Guest Blogger, Chef Andrew Marco of Open Market
My name is Andrew Marco and I’m the Head Chef and partner of Open Market. Open Market at its heart is a neighborhood place for food and market goods. We are located in Koreatown and the food, coffee, and market goods we sell aim to be locally and mindfully sourced in the city of Los Angeles, a city that all four partners were born and raised in.
About seven months prior to the pandemic, both my cooking and business partner Ralph and I, ran a restaurant and private events company out of a ghost kitchen in Hollywood. We were primarily focused on Filipino cuisine. Once the pandemic hit, we were relegated to only doing take-out and delivery. Without the balance of being able to do events and interacting with the individuals we were feeding, we were missing out on the most important part of food – people. From previous events, we had a working relationship with Brian and Yoonna Lee of Little Grace, a dinner and event space in Koreatown, and wondered if they knew of any places that would be able to house us to finally open up a brick and mortar. From those conversations, we actually developed a concept together, one that was part market, part coffee shop, part restaurant, and all parts community gathering space and decided to work alongside one another. With the pandemic isolating people in their homes, we wanted to counteract that and bring people together and that is how we conceived of this hopefully future Koreatown staple.
Open Market is a reflection of Los Angeles. We source our bread from one of the best bakeries in the city at Clark Street Bakery, we get our coffee beans locally roasted from a non-profit started in the Valley, House Roots Coffee, and the inspiration for our sandwiches come from the very city we are located in, Los Angeles. Every single item that we have on our menu has a story; whether it be from our childhood, our first dates, our favorite restaurants; any memory of smell, sight, sound, touch, and taste has been put into the DNA of everything we put out in our kitchen. In a way the food is our love letter to the city in between two pieces of bread.
We like to play with the intersection between growing up Asian-American. What’s considered American? What’s considered Asian? Is this traditional, is this authentic? Are we appropriating, are we creating knock offs or watered-down dishes?
At Open Market, we like to interact with that border of both cultures, jumping on either side of that imaginary line, picking and pulling what we believe makes sense to ultimately create our own authenticity as to what we believe new Los Angeles cuisine could be. Though we all individually grew up eating our immigrant parents' cuisines, we also grew up indulging in tacos, masalas, and fried chicken. And through this, we are able to interpret and ideate future cuisine that only 2nd generation sons and daughters could create.
The following recipe is a crowd favorite, one that if you had a Filipino friend growing up, you would surely have eaten hundreds of them – Lumpia. As it always goes with opinions on personal Filipino food recipes, your mom or grandma made the best ‘fill in the blank.’ I’m here to say that you’re all correct. Any dish served to you with love is always going to be the best. I’m not going to compete with nostalgia, however, with this recipe, I hope that you create new memories so that we can continue the cycle of remembering the food that was made for your loved ones and isn’t that the most important thing?
This recipe is one from our days at Rice Guys, the ghost kitchen both Ralph and I opened up in 2019. We would roll close to 1000 of these every two weeks, every single one of them filled with deliciousness, love, and the true special ingredient, fish sauce. You can scale up the recipe if you’d like to and store them in the freezer, they keep amazingly well for months, and who doesn’t want six of these at any random time of your choosing.
Ingredients
1 lb. Ground Pork
1 Onion, diced
5 Garlic cloves, minced
2 medium-sized Carrots, minced
1 cup frozen Green Peas
1.5 tablespoon Fish Sauce
1 30-pack frozen Eggroll wrapper
Procedure: It’s important to prep everything before you get started, this is known as mise-en-place, everything in its place. Messy station, messy mind.
Thaw frozen eggroll wrappers so that they can be peeled and are ready to go
Take onion and dice finely
With the flat side of your knife, crush garlic and mince finely
Slice carrots into matchsticks, and mince finely
Separate out 1 cup frozen peas, and the 1.5 tablespoons of fish sauce
Bring a stainless steel or non-stick pan on medium heat.
Once pan is heated through, add enough olive oil to cover the pan and add the onion. While you’re cooking, listen to the sound, it shouldn’t sizzle too loudly (pan may be too hot), or sizzle too quietly (pan may be too cold). As you cook more often, you will be able to distinguish the difference.
When the onions are translucent, 5 - 7 minutes, add minced garlic and cook for 1 - 2 minutes longer.
Add the carrots and the frozen peas into the pan and cook down. There will be water releasing from these ingredients, make sure to cook that off or else this aromatic mixture will be too wet when you add it to the ground pork. This process will take around 3 - 5 minutes.
Once everything is cooked properly, place in a strainer over a heatproof bowl and let cool down. Excess moisture will drip from the strainer. Allow to cool for at least 30 minutes.
After 30 minutes has passed and the aromatics have cooled down to room temperature, grab a large mixing bowl and place the aromatic mixture, ground pork, and fish sauce in it and mix.
Once thoroughly mixed, it’s now time to wrap. Grab the frozen wrappers and place on a cutting board. Separating the wrappers one by one you’re going to place a single wrapper in front of you so that its orientation looks like a diamond and not a square.
Grab a separate bowl of water and keep it within reach, this will help seal the wrappers,
Take two tablespoons of the ground pork and place it in the lower corner closest to you, about two inches from the edge. This will allow you to take the corner and wrap it around the filling, make sure you have this spaced out properly to make the best lumpia possible.
Once you’ve placed your filling, form the pork into a log, fold the bottom corner over the filling and make a single roll over it. Once rolled a single time, fold both the left and right corners over to create straight lines, this will be your guide to rolling straight and even lumpia.
Using the lines as a guide, roll the rest of the lumpia upward, going away from you, leaving only the last corner visible. Here you will dip your fingers in the water, gently wet that last corner, and seal the lumpia. Continue until you have wrapped all of the filling mixture, this should create between 25-30 lumpia depending on how large you make it.
To cook, heat up a shallow amount of oil in a pan, this can be a single inch and place on medium heat. If you have a thermometer, this will be at 350 degrees. Place lumpia in oil once it’s heated up, and let fry for three minutes on one side, and three minutes on the other to create a golden brown eggroll.
Let cool for five minutes before eating, serve with sweet chili sauce or any other sauce of your choice