J’s Mexican Grill
FOOD TRUCKAlright…here it is. The last blog from California on this trip. It was a fun, long eight days and I was ready to get home.
Our last full day in Los Angeles was our longest. It started at 4:30 AM and we got back to the hotel around 9:00 PM. We were able to sort of graze throughout the day at the job site but neither of us had really eaten. I desperately wanted to take a shower while co-worker went looking for food.
We passed food trucks parked on the corner of 7th and Hope Street in downtown Los Angeles pretty much every day. It wasn’t the same food truck but there was usually a taco truck of some kind parked there open well into the late night hours.
I took my shower then contemplated not getting food. I also love tacos and that ended up winning out. I got dressed then headed across the street to see what this food truck has to offer.
J’s Mexican Grill is a pretty large food truck with a pretty large menu for a food truck. The all black truck with green lettering was parked on the north side of 7th Street across from The Bloc. According to their Instagram page, it looks like there are three places they regularly park in and around Los Angeles.
Read more…Joey DTLA
700 W. 7th StreetIf you’ve noticed over the last few blogs, we hadn’t really eaten out at a decent sit down type of restaurants since our first night in LA. We didn’t have time or energy to put that kind of effort in to dinner most nights.
Our slowest work day was New Year’s Eve. We had a mid afternoon assignment just down the road from our hotel at USC then we came back to the hotel to finish up what we had to do for the evening.
I was hungry when we got back from USC though. We had plenty of time so I asked co-worker if he wanted to grab a really early New Year’s Eve dinner. I figured most places would have reservations seeing as it was the holiday so I wanted to go early.
We were just going to go to the restaurant in our hotel but when we got to the floor it was on, the doors were shut. I don’t know if they were closed for the holiday or we were too early and they weren’t open yet.
Co-Worker suggested we just go out to street level at our hotel. There’s a restaurant there and it didn’t look super busy when we drove in.
Joey DTLA is one of 30+ Joey Restaurants in the US and Canada. The chain is described as a “Western Canadian premium casual” group with headquarters in Vancouver. The US restaurants are in the Los Angeles area, Seattle, Miami, New York and Houston. This location in downtown Los Angeles is on the corner of 7th and Hope Street in The Bloc commercial complex.
Read more…Portillo’s (Buena Park)
8390 La Palma AvenueWhat happens when you send two guys from Illinois to California?
They find the Portillo’s.
We had a pretty large gap in our day where we didn’t need to be on the road around Los Angeles. We hung in the hotel for a while working on some things but then needed to go out to Glendale for an assignment.
That wrapped up around 3:30. Our next task was back in Anaheim so we headed across town to deal with that.
As we were sitting in the car waiting on something, I started looking for some place nearby to eat. I was shocked when a Chicago staple popped up not too far away.
Portillo’s of Buena Park is on La Palma Avenue near Dale Street in a very busy shopping center in the city of Buena Park. This is one of two Portillo’s locations in California. The other is about an hour away in Moreno Valley.
Read more…Joe’s Pizza (Downtown LA)
613 S. Spring StreetDay five in Los Angeles started to ease up on us a little bit.
We started Saturday morning with a trip out to Pasadena for an assignment then we had a pretty large gap in our day. We headed back to our hotel in Downtown Los Angeles to work on some stuff there in the comfort of a hotel room instead of trying to do all of our work in the car.
My co-worker had some things to do before I could do what I needed to do so I decided to take a walk. It was a nice day and I hadn’t really explored much of downtown LA to see what was around us.
I kind of started walking aimlessly but also kind of walking towards pizza.
I ended up about 3/4 mile from our hotel on Spring Street. There’s a pizza by the slice place and it was kind of lunch time, so I decided to stop in.
Joe’s Pizza is on a fairly busy part of Spring Street near 6th Street in downtown Los Angeles. The small downtown storefront is one of seven of the New York Style slice places in the Greater Los Angeles area. Are they related to the Joe’s Pizza in Greenwich Village and the Joe’s Pizza in Ann Arbor? Good question. There’s a lot of similarities but not really...I mean kinda, because it’s some family…er, ex-family drama…but no, they’re not part of the same group of restaurants.
Roscoe’s House of Chicken ‘N Waffles (Pasadena)
830 N. Lake AvenueYou see me write a lot about the long days and lack of meal breaks when I travel for work. This trip was pretty much that way too.
We left our hotel around 9 AM and we were pretty lucky if we got a meal break before 8:00 PM.
Our fourth day in Los Angeles we actually got a somewhat proper dinner break. We had a gap between about 3:30 and 6:30 where we didn’t have much going on. We were in Carson for an assignment then we had to be back in Pasadena around 6:30. I suggested we head back to Pasadena and find something to eat.
I was posting pictures from my trip on Facebook and one of my friends who lived in LA for a while jumped in and said there was a restaurant we had to try. There was a location in Pasadena which worked out even better for us.
Roscoe’s House of Chicken ‘N Waffles is a Los Angeles soul food institution. The original location is in Long Beach and the most famous location is in Hollywood, but there are seven locations in the metro area. The chain of restaurants got it’s start in the 1970’s
The location we chose was the Pasadena store on North Lake Avenue just north of Boylston Street in the Bungalow Heaven Neighborhood. The building gives me old school Pizza Hut vibes but this place has been a Roscoe’s for well over a decade. The funny thing about this spot to me is that Roscoe’s sits right next to a KFC so you have to make a choice if you want really good chicken or KFC.
