Review: Irvine’s Chengdu Lao Zao Hot Pot is hard to stomach

The menu at Meizhou Dongpo, a new Sichuan restaurant in Irvine, looks almost like a children’s book. A dozen oversized pages are filled with big, beautiful photos. Nearly every dish on the menu is illustrated. I look around the room on my first...

The Southern California invasion of chain restaurants from mainland China continues. One of the latest to land in Orange County is Haidilao, a hot-pot concept that opened in Brea last spring and in Irvine a few weeks ago. (The chain’s first — and...

What is it like to eat at Hai Di Lao, the Ferrari of Chinese hot pot restaurants, to assemble your dipping sauce from an infinite bank of possibilities, to swish your bits of meat and fish through your own pot of seasoned broth instead of having...

“Do you like it spicy?” I love hearing those words. It’s a question I got recently from the cashier at Southern Spice in Irvine. When I said, “Yes. Yes I do,” she steered me toward an incredible eggplant curry. “You want it spicy?” asked a...

Delicious Food Corner If Siam Sunset is the most Thai place in Thai Town, and it is, then Delicious Food Corner, a breakfast place at the southern edge of Monterey Park, may be the most Hong Kong place in the San Gabriel Valley, which is saying a...