Getting more beer for your money is always a good thing and the owners of OC’s biggest upstart brewery know it. That’s why the team behind Brewheim Beer Makers — currently under construction in Anaheim — are offering to give you more than double your dollars back in brewery gift certificates if you donate to […]
Long Beach’s Liberation Brewing Company Is Already a Local Favorite
It’s been a long four years for the Long Beach-bred team behind Liberation Brewing Company. When we first checked in with Dan Regan, Eric McLaughlin and Michael Clements in 2014, they were a power trio of marketing, brewing and financial talent still searching for a place to install their dream project: a tiny production brewery […]
Beer Fest Hopes to Save Long Beach’s Beleaguered Sunnyside Cemetery: What the Ale!
It’s not every day that you can drink craft beer to bring a 112-year-old cemetery back to life. But that’s exactly what Ryan Hughes and Martin Svab of Phantom Carriage Brewery want to you to do at their dark-arts beer fest that aims to #SaveSunnyside. Dubbed “A Celebration at Sunnyside Cemetery,” the June 30 event […]
Long Beach Newcomer Lacquered Needs to Rethink Prices on its Great Food
Of all the recent restaurant openings in Long Beach, none has caused quite as many conflicting opinions as Lacquered. On the one hand, it’s a small counter-service restaurant owned by an enthusiastic Harbor Area husband and wife team who parlayed their respective fine-dining experiences (him: The Fifth Restaurant in Toronto; her: Wolfgang Puck) first into […]
Check Out Your Nearest Homebrew Club for the Latest Experimental Beer: What the Ale!
Any professional brewer will tell you homebrewing is the boot-strap heart of craft beer. Many of Orange County’s best breweries (Cismontane, Beachwood, the Bruery) started in their brewmasters’ garages, and the Southern California region is rife with historic clubs that date back decades (some even before homebrewing was legal—oops!). But even in the era of […]
Long Beach Chefs Are Working Towards a True Farm-to-Table Cuisine
The big rigs zooming down the 91 freeway are hardly visible over the lush early-spring crop at Organic Harvest Gardens. Leafy purple kale, fluorescent rainbow chard, tall stalks of fava beans and pockets of herbs and colorful flowers spring from dozens of grow beds spread across the half-acre urban farm. This North Long Beach lot […]
Mexican Craft Beer Finally Has a Legit Home in SoCal: What the Ale!
Not too long ago, the only way to drink the stellar stouts and session IPAs from Baja California’s burgeoning craft beer scene was to trek across the border and try some for yourself. Since Mexican breweries need a pricey liquor license in order to sell their own product, this usually meant stopping at one of […]
California Kabob Factory Is Long Beach’s Next Great Middle Eastern Food Spot
The eggplant and falafel panini at California Kabob Factory is a sight to behold. You might order it expecting to get the namesake vegetable and a few fried chickpea balls pressed between two pieces of sliced bread. But “panini” is a serious misnomer for this knife-and-fork invention that’s stuffed with tomatoes and French fries and […]
Dry Terped IPAs Are the New Frontier in Weed-Beer Mashups: What the Ale!
Dank, piney, citrusy, skunky: Hops and weed might look alike, smell alike and even taste alike, but it wasn’t until recently that local brewers started exploring the aromatic possibilities of combining these two green, resinous flowers. Last summer, downtown LA’s Concrete Jungle Brewing Project opened with a lineup of old-world and new-school beers, including an […]
LB Vegan Is Bringing More Animal-Free Pop-Ups to Long Beach
When German Rivera first went vegan 15 years ago, there were surprisingly few restaurants in L.A. where someone could eat a hearty plant-based meal. The animal lover and graphic designer, who came from a food-obsessed family in Mexico, got excited over simple discoveries: the new Native Foods in Westwood, a secretly all-vegan Thai restaurant in […]
Beachwood Brewing LBC IPA: Our Beer of the Week!
