The South Bay's Most Prolific Chef Has Massive Plans in Huntington Beach

Huntington Beach’s newest dinner time mainstay

Check out Bluegold, the next dining stop on the fast-moving Blackhouse Hospitality train. That team is made up of CEO Jed Sanford and chef Tin Vuong (Little Sister, etc.), and now the pair is taking over some prime oceanside real estate in Huntington Beach. The project, which opened yesterday, is a dinnertime leisure space filled with soft round leather booths and emanating lots of ocean views.

The massive 235-seat project covers almost 9,000 square feet of the new Pacific City build-out, a massive shopping center that took years to come together but is now home to other eateries like Ways & Means Oyster House. Orange County locals have already been flocking to the place, which certainly bodes well Vuong and company.

The menu is a mix of Spanish and Californian flavors, it seems, with a full line of starters from oysters and charcuterie to raw bar favorites and salads. There will also be pizzas, a variety of seafood and steaks, and lunchtime plates like rotisserie chicken and sea urchin risotto. You’ll also find options for breakfast and brunch as well.

The biggest surprise of the place though is LSXO, a restaurant-within concept that will play to Southern Vietnamese and Chinese flavors, but with a different menu than what you’ll find at Little Sister already. That smaller space is embedding deeply inside the space, with close walls, low lighting, and lots of wine — all hidden behind an unmarked door and carrying just 28 seats.

The move into Orange County only shows Vuong and the Blackhouse team's ability to dominate at the outskirts of Los Angeles and beyond. It's a great model that has been working for them in the past half-decade, as Bluegold represents the ninth such opening for the company in less than as many years. As people like Ricardo Diaz and David LeFevre have also shown, life in the slower parts of greater Los Angeles can be very, very good.

Bluegold and LSXO are now open at Pacific City in Huntington Beach, keeping daily hours from 9 a.m. to close for Bluegold, and 11 a.m. to close for LSXO.

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Dim sum decisions

Menuism deep-dives into the fascinating world of dim sum culture, and argues back and forth over one fundamental issue: to use the cart or not. Traditionalists, they say, argue for the cart as a quintessential part of dim sum dining, though fresher options are undoubtedly available if you order from the menu directly.

Look deeper though, and you find a discussion on the true history of dim sum overall. Those carts, it seems, are a more recent innovation than people may remember, As the author points out, things looked very differently at the City Market Chinatown in San Pedro in the 1950’s, where dim sum was almost exclusively a takeout item. Carts likely didn’t arrive until decades later, sometime in the 1970’s in New York City and San Francisco.

Give the whole piece a read, it’s totally worth it to follow the winding road to where we are today, through dim sum innovation after innovation.

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David Alan Grier hits Cassell’s

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