The Brief

Boyle Heights is one of the most culturally significant neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

Originally home to the Tongva people, the land was purchased by Andrew Boyle, an Irish immigrant who settled on the 22 acres in 1856.

Decades later, the area became known for years as the “Lower East Side of Los Angeles.” It contained the largest population of Jewish people outside of New York, with the first location of Canter’s Deli, on Brooklyn Avenue. It would also welcome many Japanese, Black, and Latino residents who all called the area home due in part to the integrated low-income community housing developments such as Estrada Courts.

The Boyle Heights of today is as vibrant as ever, with its bustling avenues and businesses still occupying many storefronts from the early 20th century, where music and art continue to flourish on every corner. Despite various changes the area has seen throughout the years, the neighborhood remains a community hub, with generations of businesses passed down to the subsequent cohorts, looking to make their mark in the neighborhood.

This is the Boyle Heights edition of Cheap Fast Eats, where I scout out the best meals you can get across Los Angeles for around $10.

Pioneer Chicken

The exterior of Pioneer Chicken in Boyle Heights, a Los Angeles favorite for fast, cheap eat.

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A piece of Los Angeles history stands on the corner of Soto Street and Whittier Boulevard. It’s one of the last two locations in L.A. belonging to the fried chicken fast-food chain Pioneer Chicken. (The other location can be found in the city of Bell Gardens.) At one point, Pioneer Chicken boasted 270 locations and was known for television commercials featuring O.J. Simpson.

These days, the fried chicken chain is pure nostalgia for those Angelenos looking to relive the heyday of the '70s and '80s. This is thanks to the hard work of the Aguirre family, who own the Boyle Heights location where brother and sister duo Ernesto and Val Aguirre are currently leading the daily operations. The Aguirre siblings have redone the interior with the orange, red, and yellow striped branding, along with a wall of black and white celebrity photographs and advertisements of yesteryear, exhibiting the cultural significance the chain once had for the city of Los Angeles.

For those who visited the chain back in the day, the recipe for fried chicken remains unchanged. The distinctive batter covers the entirety of the chicken, allowing for maximum flavor and locking in an exquisite amount of juiciness for each bite.

For the solo diner, the fried chicken basket ($7.99) comes with two pieces of chicken (legs and thighs) and your choice of side. Other options include a two-piece dinner ($11.99) with two sides, from a selection of mashed potatoes and gravy, spicy rice, crunchy coleslaw, and a fluffy biscuit. I recommend you use the condiment packet that comes with to add a squeeze of honey. Other options include the various buckets that range in size from eight, 12, or 20 pieces. The family pack ($28.99) is another great option for feeding a large group or the next picnic.

Brooklyn Ave. Pizza Co. 

The exterior of Brooklyn Ave. Pizza Company on Cesar Chavez Avenue.

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Head down to Cesar Chavez Avenue, where you’ll find another cool slice of history. Brooklyn Ave. Pizza Co. is a restaurant and bar known for serving wood-fired pies, wings, and other delicious sides. The name Brooklyn is an homage to the original name of the street, which dates back to the late 1800s and was seen as a way to entice New Yorkers interested in moving westward. The name was changed in 1994.

To pizza enthusiasts, the name has a double meaning since Pizza Co. serves Neapolitan-style wood-fired pies, the style that Italian immigrants popularized in New York in the early 1920s.

A trio of slices from Brooklyn Ave. Pizza Co. You can see how a single slice can easily make a meal.

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Elizabeth and Kevin Obando and their son Santiago dine recently at Brooklyn Ave. Pizza Co.

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The restaurant itself is part of The Paramount, a live music venue with a history of hosting seemingly everyone over the years, including Motown artists such as Stevie Wonder to Sonny & Cher. It later morphed into a legacy punk rock venue called The Vex, where it hosted luminaries of the scene, such as Black Flag and The Plugz. The venue would later become a community space for quinceañeras and a performance space for the nearby schools.

These days, for anyone looking to grab a bite before taking in a show or just stopping by the neighborhood, Brooklyn Ave. Pizza Co. is a suitable destination. While full-sized pizzas are a great option, since this is Cheap Fast Eats, we’re focused on the slice game, with a choice of cheese, pepperoni, and a daily special ranging from around $5 each. The slices contain a crispy and chewy crust that serves as an excellent canvas for the different toppings, from melty cheese to pepperoni, that curls into little cups when cooked under the 800-degree heat of the wood fire oven.

The daily special rotates with options such as mole, topped with queso Oaxaca and curtido (pickled vegetables) and the Meat Lovers, which comes with house-made chorizo, pepperoni, and hatch chile. Wash it down with any of their various beverages, from their house-made agua frescas to anything from their full bar.

