Eastbound Food Caravan 2: Ashirwad (Upland, CA)

As Eating LA said when we were eating at Ashirwad, the best Indian restaurant in Los Angeles is actually not in LA - it's in Upland! On our latest food crawl, after Taza and Falafel Me, Food GPS led us to this place, following a tip he got from someone he met on an airplane.

Ashirwad, which means "the blessings" in Sanskrit, is strictly vegetarian and features many Gujarati specialties. I'm no expert in Indian food, but I have visited my share of Indian restaurants. Still, I was entirely unfamiliar with some of the dishes here! There are some street food like the Khasta kachori ($4.99)

The khasta kachori is a puri (crispy pastry) stuffed with potatoes, roasted spices, topped with onion, cilantro, yogurt, and a sweet and sour (and spicy) sauce made of tamarind, jaggery, and cumin.

There's also Bhel Puri ($3.99) consisting of puffed rice, papadi (small, deep fried puris), sev, onion, potatoes and sweet and sour chutney.

Both of the dishes above were crunchy, sweet, sour, and spicy at once. They pack a lot of strong and unusual flavors.

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Eastbound Food Caravan, Part 1: Taza (Arcadia, CA) and Falafel Me(Azusa, CA)

I wouldn't typically consider going all the way to Azusa, not to mention Upland, but when Carl, the PR for Falafel Me, offers to pick up and drive me along with other bloggers, my answer was "why not!"

Our food caravan started with coffee and breakfast at Taza: a Social Coffeehouse, in Arcadia.

Taza is different than most "coffee shops" in Arcadia and SGV. Instead of boba drinks, they serve Handsome Roaster coffee.
On the weekends, the place gets even more special with pastries and croissants from Sharon Wang's Sugarbloom. Sharon, who comes in only on the weekends to showcase her pastries, had worked for Thomas Keller.

My favorite of her creations was the Spam musubi croissant. It isn't cheap at $4, especially for SGV standards, but it wasn't only the novelty of spam musubi, the croissant itself was perfectly buttery and flaky. I think it's definitely worth a try and worth returning for.

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Smashburger Comes to Culver City

Smashburger is the brainchild of Tom Ryan, who has 20 years as a fast food executive under his belt, from Quizno's to McDonald's. Before all that, though, he had a PhD in Flavor and Fragrance Chemistry, and it showed in all his creative new ideas. You'll see his idea for Smashburger in just a bit.

Smashburger creates a special burger for different locations, and the one we have, the L.A. Burger, happens to be my favorite out of the few burgers I tried. The LA Burger combines the ethnic influences we have in this town with crispy wonton, fried egg, cilantro, cucumber, lettuce, tomato and Japanese steakhouse ginger dressing on a black and white sesame seed bun.

It may sound kind of weird, but this was a delicious and interesting combo. The price point is very friendly as well at $5.99 for a regular (you can also go "big" or "double").

So, back to Tom Ryan's idea and the name of Smashburger. The beef patty at Smashburger is literally smashed. They do this to create space so the heat can percolate up more evenly. The patty is then seasoned while searing.

We tasted the patty on its own right of the griddle and you get this really beefy taste.

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