These are the 101 best restaurants in Los Angeles of 2022
Welcome to the 10th annual L.A. Times guide that attempts to answer a delicious, impossible question: What are the 101 restaurants that best embody excellence and convey the essence of our food culture?
Click here for the 101 best restaurants of 2023
No matter what fresh flavors and hot openings the year brings, a guiding premise holds fast: L.A.’s astounding dining scene is a sum of California’s farmlands, the region’s pluralism and the city’s unique shimmer of possibility — the sense that an original personal narrative expressed through noodles or a stew’s secret ingredient is waiting just off the next freeway ramp.
Restaurants appearing for the first time comprise more than a quarter of the 2022 list. Among them are a Malaysian cafe in Alhambra where the power play is coffee and toast; a streetside taqueria in Highland Park where a quesotaco’s first bite delivers eight flavors at once; and a sprawling bilevel space in downtown L.A.’s Arts District where two chefs, who are married, explore Korean American identity via congee pot pie with roasted abalone and biscuits smothered in curry gravy.
Three other newcomers announce the city’s golden age of pizza, and that’s not counting the label-defying sports bar in Silver Lake where the saucy, cheesy pies can arrive crowned with tandoori onions or chicken tikka.
Some places that previously dropped off have returned. This is a living document. It happens. The occasion is particularly joyful when a favorite like Here’s Looking at You in Koreatown bounces back; it reopened in January after the pandemic forced a 17-month hiatus.
Feeling thirsty? Here are the 10 best places around Los Angeles for drinks.
And yes, the restaurants are ranked again for the first time since 2019.
Jenn Harris joins me in naming 10 places we’re excited to be drinking right now. After a two-year break we’ve also brought back our Hall of Fame, with 14 new inductees so intrinsic to our dining culture that they deserve their own category.
These restaurants are so defining of what it means to eat and live in Southern California — that they’ve earned a place of honor for all time.
Is that cheating? So be it. This is my fourth year agonizing over the 101, and the fixed number feels shorter every go-round. There’s simply too much to celebrate.
Showing Places
(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Hayato
Downtown L.A. Japanese $$$$
I consider the reasons against naming Brandon Hayato Go’s tiny tasting-menu restaurant No. 1 on this list. The cost is $350 per person, without taking into account the deep, persuasive list of sakes and Champagnes. And Go serves only 35 customers a week; a reservation means phone alarms, compulsive browser refreshing and longed-for cancellation notifications. Few will have the opportunity to enjoy his food. And yet, if I’m asked to pinpoint the single most transcendent dining experience in Los Angeles — the restaurant that meets, even exceeds, its own impossible aspirations — this is the place.
There is no fourth wall at Hayato. With seven diners seated along a cedar counter, Go and his small crew stay in continuous motion for several hours, composing more than a dozen courses. Washoku (a broad term for traditional Japanese cooking) and kappo ryori (in which the chef prepares a series of refined plates in front of the customer) inform his style of cooking. The meal’s structure loosely follows kaiseki, emphasizing varied cooking techniques served in ceremonial order. Whether Go has bound together scallops and corn in the laciest summertime tempura or steamed the sweetest fall Hokkaido crab, whether he’s grilled rockfish and lotus root to a smoky copper sheen or presented a lacquered bowl of dashi with an orb of shrimp that’s equal parts snap and silk, the quality of the seafood is profound.
Go began working at his father’s sushi restaurant in Seal Beach when he was 15. He’s been cooking in front of people for nearly 30 years. He can be at once immersed in his tasks and disarmingly relaxed. He tells funny travel stories; people lob out random questions about his favorite places to eat in Los Angeles. Bottles of wine may be shared among customers who arrived as strangers. By the time there are seconds (or thirds) of black cod and rice, followed by muskmelon and matcha for dessert, the group can be almost slaphappy from elation. It’s happened at each of my handful of meals at Hayato, this dinner-party-of-the-gods moment Go creates without forcing or staging a mood. I drift into the night always with the same feeling: That was some serious food, but that was also a seriously fun evening.
Read the full review of Hayato
There is no fourth wall at Hayato. With seven diners seated along a cedar counter, Go and his small crew stay in continuous motion for several hours, composing more than a dozen courses. Washoku (a broad term for traditional Japanese cooking) and kappo ryori (in which the chef prepares a series of refined plates in front of the customer) inform his style of cooking. The meal’s structure loosely follows kaiseki, emphasizing varied cooking techniques served in ceremonial order. Whether Go has bound together scallops and corn in the laciest summertime tempura or steamed the sweetest fall Hokkaido crab, whether he’s grilled rockfish and lotus root to a smoky copper sheen or presented a lacquered bowl of dashi with an orb of shrimp that’s equal parts snap and silk, the quality of the seafood is profound.
Go began working at his father’s sushi restaurant in Seal Beach when he was 15. He’s been cooking in front of people for nearly 30 years. He can be at once immersed in his tasks and disarmingly relaxed. He tells funny travel stories; people lob out random questions about his favorite places to eat in Los Angeles. Bottles of wine may be shared among customers who arrived as strangers. By the time there are seconds (or thirds) of black cod and rice, followed by muskmelon and matcha for dessert, the group can be almost slaphappy from elation. It’s happened at each of my handful of meals at Hayato, this dinner-party-of-the-gods moment Go creates without forcing or staging a mood. I drift into the night always with the same feeling: That was some serious food, but that was also a seriously fun evening.
Read the full review of Hayato
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Anajak Thai
Sherman Oaks Thai $$
In 2019, Justin Pichetrungsi made the life-changing decision to leave a successful career as an art director at Walt Disney Imagineering and take over the Sherman Oaks restaurant his parents founded in 1981. In his hands, Anajak Thai straddles parallel worlds. The mainstay menu preserves the legacy of Ricky Pichetrungsi, Justin’s father, whose recipes coalesce his Thai upbringing and Cantonese heritage. Justin’s creative efforts — the Thai Taco Tuesday phenomenon he introduced in 2020, the omakase meals he serves that use a Japanese format to reexamine Southeast Asian flavors, a wine list that summarizes Angelenos’ disparate tastes — reframe the neighborhood institution as a seat of innovation.
At Thai Taco Tuesday, or #TTT as Justin tags it on Instagram, expect weekly whims — perhaps blue corn tortillas cradling Ora King salmon dressed with purple cabbage, a slick of mayo, chili crisp and nam jim, or tostadas overlaid with rounds of lap cheong, brightened with mint, or lobes of kanpachi dotted with salmon roe. All the while, the restaurant’s primary menu is tighter, truer, stronger. Fried chicken wings have a tauter sour-sweet edge in the tamarind glaze; Massaman brisket curry, lush and aromatic, comforts profoundly. Fried chicken, a newer restaurant staple, is sheathed in rice-flour batter and scattered with fried shallots. The bird is prepared in the style of Nakhon Si Thammarat, a city in Southern Thailand where Rattikorn Pichetrungsi, Justin’s mother, has family. An optional side of caviar is very much Justin’s idea of embellishment.
The cooking, in whichever format you experience it, evinces skill and delight. In July we named Anajak Thai as the L.A. Times’ Restaurant of the Year.
Read more about Anajak Thai:
Why we chose Anajak Thai as Restaurant of the Year
Your next great L.A. meal will probably be a tasting men
What makes an L.A. restaurant?
How this L.A. chef made Thai Taco Tuesday a thing
At Thai Taco Tuesday, or #TTT as Justin tags it on Instagram, expect weekly whims — perhaps blue corn tortillas cradling Ora King salmon dressed with purple cabbage, a slick of mayo, chili crisp and nam jim, or tostadas overlaid with rounds of lap cheong, brightened with mint, or lobes of kanpachi dotted with salmon roe. All the while, the restaurant’s primary menu is tighter, truer, stronger. Fried chicken wings have a tauter sour-sweet edge in the tamarind glaze; Massaman brisket curry, lush and aromatic, comforts profoundly. Fried chicken, a newer restaurant staple, is sheathed in rice-flour batter and scattered with fried shallots. The bird is prepared in the style of Nakhon Si Thammarat, a city in Southern Thailand where Rattikorn Pichetrungsi, Justin’s mother, has family. An optional side of caviar is very much Justin’s idea of embellishment.
The cooking, in whichever format you experience it, evinces skill and delight. In July we named Anajak Thai as the L.A. Times’ Restaurant of the Year.
Read more about Anajak Thai:
Why we chose Anajak Thai as Restaurant of the Year
Your next great L.A. meal will probably be a tasting men
What makes an L.A. restaurant?
How this L.A. chef made Thai Taco Tuesday a thing
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Kato
Downtown L.A. Taiwanese $$$$
The ambitions of Jon Yao, his skeleton crew and their tasting menu built around the flavors of Taiwan never quite fit in the restaurant’s tiny, curiously angled West L.A. space. A liquor license in the location wasn’t permissible; the team could stretch and dream only so far in the spare quarters. Yao and business partner Nikki Reginaldo scouted for the right new surroundings for years. A fit came at last: the airy, wood-and-concrete-lined space in Row DTLA vacated by Melissa Perello’s short-lived M. Georgina.