Mariscos Jalisco

You'll find the Mariscos Jalisco taco truck parked on Olympic Boulevard in Boyle Heights.

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When discussing the best tacos in Los Angeles, there’s a good chance the Mariscos Jalisco will come up. In 2002, Raul Ortega opened his nondescript-looking lonchera truck. He parked it in an industrial section of Olympic Boulevard across the street from Estrada Courts, where he served mariscos dishes from his hometown of San Juan de los Lagos in Jalisco, Mexico.

The menu at MJ is straightforward, consisting of tacos and ceviche. But for all its simplicity in its menu, it’s the care of each menu item that shines through, especially in dishes such as the tacos de camarón ($2.50 each).

This is not an Ensenada-style shrimp taco; it is something completely different. Ortega fills a corn tortilla with a minced shrimp-and-vegetables mixture and a few other secret ingredients. The tacos are then deep-fried and topped with a light red salsa de mariscos and a sliver of avocado. The end result is nothing short of taco magic.

The heavy crunch of the taco is a symbol of monumental things to come, as you reach the contents of the taco, with its soft and almost cream-like texture. There's also the rush of tanginess from the salsa roja that permeates the fried outer layer of the taco, and, with each bite, dribbles down the side of your hand.

Dive into a plate of tacos de camaron and oysters peinados from Mariscos Jalisco.

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If you want to ceviche-ify your life, you’ve also come to the right place. The Tostada Poseidon ($11) is a heavenly combination of shrimp ceviche, octopus, and spicy red agua chile that is destined to become part of your core memory. Most recently, we’ve been drawn to their delicious oyster peinados ($15 for half a dozen; $28 for a full dozen), which translates to "dressed up," meaning they're piled high with cooked shrimp and octopus. A fresh, simple slurp is the perfect send-off as you go about your day.

X'tiosu Kitchen

Located on the corner of Forest and Wabash avenues, directly across the humble-looking Malabar Library — one of the oldest libraries in Los Angeles — is where one finds X’tiosu Kitchen. If you’re searching on Google, the small walk-up window restaurant appears to be a Mediterranean restaurant; however, upon browsing the menu, you’ll realize it’s much more.

X'tiosu is located on the corner of Wabash and Forest avenues in Boyle Heights

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The chicken shawarma and falafel taco plate from X'tiosu mashes up Mexican and Middle Eastern fare.

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Sure, you’ll find the various kabobs and shawarma plates, but the tacos are the real draw at this Middle Eastern-meets-Oaxacan concept. The chicken shawarma taco ($2.25) oozes with spices along with the onions and cilantro garnish and topped with the bright brine of magenta-colored pickled turnips. The tacos are then drizzled with their “Arabesque salsa,” providing just the right amount of creaminess to help round out the taco’s profile. The equally great vegan options, including your choice of falafel or cauliflower (both $2.50), shouldn't be overlooked. The cauliflower taco contains equal amounts of cumin, coriander, and turmeric, achieving the proper level of spice. The falafel is crispy and blooms with notes of fresh herbs. The best option to consider is the taco plate ($12), which features your choice of two tacos and a simple side salad, hummus, and rice.

Santa Cecilia Restaurant

Head to Mariachi Plaza near the Metro station entrance, where you’ll find the cutest-looking walk-up taqueria window that is Santa Cecilia. The small white building with its hand-painted signage and air-brushed murals exudes a particular charm.

Santa Cecilia Restaurant in Mariachi Plaza.

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The tacos de tripas from Santa Cecilia Restaurant in Mariachi Plaza. Get them extra crispy.

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Santa Cecilia has been feeding the locals since the mid-90s with its small menu of tacos, burritos, and other daily specials consisting of chile rellenos and menudo served on weekends. However, one particular item that has taken hold of our hearts is the tripas taco ($3). For those unfamiliar, tripas are small intestines from either a cow or a pig that are boiled and then fried. Sure, it's an acquired taste for many, but once you get past the ick factor, there’s a good chance you’ll go goo goo for guts.

When you order tacos de tripas, they’ll ask if you want them “bien dorados,” which means well-browned or fried to the crispiest, which is the best way to go. What arrives is a jagged and slightly unctuous piece of meat that exists in a space between a well-seasoned chicharron and fried wonton. The taco comes in a handmade, soft corn tortilla containing a few shards of white onion and is drenched in lovely homemade green salsa.

Howl about this for the history books? A wolf was found in L.A. County for the first time in a century on Saturday morning.

“It's the furthest south the gray wolves have been documented since their reintroduction into Yellowstone and Idaho just over 30 years ago,” said Axel Hunnicutt, the state gray wolf coordinator for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The wolf, tagged as BEY03F, was spotted in the town of Neenach, near Lancaster, at 6 a.m.

