Great Places to Eat in El Monte, CA

If there’s one thing El Monte, California, has, it’s a wide range of options when it comes to diners, restaurants, and pubs. Here at Longo Toyota, we’ve curated a list of great places to eat in our city, so you don’t have to. Please note that it’s almost impossible to list all the places serving delicious and mouth-watering dishes, so we encourage you to keep trying new places.

Annia’s Kitchen

For many, Annia’s Kitchen is the go-to Mexican restaurant in the city. It serves both authentic Mexican and American food in an open space where customers can see planes come and go. Once there, you’ll realize that despite seeming like a hidden gem, Annia’s Kitchen is loved among its customers, and the place is never empty. Customer service is excellent, as the restaurant takes pride in serving great food and giving customers an overall positive experience.

The menu is quite varied; for appetizers, there are onion rings, cheese quesadillas, mozzarella cheese sticks, chicken tenders, and chili cheese fries. The salad options include the famous chicken Caesar, fiesta salad, taco salad, California cod, and the chef’s salad. For dinner specialties, it offers liver and onions, mushroom steak, chuckwagon, meatloaf dinner, peppered steak, and sirloin steak and shrimp. Traditional Mexican specialties include carne asada a la tampiquena, carnitas dinner, chile verde dinner, fish filet, and shrimp. Lastly, some of the dessert options offered include ice cream, apple pie, cheesecake, and pudding.

The Derby

Perfect for special occasions, The Derby is an award-winning upscale dining establishment that has been around since 1922, making it one of the oldest and leading steakhouses in the area. It all started when athlete George Woolf purchased The Derby to have a place where he could reflect on his fruitful career and create a gathering space for jockeys and race fans. As you can conclude, the restaurant was a total success, and after all these years, it has maintained its reputation and status.

Regarding menus, the restaurant features three different ones: dinner, lounge, and happy hour menus. The dinner one includes the starting gate (crab cakes, ahi wontons, crispy Brussel sprouts, filet-wrapped asparagus, bacon-wrapped dates, and Cajun shrimp), soup and salad options (French onion soup, soup du jour, Debby iceberg wedge, and Caesar, Cobb, and House salads), pasta dishes, over five different types of steaks, fish, and side dishes.

The lounge menu features more standard options, such as bacon cheeseburgers, steak sandwiches, tacos, and prime-loaded potatoes. The happy hour menu, as its name explains, are appetizers that mix well with alcoholic drinks, with some available happy hour appetizers including calamari, shrimp cocktail, and Cajun shrimp.

NORMS

What initially was a coffee shop is now the perfect place to take your family and enjoy delicious American dishes in a friendly and inviting environment. NORMS provides customers with a casual yet excellent dining experience, which makes it perfect for a Sunday out. What’s more, this diner is open 24/7 and has a breakfast, lunch, and dinner menu available all day long.

Breakfast options include three different types of omelets (melting pot, the classic, and the veggie omelet) served with fresh fruit or golden hash browns, your choice of toast, and either an English muffin, biscuit and gravy, or two buttermilk hotcakes. NORMS doesn’t charge for its sugar-free syrup or egg whites on egg dishes, and you can get fresh avocado and jalapeno servings for a small fee.

For lunch, dinner, and entrees, it offers five different types of steak and eggs, special breakfast (like the Gobble Gobble Bigger Better Breakfast and the Sirloin Steak Bigger Better Breakfast), burritos, sandwiches, chicken tenders, fries, mozzarella cheese sticks, six types of burgers, seafood, pasta, and meatloaf. NORMS also offers a wide range of desserts, including chocolate fudge cake and classic cheesecake.

Pollo Mania

Pollo Mania is a family-owned and operated restaurant that offers Peruvian-style chicken and cuisine. It has been operating for over 20 years, and its story began when the Peruvian-native owners wanted to give the world a taste of their cuisine, so they opened the restaurant. Something worth mentioning is that despite its name implying that it’s a chicken-only restaurant, it has a varied menu.

For beef lovers, Pollo Mania has lomo saltado in different presentations (served with rice, in a burrito, or tallarines), and for those looking to try all the Peruvian dishes, it has soups (chicken soup and aguadito de pollo), beans, and salads. Additionally, you can enjoy the woodfire rotisserie chicken or chicken sandwiches, anticuchos, burritos, and rice bowls. The drink and dessert options are cuernitos, lucuma ice cream, mini alfajor, pionono, chicha, inca kola, and maracuya.

Havana Club Restaurant & Bar

Opened in 1998, the Havana Club Restaurant & Bar has been the go-to place for people who love Cuban cuisine. The founder, Chef Ruben Valenzuela, learned the art of making authentic Cuban dishes from the number one Cuban restaurant in downtown Los Angeles — El Colmao. After that, he passed on the knowledge to the other chefs, so the restaurant could become what it is now.

Some menu options are stuffed beef potato, beef pie, plantain chips, Cuban-style tamal, fried pork skin with cassava, different types of sandwiches, shrimp and chicken salads, soups, top sirloin steak, breaded chicken steak, chicken in cherry wine sauce, seafood, and fries. Some drinks and desserts available are tropical shakes (mango, guanabana, banana, and mamey), papaya chunks in syrup with cheese, guava shells and cheese, and homemade flan.

There you have it, our list of recommended places to eat in El Monte, California — we hope we made justice to these amazing places. If you’ve already been to any of these restaurants, please tell us how it went.

We’d like to remind you that at Longo Toyota, we’re committed to improving our community, so if you ever need a trusted dealership, nothing will make us happier than having you as a customer. For more information, please get in touch with a member of our team.

Tags: Activities
Posted in Local | No Comments »