Kato 2.0 has grown in every way possible since its move nearly a year ago. With the expansion comes an all-in beverage program, including a 60-page wine list, steered by new partner Ryan Bailey. Bar director Austin Hennelly mixes some of the city’s brainiest cocktails. Even if you don’t spot it on the menu, see if he’ll make you a Bamboo; his martini-like blend of sake and vermouth tinged with tomato brandy and soy nicely readies the palate for the meal ahead.
From the kitchen, scallops or other seasonal seafood will arrive in a fish-fragrant sauce, the perfumes of garlic and ginger blazing like a comet’s twin tails. A hot brown-butter doughnut with uni and Ibérico ham will precede a showstopper of Dungeness crab and spinach in a wild butter sauce that involves mussel liquor, fermented cream and smoked onions. Caviar crowns the dish, of course. The cost is $225 per person. It’s a worthy splurge, however you consider Yao’s food. If you’re looking to parse the almost clinical dissection of nostalgia, identity and luxury, the intellectual fodder is there. If you want simply to savor a beautiful, thoughtful sequence of plates, he can make you feel nourished on many levels.
Kato 2.0 has grown in every way possible since its move nearly a year ago. With the expansion comes an all-in beverage program, including a 60-page wine list, steered by new partner Ryan Bailey. Bar director Austin Hennelly mixes some of the city’s brainiest cocktails. Even if you don’t spot it on the menu, see if he’ll make you a Bamboo; his martini-like blend of sake and vermouth tinged with tomato brandy and soy nicely readies the palate for the meal ahead.
From the kitchen, scallops or other seasonal seafood will arrive in a fish-fragrant sauce, the perfumes of garlic and ginger blazing like a comet’s twin tails. A hot brown-butter doughnut with uni and Ibérico ham will precede a showstopper of Dungeness crab and spinach in a wild butter sauce that involves mussel liquor, fermented cream and smoked onions. Caviar crowns the dish, of course. The cost is $225 per person. It’s a worthy splurge, however you consider Yao’s food. If you’re looking to parse the almost clinical dissection of nostalgia, identity and luxury, the intellectual fodder is there. If you want simply to savor a beautiful, thoughtful sequence of plates, he can make you feel nourished on many levels.
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(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
RĂ©publique
Hancock Park American $$$
What makes République an unassailable cornerstone of Los Angeles dining? Margarita and Walter Manzke are equally exceptional talents who gave themselves the format — a bakery plus a restaurant serving three meals daily in a spectacularly baroque Hancock Park building — to succeed at what each of them does best. Together they perfected a blueprint for the all-day modern Californian restaurant.
First things first: Margarita and her team lay out one of the country’s finest pastry selections. They fill the counter with cakes, sweet and savory pies, canelés, fruit-filled tarts and laminated doughs so finely structured their layers can be stretched like an accordion. It’s a whirl of gracious plenty. Arrive early and round out the morning with a pale omelet, billowing French toast or the signature kimchi fried rice with short rib and poached eggs. Break away from Zoom for a couple of hours at lunch and meet someone for salads and a dry-aged burger.
At night the restaurant transitions elegantly to formal dinner service. Start by indulging in Normandy butter and pan drippings (imagine gravy distilled from a thousand roasting pans at Thanksgiving) served with one of Margarita’s baguettes. Walter uses meticulous technique, grounded in French tradition, to both comfort and startle. His gifts are as evident in a farmers market salad with precisely vinegared dressing as they are in the deft snap of grilled spot prawns and the goodness of roasted duck among a fall collage of squash, apples, onions and drizzles of peppery cider jus. Wine director Sarah Clarke has just the right Burgundy in mind. Need it even be said that dessert is all but mandatory?
First things first: Margarita and her team lay out one of the country’s finest pastry selections. They fill the counter with cakes, sweet and savory pies, canelés, fruit-filled tarts and laminated doughs so finely structured their layers can be stretched like an accordion. It’s a whirl of gracious plenty. Arrive early and round out the morning with a pale omelet, billowing French toast or the signature kimchi fried rice with short rib and poached eggs. Break away from Zoom for a couple of hours at lunch and meet someone for salads and a dry-aged burger.
At night the restaurant transitions elegantly to formal dinner service. Start by indulging in Normandy butter and pan drippings (imagine gravy distilled from a thousand roasting pans at Thanksgiving) served with one of Margarita’s baguettes. Walter uses meticulous technique, grounded in French tradition, to both comfort and startle. His gifts are as evident in a farmers market salad with precisely vinegared dressing as they are in the deft snap of grilled spot prawns and the goodness of roasted duck among a fall collage of squash, apples, onions and drizzles of peppery cider jus. Wine director Sarah Clarke has just the right Burgundy in mind. Need it even be said that dessert is all but mandatory?
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(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
n/naka
Palms Japanese $$$$
At a late-summer dinner at n/naka, the first plate to arrive — in custom with the ritualized, multicourse form of kaiseki — was sakizuke, a course composed of elements meant to reference the immediate past and future seasons. On this night, a scallop from Hokkaido had been layered into a precise disc with oyster aioli and fermented asparagus gelée. Yellow carrots and beets cut into thin petals encircled the scallop, and a dollop of caviar on top completed the picture: The composition, which resembled a sunflower, was the loveliest food I demolished this year. And in its arc of spring-to-fall contrasts, among the most delicious too.
Niki Nakayama composes her tasting menus around the precepts of kaiseki, which evolved out of Japanese tea ceremony traditions, but she isn’t confined by its structure. Along with Carole Iida-Nakayama, her wife and fellow chef, she follows an Angeleno’s regard for the farmers markets and for her own unmovable individualism. Their plates revise the notion of “what grows together, goes together” into Mary Oliver poems. Forests and seas of vegetables, noodles, seafood and broths appear as distinct habitats. It’s as if they’ve somehow occurred naturally, though the skill involved is also obvious and tremendous.
You will need to fight like hell for a reservation at n/naka. It will be worth it.
Niki Nakayama composes her tasting menus around the precepts of kaiseki, which evolved out of Japanese tea ceremony traditions, but she isn’t confined by its structure. Along with Carole Iida-Nakayama, her wife and fellow chef, she follows an Angeleno’s regard for the farmers markets and for her own unmovable individualism. Their plates revise the notion of “what grows together, goes together” into Mary Oliver poems. Forests and seas of vegetables, noodles, seafood and broths appear as distinct habitats. It’s as if they’ve somehow occurred naturally, though the skill involved is also obvious and tremendous.
You will need to fight like hell for a reservation at n/naka. It will be worth it.
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(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
Taco Maria
Costa Mesa Mexican $$$
Beef tartare tostada, the first of five courses one recent evening on Carlos Salgado’s mercurial tasting menu, rumbled with tastes and textures. Smoky chile morita saturated the chopped dry-aged meat and charred avocado cooled the palate. What accounted for the nutty, roasted-oat flavors that permeated every bite? Ah, of course, it was the same source as the dish’s thick crunch: the tostada made using exceptional corn.
Since Taco MarĂa opened in 2013, Salgado has been working with small farms in Mexico to obtain superior maĂz varietals that he and his restaurant staff nixtamalize and grind into masa. In philosophy and practice, masa anchors Taco MarĂa’s Alta California cuisine. Somewhere between campechano reimagined with tomato consommĂ© gelee and a block of pork belly served over meaty cocoa beans and grilled nopales strips, you will hold a blue corn tortilla in your hands. Its color will be as inky as the face of a new moon. Inhale its aromas, then tear into it and marvel at the nuances. The tortillas alone are worth the evening traffic from whichever county you may be driving. To experience Salgado’s influential genius and his small, spare indoor-outdoor restaurant, you must navigate through warrens of design stores in a fancy Costa Mesa mall. This is Southern California. No one thinks twice.
Since Taco MarĂa opened in 2013, Salgado has been working with small farms in Mexico to obtain superior maĂz varietals that he and his restaurant staff nixtamalize and grind into masa. In philosophy and practice, masa anchors Taco MarĂa’s Alta California cuisine. Somewhere between campechano reimagined with tomato consommĂ© gelee and a block of pork belly served over meaty cocoa beans and grilled nopales strips, you will hold a blue corn tortilla in your hands. Its color will be as inky as the face of a new moon. Inhale its aromas, then tear into it and marvel at the nuances. The tortillas alone are worth the evening traffic from whichever county you may be driving. To experience Salgado’s influential genius and his small, spare indoor-outdoor restaurant, you must navigate through warrens of design stores in a fancy Costa Mesa mall. This is Southern California. No one thinks twice.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Moo’s Craft Barbecue
Lincoln Heights Barbecue $$
“Texas style barbecue,” read the window signs by the entrance to Andrew and Michelle Muñoz’s Lincoln Heights restaurant. Those three words only tell the beginning of the story. Forays into barbecue during business trips to Dallas over the last decade sparked Andrew’s interest in smoking meats. In his East Los Angeles backyard, he taught himself to emulate the slowly blackened brisket, caked in coarse pepper and salt, that epitomizes Central Texas barbecue — a once-obscure art that is a global obsession in the new millennium. In 2017 he grew his hobby into an underground pop-up. Matched with Michelle’s sides (creamy, punchy esquites; beans seasoned with stray bits of brisket) and the sausages she perfected using flavor boosts like roasted poblanos and queso Oaxaca, Moo’s Craft Barbecue made a commotion. Their restaurant, with a bar that focuses on local craft beers, opened last year. The line from the ordering counter usually stretches through the dining room and out the door.
