Benny Blanco takes us on a 'bang bang' for his favorite Thai food, tacos and oysters
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Benny Blanco is attempting to paint a picture of the many dinner parties he throws at his Los Angeles home.
“My mom will walk in with like a shirt with rhinestones on it that says ‘bada bing,’" says Blanco. We're sitting at a table in a small Thai restaurant in East Hollywood waiting for our food to arrive. "Then you’ll be sitting next to a man who just like took toad and is trying to figure out his whole life. And then SZA might be sitting next to you and then there’s like my friend who writes books and is like 70.”
“I invite all my friends and they are all so different. I love people, and food is like the best lubricant to get people together.”
2:38 p.m. Spicy BBQ Restaurant
Blanco's wild, curly brown hair is just barely contained to his head. In contrast, his facial stubble is so neat, it could have been trimmed with a ruler. There are chunky, tiered gold chains around his neck. At the end of the shortest necklace hangs a gold heart with a diamond in the middle.
“Have you been to the falafel place next door?” He asks. “I heard it was good.”
He talks fast and excitedly, his frenetic energy making the empty dining room feel warm and full.
“Joe’s Falafel on Cahuenga is of course great. The pita there is nuts. But there’s really good … do you like a lot of Persian food?”
His voice drops to a hurried whisper, like the next bit of information is of crucial importance and meant for my ears only.
“In Glendale there’s such good Persian food. Do you like Thai food? My favorites are Jitlada, Northern Thai Food Club. They have that market out front that’s so sick. And this place.”
This place, Spicy BBQ Restaurant, a nearly two decades-old Thai restaurant with glass table tops, cracking laminated menus and a dining room that looks like it seats maybe 20. It’s the first stop on the day's crawl, or in Blanco’s words, a “bang bang,” to some of his favorite restaurants in Los Angeles.
If you’re the type of person who pays attention to the credits on an album, or whoever is dating Selena Gomez, you know Blanco. The Grammy-nominated songwriter and producer has helped make some of the biggest hits in the last decade, including Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger,” Rihanna’s “Diamonds,” Ed Sheeran’s “Perfect," Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself” and wrote and produced BTS’ “Bad Decisions.”
If your TikTok For You feed is crowded with recipe trends, mukbangs and people reviewing food in their cars, you're probably also familiar with Blanco. He’s filmed two YouTube food shows with chef Matty Matheson, and there are countless social media videos of him cooking alongside every notable TikTok food influencer. On April 30, he’ll release his first cookbook, “Open Wide: A Cookbook for Friends,” co-written with Jess Damuck.
Before Blanco can finish telling me about an Indonesian guy who makes the best food out of his home, our lunch arrives in a flurry of heavy white plates: spicy jackfruit salad; Chinese broccoli; spicy BBQ beef; fried egg salad and nam prik neum.
Blanco starts to pile spoonfuls of salad and beef onto my plate, making sure I get a little bit of everything before he digs in himself.
“This beef is so good you’re going to lose your mind,” he says. “You can get pad Thai anywhere, but this is a different vibe.”
The beef is good, sliced thinly and nicely charred. We dunk the strips into a toasty chile sauce brimming with green onion and cilantro. Next we try the fried egg salad, with smashed nuggets of crispy fried eggs tossed in a spicy lime dressing with sliced tomato.
“The egg salad is insane because you gotta get all the schmutz and the sauce,” he says, spooning more onto my plate. “This thing is fire.”
The Chinese broccoli is tender, wok-charred, smoky and littered with garlic. Blanco serves himself two heaping piles.
“This serrano dip is my favorite,” he says, pointing to a dish filled with a clumpy green paste.
He puts a generous dollop of the dip into a curled piece of cabbage and pops it into his mouth. Then he throws his head back, rolls his eyes up in a show of ecstasy and moans loudly. He’s not quite Meg Ryan moaning in Katz’s Deli, but almost.
I don’t have as visceral of a reaction, but I understand where he’s coming from. The nam prik neum is addictively smoky and spicy. I could imagine spoonfuls on a breakfast burrito, pizza or just about anything edible.
Blanco says his love of food and cooking started when he was 13. Before Blanco was Blanco, he was Benjamin Levin, a kid who liked to get high in the “middle of nowhere” Virginia.
“Do you smoke weed?” He asks in between bites of Chinese broccoli. “When you’re a kid, somehow you got one gram of weed and it gets 30 people high but when you’re an adult that doesn’t happen.”
After the one gram of weed got Blanco and his friends high, they would use a George Foreman grill to make elaborate sandwiches for one another.
“I would make mine and immediately I would go to someone and in my head I’d be like, are they going to like it? We’re all like our whole lives just trying to get like somebody’s 'O' face.”
