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…
Dr. Hogly Wogly’s Tyler, Texas BBQ
8136 Sepulveda Blvd., Van Nuys; 818-782-2480, hoglywogly.com
At Dr. Hogly Wogly’s Tyler, Texas BBQ, there’s an admirable reverence for beef — especially for brisket. Beef brisket is one of the leanest cuts of meat, which means that, in its own funny way, this is a diet meal.
Not that anyone goes to Dr. H for a diet meal; this isn’t the sort of place where the side dish options include cottage cheese and a fruit salad. Heck, aside from the coleslaw, beans and potatoes, the closest the menu comes to a vegetable are the sliced tomatoes and sliced onions offered as sides. There’s sweet potato pie, which I guess counts as a vegetable dish.
Anyway, getting back to the brisket, it’s the sort of dish you really don’t want to finish. Each and every bite seems to hold nuances, subtleties and tasty bits not noticed in the bite before.
If I feel the need for pork, I opt for the pulled model — shredded and rich with sauce. I prefer the baby backs, served in a rack, to the beef ribs, which take a lot of chewing; I’m split on the spare ribs, which come in batches of three or six. The hot links are always a good fall back; and there’s roast chicken for those who need roast chicken. It’s not a bad choice; it’s just not brisket.
Mizlala
4515 Sepulveda Blvd., Sherman Oaks; 818-783-6698, www.mizlala.com
Mizlala sits in a Sherman Oaks mini-mall with a parking lot in back added as an afterthought. It’s a narrow restaurant that fills up easily and quickly, with a loyal crowd that doesn’t linger. This is street food served in a sit-down setting. It arrives fast, and is consumed even faster. The menu is simple. And every bite is a treat.
At Mizlala, the old school Mediterranean cooking of father Simon Elmaleh has been replaced by the new school Mediterranean cooking of son Danny. It’s got to be said, the son also rises. This is a down-home cuisine, raised to properly served proportions.
It can be a bit of cognitive dissonance. The cooking is Danny’s take on the food he (and we) have been eating for years. The sumac fries — so crispy, so delicious — are flavored with a spicy vegan garlic sauce made in-house.
The near-perfect hummus — an essential dish, no matter what else you order — comes closer to garbanzo-flavored cream than a gritty dip. It’s served with wonderful Iraqi laffa bread, like a pita that’s learned some lessons about the joy of flavor in a dish that can be, in the wrong hands, just a pancake.
The menu has evolved over the years. These days, there are hen of the woods mushrooms in green aioli, rather than eggplant tahini with pickled Fresno chiles. There’s Moroccan chicken with harissa aioli rather than Moroccan carrots with a spicy harissa sauce made in-house, along with orange zest and yogurt — and, of all things, crispy quinoa. If you thought you knew falafel, you haven’t tasted Chef Elmaleh’s version made with pickled fennel.
There’s zaatar in the crispy broccoli; and shawarma spicy in the fried cauliflower as well, another essential dish. This is as creative a menu as you’ll find in Los Angeles — which says much, for this is a city that’s re-creating cuisines all the time.
The Original Barrio Fiesta of Manila
16150 Nordhoff St., North Hills; 818-920-3900, www.facebook.com/p/The-Original-Barrio-Fiesta-of-Manila-North-Hills-100054859476161/
818 N. Pacific Ave., Glendale; 818-552-2855, www.barriofiestaglendale.com
The fried chicken at The Original Barrio Fiesta of Manila is a wonder, a joy, a thing to behold — chicken transmogrified into an exercise in crispitude and crunch, with a lot of flavor tossed in for good measure. It’s actually so well deep-fried, it’s hard to believe there’s a chicken inside the crust. But there it is, and quite a bit of chicken at that.
The chickens used by Barrios Fiesta are enormous, massive birds, so big that a half chicken is the size of a whole rotisserie chicken at Ralphs. And they’re not packed with layers of fat like the rotisserie chicken at Costco (and yes, I am an aficionado of rotisserie chicken). These birds are all meat, aside from bones so crispy, you can chew them, if such is your druthers. Take home a whole bird; you won’t regret it.
There’s plenty of flavor in the crust at Barrio Fiesta. Which is a theme in just about every dish — enormous portions, and tons of flavor, more than seems possible at moments. Consider the lumpiang Shanghai — finger food sized egg rolls packed with ground pork, shrimp and a garden full of vegetables. You take a bite, expecting the usual squirt of grease and salt, and wind up with an explosion of more flavors than you can process in a single bite. Or perhaps the crispy posit — fried squid made extraordinary with a dipping sauce of garlic and vinegar.
Garlic and vinegar are major flavor elements in Filipino cooking, as definitive as the crispiness. And they’re flavors that do not sag or weary the palate as you keep consuming them. Unlike, say, hot sauce, there’s no palate fatigue. You just keep wanting more and more. This is food that calls to you, telling you it’s time to keep the fiesta going.
