food businesses, from spam musubi and fruit tanghulu to a rare type of focaccia only found in a remote town in Italy.
Smorgasburg began in June of 2016 and, as it has led many well-known booths to create hugely popular brick and mortar stores, is primarily known for being an "incubator" for small businesses. The famed lobster roll and seafood spot "Broad Street Oyster Co." and California taco staple "Tacos 1986" both began as small booths at Smorgasburg.
Food trucks and businesses can apply to be vendors at the market, but only very few get in, making the application process incredibly hard. The food booths that do eventually get accepted to Smorgasburg are usually foods you might have a harder time finding on your average restaurant menu.
At Smorgasburg, the vibe is everything. The market itself is located in a parking lot hidden behind a huge industrial office space. Once you make your way towards the venue, you start seeing more trees sprouting up, as well as a tall, black gate. Go through the gate, and you enter a wide, open space with many colorful tents, trucks, bars, and picnic tables. Loud Latin-themed music comes from the Disk Jockey located in the center.
I sampled a lot of different types of food. One of my favorite items was the focaccia from Recco, Italy from a booth called Glad Focaccia. It was an Italian-Greek influenced flatbread, made with a dough of flour and water and stuffed with goat cheese and spinach, like a traditional Greek spanakopita. I ordered the one with baby bok choy, lime zest, oil and salt. The creamy goat cheese really complemented the crunchiness of the bread, the bok choy was so fresh, and the zest of the lime really topped it off. The owner of Glad used to work alongside the famous chef Nancy Silverton and learned the technique from her. The focaccia variety can only be found at Silverton's restaurant, Glad, or in Recco, Italy.
Another food I tried was traditional Filipino Manila-style chicken skewers. It's marinated in Filipino banana ketchup, calamansi lime and soy sauce, then grilled on kabobs and placed on top of a generous heap of garlic rice. The chicken fell right off the kabob, and the slightly sweet, salty marinade really complemented the flavor.
I also tried Korean popcorn fried chicken, rolled in sweet chili powder. The chicken is brined for 24 hours, then left out to dry for 72 hours, achieving the perfect crispy, soft, flavorful meat inside the fried shell.
Additionally, I tried two desserts at Smorgasburg. One was tanghulu, a Chinese dessert that gained most of its popularity from social media. Tanghulu is fruit kabobs dipped in hot, melted sugar, then left to dry, forming a signature crunchy sugar coat around the fruit. I was feeling adventurous, so I tried a fruit I had never heard of before: a Chinese Hawthorne. It was sweet, sour, tangy and juicy. I highly recommend it.