Eat This, Riverside: 2024 Year In Review
Man, oh, man! What a year 2024 was. At the end of January, the Gazette published the first of sixteen Eat This, Riverside columns I authored, each one a diary entry devoted to the latest food I felt enthusiastic about. So, for my January column in 2025, I revisited many of the places I featured last year to report on the latest developments in each story.
I’m looking forward to finding even more food topics I can be enthusiastic about in 2025! The long-awaited opening of Farmhouse Collective! The arrival downtown of the Slow Bloom / Hayet Albi worker-owned cooperative coffee croissant paradise! More unexpected treasures in mall food courts like Master Gan’s hand-pulled Lanzhou noodles. More quasi-legal backyard restaurants with soulful and delicious home cooking like En La Birria.
Do you have a hot lead for 2025? Send me your food tips, and I’ll track them down! In the meantime, here’s the latest from the 2024 crop of Eat This, Riverside features.
As of July, Manna Grill is under new management. The vibe is very similar to what it was when I wrote in February; the front counter now boasts a new self-service touchscreen menu kiosk. The menu still features a greatest hits assortment of homestyle Korean home cooking. In addition to the slippery naeng-myun (cold noodles) and katsu cutlets in various configurations, the new team has added a muted version of jajangmyun (a classic Korean-Chinese noodle dish with murky fermented black bean gravy) and a fiery rendition of soon-dubu, soft tofu swimming in a kimchi and chili-infused broth with your choice of meat or veggies.
Since the publication of my article last year, I became acquainted with yet another Birria option available in this Jurupa Valley backyard. While the rojo is exemplary, Maria and her family also offer Birria en Blanco. Instead of the incendiary chili broth, Birria en Blanco comes doused in a combo of clear consomme and liquefied fat – it’s a seriously indulgent bowl that will leave your chin slicked with delicious remnants. Tangentially related, if you make the trek to Byrne Rd on a Sunday and find, as I did on a recent excursion, that En La Birria has not opened for service yet that day, I can recommend backtracking down Mission Blvd to the Rubidoux Swap Meet where an incredible assortment of street vendors gathers to feed the assembled shoppers. I had a deep-fried quesadilla made to order from one streetside popup: a hand-flattened corn masa shell pressed and filled to order with oozing cheese and beans that I won’t soon forget.
The new and improved menu and the Spicy Korean Fried Chicken Wing Combo with Ranch Dressing Dipping Sauce at Meat Lover / Greedy Cat. (Seth Zurer)
The gang at Meat Lover / Greedy Cat has redesigned their menu, rendering it marginally easier to navigate than it was when I visited last year. But it is still a dizzying document with more options than the most diligent eater could exhaust in three dozen visits. There are new meats available for the hot pot (mackerel! Sea bass!). There are new grilled meats on sticks (Taiwan sausage! Ray fins!) Plus, they’ve added a whole new menu section devoted to fried chicken combos: choose tender, wing, or leg, then select from 9 flavors and four dipping sauces! Each combo comes with a veggie (it was mayonnaise-dressed cabbage on a recent visit), house-made potato chips, and a cup of lemony iced tea. We had our inaugural Raincross Gazette Eat This Outing at Meat Lover / Greedy Cat last October; if they keep adding menu items, we’ll have to have our second and third outings there as well!
Kali Hathaway of Parzel’s Bagelry shared some very exciting news: she’s in the process of transitioning from a home-based cottage food operation to a full-fledged brick-and-mortar wholesale bakery. She (and the coffee operation Mikey G’s) are setting up operations at “The Space,” the cafe and attached commercial kitchen onsite at the Harvest Christian Fellowship mothership at 6115 Arlington. Kali tells me that the move “will enable me to drastically scale up the number of bagels made and add spreads to my offerings! It is also awesome because Mikey G’s Coffee opened up its coffee shop in this cafe space and is running all over the cafe/front of house. I will be supplying fresh bagels by the dozens, baked onsite every Sunday in Mikey G’s cafe once we get up and running, as well as expanding my wholesale business in Riverside.“ She plans to resume pre-order retail pickups once the wholesale operation has solidified. In the meantime, follow Parzel’s on Instagram as Kali shares her progress toward bagel world domination.
