Gourmet Vegetarian

The food at this restaurant is delicious. The food is all vegetarian, even their "fish", "pork" "chicken" and other meat dishes are made of faux meat, i.e. gluten or tofu. Gourmet Vegetarian is in San Gabriel Valley. We go to this restaurant quite often. I'm pretty surprised I haven't reviewed it yet. A lot of the dishes at this restaurant are so good. To accompany the dishes, you can order either (1) porridge and crispy fried bread, or (2) steamed brown rice and soup. We usually order the porridge and bread combination because the porridge is really tasty with pumpkin pieces in it. The crispy fried bread is stringy inside and slightly sweet.

crispy fried bread

For the main dishes, we usually order the tofu with bean crisps, the faux fish, bitter melon in black bean sauce(not my favorite but my mom likes it), tempeh cubes with 3 chilis, and abalone slices (which are really giant mushroom slices with bok choi). I also really like this one kind with strips of tofu and celery. It's really delicious, but I don't know what it's called! I think it's in the background of the bread picture above. The food is so tasty and we usually over order and over eat, thinking that it's healthy because it's all vegetarian. It always makes me feel happy when I'm done eating.

cubed tempeh with 3 chilis

bitter melon

tofu with crispy bean sauce

This kind of food is usually not available on the Los Angeles Westside. You have to go to the San Gabriel Valley for the Chinese vegetarian dishes, and Gourmet Vegetarian is the best vegetarian restaurant of them all. It must be good because you see Buddhist monks and nuns eating there too. Here is the information for Gourmet Vegetarian.

140 West Valley Boulevard San Gabriel,

CA 91776 (626) 280-5998

Jasmine: Burmese Food

Jasmine is a small restaurant that sells Burmese food. The food is really delicious. Whenever we don't know what to eat, we always go to Jasmine. My personal favorite is the Chicken Curry. My sister usually gets the Chicken Tandoori, and my dad sometimes gets the Keema Curry. All of these are really good. The vegetable curry is delicious also, but that comes as a side if you get a different lunch special. The prices are really cheap also and you can see the chefs in the back making naan. A lunch special ranges from $3.99 to $6.99 and they all come with vegetable curry, rice, and naan. A lot of food is put into one plate and definitely enough for one person.

Jasmine not only sells delicious food, they also sell a few other things too. They sell Sriracha (which is GREAT with almost everything), pickled bamboos, rice, other foods in jars, different kinds of corn meal/ grains, and a lot more.

There is also a freezer with different Burmese ice creams and a refrigerator with different types of drinks. Our favorite type of drink to get here is the Grass Jelly Drink. It may sound, kind of weird, but it's very good. (Do NOT get mistaken as Grass Jelly banana drink because my mom accidentally bought four cans once and it tasted horrible) Grass Jelly has a jelly consistency and a very unique flavor. We eat it a lot when we get Chinese shaved ice in the San Gabriel Valley.

The only problem with Jasmine is when you'll get your food. Sometimes you can get your food in 5 minutes. (It's actually been pretty fast recently). Other times you can wait a lot longer. Okay, maybe it's not that long, but when you see other people's food and the smell of naan and curry, it can seem like a long time.

Here's the info below:

Jasmine:

4135 1/2 Sepulveda Blvd, Culver City, CA 90230

(310) 313-3767