Read more…Lucky Boy (Arroyo Parkway)
640 S. Arroyo ParkwayOur second full day in Los Angeles was a long one.
We started the day at about 7:30 AM and didn’t get done until 8:30 PM. There was no time for stopping between there either. We were go, go, go all day. I was fortunate that I found a few minutes to stop at a gas station and grab some water. Stopping for food was pretty much out of the question all day.
When our shift ended right around 8:30, the first priority for both of us was dinner. We were in Pasadena so I did a quick search to see if there was anything around us that would be quick but still tasty.
The first hit I got was for a Greek sandwich shop about a mile from where we were. My co-worker didn’t care where we ate as long as we ate.
Lucky Boy is on the corner of Arroyo Parkway (which is Historic Route 66) and Pico Street. The restaurant was a small chain of burger restaurants started in the 1960’s. There are only two left now. This one and one nearby on Walnut Street. The business is a walk up joint with both inside and outside seating. Their claim to fame is a breakfast burrito suggested by a customer that they now serve thousands of every week.
Read more…Jollibee (Downtown Los Angeles)
729 7th Street When I travel for work, they are long work days.
Our first full day in Los Angeles saw us driving to Anaheim for an assignment. We stopped at In-N-Out Burger for “lunch” then headed back to our hotel in downtown Los Angeles to finish up our work for the day.
We got done around 8:00 and I was hungry again. I didn’t want to go somewhere for a sit down meal but there was a fast food place right across from the hotel that we don’t have many of in Michigan. I figured it would be a quick, easy, cheap meal, so I put shoe on and headed out the door.
Jollibee is a chain of fast food chicken restaurant based out of the Philippines. They have about 1500 locations worldwide with about 70 in the United States. Most of those locations are on the west coast but there are some spread about the country including one in Michigan in Sterling Heights.
The downtown Los Angeles Jollibee location is on 7th Street to the southeast of the intersection with Flower Street in the Financial District. The restaurant is a stand alone store in a street level space of the Roosevelt Lofts
In-N-Out Burger (Anaheim East)
1168 S. State College BoulevardI think we all know I’m not a fast food guy. I eat it…occasionally out of convenience but I don’t seek out fast food.
I always plan my trips around food. I found out in early December that I was going to Los Angeles right after Christmas and there was only one place on my short list of places that I had to eat it before I came home.
My co-worker and I had an assignment at Disneyland. As exciting as that sounds, it was about an hour of work being escorted the entire time and no, we didn’t get to ride any rides or eat inside the park. I have never been to Disneyland…or Disney World, so this was a cool experience but it was really just a teaser.
We finished at Disneyland around 3:30 and hadn’t eaten lunch yet. I had a one track mind.
We headed east on Ball Road until we found an In-N-Out Burger just north of the intersection on State College Boulevard. The restaurant isn’t on the corner and it’s a really confusing place to get in to. You can enter off State College Boulevard…but it’s a weird entrance and I missed it. You can’t enter from behind the building so I had to go all the way around the block. You actually can enter off Ball Road by going through the Starbucks parking lot. We eventually figured out a way in and both of us were super excited.
Read more…Karl Strauss Brewing Company (Los Angeles)
600 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 100Trips to Los Angeles are always fun.
I’ve only been to California twice. Both for work. Both to Los Angeles.
We landed at LAX a little before 3:00 on Tuesday afternoon. By the time we got our luggage, our car, and completed the one task we needed to do before heading to the hotel downtown, it was dinner time.
We got settled in our hotel and I asked my colleague if he was hungry. The answer was, of course, yes…since we’ve been traveling all day. I figured this would be the only night of our eight day trip that we’d get a chance to sit down for a good meal so I was going to take advantage of it.
There were a lot of options around our hotel, but I, as you could probably guess, picked the brewery.
Dinner on our first night in Los Angeles was at Karl Strauss Brewing Company on the corner of Wilshire and Grand Avenue in downtown LA. The restaurants takes up the corner space of a high rise building- known simply as 600 Wilshire.
Great American Bagel (O’Hare – Terminal 3)
10000 W. O’Hare Avenue, Terminal 3, Ste. H10So…I’m traveling again. Buckle up…there’s gonna be a lot of blog posts from the road. I’m in Los Angeles for 8 days.
My trip started the day after Christmas. I had a late morning flight from Grand Rapids to Los Angeles via Chicago.
We had a pretty lengthy layover at O’Hare. So many times I’ve had like a half hour there and had to run to my gates. We had the opposite this time. A two hour layover meant plenty of time to walk at a leisurely pace.
It also meant I had time to grab breakfast. I needed something to drink and started walking towards one of the gift shops when I saw a bagel shop that also had bottles of Pepsi.
I stopped at The Great American Bagel in Terminal 3 at O’Hare International Airport. We were on an American Flight and Terminal 3 is where many of the larger American Airlines planes depart from. The Great American Bagel is right near the end of the terminal. It’ just a small walk up order restaurant without dedicated seating. There is plenty of seating at the gates though so most people just grab their drinks or food stuffs and go sit down at their gate.
Read more…
SW Michigan Dining 