So yes, Andrew rightly acknowledges the Lone Star roots of his craftsmanship. He renders brisket nearly to pudding; the meat on his pork ribs, with their barky crust, nicely tugs back a little. But their efforts are not solely about homage. They’ll glaze pork belly burnt ends with gochujang as a special, and the tres leches strawberry bread pudding served on the weekends sells out fast. The thick, campfire-scented burgers have their own cult. On the shoulders of Mexican and Indigenous pit-cooking traditions and the Black barbecuers who arrived in Southern California as part of the Great Migration, the Muñozes are setting the tone for a new school of Los Angeles barbecue.
So yes, Andrew rightly acknowledges the Lone Star roots of his craftsmanship. He renders brisket nearly to pudding; the meat on his pork ribs, with their barky crust, nicely tugs back a little. But their efforts are not solely about homage. They’ll glaze pork belly burnt ends with gochujang as a special, and the tres leches strawberry bread pudding served on the weekends sells out fast. The thick, campfire-scented burgers have their own cult. On the shoulders of Mexican and Indigenous pit-cooking traditions and the Black barbecuers who arrived in Southern California as part of the Great Migration, the Muñozes are setting the tone for a new school of Los Angeles barbecue.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Morihiro
Atwater Village Japanese $$$$
Most of the top-flight sushi bars in Los Angeles follow a school of omakase involving ornate small dishes that precede the parade of nigiri. It might be a few plates or a half dozen; they will display various culinary techniques (steaming, grilling, frying) and might include a zensai course of seasonal vegetables and seafood distilled into single exquisite bites. Morihiro Onodera, who has been making sushi in Los Angeles off and on for nearly 40 years, helped define this style. At his 2-year-old restaurant in Atwater Village, the first dish is usually homemade tofu: a square of near-custard made with particularly sweet soy milk from Kyoto, crowned with freshly grated wasabi and set in a pool of soy sauce. It arrives in a beautiful ceramic bowl, in a shade of robin’s egg with a speckled brown glaze, that Onodera fashioned himself.
Onodera has a special place in L.A. His splicing of traditions and innovations, his quest for the perfect sushi rice and his talents as a ceramist have made him a legend. Some sushi bars radiate serenity, or gravity. His tiny place exudes a chaotic sort of warmth. Seiichi Daimo, a certified sake sommelier, pours the most compelling pairings of any sushi bar in L.A. When I joked with Onodera once that he serves so many opening omakase courses that maybe some customers could leave satisfied without any nigiri, he bellowed back, “No way. This is a sushi restaurant!” You will leave very full and deeply aware that this is what fine dining in Los Angeles is all about.
Onodera has a special place in L.A. His splicing of traditions and innovations, his quest for the perfect sushi rice and his talents as a ceramist have made him a legend. Some sushi bars radiate serenity, or gravity. His tiny place exudes a chaotic sort of warmth. Seiichi Daimo, a certified sake sommelier, pours the most compelling pairings of any sushi bar in L.A. When I joked with Onodera once that he serves so many opening omakase courses that maybe some customers could leave satisfied without any nigiri, he bellowed back, “No way. This is a sushi restaurant!” You will leave very full and deeply aware that this is what fine dining in Los Angeles is all about.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Bavel
Downtown L.A. Middle Eastern $$$
At the top of my wish list for Los Angeles restaurants: more chefs articulating the spice-fragrant, sun-soaked flavors of North Africa and western Asia (a.k.a. the Middle East, a term many friends and peers from the area increasingly reject). Bavel is one booming, energized affirmation of the possibilities. No map can pinpoint the exact geographic influences of Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis’ second Arts District restaurant. Menashe was raised in Israel and comes from Turkish and Moroccan roots; Gergis’ family is of Egyptian ancestry. With Bavel’s menu they pay respect to their personal lineages, but the food also crisscrosses Southern California and the topography of their imaginations.
From iterations of hummus and baba ghanoush at their silkiest to chicken liver pâté sequined with tarragon leaves and pickled blueberries, the spreads with their sides of hot pita or buckwheat toast are the menu’s nucleus. Anchoring ingredients — roasted cauliflower, grilled prawns, lamb chops both charred and blushing — are canvases for brushstrokes of chile pastes, herbs and many forms of deliciously soured dairy. Of the three restaurants she and Menashe run, Gergis chooses Bavel as the most dazzling showcase for her pastry skills. Finales like licorice root ice cream bonbon (try it to understand) or clove-scented chocolate doughnuts with sherried cream deserve their due attention, even after all the amazing bread. Also, after four years and a pandemic, it’s lovely to see the vines that trail from the dining room rafters looking so healthy.
From iterations of hummus and baba ghanoush at their silkiest to chicken liver pâté sequined with tarragon leaves and pickled blueberries, the spreads with their sides of hot pita or buckwheat toast are the menu’s nucleus. Anchoring ingredients — roasted cauliflower, grilled prawns, lamb chops both charred and blushing — are canvases for brushstrokes of chile pastes, herbs and many forms of deliciously soured dairy. Of the three restaurants she and Menashe run, Gergis chooses Bavel as the most dazzling showcase for her pastry skills. Finales like licorice root ice cream bonbon (try it to understand) or clove-scented chocolate doughnuts with sherried cream deserve their due attention, even after all the amazing bread. Also, after four years and a pandemic, it’s lovely to see the vines that trail from the dining room rafters looking so healthy.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Providence
Hollywood Seafood $$$$
Providence is a local and national benchmark of white-tablecloth extravagance, rightly famed for Michael Cimarusti’s luxury coddling of seafood. His cooking is less about fireworks and drama and more about technique in pursuit of clarity: Even if frothy corn sauce and fermented radish surround king crab, or truffles and pancetta scent a Hokkaido scallop, it’s the taste of the ocean that long stays in the memory.
If you desire, white truffles will rain down over risotto or golden scrambled eggs; cocktails can be made tableside; and a sommelier might arrange a parade of wine pairings that costs nearly as much as the tasting menu, which is $295 per person. Go ahead and splurge on the optional uni egg gilded with Champagne beurre blanc. Fanciness without human connection feels vacant, and the warm, alert individuality that Providence’s service team brings to the experience has contributed as much to the restaurant’s longevity as the brilliant food. I recently brought a 30-something Times colleague (who doesn’t work on the Food team) for his first dinner to Providence, and at the end of the evening he said, “If I make it to 80 I’m still going to be thinking about this meal.” I sat with his words for a minute, and then I thought: Same.
If you desire, white truffles will rain down over risotto or golden scrambled eggs; cocktails can be made tableside; and a sommelier might arrange a parade of wine pairings that costs nearly as much as the tasting menu, which is $295 per person. Go ahead and splurge on the optional uni egg gilded with Champagne beurre blanc. Fanciness without human connection feels vacant, and the warm, alert individuality that Providence’s service team brings to the experience has contributed as much to the restaurant’s longevity as the brilliant food. I recently brought a 30-something Times colleague (who doesn’t work on the Food team) for his first dinner to Providence, and at the end of the evening he said, “If I make it to 80 I’m still going to be thinking about this meal.” I sat with his words for a minute, and then I thought: Same.
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(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
Sonoratown
Downtown L.A. Mexican $
Whenever I bite into one of Sonoratown’s tortillas, my brain flickers on like the downtown skyline at dusk. I flash on the near-impossible thinness of an expert dumpling wrapper and the elusive mastery of pie crusts that are at once flaky and buttery. Never do I forget that this is a union of Sonoran wheat and pork lard, cranked out by master tortillera Julia Guerrero, in a style Teodoro DĂaz Rodriguez Jr. learned growing up in San Luis RĂo Colorado, Mexico. Nearly translucent and handsomely pocked from the griddle, it is the flour tortilla against which to judge all others in Los Angeles. Savor it in the guise of a taco, quesadilla, caramelo, chimichanga — or, best of all, as the famous Burrito 2.0, swollen with pinto beans, mashed guacamole, Monterey Jack and sharply spicy chiltepin salsa. The meat of choice is costilla — a mix of boneless short rib and chuck robed in mesquite smoke. Go for the option to add poblano.
DĂaz Rodriguez and partner Jennifer Feltham rose to national prominence at the taqueria they opened in 2016 in DTLA’s Fashion District. This year we gained a second location in Mid-City. Same menu; same brilliance.
DĂaz Rodriguez and partner Jennifer Feltham rose to national prominence at the taqueria they opened in 2016 in DTLA’s Fashion District. This year we gained a second location in Mid-City. Same menu; same brilliance.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Pasjoli
Santa Monica French $$$$
Our server at Pasjoli drops off a plate holding a whole tomato. It has been blanched and peeled, as if readied for a canning project. I cut the fruit in two, revealing its surprise viscera of tuna tartare. The fish is cut so finely and precisely that the filigrees suggest grains of basmati on the tongue. That’s intentional; the dish is chef-owner Dave Beran’s remake of a Provençal recipe of tomato stuffed with rice and canned tuna. He adds tomato water gelée to his version to reinforce flavors and textures, and yogurt cream with a vinaigrette made from fermented tomatoes to keep the brain busy. “Thon et tomate” has appeared every year since Pasjoli opened in 2019, and the elements always strike me as the embodiment of Beran’s approach to his profession: part cook, part history buff, part physicist. The names of the dishes are in French, but the cooking can more accurately be called “Beranaise.” A costly temple of high gastronomy in the guise of a design-forward bistro, it serves its audience for a special-occasion date night, a power dinner summit … or even for a bar snack of chicken liver mousse in brioche and an Armagnac-fueled cocktail that’s as erudite and delicious as the food.
