dineLA Returns January 21 – February 1 / A Look Back at a dineLA Meal at Lukshon

 

Restaurant Week dineLA returns January 21 to February 1.

I’m excited one of my favorite dineLA meals from last year, Lukshon, will be participating again. This year, the choices are:

Cantonese chicken soup, tea leaf salad , pig ear terrine, steamed cod, grilled squid salad, crab fritters, Chinese eggplant, Korubuta pork ribs, garlic pork belly, beef & broccoli, chiang mai curry noodles, dan dan noodles, ginger-carrot cake, coconut panna cotta

Like the meal I had, I think the perfect dining group is 3 people so you can order everything and get to try it all as it’s served family style. It’s great to see favorites like the tea leaf salad and Korubuta pork ribs come back. I’d be interested in trying the pig ear terrine and grilled squid salad.

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Here’s a look back at that meal from last July.

There were three of us and the number of choices worked out perfectly to order one of each item. Usually for dine LA, you get to order one appetizer, one main and one dessert. At Lukshon, it’s more family style so the small dishes were shared like tapas. We started out with the Sichuan lamb tartare. I think this was the first time I had raw lamb and I liked it. The flavoring was very good. I loved the puffed black rice chips.

 

The other raw item we had was the Hawaiian butterfish sashimi. I know plenty of people go gaga over butterfish and I can see why. As the name suggests, the fish is quite rich but the pickled watermelon radish and daikon helped cut that richness.

 

I was pretty excited by this high-end prawn tea leaf salad. The only bad thing is figuring out the math to divide the prawn fairly.

 

However, the tofu noodles didn’t work as well. They didn’t taste like anything to me but usually tofu noodles don’t really taste like anything to me. I guess I treated it more like texture to accompany the other food. I’m glad this round of dineLA serves up the Chiang Mai noodles and dan dan noodles.

 

Oh man, am I sucker for a good green papaya salad. Lukshon’s was very fresh.

 

It was good to see one of Lukshon’s more popular dishes, the spicy chicken pops, on the dineLA menu.

I actually enjoyed spooning the sauce from the steamed black cod over the tofu “noodles” since we didn’t have a rice dish.

 

Our little buddy, the crispy soft shell crab was just so cute which didn’t prevent us from tearing him apart by the various claws and legs. Sorry, veggies.

 

One of my favorites of the night were the juicy and tender pork ribs.

And we ended with a trio of desserts. The small portions were ideal after the medley of flavors we just had.

 

Lukshon

3239 Helms Ave., Culver City, CA 90232 — (310) 202-6808

© The Minty 2013