If you’ve moved to Los Angeles from just about anywhere else, one of the first impressions you may get — especially in the San Fernando Valley, San Gabriel Valley and South Bay — is that a lot of the city exists in the strip malls found at just about every intersection.
Along with a modicum of parking, these mini-malls are where locals go for hair and nails, for phone repair and dental work, for watches and sneakers. But more than anything else, it’s where we go to eat.
I call it “strip mall cuisine” — a culinary phenomenon that touches just about every culinary option in this area of peak diversity. So often, we only glimpse at these malls while stopped waiting for a light to go from red to green. Otherwise, they’re as easy to ignore as birds on a power line; they’re just kind of there.
But my appreciation of the multiplicity of cuisines also leads me to occasionally stop … and sniff the spices. Which I did recently at the strip mall near the northeast corner of Laurel Canyon and Chandler boulevards in Valley Village. What I found was kind of … amazing. A virtual United Nations of eats.
What grabbed my notice first of all was a new spot called Chick Corner Thai Kitchen (5424 Laurel Canyon Blvd., Valley Village; 818-821-3747, www.chickcornerthai.com). A Thai restaurant specializing in chicken? Perhaps jumping on the Korean chicken bandwagon? Well … not exactly, but close.
I counted 16 dishes made with chicken — including the Chicken Corner specialties of Hainan steamed chicken, Hainan fried chicken, plus grilled chicken with both sweet and sour sauce and with Thai chili sauce (and the option of two out of the three chicken specialties, served with garlic rice).
And yes, bunky, Hainan is an island province of China, and the nation’s southernmost point, in the South China Sea. So, why is it on a Thai menu? Because Los Angeles, of course.
Speaking of islands, a few doors down is La Taverna Cubana (5424 Laurel Canyon Blvd., Valley…
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