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(Annie Noelker / For The Times)
Holbox
Historic South-Central Mexican $$
Gilberto Cetina has earned kudos for his mariscos stand near the entrance of Mercado La Paloma in Historic South-Central, but I’m not sure that praise has been heard broadly or frequently enough. Nearby daytime workers, whether coming from offices or their own homes these days, know what they have in his gently spicy coctel mixto and the smoked kampachi tostada with its two-toned crunch of shattering tortilla and peanut salsa. Baja blood clams in their gory beauty are a clue to the rigor of Cetina’s sourcing. There are also warming dishes, such as sopa de mariscos, buoyant with homemade fish sausage, and octopus grilled over mesquite.
The best news? After a two-year absence Cetina has revived his weekly six-course tasting menu. Holbox’s 10-seat counter takes on the intimacy of a sushi bar as he passes out aguachile in wincingly tart citrus marinade, the better to offset the sweetness of scallops and spot prawns, and a fried taco filled with Dungeness crab and smoked yellowtail. The cost is currently $95 per person. I’ve paid twice as much in Los Angeles for meals half as revelatory.
The best news? After a two-year absence Cetina has revived his weekly six-course tasting menu. Holbox’s 10-seat counter takes on the intimacy of a sushi bar as he passes out aguachile in wincingly tart citrus marinade, the better to offset the sweetness of scallops and spot prawns, and a fried taco filled with Dungeness crab and smoked yellowtail. The cost is currently $95 per person. I’ve paid twice as much in Los Angeles for meals half as revelatory.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Osteria Mozza
Hancock Park Italian $$$
I showed up early on a Thursday evening to attempt my first dinner at Osteria Mozza, less than a year after the restaurant opened in mid-2007. Reservations were impossible; two friends and I could only pray for a few open seats held for walk-in diners at the mozzarella bar. We snagged them, miraculously. Ribbed garganelli trapping lush ragù Bolognese, the famous raviolo with its self-creating sauce of oozing yolk, braised meats we cut with spoons and a dessert that included fragrant peaches hinting of roses all flicker as memory fragments. What I recall with total clarity is the presence of Nancy Silverton, who stood at the bar’s center. The dining room’s crowd contained famous faces if you looked hard enough, but Silverton was a star in her own right. She kept a force field of concentration around her, smiling enigmatically and staying in constant motion. Her plates of cheese and condiments were notions of Sicilian crudo, or even Nikkei-style sashimi, rendered in dairy. Pairings gave alliums — fried leeks, grilled spring onions, garlic as subtle as a pheromone — center-stage status. She employed peppery olive oil as an acid; no vinegar needed. The variations on mozzarella seemed to defy nature’s laws in their suspension between cream and cheese. Everything was extraordinary.
Osteria Mozza, under the current guidance of culinary director Liz Hong, heralded the decade when Los Angeles became one of the world’s most exciting dining cultures. Silverton is a global culinary ambassador these days. I haven’t seen her behind the bar in years. Still, when mozzarella di bufala meets the papery cruschi peppers that almost rustle against the teeth, and the yolk bleeds into the brown butter under the raviolo, I feel the same Mozza excitement. More than 15 years since its debut, a little is lost but a whole lot remains.
Osteria Mozza, under the current guidance of culinary director Liz Hong, heralded the decade when Los Angeles became one of the world’s most exciting dining cultures. Silverton is a global culinary ambassador these days. I haven’t seen her behind the bar in years. Still, when mozzarella di bufala meets the papery cruschi peppers that almost rustle against the teeth, and the yolk bleeds into the brown butter under the raviolo, I feel the same Mozza excitement. More than 15 years since its debut, a little is lost but a whole lot remains.
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(Silvia Razgova / For The Times)
Orsa & Winston
Downtown L.A. Italian Japanese $$$$
On the five-course tasting menu at his tiny, 9-year-old downtown den of creativity, Josef Centeno will always serve the restaurant’s North Star dish: rice porridge, the short grains nearly as translucent as tapioca pearls, steeped in Parmesan cream; glittered with yuzu zest or similar citrus; and garnished with seafood, usually uni or abalone. From there — who knows? A premise of Orsa & Winston is to mine connections between Japanese and Italian flavors, but Centeno never stoops to shenanigans to oversell the thesis. He follows the seasons and his inspirations. In the spring, brown butter and a few shavings of black truffle may gild an English pea raviolo. In the fall, the same pasta shape will arrive filled with sweet potato and ricotta and dressed in duck sugo. A bright, taut combination like scallop crudo with passion fruit vinaigrette and yuzu kosho often kicks off dinner; a chocolate tart with just-ripe peaches or sake-poached pears may conclude it. At any moment, though, one senses Centeno could scrap this outline and start fresh. His remarkable balance between improvisation and self-discipline is what makes him one of L.A.’s vital chefs.
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(Annie Noelker / For The Times)
Here's Looking at You
Koreatown American $$
Here’s Looking at You, Lien Ta and Jonathan Whitener’s Koreatown restaurant, could have vanished forever as one of the pandemic’s countless casualties. Its reopening in January after a 17-month hiatus felt like an act of grace to its enthusiasts, me among them. A reductive description like “global small plates plus brainy cocktails” doesn’t convey the improbable combinations that Whitener, who leads the kitchen, and bar director Danny Rubenstein graft with skill and imagination. Sip a mai tai given unexpected depth from house-aged Jamaican rum before disappearing into salt-and-pepper frog’s legs splattered with salsa negra; whipped duck liver swiped with crusty bread and a few drops of smoked maple syrup; and steak tartare channeling Korean galbi, potent with chile and tamari and mellowed with egg yolk. Whitener has an ideal counterpart in pastry chef Thessa Diadem. Her desserts, including chewy chestnut mochi bathed in muscovado caramel and coconut cream, stretch notions of spice and texture without tipping into absurdity. Like most everything at HLAY (as it’s called by nearly everyone who knows the place), these sweet endings come off as unorthodox, sating and perfectly Los Angeles.
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(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
Pizzeria Bianco
Downtown L.A. Pizza $$
Pizzeria Bianco’s arrival in Los Angeles, the first location outside Arizona, has been long in coming. Its first months in downtown’s Row DTLA complex coincided with a pizza-themed season of Netflix’s “Chef’s Table” series, which includes a moving episode about Chris Bianco. Dinner reservations went berserk, booking up for literal months, though a handful of tables have been set aside for walk-ins.
When you do finally inhale these pizzas, with their balanced restraint and structured crust, you understand why Bianco is the most revered pizzaiolo in the United States. The Wise Guy (a pie with rough hunks of fennel sausage covered in smoked mozzarella) and the Rosa (slivered red onion, Parmesan, rosemary, crushed pistachios) brought me the same heart-pounding joy as the first time I ate them in 1997, half my lifetime ago. Head chef Marco Angeles ably translates Bianco’s genius at the pizza ovens, and right now the man himself is spending much of his week in town. Keep checking for chance availability. We have a living master in our midst.
When you do finally inhale these pizzas, with their balanced restraint and structured crust, you understand why Bianco is the most revered pizzaiolo in the United States. The Wise Guy (a pie with rough hunks of fennel sausage covered in smoked mozzarella) and the Rosa (slivered red onion, Parmesan, rosemary, crushed pistachios) brought me the same heart-pounding joy as the first time I ate them in 1997, half my lifetime ago. Head chef Marco Angeles ably translates Bianco’s genius at the pizza ovens, and right now the man himself is spending much of his week in town. Keep checking for chance availability. We have a living master in our midst.
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(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
Sushi Kaneyoshi
Downtown L.A. Japanese $$$$
The elevator descends toward the basement of Little Tokyo’s Kajima Building. The doors open onto a waiting area. Soon the evening’s congregants will be led to a softly lit room of clean lines and blond woods, where Yoshiyuki Inoue presides over a 12-seat sushi bar. A veteran of local sushi restaurants — Mori and Sushi Ginza Onodera among them — Inoue was primed for his star turn. Two-year-old Kaneyoshi instantly became one of the city’s most coveted omakase reservations.
A few preambles might include grouper karaage; citrusy chawanmushi laced with matsutake mushrooms; and ankimo (monkfish liver) dressed in sweet miso and paired with a tiny log of green onion. Then Inoue and his assistants launch into a procession of edomae-style nigiri, each seasonal seafood aged (or perhaps cured or marinated) and lightly seasoned to magnify its flavors. At one point he’ll likely hand each person pressed sushi folded into a sheet of nori that crunches like a potato chip. By the final piece you’re in the master’s trance. This is sushi for connoisseurs, many of whom, at $300 per person, are already regulars.
