19 Town Is San Gabriel Valley’s Most Exciting Modern Chinese Restaurant | Eater LA

"I visited the new fine-dining restaurant 19 Town and found Chef Yang Liu’s contemporary approach to Chinese cuisine deliberately provocative and playful: she stretches Sichuan techniques into unexpected territory, lacing mapo tofu with melted mozzarella in a fondue-style dip and reworking oxtail soup on a tomato base. Dishes range from Sichuan-style snacks—the assorted baskets with imported Sichuan mushrooms, a spinach ball with black sesame paste, and pickled vegetables—to showstoppers like the gnocchi con le cozze (a standout fusion that marries Chinese pickled-pepper sour-and-spicy sauce with mussels and chewy gnocchi), lamb shank paella colored with gardenia fruit instead of saffron, peppercorn-infused steak tartare topped with baby lotus root, wok-tossed lobster tails on tea tree mushrooms, dry-aged trout with crackly skin, and a slow-cooked, melt-off-the-bone oxtail. The theatrical flaming pork jowl (tableside, lit with high-proof rum) and the packed weeknight atmosphere—hip-hop bumping as stylish diners share dishes—underscore the restaurant’s nightlife-leaning ambitions, while an attentive, reservation-only, limited-seating format (three private rooms for about a dozen people each and a heated outdoor patio with lounge and cocktail bar) gives it a fine-dining feel. The sleek, minimalist interior—steel-backed booths, green chairs, black tables, and an absence of traditional red lanterns or lazy Susans—matches the restaurant’s intent to break stereotypes, and the cocktail program (bar manager Alex Feng’s baijiu-forward Weird-O and the vodka-based Foggy Plum Grove with hand-made plum juice) aims to reintroduce intricate drinks to younger Chinese diners. The name itself is a play on words in Mandarin—shi jiu sounding like “food” and “drink”—emphasizing 19 Town as a gathering place for shared, contemporary Chinese food and cocktails." - Lynn Q. Yu