Plugs — Vanessa Anderson

L.A. food, drink, and leisure recs from a grocery goblin + LINKS

Plugs is The Angel’s recs column. Every week, you’ll get six picks—a restaurant, a bar, a shop, an ingredient, a person, and a treat—from someone in Los Angeles who knows what they’re talking about, plus a selection of Angel-curated links. (Plugs are for paid subscribers of The Angel only; upgrade your subscription to receive all six!)

#81 is Vanessa Anderson, the brains behind Grocery Goblin. A brilliant anthropologist whose ambition is to visit every grocery store in the world, Vanesssa’s work spans multiple mediums. She writes a column for the Los Angeles Times (“The Grocery Goblin Reports”), hosts LA: Spiritual Mecca on frankradio, organizes screenings and readings at franknews, and makes short-form documentaries on TikTok. She’s also embedded in the food world, having worked as a private chef and in restaurant kitchens such as Wildair (New York) and Café Triste. I’ve been enamored with Vanessa’s work ever since I started watching Grocery Goblin’s TikToks (after Matthew plugged her as his person), and even more so after profiling her for The Angel last year. She’s an all-around very cool person, and I’m grateful to call her a friend. Here’s Vanessa with her Plugs!

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Restaurant — Wayang Halal

I've been doing this amazing thing where I refer to dinner as “amazing dinner.” Amazing dinner has no context, just blind trust in a nebulous promise.

“Guys!! What do you say we all go eat amazing dinner tonight?”

It’s rather baffling how the addition of one mid-to-low effort adjective can convince a group of people to do something. I instructed my last cavalcade of intrigued pals to join me for amazing dinner at Wayang Halal, an Indonesian restaurant in Alhambra next to a pale pink daycare. If you go around 7 p.m., the sky turns the color of the daycare and they fade into each other in a rather…. amazing way. At Wayang, the coconuts are cold and the vegetables look like they’ve given up. The gado gado salad of snappy green beans, cucumbers, and bean sprouts surrenders to a weighted blanket of thick, deeply spiced peanut sauce. Water spinach floats in a pool of sambal and shrimp paste, ripe for a rice dip. The lacy edges of fried chicken look like designs on a piece of frosted glass, and the ketjap manis (a thick, dark sweet soy) punctuates everything like a mid-to-low effort amazing adjective.

Photo by Vanessa Anderson.