A few preambles might include grouper karaage; citrusy chawanmushi laced with matsutake mushrooms; and ankimo (monkfish liver) dressed in sweet miso and paired with a tiny log of green onion. Then Inoue and his assistants launch into a procession of edomae-style nigiri, each seasonal seafood aged (or perhaps cured or marinated) and lightly seasoned to magnify its flavors. At one point he’ll likely hand each person pressed sushi folded into a sheet of nori that crunches like a potato chip. By the final piece you’re in the master’s trance. This is sushi for connoisseurs, many of whom, at $300 per person, are already regulars.
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(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
Heritage Barbecue
San Juan Capistrano Barbecue $$
The future of barbecue in California — and America — probably will read and taste very much like the cross-cultural connectivity that pitmaster Daniel Castillo is shaping in San Juan Capistrano. As with many savants of the new generation, Castillo looked to Central Texas to master technique; he perfumes meats over California white oak in four 1,000-gallon pits. Yet as he grows more assured in his own smoky arts, he casts a wider spell. The brisket, beef ribs and chorizo links may share the menu with pastrami, striated blocks of pork belly glazed in the manner of char siu and perhaps a special of smoked shrimp in green curry. On the side? Beans beefed up with brisket and guajillo chiles, jalapeño cornbread and potato salad that in the day’s mix of flavor may conjure the American South or Hawaii. The array changes ceaselessly, but there is one constant at Heritage: the line, which you’ll encounter no matter the time or day.
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(Yasara Gunawardena / For The Times)
MĂ©lisse
Santa Monica American $$$$
Late in 2019, a few months before the shutdowns, Josiah Citrin debuted a new two-in-one direction for his Santa Monica bastion of French-ish, American-ish haute cuisine: The main dining room became Citrin, serving a la carte crudos; pastas like his signature lobster Bolognese; and Wagyu sirloins. Mélisse contracted into a windowless modernist theater for tasting menus with an open kitchen inches away from the room’s five tables.
For this venture, Citrin recruited two talents who make Mélisse’s price of admission — currently $325 per person— worthwhile for celebratory occasions. Chef de cuisine Ian Scaramuzza has fine-dining credits that include In Situ, the now-closed restaurant in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that rotated the masterwork dishes of 80 chefs like a gallery collection. I recognize a similar range of his virtuosity at Mélisse. It’s there in the parade of luxury ingredients; in its one- or two-bite wonders displayed on textured plates and mini pedestals; and in the leaps in perspective, from crab intensified with finger limes and house-made XO sauce to smoked quail arranged among ripe pluots, matsutakes and bacon gastrique.
Scaramuzza has a fitting counterpart in wine director Matthew Luczy, a showman, at turns serious and playful, who is a blur of motion making everyone in the room feel special at once. He orchestrates a brainy wine pairing of side-by-side glasses per course for comparative tasting, though he’s equally game to help you choose a spot-on bottle. He’ll uncork it as soon as he flips the Sade LP playing on the restaurant’s sterling sound system.
For this venture, Citrin recruited two talents who make Mélisse’s price of admission — currently $325 per person— worthwhile for celebratory occasions. Chef de cuisine Ian Scaramuzza has fine-dining credits that include In Situ, the now-closed restaurant in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that rotated the masterwork dishes of 80 chefs like a gallery collection. I recognize a similar range of his virtuosity at Mélisse. It’s there in the parade of luxury ingredients; in its one- or two-bite wonders displayed on textured plates and mini pedestals; and in the leaps in perspective, from crab intensified with finger limes and house-made XO sauce to smoked quail arranged among ripe pluots, matsutakes and bacon gastrique.
Scaramuzza has a fitting counterpart in wine director Matthew Luczy, a showman, at turns serious and playful, who is a blur of motion making everyone in the room feel special at once. He orchestrates a brainy wine pairing of side-by-side glasses per course for comparative tasting, though he’s equally game to help you choose a spot-on bottle. He’ll uncork it as soon as he flips the Sade LP playing on the restaurant’s sterling sound system.
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(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
Tsubaki
Echo Park Japanese $$$
Charles Namba and Courtney Kaplan’s Echo Park gem exists at the intersection of Japanese pub, neighborhood restaurant and tiny atelier — the kind of place where the owners present their latest fixations on the plate and in the cup, so that you too become rapt. Namba crafts a distinct California izakaya repertoire, honing two dozen or so raw, steamed, fried and grilled dishes with a native Angeleno’s intuition for seasonality. His salads are some of the most compelling in the city; I’m thinking in particular of a patchwork of tomatoes and shaved corn mingled with pickled cucumbers and brined tofu in a balsamic-ginger vinaigrette that tasted of summer but reached beyond the needs-no-adornment clichés. Double down on yakitori (including skewers of prized chicken oysters with yuzu kosho) and splurge on the fried rice with Dungeness crab.
Kaplan’s selection of sake is one of the deepest and most exciting on the West Coast. I brought a visiting friend here after he gave an incredible performance in a staging of Haydn’s “The Creation” at Disney Hall. I asked Kaplan if she could recommend a sake that felt as celebratory as Champagne. When she poured a golden sparkling liquid that tasted of melon, my friend’s eyes popped with joy, and I was reminded why I often bring out-of-towners here. An even more immersive imbibing experience awaits next door at the couple’s sake bar, Ototo, where the finesse of the okonomiyaki and other drinking foods has all but caught up to the cooking at Tsubaki.
Kaplan’s selection of sake is one of the deepest and most exciting on the West Coast. I brought a visiting friend here after he gave an incredible performance in a staging of Haydn’s “The Creation” at Disney Hall. I asked Kaplan if she could recommend a sake that felt as celebratory as Champagne. When she poured a golden sparkling liquid that tasted of melon, my friend’s eyes popped with joy, and I was reminded why I often bring out-of-towners here. An even more immersive imbibing experience awaits next door at the couple’s sake bar, Ototo, where the finesse of the okonomiyaki and other drinking foods has all but caught up to the cooking at Tsubaki.
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(Annie Noelker / For The Times)
Cassia
Santa Monica Vietnamese French $$$
There is no other cuisine in the Los Angeles area, or arguably anywhere, like Bryant Ng’s. He culls his Chinese-Singaporean heritage, wife and business partner Kim Luu-Ng’s Vietnamese background, his Parisian culinary training and his work at places like Pizzeria Mozza. His is reclamation cooking, rich in cultural connections and potent with fresh herbs, sambal and pickled shallots. Cassia, a blockbuster when it roared into existence in 2015, now models balance. The dining room has returned to punishing decibels, though plenty of well-heated outdoor space provides a quieter option. Menu standards like handsomely charred pig’s tail splashed with fish sauce or spice-suffused beef rendang deliver as deliciously as ever, and newer dishes keep the kitchen’s energy high: Look for raw scallops with a garnish of dried shrimp, slivered ham and chile oil, suggesting a deconstructed XO sauce, and steak frites served over a reduction zapped with unusually aromatic peppercorns grown on Vietnam’s Phu Quoc island.
Ace sommelier Marianna Caldwell leads her wine list with a section labeled “What I’m Drinking Now.” Let it direct you to offbeat options — like a Hungarian orange or a lemony Alpine white from Switzerland — that meet the food in all its superb complexities.
Ace sommelier Marianna Caldwell leads her wine list with a section labeled “What I’m Drinking Now.” Let it direct you to offbeat options — like a Hungarian orange or a lemony Alpine white from Switzerland — that meet the food in all its superb complexities.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Pearl River Deli
Chinatown Chinese $$
Any chance you tried Johnny Lee’s stir-fried pork jowl chow mein, or his lemon-scented fried chicken, or the silky crab omelet over onion-laced fried rice with crab gravy? They were flashes of inspiration, available anywhere from a few months to a single weekend and then abruptly retired, never to return. Or maybe they will? Check the restaurant’s Instagram account for its latest concise menu. Lee once wrote there, “We’re gonna continue the ethos of what’s driven us since the beginning: We cook whatever we want and feel like.”
True to those words, no single label neatly defines Pearl River Deli, though Lee devised it foremost as a personal expression of Cantonese cooking. There will likely be char siu, the rendered slices of pork belly glossy with five-spice glaze on a plate of either rice (ideal for soaking up the meat’s juices) or egg noodles (pleasing in their tangled, textural contrast). Legions of us will be bereft if the extraordinary pork-chop bun, slicked with tomato-onion relish and mayo umami-boosted with Maggi seasoning, disappears for long. Otherwise, we embrace the creative anarchies of Lee and chef de cuisine Laura Hoang, who is responsible for the case full of pandan chiffon cake and char siu bao. They are two of her most masterful creations. Will she still be baking them by the time you read this? I wish I could tell you.
True to those words, no single label neatly defines Pearl River Deli, though Lee devised it foremost as a personal expression of Cantonese cooking. There will likely be char siu, the rendered slices of pork belly glossy with five-spice glaze on a plate of either rice (ideal for soaking up the meat’s juices) or egg noodles (pleasing in their tangled, textural contrast). Legions of us will be bereft if the extraordinary pork-chop bun, slicked with tomato-onion relish and mayo umami-boosted with Maggi seasoning, disappears for long. Otherwise, we embrace the creative anarchies of Lee and chef de cuisine Laura Hoang, who is responsible for the case full of pandan chiffon cake and char siu bao. They are two of her most masterful creations. Will she still be baking them by the time you read this? I wish I could tell you.