Raffi’s Place
211 E. Broadway, Glendale; 818-240-7411, www.raffisplace.com
Like a lot of iconic restaurants, you don’t just go to Raffi’s Place — generally acknowledged as both the best Persian and the best Armenian restaurant in a land of many Persian restaurants, and perhaps even more Armenian restaurants — just to catch a bite. You go with a sense of reverence, of expectation, which will not come up short.
Although there’s a front entrance, on Broadway, almost no one actually uses it. The back is where the hostess waits with her list, letting you know how long the wait will be. Raffi’s does not take reservations. Except for large groups, that is.
What you also will see is an army of servers, working with amazing efficiency and speed, taking the time to answer all questions and deal with all issues, before heading for the kitchen, and for trays piled high with breads, hummus (some of the best I’ve ever tasted!), mast moosir (yogurt mixed with shallots), mast-o-khiar (yogurt mixed with cucumbers and herbs), a fine tabbouleh salad, the eggplant dip called ikra — and a barley and chicken soup worthy of Brent’s Deli.
The large groups are right on the money; they understand that although a party of two can eat here, the cuisine is far more fun for larger groups, and even much larger groups.
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One of the stews, the essence of long-cooked food, is a beef wonderment called gheimeh bademjan, made with split peas, fried onions and eggplant. The other is also built around beef, but with far more vegetables; it’s called ghormesabzi, and along with the beef, tender as baby food, it contains kidney beans, parsley, leeks and fenugreek. Dehydrated limes, too. It’s very much a Persian creation.
The shirazi salad — tomatoes, scallions, cucumber and mint — is a fine midpoint dish, allowing you to marshal your appetite for the influx of rice and kabobs. The default rice is tasty basmati, sufficient by itself.
But if you want to live large, there are four specialty rices, superb every one of them (few cuisines, if any, are as good at rice!) — one with dill and lima beans, another with black cherries, a third with a multitude of herbs (making for a greenish rice), and the fourth with barberries, which are a bit like currants, and a bit like sour cherries, with some cranberries tossed in.
There are 15 kabobs all told, with a couple of worthwhile combinations — sliced filet mignon with ground beef koobideh in one; chicken breast with ground chicken in the other.
All the kabob plates come with a grilled tomato and a grilled Anaheim pepper, because, well, they do. The three fish kabobs — white fish, mahi mahi and Scottish salmon — come as a surprise, for this is not a cuisine with a lot of seafood, as a rule. But then, at Raffi’s, the rules are their own.
King’s Fish House
Commons at Calabasas, 4798 Commons Way, Calabasas; 818-225-1979, www.kingsfishhouse.com
I grew up in a world of flounder and bluefish and mackerel — seafood cooked till it had the texture and taste of wet wool. King’s Fish House is so far from that, that it’s almost impossible to believe I’m eating the same aquatic species.
The menu, which is printed daily so that what’s fresh is what there is, is heavy with seafood dishes both serious and whimsical — this ain’t your granddad’s fish house. Or at least, not my granddad’s.
Consider the oyster selection — four from the west, six from the east. There are familiar names like Hama Hama and Kumamoto. But there’s also Paradise and Pacific Kiss, both from British Columbia; and Barcat and Rappahannock from Virginia.
When an ingredient is from the wild, the menu tells us that, as in the wild Littleneck Clams from Long Island. When they’re farmed, we’re told that as well, as in the jumbo white shrimp and Penn Cove black mussels.
If you feel like going with the classics, there’s a Louie, topped with jumbo shrimp, lump crab, or both. There’s macadamia crusted Alaskan halibut, and parmesan crusted Alaskan sand dabs. There’s fish and chips, Idaho rainbow trout amandine (from Clear Springs Farm in Magic Valley), and fried Mississippi catfish (from Simmons Catfish Farm in Yazoo City). There are several surf and turf options of beef with South African lobster tail. There’s even a New England clambake with lobster, clams, mussels and red spuds.
But even though there’s plenty on the menu to satisfy Aunt Matilda, there’s also plenty for those who don’t want to roll with the same old same old. Consider the baked Penn Cove mussels. Sounds kind of mundane. But, the mussels are topped with spiced mayo, eel sauce, mushrooms and avocado. In other words, it’s a mussel equivalent of the outré sushi bar dish called Dynamite. It sounds wack; it tastes amazing.
Ditto the blackened shrimp taquitos, a sort of Mexican-Cajun combo topped with crumbly cotija cheese and guac. There’s a ceviche that mixes salmon, mahi, swordfish and albacore in a citrus and tomato sauce that cooks the fish in its acid — it’s raw and cooked at the same time, always a good trick.
Merrill Shindler is a Los Angeles-based freelance dining critic. Email mreats@aol.com.
