 So, the thumb roast food, David here, Andrew, we're with Guwak Thai himself, Nelly Nell Chan. Don't be calling the cops on me, all right? As you guys may know, a lot of different styles of Asian food are not only trendy right now, but they are being modernized. However, a style of food that has yet to be modernized in America, and is also very dear to our hearts here, is the Cantonese roast meats. As far as I know, in America, rice box in downtown L.A. is the first elevated Cantonese barbecue shop, and guess what guys, as some Cantonese guys, we're about to try it. Elevated Cantonese barbecue, let's go. Yo, what's going on? I am here with the owners of rice box, Leo and Lydia. Hi. What rice box, the family recipes, is from my grandpa's, our Cantonese barbecue restaurant in central. How true to the recipes from your grandparents? It's really true, we modify a few things, but it is really true in honor to the family's recipe, but we just tweaked it a little bit just to bring it more up to date. We're excited, thank you guys for opening it. First off, to kick off any proper Cantonese meal, you must have the VLT. Every time I drink this, I am zapped back to HK, man. I'm going with the cheesy chashu-bob first. Let's do the cheesy one. Cheesy. I've never seen a cheesy chashu-bob. Everybody doing it that way, I'm just gonna take a bite. A cheesy chashu-bob, that just sounds fun. That sounds crazy. And I feel like, especially you like mac and cheese on pizza, so I'm like, explosion. The combination between cheese and the chashu-bob, growing up, I eat this so much. You know, my mom and dad would just like, yo, you hungry, just give you a chashu-bob. Real quick snacking on it before I get into business, you know. What was the concept behind the cheesy chashu-bob? The cheese itself blended very well with the sweetness and saltiness of the chashu-bob. So it's like, you know, a little mix of what we're all about. Something old, something new, something fusion. It's almost like this rice box encapsulated the ethos behind the ice box. I would say it works surprisingly well together. I am just glad to see people pushing Cantonese things forward, man. Push it, push it, push it, push it, push it, push it. It's almost like KitKats. When you added new more flavors to KitKats, they didn't get rid of the original one. They just added the green tea matcha one. Yeah, and jeez, listen. Don't let anyone tell you to not eat the OG chashu-bob. Hey, we like to say ho-fluffy-ah. Oh, oh, here's what's cool about this chashu-bob right off the bat. It's not super red inside, which means that it doesn't have the food coloring. You know that outside is almost more like a lousap-ow? Yeah. It's more like a steamed mantou, how it's kind of spongy, bouncy. Got a good meat to sauce ratio. No. The one other chashu-bob that I've had the feeling that I would say tastes similar is mainly waf. That is the best chashu-bob in Chinatown. Now, something else that they're doing differently here is the vegan chashu-bob. Have you guys ever heard? Nell's favorite, Nell's favorite. Have you ever heard of a vegan chashu-bob? How can it be vegan if it is also chashu? Unless only maybe you feed the pig only vegetables when it is growing up. No, I love how they have the charcoal stripe. It looks something that you'd only think you'd only see at a Japanese spot. No, this looks like a cool brush stroke, something like you might want to get a tattoo of. That smells good, man. This is mushroom and vermicelli vegan chashu-bob. Never had that before. I'm rocking with that. That is really sweet. Got that mushroom flavor. I would say it does kind of taste like chashu. It does in a way. No. Lydia and Leo know they're in LA and they got to serve a vegan option. Do you have any vegan options? Nelson, you've been analyzing and scanning the insides of that bow for like 30 seconds. So what have you found, Detective Chan? There are some... And you do look like a detective, man. Look at this coat. No, no, no. Actually it looks like the gangster but it's also a little... I tell myself every day, am I a good person or a bad person? Chashu-bob almost more like viewed as like a snack, you know, like a hot dog. Like a corn dog or something. Did we notice that they have a mahjong table right here? But like, when we say mahjong table, not a mahjong sport table, like it's a table made out of mahjong. That a poor Chinese American can be worth it. I don't know what she's saying. Woo! I feel it coming. I got a question, yo. You guys know how when you spell chashu in English, they spell it char-su? Yeah. Like why? Like that's not how you say it in Mandarin or Cantonese. Could be based off Tuan Sa Muai. Oh, that's true. Char-su. Char-su. Char-su. I don't know. Sounds more like Beijing. Beijing, Char-su. Woo! Okay, we got rice boxes. Chashu-fan. Barbecue pork rice. First of all, you know it's New Age because they throw in the cracks, sunny side, egg up, okay? You got pickled daikon, pickled kuk. So those are a little new. Yeah, and then you got the gailan, which is the Chinese broccoli right here. This is a durak pork, right, Andrew? Durak pork, which is an American breed of pork that is bred for eating. So you know it's gonna be delicious. Chashu. Tender. And it has this nice little char-finishing where after, you know, it's marinated and cooked, they lock it in by charring it for a little while. I like how it has the right balance between like lean meat and fat meat. When face out, it's just perfect. But they don't have food coloring in here, so this is all the natural color that Chashu is looking at. This is a lot darker and a lot more brown. Immediately I was looking for like that really sweet candy flavor, but ended up tasting a little bit more of the pork, which is good though, because you get more like the meaty essence. The more savory taste. The most underrated, the sea-eye. They gave you that huge heaping, serving of the ginger scallion sauce. That's gherng cheong right there. The scallion gives it that extra