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(Annie Noelker / For The Times)
Poncho’s Tlayudas
Historic South-Central Mexican $
When Alfonso “Poncho” Martinez’s Friday night pop-up in South L.A. returned in March after two long years, so too did one of the city’s defining dishes. Home to the largest Oaxacan population outside Mexico, Los Angeles knows tlayudas: Our restaurants usually serve them as open-faced discs, their crackling, foot-wide tortillas showered with quesillo and crumbled chorizo Oaxaqueño or sliced avocado and nopales like spokes on a bicycle tire. Martinez grew up eating tlayudas grilled and folded by cooks in Oaxaca’s Central Valleys, where he was raised, so that’s how he prepares his as well. He begins by painting his masa canvas with asiento, a toasted lard he renders himself, before spreading over frijoles refritos, cheese pulled into short strings and shredded cabbage. His masterwork is the tlayuda mixta with three meats: crumbled chorizo; tasajo, a thin cut of flank steak salt-cured for a few hours before grilling; and moronga, a billowy, herb-laced blood sausage made from a recipe that was a wedding gift to Martinez from the father of his wife and business partner, Odilia Romero. Warmed over mesquite, Martinez’s tlayuda is astounding with its density of tastes and textures; you won’t forget your first bite, or your 100th.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Saffy's
East Hollywood Middle Eastern $$$
Of the two hummus plates on Saffy’s menu, one is an advanced course in subtle contrasts: chickpeas blitzed to weightlessness; a dollop of lemony, long-simmered fava beans; and a pool of good olive oil to unite them. But then there is the hummus tahini. A quenelle-shaped garnish of green zhoug, the Yemeni hot sauce, brings in acidic jolt, but the real clincher is the handful of Lebanese pine nuts. The cost of exquisite pine nuts — long and tapered, buttery and hinting of resin — has lately skyrocketed. I’d rather eat three of these than a handful of the short, squat, tasteless variety. The same details uplift grilled lobster brushed with green harissa; wood-fire-kissed shawarma shaved from the spit to order; and skewered lamb herbed with dried mint and marjoram, then lightened by minced sweet peppers.
Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis’ third restaurant, in an Art Deco space across from the big blue Church of Scientology building in East Hollywood, follows their downtown successes with Bestia and Bavel. Given Saffy’s focus on kebabs and a dozen or so California-inflected small plates, it may have appeared that the couple was striving for something more casual. One can argue how “casual” may be best defined these days; I certainly wouldn’t label Saffy’s as inexpensive. And really, given the ambition on display, Menashe and Gergis don’t quite seem capable of a stripped-down, laid-back style of restaurateuring. It’s largely to our benefit. Check out their small daytime bakery next door for excellent ham and cheese biscuits.
Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis’ third restaurant, in an Art Deco space across from the big blue Church of Scientology building in East Hollywood, follows their downtown successes with Bestia and Bavel. Given Saffy’s focus on kebabs and a dozen or so California-inflected small plates, it may have appeared that the couple was striving for something more casual. One can argue how “casual” may be best defined these days; I certainly wouldn’t label Saffy’s as inexpensive. And really, given the ambition on display, Menashe and Gergis don’t quite seem capable of a stripped-down, laid-back style of restaurateuring. It’s largely to our benefit. Check out their small daytime bakery next door for excellent ham and cheese biscuits.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Chi Spacca
Hancock Park Italian $$$
It’s been a decade since Nancy Silverton’s “Italian meat restaurant” emerged from the catering and cooking-class space at the corner of Melrose and Highland avenues, though Chi Spacca still feels like the unruly younger sibling to the adjacent Osteria Mozza and Pizzeria Mozza. The 36-ounce Florentine-style bone-in New York strip, cooked exactingly to showcase the beef’s mineral tang and melting fat, costs just over $200 these days. It feeds at least three people; I don’t know of a better steak in Los Angeles. The potato, Comte and caramelized onion pie makes a superb accompaniment. I will always order the focaccia di Recco, a crackery, stretchy-cheesy flatbread with Ligurian origins that Silverton obsessed over for years to perfect. You’re most likely to see the woman herself in action for the lunchtime burger event held the first Saturday of every month. There is Silverton, flipping burgers and stacking them on sesame-crusted buns with the single-mindedness of a neurosurgeon.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
AmmatolĂ
Long Beach Middle Eastern $$
With a soaring, plant-filled extension to her dining room and a remodel of her open kitchen, Dima Habibeh’s Long Beach restaurant feels all the more like a hub of community. In her food, Habibeh — born to a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother and raised in Jordan — embodies her origins and beyond. Pleasantries like a Moroccan spiced salmon salad over arugula dot the menu, but the tradition-minded dishes are the reason Ammatolà is a destination. Look for rotisserie chicken over faintly smoky freekeh; handsomely speckled mana’eesh, the flatbread pulled straight from the oven; knafeh, its crust of shredded, orange blossom syrup-soaked pastry giving way to the cheese pull of life; and weekend specials like mansef, lamb shank with spiced yogurt sauce over rice and flatbread. This is arguably the most accomplished classical Levantine cooking in a Southern California restaurant.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Felix Trattoria
Venice Italian $$$
Evan Funke has necessarily funneled his attention into Mother Wolf, his new Roman restaurant in Hollywood, and his hands are deep into planning future projects. Felix, though? Paradoxically or not, it’s better than ever. The Venice pasta laboratory he started five years ago with Janet Zuccarini has mellowed in temperament; it reached a contented midpoint between the trattoria Funke wanted for us and the one we hoped for from him. The cocktails spiked with citrus and amaro; the sharp chicory salad and roasted meats; and the Sicilian focaccia called sfincione are, under the nightly leadership of chef de cuisine Viktoriya Campos, as splendid as ever. Still, we know why we’re here — for spaghettoni ensnaring anchovies and herbs, for linguine so light with lemon it’s always the first empty plate, for the chew and snap of orecchiette bumping against the textures of sausage and spigarello. The tagliatelle with ragù that Funke studied at La Vecchia Scuola Bolognese has crept up to $45 a bowl. Even in times of inflation and crippling labor costs that’s an extreme sum. If I’m being honest, it was also the single most enjoyable pasta I had in Los Angeles this year.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Bridgetown Roti
Arts District Caribbean $
In 2020, Rashida Holmes moved from cooking at restaurants like Botanica and Rustic Canyon to running a pop-up selling roti and other dishes of her Bajan heritage. In a town where Caribbean cuisines often go overlooked in the zeitgeist sightlines, the excellence of her cooking shows many of us what we’ve been missing. Operating on weekends from the Crafted Kitchen commissary in the Arts District, Holmes fills her tidy bundles of roti with her mom’s recipe for chicken curry, a patchwork of sweet potatoes and fried cauliflower or, best of all, soft, ropy hunks of goat meat she buys from Jimenez Family Farms. The crust of her savory patties is improbably delicate, even when bulging with green curry shrimp or shredded oxtail meat with peppers. Start a meal with smashed cucumber salad jolted by jerk seasonings. Sometimes as a special Holmes makes chana doubles — palm-sized rounds of fried bread cradling curried chickpeas with mango relish, cilantro-ginger chutney and other garnishes that pop like flashbulbs. Treat them like tacos from a sidewalk stall; doubles were never meant to wilt in takeout containers.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Knife Pleat
Costa Mesa French $$$$
Chef Tony Esnault and front-of-house whiz Yassmin Sarmadi, who are married, left Los Angeles a few years ago to take up residence in the haute couture Penthouse wing of Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza. The location suits their ambitions. Esnault performs a rigorous, meticulous form of fine dining that’s nearly extinct in America. The cooking is high craftsmanship and the plating is art; you stare, as in a gallery, considering vegetable geometries and the deliberate white space between wheels of chicken roulade and spears of asparagus. The restaurant has one Michelin star, and since the couple has switched to prix fixe at dinner, one senses they want more of them. Tasting menus are occasionally themed around, say, game meats, but the most elegant and uplifting annual meal in Orange County may be the spring dinner at Knife Pleat celebrating Nowruz, the Persian New Year.