No timelines have been announced yet for the opening of Slow Bloom & Hayet Albi’s downtown Riverside location. Nizar Aridi, the baker and founder of the worker-owned cooperative bakery, reports that progress is being made. In addition to Slow Bloom’s coffee roastery, tasting room, and Hayet Albi’s production bakery, Aridi says he’s working on plans for weekend brunch service featuring his laminated patisserie and donuts as well as sandwiches on naturally leavened pita bread, as well as manakish (Levantine flatbreads adorned with a variety of savory fillings) ka’ak al quds (traditional Palestinian sesame-coated bagels) and ka’ak alasreya, a purse-shaped Lebanese pita variant. In the meantime, their weekly coffee and pastry Saturday popup at Urge Palette has slowed its frequency to twice a month. The last iteration was disrupted when wildfire prevention power outages prevented Aridi and crew from baking for a scheduled popup on January 11. Keep tabs on Slow Bloom and Hayet Albi on Instagram to see when the next downtown popup is scheduled.
Mirchi continues to serve our community with tasty traditional halal Pakistani fare. I stopped by to catch up with Farrukh: the restaurant is open for business while undergoing light renovations – new menu screens, sports bar style monitors, and refreshed furnishings are in the works. The team still serves an all-you-can-eat buffet brunch every Sunday, and when Ramadan rolls around this year (starting February 28, 2025), they’ll be serving their Iftar buffet starting at sunset each day up until the end of the month of daytime fasting on March 29.
When I wrote my doughnut roundup, downtown’s Urban Dripp was closed for restorations following a fire in the building. They are reopened now and offer a variety of vegan doughnuts every day (notwithstanding my source, Linda’s skepticism about the veracity of vegan claims from CA donut shops). My non-dairy wife, Kerensa, whose doughnut intake has been curtailed significantly since giving up lactose, reports that the strawberry matcha vegan doughnut I brought home for her was perfectly fine, even if I didn’t feel it lived up to standards set by the buttery milky donuts I prefer.
To date, Corona Farms is still the best farmstand I’ve found in the city. It’s strawberry season again, and the Romanesco is ripe! One quarantine has been lifted (fruit flies!), but the other one (HLB) remains in place. Restrictions on the movement of produce have largely gone away. The family’s real estate quandary remains, however. The land on which the farm is located is still up for sale; the Corona family and their patrons still hold out hope that a benefactor may appear to purchase the property with the goal of keeping urban agriculture alive in the greenbelt.
Sushi OK – continues to undersell and overdeliver in the sushi department!
Los Altos – The ladies behind the counter at Los Altos are still slinging super tacos at the corner of Lincoln and Madison.
Pupusa Roundup – I’m afraid I have no news on pupusas, except that I still like ‘em.
Experimental Pomegranates – Pomegranate season has come and gone. I reached out (at very short notice!) to Mariano Resendiz, one of the researchers who showed me around the grove, to ask about how this year’s analysis of the pomegranate harvest was going. He replied: “The pomegranate research students are still juicing the fruit and are busy processing the last harvest. We have learned a lot about post-harvest processing to limit fungal infections, too. As you can imagine, it takes a village to process nearly 1000-1500 fruit.” In the meantime, they are working on ramping up a new pomegranate genetics experiment and working on a new protocol to assess consumer preference with tastings of pomegranate juice instead of arils, so keep your eyes peeled for tasting opportunities throughout the year next year.
Master Gan – This Tyler Galleria food court stall is still one of the most exciting openings of 2024, to me at least, and remains a source of great noodle pleasure for those willing to venture up to the mall’s Terrace Cafe. However, Seth Zurer is not the owner, no matter what Google’s Generative AI thinks.
European Deli Market – Still, a great source for Eastern European meats, even if their suppliers no longer offer the intense Black Forest schinkenham that I enjoyed so much last year.
La Mazorca – Although I haven’t been back for a few months, it’s still in the Riverside pantheon of grocery store taquerias worth a visit!
Kabob House – I have been back to Kabob House and am still a fan of their garlicky toum and smoky roast chicken.