I used to believe that Father’s Day was something of a runner-up holiday, a consolation prize awarded to fathers after the gala celebration of Mother’s Day, with its flowers and chocolates and brunch.
It’s a day given to fathers, somewhat begrudgingly, when they’re given the honor of standing over the Weber burning steaks, chicken and fish, until they’re finally released from toil, and allowed to collapse on the couch and watch the Dodgers game in peace, with a cold one in hand. And, as ever, I was wrong.
Father’s Day, in one incarnation or another, has been around for centuries. In the Middle Ages, it was St. Joseph’s Day, honoring the earthly father of Jesus. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, the ancestors of Christ are celebrated with the Sunday of the Forefathers — beginning with Adam. (It’s a long list!)
Indeed, there’s hardly a country on Earth that does not honor fathers in some fashion — from Defender of the Fatherland Day in Russia and Belarus, to Soldiers’ Day in Mongolia, to Dia do Pai in Macau.
Father’s Day as we know it began on Mother’s Day in 1909. A woman named Sonora Louise Smart Dodd sat in her church in Spokane, Washington, listening to a sermon on the sacrifices mothers make for their children. The sermon touched a nerve. Her mother had died when Dodd was young, and she had been raised by her father, who also raised five sons.
He did it all alone — farming the land, caring for the children, doing the double work of a father and a mother. Dodd felt it was high time for a holiday to honor fathers as well as mothers. As a date, she chose a Sunday close to her own father’s birthday. But, as with Mother’s Day, the all-male United States Congress refused to make it official; they felt people would think they were patting themselves on the back.
That’s how it stood until 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson celebrated the day with his family. Father’s Day has been with us ever since.
And yet, unlike Mother’s Day, Father’s Day is a bit hard to define. I’m a father. And, for years, happiness for me would have been a chance to take my beloved labradoodle George (who as a former breeding dog has dozens of offspring) for a nice walk in the hills, followed by a chance to take a nap on the couch. My singular regret is that Father’s Day is in June, long before football season, so I can’t veg out watching a Rams game.
But instead, my family will insist we go out for a meal, probably with an assortment of relatives. I’ll be given a shirt I don’t need. I’ll be asked, politely, not to light that cigar I’ve been saving.
The best thing about the day may be that I’m given the chance to go back to a favorite restaurant. And what might that be? Given my druthers, here’s my Father’s Day list…
Mama Lu’s Dumpling House
2 E. Colorado Blvd., Old Pasadena; 626-803-0028, www.mamalutogo.com
I’ve been to the Mama Lu’s in Monterey Park and in the City of Industry. They’re not tiny storefronts, like the wonderful You Kitchen in Alhambra, a much loved destination with a short menu of perfect dishes. But they’re tiny compared to the branch in Old Pasadena, with its several dining areas upstairs, and a secondary dining room downstairs. (Downstairs is fine. But it doesn’t have the buzz of upstairs, where the waiting crowds ebb and flow.)
Ordering too much comes with the territory, for there are many temptations on the menu — and a table full of good eaters is packed with lots of elbow benders who have a dish they can’t live without. Which is why most tables are crowded with plates and bowls, many of which were inhaled soon after they arrived.
This is not a cuisine where you worry about stepping on a scale the next day. You can always eat a salad … tomorrow.
The menu, with its more than 130 dishes, can be daunting. But not so daunting that, after a few minutes, your table won’t be piled high with so many dumplings, it’s easy to lose track of what you’re eating. But only almost.
The juicy pork dumplings are a basic, essential dish, served in a steamer of eight. As one of the first dishes to emerge, they were one of the first to disappear. Followed soon after by the fried pork buns — a clever treatment of the usual steamed buns, but crisped on the bottom, with a layer of crunchy sesame seeds.
The green onion pancakes were as good as any I’ve ever had — lean and crunchy with a pita-like taste. We had a special request from one diner for the beef wraps, essentially a Chinese burrito with an excess of goodness within. Of course; as they say, in for a penny…
Canyon City Barbeque
347 N. San Gabriel Ave., Azusa, 626-815-4227, canyoncitybbq.com
Canyon City may be the most affable barbecue house in Southern California. This isn’t to say that places that serve ribs and brisket and pulled pork are hotbeds of hostility. But Canyon City exudes a sort of casual ease that makes you want to linger.
To cut to the chase, good barbecue is moist, tender and rich with a multitude of layers of flavors and textures. Bad barbecue is dry, and needs lots of sauce and beer for you to choke it down. Canyon City serves very good barbecue.
