Asian Gluttons Beware: L.A.'s Most Treacherous Food Street
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

Pioneer Boulevard in Artesia offers an irresistable combination of East and South Asian treats.

There’s no shortage of streets packed with great Asian food in Southern California. But for me Pioneer Boulevard between Artesia and South Street (just off the 605) offers a uniquely irresistable combo: the Guppy Teahouse and a killer row of Indian snack shops.

The Guppy Teahouse (aka New Corner Teahouse) on Pioneer at the intersection of South Street is a food phenom. Its huge pan-Asian menu includes favorites like Taiwanese beef noodle soups, Korean kimchi fried rice and spicy popcorn chicken. They’re backed up by coffees, boba teas, smoothies, shaved ices in washbin-size bowls and brick toast. Essentially, Guppy offers a compendium of treats in vogue among young Asians on both sides of the Pacific.

The decor and ambience has much to do with Guppy’s charm. The interior feels like a cafe instead of a full-blown restaurant. The walls are decorated with gaudily lit aquariums filled with tiny, energetic fish. Greenery hangs down from ubiquitous planters. The youthful, mostly Asian wait staff is at once breezily friendly and efficient in attending to the inevitable requests made by Asians eating the Asian way. It seems modeled after student hangout at universities in Taipei or Seoul or Tokyo.

Every dish comes with gargantuan portions. I could have spent an hour trying to finish my soup noodles topped with pork and sour greens. The kimchi fried rice was a heaping mound the size of a football. The popcorn chicken salad was loaded with enough chicken to feed all three of us. We could have ordered one lunch and shared it. We dug freely into one another’s dishes for an orgiastic feast and still had enough for two full doggy boxes. I like the food even better because the entrees are in the $8.99 range. I suspect they make more of their profits on drinks and desserts which are in the $3.50 – $5 range.

We chased our meal with boba tea, boba juice and a peanut-butter-and-strawberry brick toast. Normally people in our condition wouldn’t want to see or smell food for several hours. But we had too many fond memories of Pioneer’s other temptations to go away meekly.

We headed two blocks north to what has become Southern California’s Little India. Those two blocks might as well be ten thousand miles as far as your taste buds are concerned. This Indian strip is lined with restaurants, cafes, markets, jewelers and snack shops. Having already become addicted to Indian snacks through repeat visits to Ambala Sweets, we decided to check out the offerings of Standard Sweets and other establishments on the east side of the boulevard before ending our visit by picking up some dependable khasta kachori, besan laddoo and kalakand (sweet milk cakes) at Ambala.

That plan was shot to hell the moment we entered Standard Sweets on the corner of 186th Street. It is a bright comforting place with big windows, roomy booths and a big glass snack case strewn with sample trays. The place may be affiliated with Ambala Sweets, judging by the familiar faces of some of its staff. The friendly counterman was eager to give us samples and edify us as to what we were eating. The treats included spicy trail mixes of peas, nuts, tiny crackers, nuts, as well as nutty little sweets that look like miniature slices of watermelon and oranges. There was also heavier fare like a vegetarian samosa sampler. The temptations of exotic treats overwhelmed our better judgment and we staggered out with two big bags, wondering how we were going to eat everything before they went stale.

Unfortunately, Pioneer exerts an irresistible pull for adventuresome taste buds. Rather than retreating back to our car, we continued into Bombay Sweets & Snacks in a mini mall just a half block north. There were a few small tables instead of the big booths but its display case held, in addition to the kachoris, burfis, laddoos, several delicacies we had never seen before. They were made even more attractive by the neat little labels giving the names and descriptions of each. We walked out with yet another bag, albeit a bit smaller than the ones from Standard.

Now we were caught up in the thrill of exploration and continued further north to the corner of Pioneer and 183rd where we spied, on the northeast corner, the irresistable combination of a sparkling new cafe and, to its right, an equally new nouvelle-looking Indian bakery. The bakery sold the only treats that could have tempted us to make yet another food purchase: a fusion menu of paninis, breads and croissants garnished with Indian-spiced fillings and toppings. We walked out with the uneasy feeling that we had lost our minds, but it didn’t feel entirely wrong either. Where else could we load up on these kinds of goodies?

I would like to report that we hastened to our car. But such is the pull of remembered delights that we decided that we would still cross Pioneer and head back down toward Ambala to pick up at least a few of those inimitably oily khasta kachories like no one else seems to make. But barely a block down we were waylaid by possibly the only food sign that could possibly have caught my interest at that juncture of my life: a Chinese bakery.

As I mentioned in one of my earlier columns, red bean buns have always reigned supreme in my pantheon of irresistable pastries. Turned out this Chinese bakery was having a four-for-the-price-of-three sale on bean buns. They were also selling hefty packets of red-bean-filled cookies at the ridiculous price of $2.75 each. What could I do? Buy, of course.

At that point my companions took charge of the situation and insisted that we immediately cross the street and head back to the car. When we got home we were cursed by the other members of the household as they tore open the bags. I think I saw in their eyes simultaneous tears of joy and (dieters’) remorse as they began a feeding frenzy.