4 p.m. Found Oyster
We struggle to find a spare inch of real estate on our sidewalk table just outside Found Oyster. The Overboard seafood platter dominates with its tiered mounds of crushed ice covered in oysters, two kinds of crudo, shrimp stained red with Old Bay, crab cocktail, smoked trout dip and a cup of Ritz crackers. There’s just enough space for our multiple orders of scallop tostadas; oyster shooters topped with dollops of caviar; and a plate of spot prawns.
He squeezes lemon on the oysters then proceeds to shoot them back. Each one gets its own moan.
“Matty [Matheson] came here the week it opened and he told me I had to come so I went back with him that same day,” says Blanco. “There are not many raw bar situations in Los Angeles, and this is so next level.”
He marvels at the tostada. He takes a bite and the rugged fried shell shatters onto his lap. He lets out what could be his loudest moan of the afternoon.
“You know what makes this so good?” He asks, before picking up the plate and slurping the remaining sauce. “The grated apple.”
Blanco knows, because Found Oyster chef and co-owner Ari Kolender is one of the many friends who collaborated with Blanco on recipes for his cookbook.
“He did a special one with lobster and this special sauce,” he says. “Honestly buy the book just for that.”
After mastering the George Foreman grill, Blanco started cooking for himself and inviting friends over for dinner parties. He acknowledges that at first, the food wasn’t great. He accidentally served raw chicken. But he kept cooking, learning and befriending chefs like Damuck, a recipe developer, food stylist and cookbook author who spent years working for Martha Stewart. The two started throwing dinners together. After one of the parties was covered in the New York Times, book agents started asking for a cookbook.
“I was like, oh my God, it was always a dream of mine that I never thought could be a reality because I never saw myself like that,” he says. “I’m one of those people that’s really confident, but at the same time thinks I’m not good enough. I make a song and I’m like this is the best thing ever. Then I wake up the next day and I’m like I hate this, I hate myself.”
Blanco takes his time excavating every last morsel of meat from the prawn tail before dragging it through the yuzu ponzu beneath.
"You can tell a lot about a person by how they eat their shrimp," he says.
Matheson and Jitlada’s Sarintip “Jazz” Singsanong are also featured the cookbook. There’s a banana pudding for SZA, who formed an obsession for Blanco’s banana pudding while they worked together in his studio.
“She came over to work one time and I had banana pudding in the fridge and she saw it and asked if she could have some,” he says. “She proceeded to eat the entire thing over the course of a day, and from then on it was a requirement.”
While working on her 2022 album “SOS,” Blanco says SZA expected both the banana pudding and his homemade lasagna whenever she visited the studio.
“Food is the only way I make songs,” he jokes. “I think the only reason people want to make music with me is because I cook OK food.”
When Blanco is in the studio with Lil Dicky, he typically makes enchiladas or shawarma.
“I make a nice shawarma," Blanco says. "In the book, I have a shawarma recipe that I made with Michael Solomonov from Zahav. I basically just tried to make all my dreams come true with this book and get all my friends who are like amazing chefs to do it.”
5:28 p.m. Tacos Y Birria La Unica
“I’m a cabeza type man,” says Blanco as we approach the Tacos y Birria La Unica truck parked on Olympic Boulevard in Mid-City. “I like head.” He says with a laugh. “Tongue is good too. And lips!”
He orders both goat and beef queso birria tacos and a few tacos filled with a mixture of cabeza and lengua. He makes sure we each have our own cups of consommé.
“L.A. is like one of these crazy places where a truck serving tacos on the side of the street could be better than the double Michelin restaurant,” he says. “I love like the community, I love everything about it."
Blanco pries open each of the queso tacos and squirts a stripe of both red and green salsas down the middles. The orange-tinged shells are crisp and bubbly, padded with a layer of melted cheese and overflowing with shredded meat, diced onion and cilantro.
He dunks one of the queso tacos into a styrofoam cup of consommé then devours half the taco in a single bite. Juice drips down his chin and his fingers. Despite many moans, this is the quietest he’s been all day, his focus completely occupied by the crunch, juice and cheese of the tacos. He sips some of the consommé before reaching for another taco.
After the second, he’s back to his fast-talking self.
“It’s a crispy, spicy shell and there’s cheese oozing out of the side and you have meat that’s the most tender thing you’ve ever touched to your lips and you have spicy salsa and the acidity of the lime then you dip it into this warm almost like cinnamon-clove broth ... and mmm you want to kill yourself because it’s so good.”
With a cookbook, a cooking show and a lifelong love of food to enthrall him, Blanco says he'd consider opening a restaurant, but most likely in the form of a sandwich shop or a diner.
"And I'd want to work the counter," he says. "That's like what I want to do when I retire. Or it would be some sort of place where you sit on the floor with people you've never met and you have a communal meal and it's like maybe a tempura and like wagyu stuff. I don't know."
The concept, like Blanco, is evolving, inspired and a little all over the place.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