There’s the tender, sweet, very smoky brisket, dry-rubbed and not really needing the sweetish barbecue sauce at all … or the tri-tip, with its grainier texture, and penchant for melting away before you can chew it. And then, there’s the pulled pork, which the restaurant notes is its “#1 seller.”
I liked the pulled pork. But pulled pork is Southern barbecue, and Canyon City offers ’cue from the South, the West, the Heartland — wherever there’s smoke and meat and rub and sauce. There’s some fine smoked chicken as well, along with rib tips (“chopped, sauced and piled high”), and brontosaurus-sized beef ribs and “fall off the bone” St. Louis spareribs. Links, too. And so much more.
In case I’m in need of a between-meals snack, rather than a serious feed, I appreciate the presence of the pulled pork sandwich, the pulled chicken sandwich, the beef brisket sandwich, and the PPSO (pulled pork, Swiss and diced red onions on a toasted bun).
For the record, you can add bacon and avocado to the sandwiches, double the cheese, supersize and top with coleslaw — which gets downright kinky.
Rocco’s Tavern
44 W. Green St., Old Pasadena; 626-765-6810, www.instagram.com/roccospasadena/?hl=en
Rocco’s Tavern sits, more or less, open to the street, with much of the front slid aside to allow full access for those wandering past. It’s hard to go past Rocco’s without pausing to check one of the many games on the big screens — and perhaps to pause for a bit of refreshment, and some conversation with sports fans seated at the bar, and the adjoining tables.
It’s hard not to think that food is beside the point here. But sports fans like to nosh in between cheers; consider the zillions of wings consumed at the many branches of Hooters.
Were Rocco’s not a sports bar, it would be a good old school red sauce Italian restaurant, competition for Buca di Beppo down the street. This is the land of chopped antipasto salad — a little heavy on the romaine, but still with plenty of olives, ham, salami, capicola and provolone.
There’s a very garlicky garlic bread, and a nice messy melted cheese and pepperoni garlic bread, which is more an oddly shaped pizza than a slab of bread. Though there are salads — along with the antipasto, there’s an oversized Caesar, a Greek, a grilled salmon and a spinach salad — this is, in the great sports bar tradition, not a place to go when you’re on a diet.
Consider, for instance, the “white fries” — french fries topped with Alfredo sauce, garlic, mozzarella and pepperoni. There’s a seven cheese mac and cheese, which along with the seven cheeses is made with bacon and a garlic and Alfredo sauce.
There are pizza fries, too, which are like the white fries, except they’re made with marinara sauce. Which I guess makes them a diet dish, compared with the Alfredo.
And there’s more: a multi-patty burger, an eggplant parmigiana hero, a meatball and parmigiano hero, and an Italian sausage, pepper and onion hero right off the streets of New York’s Little Italy. There are pastas with pesto cream sauce, and that ubiquitous Alfredo.
By comparison, the steamed mussels and Little Neck clams are practically a Weight Watchers creation. Though I am unsure of what to make of the “salad pizza,” which sits in two worlds. It’s a funny dish that needs to be eaten without haste, before the salad gets the crust too wet.
Oh, and if you want to be efficient in your eating, get the boneless chicken wings, breaded with panko crumbs and corn flakes. With no bones, you can inhale them that much faster.
The Chicken Koop
12824 Hadley St., Whittier; 562-464-1780, www.thechickenkoop.com
The logo at The Koop is a chicken (a kind of angry looking rooster, I think). There’s a framed sign on one red wall that reads, “I’ve got OCD (Obsessive Chicken Disorder).” Another reads, “Money can’t buy happiness. But it can buy chickens.”
And though I’m sure the vegetarian portobello wrap is a perfectly fine creation, and the roasted street corn, topped with mayo, cotija cheese and chili powder is just fine, the bird is the raison d’être of The Koop. And well it should be. Eat here, and you may never touch a hunk of KFC’s high fat, high sodium product again.
That they could cook so many chickens, for so many diners, and every one of them (far as I can tell) is done just right, is a tribute to the Obsessive Chicken Disorder that afflicts the place. The birds are both crisp on the outside, with a fine layer of mouth-happy spice, and moist on the inside — but without being undercooked, which is no small trick.
Along with the basic spice model, there’s also a butter-garlic chicken, and a glazed Hawaiian style. But I haven’t had to move beyond the spice to find happiness. Though I have moved up from the minimalist order of one-quarter dark meat (with one side dish), to the top-of-the-line whole chicken, with three sides. In for a penny, in for a pound.