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(Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times)
Soban
Koreatown Korean $$
Koreatown: annex of Seoul (where a generation of Oaxacans and Salvadorans have also made a home); city within a city; civic treasure. Among dozens of restaurants and bars, there’s a strong argument for starting with a seat in Jennifer Pak’s small, welcoming dining room to begin delving into Koreatown’s food culture. The banchan is first-rate. A server will set down a dozen-plus plates — likely among them rolled egg, myeolchi bokkeum (stir-fried anchovies with peanuts) and kimchi that fizzes lightly on the tongue — arranging them with the efficiency of a blackjack croupier. Three vital dishes keep Soban’s reputation intact year after year. Ganjang gaejang, a speckled raw crab marinated in house-made soy sauce and dressed with green chiles and a sliced clove of garlic, reigns supreme. Extracting its sweet flesh is a full-sensory pleasure. Follow it with eundaegu jorim, the gochujang-spiced braise of black cod and daikon, and galbi jjim hearty with short ribs and root vegetables. The sense of place they engender is palpable.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Meals by Genet
Little Ethiopia Ethiopian $$
Last year Genet Agonafer announced her semi-retirement — she’d prepare meals to-go from her Little Ethiopia stalwart Thursday through Sunday, and open her once-bustling dining room only for private events. The decision has meant less cashflow but also less stress for Agonafer. And, as L.A. Times Food General Manager Laurie Ochoa wrote in her selection of Meals by Genet for this year’s Gold Award, “Her customers have adapted as well, grateful that they can still get her cooking through takeout and re-create the shared feast experience in their own homes.” The colors of Agonafer’s vegetarian combination platter, spread over injera, look like an image of California’s shifting geography captured from space: forest-green collards segue to earth tones of spiced lentils and split peas and the soft shades of turmeric-stained cabbage. Lately I’ve been crushing on yebegsisga alitcha, a buttery lamb stew with a mellow thrum of garlic, but let’s never envision a day without Agonafer’s doro wat: She spends two days melting onions and simmering chicken with dusky berbere spices until every flavor fuses into a new, indivisible whole.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Bicyclette
Pico-Robertson French $$$
Before Walter Manzke opened République with his pastry chef extraordinaire wife, Margarita, he sealed his reputation for French-California cooking with cassoulets, bouillabaisse and fried pig’s ear during his run at Church & State, and with tenures at Bastide and Patina before that. With Bicyclette (which shares a space with their tasting-menu restaurant, Manzke), the couple lay claim to their own stylish take on a bistro. The canonical dishes may be refracted through the sensibilities of American chefs, but never in ways that derail their essence. Beef Bourguignonne is full of short rib hunks and chewy lardons and especially satisfying over potato mousseline. The bouillabaisse has been resurrected, its broth again distilled into a seafood liqueur. I love the electric current of nutmeg flowing through the textbook boudin blanc, which comes and goes from the menu. Start the meal with savory tarte tatin with caramelized onions arranged in a swirl over goat cheese, and return to the form at the end for one of Margarita’s seasonal fruit tarts; the precision of the patterns suggests rulers were involved.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
A.O.C.
West Hollywood Californian $$$
In the arc of A.O.C.’s two-decade evolution, from cramped wine bar to modern institution with beautiful locations in West Hollywood and Brentwood, Suzanne Goin essentially codified an entire branch of L.A.’s dining culture. She concentrates the tastes of the California seasons, intensifying them with flavors gleaned from North Africa, western Asia and the Mediterranean coasts of Spain, Italy and France. Dates stuffed with Parmesan and wrapped in bacon; fried chicken drizzled with chile-cumin butter with a side of romesco aioli; the “ode to Zuni” roasted chicken with bread salad: They are constants in a chaotic world. The menu never feels stale, though. There’s an innate synchrony with the farmers market — roasted peaches will flank duck breast in the summer, while duck sausage stuffing with apples, dates and walnuts signals fall — but also flashes of imagination like green quinoa dumplings, the grains popping on the tongue, smoothed with sumac-flecked yogurt. Would a Riesling from New York’s Finger Lakes region or a Châteauneuf-du-Pape with some age pair nicely with those flavors? That’s the domain of co-owner and wine director Caroline Styne.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Damian
Downtown L.A. Mexican $$$
Damian began as Mexico City-based chef Enrique Olvera’s grandly announced entrance to the L.A. market but has settled into a restaurant that feels intentionally engaged with the city, with progressively delicious results. In a region already rich in Mexican food culture, Damian’s leadership team, led by Jesús “Chuy” Cervantes, seems to ask through its cooking: What can we bring to the conversation? Answers come in the forms of a modernist tlayuda tiled with squash and huitlacoche; elegant duck “al pastor” served with caramelized pineapple butter and hand-formed corn tortillas that taste as if they’re made of sunshine; plus a masterpiece centered around a meaty bulb of celery root that has been nixtamalized, baked, then braised in garlic, lemon and butter. At brunch, don’t book a reservation expecting a rundown of egg dishes. Go for pastry chef Josh Ulmer’s crunchy-soft blue corn conchas and the Korean-inspired fried chicken, sheathed in a batter of rice and white corn flours.
Housed in a former Arts District warehouse, the interior is mod and moody, though the terrace is especially stunning. Architect Alonso de Garay and designer Micaela de Bernardà have turned the area — amid industrial decay, offset with fresh planters built above winding banquettes — into something exhilarating: part art installation, part urban haven.
Housed in a former Arts District warehouse, the interior is mod and moody, though the terrace is especially stunning. Architect Alonso de Garay and designer Micaela de Bernardà have turned the area — amid industrial decay, offset with fresh planters built above winding banquettes — into something exhilarating: part art installation, part urban haven.
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(Yasara Gunawardena / For The Times)
Shin Sushi
Encino Japanese $$$
The San Fernando Valley claims its share of top-tier sushi counters: I’d direct you to Brothers Sushi in Woodland Hills, Go’s Mart in Canoga Park or, for a glass of grand cru Chablis alongside your aji and hirame, Sushi Note in Sherman Oaks. I particularly admire Shin Sushi in Encino, an experience of the genre stripped to its essence. Chef-owner Taketoshi Azumi doesn’t pad his omakase with farmers market finds, vegan derivations, A5 Wagyu or truffle salt. Dinner will start with an appetizer plate of rotating seafood and vegetables that frequently includes one sawagani — a tiny fried crab that is entirely crunch. Then Azumi channels his energies solely into nigiri. His focus is a reminder that unions of fish and rice can be riveting in their gradations of texture, with minimal embellishment needed. Pray that he receives his shipment of menegi, needle-thin Japanese chives. He binds a bundle of them to rice with a band of nori and a finishing sprinkle of bonito flakes. This is often a finale piece, and its resonant sharpness doesn’t dim until after a spoonful or two of tofu mousse with black sugar syrup for dessert.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Causita
Silver Lake Peruvian $$
Ricardo Zarate’s expression of Nikkei cuisine, the style of Peruvian cooking created over the last century by Japanese immigrants, lights up the palate with citrus and bright-tasting herbs. A ceviche mixto of shrimp, scallops and slices of sea bass is bracing in leche de tigre and dotted with fried rings of calamari for clever crunch. Minced chocolate clams, paired with finely diced apple, is presented in a manner similar to choros a la chalaca, a Peruvian classic of steamed mussels served in their shells and covered with a limey onion relish. There is an exceptional vegetarian homage to rockfish tempura, a Nikkei-inspired creation made famous by Nobu Matsuhisa; Zarate uses ricotta gnocchi that he fries and tosses in a creamy sauce built around tobanjan, a Japanese chile paste laced with fermented broad beans. This goes over a lime-green pool of pureed cilantro, spinach and basil. My table usually orders two.
Causita — an airy room with two-story ceilings, exposed brick and light woods, with a beautifully tiled terrace out back — is part of a three-in-one Silver Lake project by David Rosoff, one of L.A.’s great wine savants, who launched a hospitality group last year. Start at Causita but keep in mind his two other side-by-side ventures at Sunset Triangle Plaza: Rápido, a tiny market great for bread and tinned seafood, and Bar Moruno, a restaurant themed loosely around Spanish bar food that’s fantastic for chef Chris Feldmeier’s tortilla española, martinis and whatever obscure red wine from the Canary Islands Rosoff is crushing on.
Causita — an airy room with two-story ceilings, exposed brick and light woods, with a beautifully tiled terrace out back — is part of a three-in-one Silver Lake project by David Rosoff, one of L.A.’s great wine savants, who launched a hospitality group last year. Start at Causita but keep in mind his two other side-by-side ventures at Sunset Triangle Plaza: Rápido, a tiny market great for bread and tinned seafood, and Bar Moruno, a restaurant themed loosely around Spanish bar food that’s fantastic for chef Chris Feldmeier’s tortilla española, martinis and whatever obscure red wine from the Canary Islands Rosoff is crushing on.
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(Annie Noelker / For The Times)
Found Oyster
East Hollywood Seafood $$
“There’s no wait at 4 p.m.,” the Found Oyster team has lately taken to posting on Instagram with glamour shots of its namesake bivalves. The message is clear and, in my experience, true: At most any other hour of service, patience for seats (inside or along a semi-enclosed sidewalk patio) will be necessary. The 3-year-old East Hollywood seafood bar feels in essence like a neighborhood hangout, but the wit and consistency of its bicoastal dishes makes it a citywide destination. From the Pacific, count on Santa Barbara uni lacquered with wasabi and soy sauce, as well as spot prawn sashimi and Dungeness crab salad in season. The Atlantic inspires the brilliant lobster roll bathed in bisque; porky chowder; and small, crisply saline oysters, often from Maine or Massachusetts. Ask for a couple of oysters “Moscow style,” gilded with crème fraîche, vodka and a few beads of caviar. The “wedge” salad is more of a half-circle than a sliver, with the iceberg lettuce cut to model its concentric beauty even beneath fistfuls of Stilton, bacon and popping cherry tomatoes. It’s my favorite in Los Angeles.
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(Annie Noelker / For The Times)
Alta Adams
West Adams American $$
At the 4-year-old West Adams community beacon, chef and co-owner Keith Corbin continues to perfect the style of light-handed cooking he calls “California soul.” His lacy, crackling fried chicken has always been outstanding; it translates seamlessly into a fried chicken sandwich stacked with pickles and hot sauce mayo. It’s hard to imagine a dinner without the oxtails braised with miso and soy, served with rice to capture all the saucy goodness. Corbin employs similar flavoring techniques for his vegan gombo (an alternate spelling for gumbo that hews closer to the word for okra in several West African languages); he uses red miso, rather than roux, for rich base notes among an ensemble of seasonal vegetables.