shing. The cool thing about this chicken is that there's no bones in it. Bro, you hooked it. You hooked it. How about gherng cheong even on the Chashu? I'll put it on anything. Gherng cheong goes on everything. GS. GS for my gun squad. Yeah, really healthy. Really healthy. You know, you got the white meat. To do white meat well is very hard because you know, you're talking about the breast meat, it's very big, it easily dries out. It has like less fat in it, but it did a great job. I'm normally not a fan of white meat. I'm more of a dark meat guy, but this white meat done really, really well. And it's still juicy, you know? Like you said, you know, white meat normally dry. That chicken was dry. This might be the healthiest thing here. So if you guys are on a diet or you guys are trying to cut weight, rice and chicken, maybe mine is the rice. This might be my dump package meal. Siyu roast pork. Not barbecue pork. Roast pork. Oh, that crunch. I didn't even hear it. I just heard it. Wow. This to me is the craziest item. This was actually pork headum. So this is like a European thing. It's a roll of pork that they put like herbs and stuff in between each roll. This is a shift in technique. Yeah, yeah, because, because usual Siyu, which is the pork, the crispy pork skin, it's usually flat out long, you know, and then you're chopping it out of like a long, flat block. No, you're just chopping the pigs back where the pigs just, oh, oh, oh. No, it's awful. Actually, you know what happens when you roll things up and you roast them, all the juices stay locked in and they're just like marinating each other in like a crazy like marination cycle cycle. Oh, there's chimichurri. Okay, chimichurri sauce on this. This is new. And I liked how the skin didn't immediately break off the meat. Team stayed together. Team skin, team meat. Here we have the last two and these are the saucy ones. Gale au laum, curry beef brisket. One of my favorite dishes. This piece of nao naom, which is beef tendon, man, it's jiggling like as you shake it a little bit. I could see the tendon just. That's super good. And you know me, I'm about to curry. Wow. No, different from traditional curry. But it just tastes so good. Little Malaysian, obviously the Malaysian style, closer to the Indian style. No, it's spicier. It's spicier than the original Chinese curry. Yup. No, even like the color you can tell, you know. Little more coconut. And this is where I feel like the pickled vegetables really come into play on the spicy curry. Got a little daikon, little cubes, cool everything down. Yo, don't do that. Yo, don't do that. Oh, oh, man. Yo, Ethan! Vegan mapo egg plant. I like how the eggplant, it's just soft enough, but it doesn't fully break apart. Yo, that definitely tastes like meat. That's crazy. Also, you can taste a lot of the mushroom in it too. Yeah. I heard there's a debate in some vegan circles. Should you eat vegan things that are designed to taste like meat? I always thought it was a little bit strange that you would go vegan, but still want everything to taste like meat. You're really impressed by the way they do vegan things here. You've just turned me vegan for the night. Whether it was the vegan chashu bao, to now this vegan mapo egg plant. This might be the one. It was done really well. This is for me, because I don't eat at vegan spots all the time. This is the best vegan cancer food I've ever had. Affordable, beautiful, amazing. Yo, pain, yo, laying, yo, pain. Who am I? What was your absolute favorite thing? For me, obviously I liked the curry brisket the most. I was most impressed by the porketta. So you were impressed by something, but your best choice was something correct? Because I am able to, in my mind, separate my individual tastes from what is more globally impactful. Going off of that, I would say definitely the porketta, crispy pork is definitely the most impressive. And one of my favorite. But the OG chashu, you can't go wrong. You know, I had $40 chashu over in New York, at a Chinese tuxedo. I think you should be able to pay more money for chashu. I'm just glad to see chashu and sumay have its range. That's all. I'm gonna have to double down on the chashu rice box, man. You know, like, basically Andrew said it all, the staple, you can't go wrong with chashu. The way they do it here at rice box is just, you know, to another level, which is like they upgrade it with more premium quality. I'm also gonna have to go with cheesy chashu bao, man. It's just like something different. I like the cheese filling inside of it. You know, it really gives it that more extra savory taste. It's like what Leo said, the cheesy chashu bao really represents the ethos and the motto and like the philosophy of the rice box. With so many other spots popping up in LA, whether it's, you know, a lot of mainland Chinese spots. I love mainland Chinese food. I love Sichuan food. But I'm really, I mean, aren't you glad to see a canceled spot come through with clean aesthetics, high quality meats. This is inside the Spring Arcade on Spring Street. And shout out to Rice Box for taking on that challenge and being like, yo, put that on me. That's on me. Aren't you guys, thank you so much for joining us on that very special Cantonese episode of From Rose Food. We are at Rice Box in downtown Los Angeles at the Spring Arcade. Huge shout out to Leo, Lydia, everybody here at Rice Box. Bon hop. Hey guys, as Kanto guys, did we fulfill our duty today? Cheers to that. Aren't you guys, please let us know in the comment section below, what are some other things you would like to see an elevated version of. And number two, some spots in LA that we need to try out. Again, you guys, it's always about food and culture together, never just one or the other. And until next time, you guys, thank you so much for watching. We out. Peace. Okay, Rice Box, a lot of great graphics. You got Stephen Chow. He played like a Chashu guy in a movie called From Beijing with Love. They actually have the movie that Chelsea is in.