If you walk in the east side of the recently renovated Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles, you are confronted by the snaking lines at the trendy Eggslut, which sells, as far as I can tell, glorified Egg McMuffins. If you enter on the west side of the blockwide building, however, you come across a time capsule: China Café, a lunch counter that serves Chinese-American food — egg fu yeung (a.k.a. egg foo yong), chow mein, chop suey and other old-fashioned former standards — to a clientele of mostly Latinos and hipsters.

China Café opened in the basement of Grand Central Market in 1959, and moved upstairs sometime later. (The best guess seems to be the early ’70s.) The menu hasn’t changed much over the decades, making it an island of Chinese-American food in the 4,000-square-mile sea of Los Angeles County, home to what is probably the continent’s widest variety of authentic regional Chinese food.

China Café’s food is authentic, all right, but it has its roots firmly planted in California. It’s the food that was created by immigrants who were using ‘‘foreign’’ ingredients and cooking not only for one another but also for the tame palates of non-Chinese customers they encountered throughout America. It also happens to have been the Chinese food of my youth, before the first Sichuan restaurants arrived in Manhattan, when chow mein and shrimp with lobster sauce were among the most exotic foods you could eat, even in New York City. In the ’70s, I scorned it; now it has achieved the kind of comfort-food legitimacy accorded to mac-and-cheese: It may not be carbonara, but it’s undeniably good.