The three-year-old wolf was born in 2023 in Plumas County, north of Lake Tahoe, as part of the first litter of the Beyem Seyo pack.

“ We don't know what happened to her after that,” said Hunnicutt. “ We documented her through genetics when she was born.”

Last May, BEY03F was caught in  Tulare County and fitted with a GPS tracking collar. The department has been monitoring her movements since. Hunnicut estimated that she has traveled more than 500 miles throughout the state.

The end of January marks the start of the breeding season for gray wolves, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. They will typically break from their pack to find a mate, sometimes traveling thousands of miles to establish a new pack.

There are no records of wolves in the San Gabriel or coastal regions, but the likelihood of her finding a mate is not impossible. Researchers were surprised to discover the pack that BEY03F belonged to in Northern California.

 ”No one expected a pack to pop up there,” Hunnicutt said. “And that's because two wolves wandered hundreds of miles, so it's possible that some other wolf is doing the same thing.”

The last gray wolf to make it into the Southern California region was in 2021, when the male wolf, OR93 traveled as far down as Ventura County. His journey was cut short later that year, after he was struck and killed by a vehicle along Interstate 5 in Kern County.

Hunnicut said that’s one of the main challenges for BEY03F in her search for a mate.

“ This morning she’s just east of Pyramid Lake,” said Hunnicutt. “Close to I-5, which is honestly just down the road from where [OR93] was killed on the highway.”

Bad Bunny has fans the world over. One of them apparently is Gov. Gavin Newsom.

On Saturday, Newsom posted on social media proclaiming today, Super Bowl Sunday, as "Bad Bunny Day" in California in a rather tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top tweet written in all caps.

"AS MANY PEOPLE KNOW, I AM A TREMENDOUS LOVER OF 'THE SPANISH'... THAT IS WHY I AM DECLARING TOMORROW IN CALIFORNIA AS 'BAD BUNNY DAY' WHEN BAD BUNNY PERFORMS AT THE BIG GAME IN THE GOLDEN STATE WITH HIS SOOTHING, BEAUTIFUL VOICE, AND HIS VERY NICE LOOKS," reads the message tweeted out through Newsom's office.

For months, the governor's social media team has been adopting the manners and tone of President Trump's signature style.

 "Obviously in this case, the governor is making light of the President's criticisms of  Bad Bunny performing during today's Super Bowl halftime show," said Chris Micheli, an adjunct professor of law at McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, as well as the author of a number of textbooks on California state government.

So, is the proclamation for real?

To answer that question, let's take a detour into the state proclamation process.

"The governor has a wide authority on proclamations," said Micheli, who also works as a lobbyist for groups like the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce.

Proclamations generally fall into two categories, he said. One is official actions, such as states of emergency in the case of disasters, to direct resources for relief. The second is proclamations that are ceremonial and commemorative in nature, where the governor may designate a specific day, week or a period of time to recognize a person or an event — like Black History Month or Ronald Reagan Day.

The Bad Bunny Day proclamation, Micheli said, falls in the second category. But, he added, proclamations are signed by the governor and attested by the Secretary of State in written declarations. As such, it's easy to interpret the Bad Bunny Day tweet as done in jest.

Here's what the Governor told LAist

"The Governor declared Bad Bunny Day via tweet. Enjoy!" The governor's office told us in an email seeking confirmation on Sunday.

Micheli said that means the governor would likely follow up with an official written declaration.

Here's the thing with ceremonial proclamations, though. Micheli said they need to be re-upped every year by the governor — they don't automatically renew.

So yes, let's celebrate Bad Bunny Day on this Super Bowl Sunday. Let's hope to do it again next year, and the years after.

Puerto Rican superstar, Bad Bunny, made history at the 2026 Grammy Awards when he became the first artist to win album of the year for a Spanish-language project, with him winning for his album Debí Tirar Más Fotos. In addition to the top prize, Bad Bunny, whose given name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, took home the award for the best música urbana album and best global music performance for his song "EoO".

In his acceptance remarks, and not unlike other moments throughout his career, the artist used the spotlight to express his political views.

"Before I say thanks to God, I'm going to say ICE out," Bad Bunny said during his acceptance speech for best música urbana album. "We're not savages, we're not animals, we're not aliens — we're humans and we are Americans," he added in response to the ongoing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids across the country.

The crowd in Los Angeles, largely met his statements with applause and ovation.

But this Sunday, Bad Bunny will meet a larger and potentially more politically divided audience at the Super Bowl, where he is set to headline this year's halftime show. Since late September when the NFL, Apple Music and Roc Nation announced their invitation to Bad Bunny, many took to social media to voice their indignation at the choice to platform an artist who has only released music in Spanish.

