We’ve seen some crazy things in 20 years of covering street food in Los Angeles. Still, nothing had yet prepared us for the sight of a fluorescent-lit refrigerator display case glowing through the dark on the sidewalk in front of Brockton Liquors in West L.A.’s Sawtelle neighborhood.
What exactly might be going on here, we had to ask. A streetside sushi omakase? Some kind of sidewalk butcher? The lack of any signage only deepened the mystery.
Our curiosity irreversibly piqued, we flipped a proverbial bitch to find a lean man building a charcoal fire, his fridge filled with steel-impaled kebabs of steak, lamb, chicken, and the hand-shaped, Persian minced meat skewers known as koobideh.
Introducing ourselves, we tripped out to hear this kebab chef tell us his name was “Jose,” which made some certain sense on this stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard, east of Bundy, where the food truck and street food vendor scene has snowballed of late, in part due to its concentration of Oaxacan families.