LASA

<p>Few restaurants did more to establish modern Filipino cooking as a serious proposition in Los Angeles than LASA, the Chinatown project run by brothers Chad and Chase Valencia from their address inside the Far East Plaza complex on North Broadway. Chad handled the kitchen; Chase ran the floor. The arrangement produced something that read less like a restaurant with a concept and more like a household with a point of view: communal, lively, and built around the idea that Filipino food could hold California's seasonal produce without losing its own identity.</p> <p>The cooking drew on local and seasonal ingredients while staying anchored in Filipino technique and flavour logic. Dishes like kesong puti pancakes with calamansi curd and muscovado butter, and twice-cooked pork belly with coconut and kabocha squash purée, showed how that negotiation actually worked on the plate rather than just in a mission statement. The crispy pata, available by pre-order, became a reference point for what the kitchen could do when given the time. The room itself reinforced the register: palm-green walls, dark brown tables, a space designed for sharing rather than ceremony.</p> <p>The cultural weight of what the Valencias built here is documented. Early pop-up iterations drew attention from Jonathan Gold and Anthony Bourdain, two critics whose interest in a Filipino concept in Los Angeles carried real signal at the time. That recognition helped position LASA as a progenitor of the Cal-Filipino wave that followed, influencing how the city's dining scene thought about Filipino food beyond the traditional neighbourhood restaurants of Historic Filipinotown. The restaurant operated at a moderate-to-upscale casual price point, with an à la carte format that expanded after a 2017 move within the Chinatown area.</p> <p>LASA transitioned into a new concept, Lasita, in 2021, which means the restaurant in its original form no longer operates at this address. For anyone tracing the lineage of Filipino cooking in Los Angeles, the LASA chapter remains a fixed point of reference: the place where a specific argument about what Filipino food could be in California was made clearly, repeatedly, and with enough skill that the broader conversation shifted around it.</p>

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