Let it be known: Beachwood Brewing’s LBC IPA is the new unofficial official beer of Long Beach. To be fair, this classic West Coast-style IPA kind of already was, since it’s one of only two alcoholic beverage (besides the Long Beach Tea–ugh) to even bear the name of the misunderstood beachside metropolis – not to […]
Loaded Cafe Is the Mexican-Owned Greasy Spoon the Future Needs
The greasy spoon diner is an icon of mid-century American culture, but it’s most prolific form is really a slice of Southern California. With home-style meals, cozy-booth settings and snappy service, freestanding kitchens slinging pancakes and burgers become important community spaces – where working-class folk from across the community could sit side by side at […]
Blue Bird Cafe Brings More Than Just Vegan Sushi Back to Alamitos Beach
Happy Elephant was Long Beach’s only sushi restaurant that didn’t bother stocking any fish. It was also the only vegan place around that served a full menu of reimagined and deconstructed Vietnamese and Thai dishes, a la Au Lac. The restaurant’s location next to Spicy Sugar in the middle of the Thai Town Gayborhood […]
4 Exclusive Dishes During Dine Out Long Beach, Restaurant Week 2.0
I can’t decide whether it’s a blessing or a curse that Long Beach has two distinctive restaurant weeks. After several years of just one seven-day celebration of all things culinary here, a rift among its two founders left the city with two: Dine LBC, returning in August, and Dine Out Long Beach, Restaurant Week 2.0, […]
Tux & Chucks Makes Loaded Fusion Food in Long Beach’s Fabulous West
Long Beach’s Westside has its own special brand of local pride. As if the vehement solidarity that comes from growing up in an often forgotten second city betwixt two counties and between all the cultures of its working-class residents wasn’t enough – try being from part of the city that itself is often forgotten. The […]
Hot and Spicy: Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken Now Open in Long Beach
The bright yellow door only appeared in the entrance of the former Sketchers store a few months ago, but you’d swear Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken was already a Long Beach institution. Plastic gingham tablecloths and branded roadhouse-style signs started greeting customers at the Tennessee-bred chain two weeks ago, filling a much-needed gap in the […]
Long Beach’s Pizzanista Caters to Skaters But You Should Eat Slices There Too
In an alternate teenage universe that I once thoroughly inhabited, skateboarding was bae. My shoes were big clunky Osiris slip ons, my deck was a shortboard hand me down Toy Machine and my days after school were spent working up an appetite at whatever nearby fast food restaurant supervised their grindable patio furniture the least. […]
Chef Roq Is Back in Long Beach, Cooking Global Comfort Food at Lasher’s Kitchen
Chef Raquel Jubran is the most accomplished and versatile Long Beach chef you’ve probably never heard of. For the last three decades, the multicultural military veteran (who is better known as “Chef Roq”) moved through a handful of notable Southland restaurants, learning everything she could about cooking cuisines from around the world and earning hard-won […]
SoCal’s Latin Music Scene Is More Than Just a Crossover Trend
There’s a scene in the 2017 documentary Residente in which the titular Puerto Rican rapper tells a story about his dislike for a childhood staple. “When I was a kid, I didn’t like milk, so my mom would put a little bit of chocolate into it,” the artist born René Pérez Joglar tells a traditional […]
2017 Was the Year of the Taco Truck in Long Beach
When I first moved to Orange County as a jaded teenager — fresh out of North Hollywood High School, on the prowl for la vida tranquila — my favorite pastime was to troll the streets of SanTana, searching for the blinking signs and soft-white string lights that a lifetime of living in L.A. had trained […]
Sarah Bennett’s Top 5 Long Beach Restaurants of 2017!
Welcome to our annual Top 5 countdown, in which our SAFII writers tell you what impressed them over the past year! Here, Sarah Bennett shares her picks – eat up! By most accounts, 2017 was a shitty year, one that brought an unending stream of oppressive policy changes from the rotting pumpkin-spice-latte-in-chief and (#metoo aside) […]