To learn more about Bad Bunny's political history and what we might expect at the Super Bowl, Morning Edition host A Martinez spoke with Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, who chairs the American Studies Department at Wellesley College and the co-author, alongside Vanessa Díaz, of the new book, P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance. The two academics are also behind the Bad Bunny Syllabus, an online teaching resource based on Puerto Rican history and Bad Bunny's meteoric rise since 2016.

Below are three takeaways from the conversation.

Students come for Bad Bunny and stay for the history 

Rivera-Rideau teaches "Bad Bunny: Race, Gender, and Empire in Reggaetón" at Wellesley and said the course uses Bad Bunny's work as a hook to get students into the seminar.

"But we really actually spend most of our time talking about Puerto Rican history and Puerto Rican history is part of U.S. history," she said. "And Bad Bunny music has consistently made references to this history."

Rivera-Rideau pointed to an example from 2018 when Bad Bunny debuted on a U.S. mainstream English language television show, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The artist opened with a critique of the Trump administration's handling of Hurricane Maria, which had devastated his island in 2017.

"After one year of the hurricane, there's still people without electricity in their homes. More than 3,000 people died and Trump is still in denial," Martínez Ocasio said.

Latinos remain "perpetually foreign" to some

Puerto Ricans are born U.S. citizens — but this has not always protected them from being caught in recent ICE operations.

"I think part of that has to do with the kind of racialization of Spanish and the racialization of Latino communities of which Puerto Ricans are a part," she said. "And I think what it indicates is that, to me, Latinos in the United States, many of whom have been here for generations, are often understood to be perpetually foreign as a group of people that just does not belong."

The Party is the Protest 

Rivera-Rideau said if Apple Music's trailer for the Super Bowl halftime show — which features Bad Bunny dancing with a group representing a smattering of ages, faces and abilities — is any indication of what audiences can expect on Sunday's stage, the theme might be joy in the face of a difficult moment for immigrants and Latinos in the U.S.

"One of the things we talk about in our book is that Bad Bunny is part of resistance, he does engage in protests but it's often through joy," she said. "We have a chapter in our book called 'The Party is the Protest' and I actually feel like that's what I expect at the Superbowl, a party and a protest.

Copyright 2026 NPR

The Super Bowl, to someone who a) grew up in the UK, and b) doesn’t really get football, is a strange experience.

Of course, I’m talking American football, not English football, by the way. If England gets into the World Cup quarter final you might find me at 7 a.m. in a pub in Santa Monica drinking a nice cup of tea and cheering the TV.

The Super Bowl is a national cultural event, and there’s so much excitement running up to it, yet when it happens, the thing that everyone is fixated on is the thing you’re least interested in. As in, the football — the men with padded shoulders who pile into a heap. I mean, I get the ones in the middle are doing something, but the ones at the edges are just for show, right?

All the running and the throwing and the tackling … well that just gets in the way of all the entertainment.

OK, OK, I’m kidding. I do get excited when a halfback grabs the ball and starts up the field, elbowing people out of the way, but even that can get a bit wearing when it happens over and over again. Just let the guy get to where he wants to go already!

And that’s where the Super Bowl is ideal. It comes with ready prepared breaks in the action, so there’s no chance to get bored. There’s the commercials. Over the years, some of them have been so great, like that one with the kid and the Force, and that Eminem Detroit one.

Some, not so much. That’s where I do my armchair critiquing. “Well I hoped they paid him a whole boatload of money for that one, his credibility’s down the toilet,” or, “Oh come on, ad agency, for a million dollars per millisecond, that’s all you can come up with?”

But it’s the hope, the desire, that this moment you’ll be blown out of your chair. Wait, that sounds a lot like watching football. Hmm.

Then there’s the half time show, which I always watch. “Call me when it starts!” I yell at my family as I walk out to do some very important laundry folding. As the music begins, I rush back in. Lady Gaga, Beyonce and now … Bad Bunny. As I watch pure perfection, I keep telling myself, they’re doing it live, in front of a billion people. They are not missing a damn note. Or step. Except that left shark. Hell, even the Weeknd won me over eventually.

And then there’s the last quarter. I make sure I watch that. It’s the psychodrama of it all. The looks on the coach’s faces as they chew their gum, serious, determined. The fans, holding their breath. The commentators asking Tom Brady what it was like when he was doing it. And then.. the whistle blows. And one half of the stadium is ecstatic, giddy with delight, while the other half stares into the abyss. It's a Shakespearean tragedy come to life. For all the commercials and the music, this really is the can’t miss part, which brings me back year after year. Go Patriots! Go Seahawks! Let the game begin.