LA: internet punk foodies Starry Kitchen resurface at Echo Park video-game bar

Starry Kitchen’s social media hype man, Nguyen Tran. (Instagram)

Starry Kitchen’s totally insane tofu balls are the punch line in many of founder Nguyen Tran’s raunchy Instagram captions.

Angelenos, our city’s best Uber-and-Facebook-based restaurant and its banana-suit-bedecked hype man are back. Nguyen Tran and Thi Tran, a husband-and-wife chef and viral marketing powerhouse, will be serving their adventurous Asian fare out of Button Mash, a new video game themed bar in Echo Park.

They have been missed. The Tran’s adventurous culinary projects began out of their North Hollywood apartment in 2009, made it to Pulitzer-winning food critic Jonathan Gold’s 101 Best Restaurants list, and became Yelp’s top rated Asian Fusion restaurant in Los Angeles.

As LA Mag explains,

After it was shut down because of legal complications a year later, and the inaugural brick-and-mortar shuttered shortly after that, the operation became a whirlwind of semi-permanent pop-up stints. When their January Kickstarter campaign failed to raise $500,000, it looked as if Starry Kitchen was left for dead.

Well, then they became an Uber-delivery-only experiment, and blew everyone’s minds again. And their marijuana dinners were literally the hottest underground ticket in LA for a while.

Can’t wait to get over to Echo Park.

The adorable Mr. and Mrs. Tran, of Starry Kitchen (Facebook)

Tickets to the Marijuana Dinner.