Years before Mei Lin won “Top Chef” and founded some of L.A.’s hottest restaurants, her taste buds underwent crucial training at the local mall.
“I feel like I grew up in a food court,” Lin said. “When I was 13 or 14 I would go to the mall with my younger brother and we would spend pretty much all day there.”
They’d while away hours at Fairlane Town Center’s food court in Dearborn, Mich., where she’d beeline to Hot Dog on a Stick and other stalwarts sporting paper cups, plastic trays and affordable meals. This month Lin, along with Roy Choi and a handful of other chefs, put that food-court nostalgia to use at a new pop-up residency that’s taking over multiple stands in a Canoga Park mall.
Food-event company Chain, with celebrity backers including B.J. Novak and Chrissy Teigen, occasionally teams up with famous restaurants, chefs and brands to throw one-off parties and even its own food festival, sometimes riffing on bygone items and businesses.
Now through February 2027 Chain is taking up four stalls in the Westfield Topanga mall’s Topanga Social food hall, corresponding to different menus.
One flips some of the world’s most iconic cereals into desserts such as Cinnamon Toast Crunch tiramisu; one stall rotates in collaboration with a retail food brand, currently Cheez-It; and the others serve Chain’s house menu of burgers, curly fries, tenders and wraps along with four dishes from its celebrity chefs. Items are priced between $8 and $18.
At one, vintage glassware from fast-food chains is available for purchase, as is vintage-inspired Chain merchandise.
“Being a company that’s rooted in cornering nostalgia, the ability to work with different chefs … is fun to see,” said chief creative officer Nicholas Kraft, who helped organize the residency. “I think it’s just a fun sandbox, like, ‘What are you nostalgic for?’”
‘Cruncho Perfecto’
Chain’s top seller thus far is Lin’s “Cruncho Perfecto,” a spin on her go-to order at Taco Bell: the Crunchwrap Supreme. Lin, who brought her Sichuan heritage and flavor to L.A. with restaurants Daybird, Nightshade and 88 Club, uses mapo-inspired Wagyu as the base, loading the ground beef with Sichuan peppercorn, fresh ginger, garlic and scallion. It’s layered in a locally made Mejorado flour tortilla along with farmers market lettuce and fried spring roll wrappers, then dunked into a side of sour cream and Lin’s fan-favorite jarred chile oil.
Teriyaki Bowl
Choi, who joked that he grew up on food-court chicken teriyaki samples from the Glendale Galleria and beyond, designed a grilled chicken teriyaki bowl that marries dishes from two of his iconic L.A. restaurants. The charred-chicken teriyaki bowl loaded with green onions utilizes Kogi’s sweet garlic teriyaki marinade, while it’s served as a rice bowl reminiscent of his fast-casual, now-shuttered local chain Chego.
Spicy Chicken Sandwich
Turkey and the Wolf chef-founder Mason Hereford is known for creating flavor-packed sandwich stacks, and he flew in from New Orleans to unveil his spicy chicken sandwich — an ode to Wendy’s. It’s laden with a house-made, Louisiana Pepper Exchange-based hot sauce and Duke’s Mayonnaise.
Fried Fish and Shrimp Sandwich
Calvin Eng, chef-owner of Bonnie’s in Brooklyn, grew up frequenting McDonald’s with his grandmother and translated the experience through a Cantonese American lens. Eng reimagined the Filet-O-Fish by building a fish-and-shrimp patty reminiscent of a Chinese fish ball. It’s breaded with panko and fried, placed atop a slice of New School American Cheese and slathered with a fragrant ginger-scallion-oil tartar sauce.
Helping to create these recipes is Chain’s culinary director, Jared Dowling, who is also chef of Silver Lake’s Doto and Santa Monica’s Edgemar. Raised in South East London, Dowling didn’t grow up with the traditional U.S. model of a food court — but he certainly became acquainted during his recent years in California, and visited the Grove, the Westfield Century City, the Glendale Galleria and others in preparation for this project.
He brought his own research and the memories of the celebrity chefs to dial in the dishes served during Chain’s six-month residency in Canoga Park.
“That was the nicest part of this entire thing: creating those relationships with each one of the chefs and really understanding why each dish resonates with them,” said Dowling.
Dowling and Chain chef Alan Rudoy worked with all four chefs to perfect their visions. The duo also collaborated on Chain’s house menu, which includes a karaage-style chicken wrap, porcini-and-truffle curly fries and a mustard-laced Wagyu burger topped with a heap of caramelized onions, as well as the desserts and drinks found in the General Mills snack stand and the stall of monthly rotating items.
Rudoy — an alum of Funke, Estrano, Destroyer and Bahr — said he’s already picking up culinary and life lessons, such as Choi instructing him to treat a grilled chicken thigh as carefully as you would nigiri.
“That was a weirdly inspirational moment for me because I didn’t think I’d learn something from a bowl of chicken teriyaki in a mall,” Rudoy said. “But here I am hearing philosophical concepts about how if you want something to be right, every little step that leads to it needs to be great.”
Chain can be found in the Topanga Social food hall now through February 2027, within the Westfield Topanga shopping center at 6600 Topanga Canyon Blvd., Canoga Park, open Monday to Saturday from noon to 8 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
The post Inside the new pop-up where celebrity chefs serve food-court favorites appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