There are sauces, too — seven of them, including a nice sweet Thai chili sauce, and a very good chimichurri. But the sauces feel to me like gilding the lily; or, in this case, the chicken. I like the birds just as they are.
Though the cucumber salad is a pretty good counterpoint, the garlic fries call out to me, the potato salad is good stuff. And who doesn’t like corn on the cob with their chicken, Mexican style or otherwise? Most of the dishes come with naan bread, which can easily be confused with pita, and which, with the presence of hummus, nachos, empanadas and the poutine gives the restaurant a surprisingly sense of global chicken-ness.
So does the presence of the Cuban-style chicken plate (with rice, black beans and plantains), the Hawaiian-style plate (with white rice, sweet potato fries and maple syrup), and the Canadian-style plate — poutine uber alles.
There’s a secondary obsession here with poutine that does leave my already cholesterol-challenged heart puzzled. For those not familiar with poutine, it’s a French-Canadian calorie speedball, made in its basic form of french fries topped with cheese curds (mozzarella in this case), and brown gravy. It can be, and is, tarted up with all sorts of additional ingredients, like curry sauce and chopped hamburger. In this case, the tarting involves the chicken, which is shredded and tossed with the dish.
Under the Roasted Chicken heading, there’s a box that informs you can “upgrade any side to a poutine” for a modest additional fee. Which means, I guess, you can pay extra to substitute poutine for the jalapeño mac and cheese — one cheesy mess for another in my schoolmarmish way of thinking.
The Dive
Camellia Square, 5708 Rosemead Blvd., Temple City; 626-766-1569, www.divesteamkettlecooking.com
At The Dive, it’s all about the hot bubbling kettles of pan roast which sit behind a counter where you can sit and watch the chefs work their magic, mixing a tomato-cream sauce with celery, onion and green peppers, and then the seafood of your choice — lobster, crawfish, blue crab, king crab, clams, mussels, shrimp and oysters, along with chicken and andouille sausage.
There are some options for mixing and matching: The House Specialty pan roast includes crawfish, blue crab, clams, mussels and shrimp. And it’s served over a choice of jasmine rice or linguine.
Though I tend to dive (as it were) right into the seafood, ripping the shells apart, making a general mess, getting splatters all over whatever I was foolish enough to wear. (As at The Boiling Crab, not only will your food come home with you on your clothing, it doesn’t wash out, pretty much ever. Be warned.)
Should you prefer gumbo to a pan roast, with its andouille sausage and okra, the choice of seafood is exactly the same — though the flavor is, arguably, even more intense, more down-home Cajun. And if either of these house specialties seem like more than you want to commit to, well, there’s a lot more on the menu here.
Indeed, despite these being the defining dishes, they actually take up a small portion of the menu. And the rest of the menu is filled with twists and turns — from Cajun classics on the one hand, to oddities like the “Chowder Frots” on the other. The Frots are a mix of french fries and tater tots, served in a small cast iron pan, drowned under a big splatter and splash of clam chowder, melted cheddar, bacon bits, onions and tomatoes.
It’s spicy, it’s tasty — and it’s really messy, a bit like a home cook deciding to just put everything in the pantry and fridge together, and see what happens. (Anyone who’s mixed Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup with French’s fried onions, and green beans knows the experience. Which means all of us.)
The Hot Cheetos Truffle Mac is a near cousin of the Frots, another dish that seems to have more ingredients than it needs, with the option for crawfish if you want. But The Dive isn’t all about random (and admittedly tasty) combinations of ingredients. The steamed clams or mussels are pretty straight forward, though do be prepared for a lot of garlic in the broth.
There’s bacon-wrapped shrimp, which is always a welcome addition to any meal, bringing two of everyone’s favorite ingredients to the table. Shrimp and grits is a proper Low Country creation, down-home as biscuits and gravy. Though the “made from scratch traditional” clam chowder is a bit of a head-scratcher, tasting more of thickener than of clams.
If you want to continue the Cajun theme, there’s jambalaya, a seafood boil, Cajun fries, half a dozen po’boy sandwiches, and both bread pudding and beignet for dessert.
If you want to go further afield, there’s cioppino and bouillabaisse. If you want to stay in California, there’s a Brussels sprout salad, and a Caesar, both with an option of chicken or salmon — blackened, of course.
Merrill Shindler is a Los Angeles-based freelance dining critic. Email mreats@aol.com.
