Everyone who knows me, knows I’m a taco truck following, hot dog cart stalking, roll my window down to buy a churro from a strange man while crossing the border kind of food lover. I love street food of all kinds and from every culture. So, you can imagine how excited I was when I heard that Susan Fenniger would be opening a new restaurant just minutes from us that would be entirely devoted to this noblest form of edibles, aptly named Street. What’s not to love about that? Unfortunately a lot.

To my disappointment Street feels more like a trendy concept restaurant for the kind of person who would never have the guts eat a bacon wrapped hot dog in Mexico or those fried octopus balls in a back alley of Tokyo. I wanted so badly to like it this place, after all I’m their target customer! We went in hopes that Street would be a foodie temple, a place of worship for all of us devotional meat on a stick junkies. Sadly it felt like just another sanitized L.A. pseudo hipster joint that tries so hard that it totally forgets what makes street food cool in the first place; it’s inexpensive AND delicious at the same time.

Street is definitely aimed at trying to make you feel current, cool and urban for eating there but just felt so disingenuous. The walls depict scenes of city lights at night with drawings of urbanites and random graffiti. There is way more tangerine than can be forgiven, such an active alarming color when you are surrounded by it on all sides. There is nothing organic or gritty about the place, nothing that remotely eludes to the fact there may be an enormous steamy pot of something truly amazing bubbling away on the stove in the kitchen. It’s hard to believe that even while the decor had us feeling such acute disconnect from our meal we were still ready to forgive it all had the food just been mind blowingly delicious.

We were hopeful when a bowl of little savory Indian Spiced Millet Balls came to the table. They were studded with tiny black currants and colored with turmeric like a papadum and a rice crispy treat had an exotic love child. I liked them and actually thought they were fun to eat and good eye candy but not enough to ask for them by name. We ordered five small plates just to get a taste for the menu. I woke up thinking about dim sum so the bulk of the dishes we tried were in the Asian category. The biggest let down came three plates in when we realized that the highlight of our meal had actually been reading the descriptions of the dishes on the menu.

We started with the Cantonese White Radish Cake with grilled Chinese sausage. There was a fried egg placed on top that had a nice runny yolk—which I adore—but the white was still extremely runny as well which kind of made my stomach turn when I took my fork to it and it wrapped around it like snot. The radish cake itself wasn’t a total failure, they are intentionally benign little things to begin with but topped with the egg it just became a messy doughy plate of paste. The spicy chili sauce did help but totally overwhelmed the palate so that it really wouldn’t have mattered what you were eating at that point, but it did distract from the blandness.

The Japanese Shizo Shrimp didn’t taste like shizo at all, although the quality of the shrimp was good. I’ve definitely had better won ton wrapped shrimp at a hole in wall in Thai town and the sauce was so nondescript that I actually had to ask what it was. I was given a one word answer, “ponzu”—but I love ponzu sauce so I beg to differ. What I do know was that there was a blob of wasabi in the sauce, because that was really all I tasted.

The Mung Bean Pancake had a nice heat and the little pieces of pork belly—although a little over cooked for my taste—did have a starring role. The Chinese mustard sauce was great but the dish could have used some more kim chee or some bright taste somewhere, it all ended up as one big salty taste in the end.

The Pork Dumplings were essentially bad pot stickers. The won ton skins were chewy and thick like shoe leather, nothing delicate about it. The ones I make from Trader Joe’s have lighter dumpling skins. What made me mad was that the meat inside of the dumplings was delicious! I could see little flecks of orange zest which I really liked and the flavor was subtle and sweet, but in the end it was completely obliterated by a doughy, chewy won ton skin.

We both liked the Cuban Stuffed Potato Cake stuffed with picadillo. Me being part Cuban I am a fan of picadillo and make my mother’s recipe regularly so I can be a little biased about this dish, but this was a decent version. The olives, meat and raisins were all minced very fine and stuffed inside a pancake that had the fried mashed potato texture of a Cuban croquette. (Porto’s anyone?) It was covered in a pico de gallo style salsa and something that looked like guacamole sauce but tasted of mint. It was a very homey dish and I enjoyed it’s soft messiness as soon as it cooled down—which took a while actually, because it was incendiary hot.

We then made the mistake of ordering the $16 Beef Phở. Don’t ask me why, I know better. I blame the fact that we were slightly hungover for the thought that this magical $16 phở would somehow not only cure us of what ails, but also be so special it could change the course of our mediocre meal. Not only was this not the case but what came to the table does not constitute as phở in our book. The wide rice noodles, laying there sluggishly, barely able to float in the fatty beef broth, the brisket bits throughout were fine but tasted just like everything else and there were a few herbs thrown in for color I’m guessing. Mint, really Mint? Where was the Basil? The bean sprouts? The lime? The jalapeños? The vermicelli noodles? All the things that make phở, phở?!

It was truly the most miserable bowl of phở either of us had ever had. I had to ask for some lime on the side just to try and lift it slightly from the only note it knew how to play—a defining middle.

Here’s my thought, in a town where you can have a religious phở experience in a mini mall down the road for $5 dollars you better give me a real reason to pay $16 for you’re version, or maybe you just shouldn’t call it phở at all and leave it at “Vietnamese inspired soup” to avoid disappointing all the people who know better.

If you are looking to spend $85 on lunch for two—with no drinks—and you’ve never actually experienced the total transcendence that eating real street food can be, than you may really like this place. In a city like L.A., overflowing with generations of unsung chefs quietly cooking away culinary masterpieces in every innocuous mini mall you pass in your car, you just don’t need to pay 10 times as much for the food to be special.

Street 742 N. Highland Ave. LA CA 90038