this is the best dumpling spot in town. my mom would just order all these dumplings and leave them on my door, because she s not allowed in my house. and then, i just said, where are you getting these? you know, my mom likes to withhold information, so i finally got it out of her. myung in dumplings, where they serve a mix between korean and chinese. each plate handmade to order, my friends. opened in 2007 on olympic boulevard, it s run by yu jin, a korean by way of shenyang province in china. been coming here for about two years now. there s no one ever in here. every time i ve ever come in. i don t understand how they re open. they re the best dumplings i
i just want to know why you re so sentimental about the business of feeding people. it s a trippy state of romanticism. like, i m very hard-ass, too. like you pack your own [ expletive ], you get what you get. if you complain, i take the food out of your hands and give you your money back. but within those rules, there s a lot of love. there s a lot of care. across town in venice is a-frame, roy s first brick and mortar. this used to be a ihop, so everything is really narrow. hence the shape. it s heavily influenced by local takes on hawaiian cooking, not that you would necessarily notice. every dish designed to be eaten with the hands. what s good? the baby back ribs are air-dried, braised, then breaded and fried. ling cod tacos treated like shawarma, then meat dried like duck. then fried. meanwhile, not too far away on sawtell, a kogi truck pulls up, stops, reverses back to the corner. before the awning is even up, there s already a line. hungry people have been waiting in ca
started to go down. roy choi is a second-generation korean-american. he lives in los angeles. he s the owner-operator of four groundbreaking and much-loved food trucks, among the first to harness the strange and terrible powers of social media to alert customers to where to find delicious food. this was the command post. from here, you know, you could look and you could see if fires were going on. when the los angeles riots happened in 1992, roy was 22 years old. and this plaza s rooftop played a central role for koreans defending their town.
thai, samoan, bangladeshi. everybody has left their mark, continues to shape the town, determine its character. k-town exists upside its latino neighbors and i guess it s natural that both choe and choi identity very much with mexican street culture. few things embody that particularly southern california latino street culture more than low riding. esteban is a photographer, chronicler of everything iconic at the crossroads of hip-hop, design, tattooing, fashion and low-riding. the old-timers, they used to cut the coils or put sandbags in their truck to make them lower. then around the 70s is when they got popular. why these particular models of cars? it s pretty much always been late 50s all the way through the 60s and the 70s.
where major chains feared to tread, where others preferred to abandon, koreans moved in. so 1992 four l.a. police officers are on trial for what sure as hell looked to me like a wildly excessive and prolonged beating of an unarmed rodney king. in april of that year, they were acquitted. for me, it was a holy [ expletive ], i never saw that coming moment. for african-americans it was a somewhat ruder surprise. to say people were angry would be an understatement. they don t represent the people no more! south central was that way. so you could almost feel it like a tidal wave coming. the lapd were completely unprepared for what happened next. everything you see right here, all this was being looted, chairs and rocks and everything being thrown through walls. if you go straight down western on venice, the whole plaza burned on fire. we were calling 911, and there was no response. did the cops come at all? i was here all three days. i didn t see any cops. well, where did th