Blowhard, Esq. writes:
L.A.’s Grand Central Market has been undergoing a renaissance over the past few years. When a friend and I were there three years ago, the food offerings ranged from mediocre to lousy. While the middling places we ate at are both still there, they’ve been joined by a number of foodie establishments like Horse Thief BBQ, DTLA Cheese, G&B Coffee, and others. The quality has improved so markedly that Bon Appétit named it one of America’s 10 Best New Restaurants this year. During a recent trip downtown I tried one of the new spots, the Belcampo Meat Co.
Based in northern California (one of the workers was wearing a SF Giants baseball cap, a hanging offense in L.A., but I gave him a pass), Belcampo sources all of its meat from its own farm. Thus, in addition to offering a few dishes, it’s also a butcher. They don’t seem to offer any offal, though, so the hardcore Paleos are out of luck.
I got the meatball sub and it was delicious. Everything — the bread, sauce, basil, cheese, and meatballs — was very fresh. The sandwich is a little pricey at $11.50 but it’s enough for two, especially if you get a side of their beef tallow fries.
Related
- KCET’s food editor picks her two favorite dishes and dessert at the GCM.
- GCM, then and now.
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
McDonald’s used to fry their French fries in beef tallow, until the animal food-phobic Baby Boomers took over as the main customer block. They’re also the pioneers in lipid-phobia, but you have to fry your fries in some kind of oil.
The result: out with beef tallow, bacon grease, duck fat, and lard — which are monounsaturated and some saturated fat — and in with oil from peanuts, corn, soybeans, etc., bastard oils which are mostly polyunsaturated fat (and not the good omega-3 kind). The old fats had a creaminess, whereas now they’re more runny and liquidy.
In order to find the good old stuff, you have to patronize one of these foodie joints that caters to Gen X competitors in the lifestyle status game ( = $$$ ), where contestants LARP as Midcentury fine diners, before fat-phobia and animal-phobia took over.
I miss the days when you could get all of that for under two bucks at the nearby McDonald’s, and without the pretension.
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Haha, good god man, do you ever like to stick it to people.
GCM is a pretty unpretentious place, you’ll be happy to learn. Mexican day laborers, LAPD cops, European tourists, and gross hipsters who care only about status and not about the actual food we just want to signal how cool we are (that would be me) all mingle, shop, and eat without anyone caring what anyone else is doing.
The beef tallow fries at Belcampo are $4, double your ideal, but they still won’t break the bank.
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It wasn’t the exact dollar figure that I was talking about, but the kind of human-scale setting in which you used to find halfway decent food, and how that has shifted to a more loathsome setting.
Wage-lowering Spics, militarized pigs, foreign-language-speaking tourists, and hipster faggots, who are all psychologically blind deaf and numb to one another, is no kind of community setting. It sounds worse than the atomization in Blade Runner, which at least was free of pigs. And you have to live in a “global alpha city” to have such a destination within traveling distance, even if you only cared about the food and not your fellow patrons.
Butchers, beef tallow for fries, etc. used to be available in everybody’s own neck of the woods, whereas now you have to hold your nose to visit such a place, assuming you even live near one.
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I bet you’re just peachy at parties, sweetie. I hope you get all your anger and resentment out in your blog and in these comments before you venture out of your cocoon into the real world.
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>>Wage-lowering Spics, militarized pigs, foreign-language-speaking tourists, and hipster faggots
LOL, fuck you, pal.
>>who are all psychologically blind deaf and numb to one another, is no kind of community setting.
Sounds like a lot of empty rhetoric to me. What kind of “community setting” would realize your socially connected ideal? It’s not enough that various groups mingle and eat together, are we all supposed to hold each others’ dicks when we pee afterwards?
>>Butchers, beef tallow for fries, etc. used to be available in everybody’s own neck of the woods
Beef tallow fries disappeared b/c of the low-fat hysteria, a trend that’s been changing over the past few years with more and more places offering animal fat fries. You and I both hope that they’ll continue to spread.
As for butchers, I live in a plebeian part of Orange County with a very low Faggot Hipster Ratio, and I have numerous markets to choose from with real butchers. There’s a Stater Bros less than a mile from me with a real meat counter and butcher, numerous Mexican ones, and a Vietnamese place that sells every part of a pig and chicken. Lots of supermarkets of course do not have a good meat counter. Let’s hope this is another trend that changes.
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“I hope you get all your anger and resentment out in your blog and in these comments before you venture out of your cocoon into the real world”
Heh. Judging by the retarded shit he writes, I doubt this clown ever leaves his basement.
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McDonald’s actually got into trouble for saying they’d completely switched to vegetable oil while continuing to use tallow for a while. A group of (Jains? Sikhs? Hindus?) sued them for it…and won, as I recall.
This place sounds incredible. Did I read somewhere that the GCM also has a bar-b-q joint?
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Yes, it’s called Horse Thief BBQ: http://www.horsethiefbbq.com
That’s the place I originally wanted to eat at. I looked all around the food stalls, couldn’t find it, and being a man, I wasn’t about to ask anyone for help. I went to Belcampo instead and soon discovered that HTBBQ is right next door to GCM. LOL, next time.
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Certain visiting tourists are one day going to hand Blowhard a wad of cash and be all like “you will be our tour guide for the day and take us to all these places. Fuck the Hollywood walk-of-fame”.
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I know a couple of good places on the Walk of Fame, so even if you wanted to go there I got you guys covered.
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Hey, isn’t Eggslut near this place? I simply have to visit a place called Eggslut once in my life.
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Yup, it’s there and supposed to be great. Watch the video I linked to in the “Related” section.
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