CORNER GRILLE
★★½
Address: 8261 Sepulveda Blvd., Panorama City.
Information: 818-810-6396.
Cuisine: Asian-Latino eclectic.
When: Lunch and dinner, Monday through Saturday.
Details: Soft drinks. Reservations not needed
Prices: About $12 per person.
Cards: MC, V.
★★½
Address: 8261 Sepulveda Blvd., Panorama City.
Information: 818-810-6396.
Cuisine: Asian-Latino eclectic.
When: Lunch and dinner, Monday through Saturday.
Details: Soft drinks. Reservations not needed
Prices: About $12 per person.
Cards: MC, V.
Let me say it from the outset: Corner Grille is anything but fancy. It’s cozy, and friendly, and happy, and good. But it’s definitely not fancy.
It’s a place to go with friends for some of the quirkiest Asian fusion dishes around, served by a staff that loves to feed its customers large portions of creations that are, in numerous cases, their own, and in numerous cases the sort of chow we’ve been eating ever since the first Kogi Truck hit the road.
It’s an easy eatery to hang in, with prices so low, they’re almost negligible. Only one dish goes over $10, and that’s the Korean barbecue ribs served with salad and rice. Plenty of items on the menu are less than $5; the Korean tacos run between $2.49 and $2.99. Order away. The tab won’t cause any pain at all.
Corner Grille sits in a corner mini-mall — of course it does! — of the sort found everywhere in the Valley. Its neighbors include a 7-Eleven, a place called BBQ Land, a Yoshinoya, a Fat Burger, a doughnut shop, a bakery and a dental office — there’s almost always a dental office. It’s easy to zip on by, on your way to wherever you’re on your way to. And indeed, parking is a bit of a challenge thanks in particular to the 7-Eleven, which does a considerable business among those in need of alcoholic libations.
There’s no alcohol at Corner Grille, just soft drinks, including Sobe and bottles of Starbucks Frappuccino.
Go for the food
Mostly, fans are here for the chow, which is served as fast as possible, with the sort of affability that’s vanished from much of our world. And the food is good, with more choices than you can shake a plastic utensil at. There are 13 burgers, ranging from the simple cheeseless Roscoe Burger, through the very tasty, almost essential Kalbi Burger (made with Korean barbecue beef and shredded cabbage), the Crazy Boy Burger (pork cutlet, barbecue beef and cream cheese) and the Hungry Boy (beef, Kaçak İddaa bacon and a fried egg).
There are four Korean tacos: chicken, steak, fish and shrimp, all with shredded cabbage and salsa. Order three, get one free!
There’s Korean barbecue: beef, chicken, pork and short ribs, which you don’t have to cook yourself at the table, which means it’s not burnt to a crisp, for a change.
If you need to stretch things out, there are sundry fries, including moderately spicy Korean barbecue fries. And just to remind you that there’s a Korean underpinning here, there’s kimchi.
Specials are posted all over the place. But mostly, there’s a warm, fuzzy sense of being in a new version of an old-school eatery, where everyone cares, and you can taste it in every bite.
Side dish: Eatsa
By contrast, there’s no sense that anyone cares at Eatsa (The Village at Westfield Topanga, 6320 Topanga Canyon Blvd., Woodland Hills, 844-478-4662, www.eatsa.com), simply because there are no visible employees. This is where we’ll eat when the machines take over.
Eatsa is a small chain in which you order from a line of iPads, then wait for your food to appear in a window at the end of a rather cold, charmless room. Though there are a few (very few) tables and chairs, they’re made of a metallic mesh that doesn’t make you want to eat at them. This is a place where you grab and go, engineered to make eating in your car, or at your desk, more hospitable.
The food is vegetarian, mostly bowls, assembled by someone somewhere behind the windows. There’s a button to push, if help is needed, which summons a somewhat surprised seeming server who’s there to explain how the iPad ordering works.
She may, indeed, be the only person in the back. The food is largely … let’s say uninspired. A bento bowl had mushy quinoa, dried out edamame, chopped-all-to-heck “apple-cabbage slaw,” and an inedibly salty miso flavored portabello mushroom.
If this is where dining is headed, I’ll be eating TV dinners. At least there’s a human involved.
Merrill Shindler is a Los Angeles-based freelance dining critic. Send him email at mreats@aol.com.
Corner Grille
Rating: 2.5 stars.
Address: 8261 Sepulveda Blvd., Panorama City.
Information: 818-810-6396.
Cuisine: Asian-Latino eclectic.
When: Lunch and dinner, Monday through Saturday.
Details: Soft drinks. Reservations not needed
Prices: About $12 per person.
Cards: MC, V.
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