Before I lived in L.A., every visit included at least one field trip to eat in the San Gabriel Valley. I’d plan my trip around a dumpling crawl, dim sum excursion, and/or Chinese banquet hall feast, preferably with a large group for maximum consumption. To me, the SGV was a suburban wonderland completely unlike the New York Chinatowns to which I was accustomed, and I greedily read everything I could about the food there, from Jonathan Gold reviews to the sleuths on Chowhound and eGullet (remember eGullet?!) who trawled the area with a frequency I could only dream of. Every regional specialty they revealed, every culinary technique I’d never heard of, furthered my conviction that the SGV was the most delicious place in America.
When I finally moved to L.A. in 2019, I made eating my way across the SGV a priority. Living in Silver Lake provides easy access, and I spend many a weekend exploring, rallying friends or heading out on solo missions for tiny cat-ear dumplings, numbing Sichuan fish soups, and sheng jiang bao so juicy they threaten to explode. Some 15 years after I first started eating in SGV, my affair shows no signs of slowing—restaurants come and go (although some, magically, seem to stay forever), trends cycle through with TikTok-fueled rapidity (I’m not sure I really need to slurp broth out of an oversized soup dumpling ever again, though it was fun the one time), and there’s always more to uncover (I’m currently trying to figure out how to use Xiaohongshum, aka Chinese Instagram, which promises to unlock a whole new world of dishes I’m not familiar with).
How did the SGV get so delicious? I do think it’s worth reading this entire L.A. Times article on the explosive growth of AAPI communities across all of L.A. County, but the long and short of Asian migration to the SGV specifically, which began in the ‘70s, is that post-WWII L.A. was booming, and presenting “an American dream for Asian immigrants rooted in Southern California suburbanization.” (My favorite tidbit is that Monterey Park was billed as ‘the Chinese Beverly Hills’ in ads across Asia.) Monterey Park was indeed the first suburb to turn majority-Asian, which explains why it feels so different from the urban enclaves I grew up with as a dumpling-loving Jewish girl from Chicago.
Today, the San Gabriel Valley has the largest concentration of East Asian American communities in the U.S., and is home to eight of the ten cities with the largest proportion of Chinese Americans in the country. The SGV is not a monolith; it’s impossible to capture its vastness and diversity in any one story. And let me be clear here: as a white girl who doesn’t speak Chinese, much of the SGV is not for me, and will not reveal itself to me. I can’t claim any expertise outside of the tiny sliver of restaurants I like eating at, which I swear I’m getting into momentarily. For a more nuanced understanding of the area — which is also home today to rapidly expanding Latino, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Korean populations — I recommend checking out Frank Shyong’s Lunchbox and David R. Chan’s Instagram (Jenn Harris also does a nice job of covering SGV restaurants for the L.A. Times).
All that said, I do have strong feelings on what to eat across the SGV, for all different scenarios. The following are a few of my favorites, grouped by category. It should go without saying that this list is by no means exhaustive, but I do hope it provides you with a useful starting point, whether it’s your first visit or your 100th.