“California Soul” is also the name of Corbin’s powerful memoir, published this year, about growing up in Watts, surviving the drug economy and finding his way in the kitchen. A highly recommended read.
“California Soul” is also the name of Corbin’s powerful memoir, published this year, about growing up in Watts, surviving the drug economy and finding his way in the kitchen. A highly recommended read.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Birdie G’s
Santa Monica American $$$
Matzo ball soup, pecan kugel, Caesar salad dotted with fried oysters, an avant-garde jellied berry pie: On his ever-evolving menu of comfort foods, Jeremy Fox traces his zigzagging roots through Eastern Europe, the South, the Midwest and California. After following Fox’s career through his cerebral vegetable-based innovations at long-gone Ubuntu in Napa, and the tightrope between earthy and heady cooking he navigated at nearby Rustic Canyon in Santa Monica, it’s wonderful to see him settled into a more lighthearted sort of creativity. One great example: “pickle chick,” in which Fox seemingly imagines the flavor possibilities of Southern fried chicken crossed with the brine from a jar of kosher dill spears. A coating of rice flour and potato flakes gives the bird an unusually fine crumb; fresh dill, dill pickle powder, hot sauce sharpened with pickle brine and a few slices of dill pickle drive home the theme. Blasting salty twang and dry wit, this is excellent fried chicken.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Antico Nuovo
Larchmont Italian $$$
Given how time has distorted lately, it feels remarkable that Chad Colby’s solo venture — his first after a star-making turn as chef of Nancy Silverton’s meat-immersive restaurant Chi Spacca — has been open three years already. Pastas, rather than salumi or steaks, steal the focus, though the best of them incorporate the carnivore’s secrets that Colby acquired at his previous gig. I’m thinking of his take on agnolotti del plin, the pinched bundles with crimped edges that he fills with rabbit and then sauces in braising juices with a downpour of Parmigiano. And also the marvelously chunky beef cheek and veal tongue ragù he twirls among strands of pappardelle cut with a clothier’s precision. Bet on his seasonal salads — he splashed Marsala on stone fruit this summer to gorgeous effect — and the ice creams he crafts with flavors dense and intense enough to slow conversation.
The place is not inexpensive, and it resides in a nondescript strip mall on a stretch of Beverly Boulevard that doesn’t exactly stick in the brain. Point being: If you need to make last-minute reservations for a dinner that leans special occasion, this is an excellent option.
The place is not inexpensive, and it resides in a nondescript strip mall on a stretch of Beverly Boulevard that doesn’t exactly stick in the brain. Point being: If you need to make last-minute reservations for a dinner that leans special occasion, this is an excellent option.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Henry's Cuisine
Alhambra Cantonese $$
An exchange with David R. Chan, the Los Angeles native who has eaten at almost 8,000 Chinese restaurants across the United States, led me recently to the Alhambra restaurant run by Henry Tu and Henry Chau. It was a superb recommendation. Their menu blends Hong Kong-esque banquet seafood luxuries with a genre of dining that my Cantonese friends describe as the kind of place you’d eat homier-style dishes executed at restaurant-level skill. On Sunday nights, Henry’s booked-out dining room is a joyful cacophony of families sharing platters like whole lobster pummeled with fried garlic; a delicate mix of mushrooms sauteed with dried shrimp, pieces of dried fish and chives; beef chow fun; and the must-order dish, pig’s feet cured to the texture of greaseless ham and draped with near-sizzling squares of crisped skin. Come with a group too, and call a day ahead to order the winter melon soup, presented with pageantry in a silver tureen and swirling with chicken, dried scallops, fresh and cured pork, black mushrooms and dried longan fruit. The measure of the soup is the stock; it should have a clear, resounding richness … and this one very much does.
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(Carter Hiyama / For The Times)
Mariscos Jalisco
Boyle Heights Mexican $
It’s more than 20 years now that Raul Ortega has been parking his white lonchera at a curb along Olympic Boulevard in Boyle Heights, serving fish ceviches, octopus cocteles and the crowning dish he credits to his hometown of San Juan de los Lagos: tacos dorados de camarón. Corn tortillas clutch a mixture of spiced, chopped shrimp that’s nearly a paste; Ortega and his team don’t quite seal the tortilla, so in the fryer the filling sizzles around its edges. Then they slice avocado over the top and ladle on a thin red salsa with roughly minced onions and cilantro. The first bite is the textural equivalent of your life flashing before your eyes: It’s every possible experience all at once.
I am one in a lineage of restaurant critics declaring Mariscos Jalisco to be a worthy first meal in Los Angeles if you want to understand the city’s culinary culture. I’m still amazed at how many people ask me for taco recommendations and have never heard of the place. Maybe this will help: Ortega operates three additional outposts, including a counter restaurant in Pomona, with the same menu, and a lonchera on the Westside. If none of them quite reaches the summits of the Boyle Heights truck, it still might be the most amazing seafood taco you’ve ever had.
I am one in a lineage of restaurant critics declaring Mariscos Jalisco to be a worthy first meal in Los Angeles if you want to understand the city’s culinary culture. I’m still amazed at how many people ask me for taco recommendations and have never heard of the place. Maybe this will help: Ortega operates three additional outposts, including a counter restaurant in Pomona, with the same menu, and a lonchera on the Westside. If none of them quite reaches the summits of the Boyle Heights truck, it still might be the most amazing seafood taco you’ve ever had.
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(Yasara Gunawardena / For The Times)
Quarter Sheets Pizza
Echo Park Pizza $$
Quarter Sheets began as a pandemic pop-up from the home that Aaron Lindell and Hannah Ziskin, both accomplished chefs, share in Glendale. He made Detroit-style pizzas — the craggy, lacy borders of his rectangular creations approached blackened without ever tasting burnt — paved with classic red-sauce-based toppings or sometimes wild but amazingly cohesive creations. She composed layer cakes bordering on otherworldly in their deliciousness.
Over the past year they slowly moved into a magnetically eccentric Echo Park space, selling takeout while building a pizza parlor that ended up looking like an early-’80s rec room, complete with both record and cassette players. Their respective specialties are now even better, and also more unpredictable in their imaginings. Maybe potatoes, pistachio pesto and cured lemon will crown a pie, or perhaps there will be a meatball sub reimagined as a pizza, or sambal goreng tingling under a veil of mozzarella. Ziskin dreams up fantasies like olive oil chiffon with tiers of bay leaf-vanilla custard, passion fruit curd and salted Chantilly. Lately there’s been an incredible butter bean salad dotted with feta. No one can guess what L.A.’s first couple of carbs will devise next, but I feel pulled to show up every week and find out.
Over the past year they slowly moved into a magnetically eccentric Echo Park space, selling takeout while building a pizza parlor that ended up looking like an early-’80s rec room, complete with both record and cassette players. Their respective specialties are now even better, and also more unpredictable in their imaginings. Maybe potatoes, pistachio pesto and cured lemon will crown a pie, or perhaps there will be a meatball sub reimagined as a pizza, or sambal goreng tingling under a veil of mozzarella. Ziskin dreams up fantasies like olive oil chiffon with tiers of bay leaf-vanilla custard, passion fruit curd and salted Chantilly. Lately there’s been an incredible butter bean salad dotted with feta. No one can guess what L.A.’s first couple of carbs will devise next, but I feel pulled to show up every week and find out.
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(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
Kismet
Los Feliz Californian Mediterranean $$
Some particulars around Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson’s nearly 6-year-old restaurant can be debated. Is the rabbit for two, spread over a garden bed of perfect lettuces, overpriced at $92? I’d argue yes. Do many of us miss Kae Whalen’s deep, wild, surprise-there’s-something-for-everyone natural wine list, and the Turkish-ish breakfast platter from the Before Times when the restaurant served lunch? Big yeses. But here’s a clincher: While not being a restaurant that serves strictly plant-based meals, Kismet is the finest place I know in Los Angeles for a vegetable-focused dinner. Whenever I have vegetarian friends visiting town, we come for a feast of small plates. It might involve fried cauliflower, the florets frizzled to an ideal pecan shade, dipped in capered yogurt; the Persian crispy rice that hides in its center an egg yolk set somewhere between oozy and jammy; and seasonal wonders like squash and chevre salad heady with the musk of marjoram, or the amazing stone fruit salad dressed in a savory sort of icing made from whey and lemon balm. “This is the California dinner we dreamed about,” they say. Discussion over.
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(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
Petit Trois
Hollywood French $$$
When Petit Trois opened in 2014, the narrow bar was a portal to chef Ludo Lefebvre’s Paris. Partnering with Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo, he poured his Gallic Angeleno spirit into the blond rolled omelet, filled ironically but perfectly with Boursin; escargots saturated in butter and garlic; and the Big Mec burger, drenched in excesses that included foie gras before its ban. The tone, space-wise, was curated for scruffy, appealing indifference, though it never felt like a stage set. Past its doors you disappeared so far from California that you expected to inhale cigarette smoke from the person sitting two inches away.
These days most of us eat on a patio set up in the restaurant’s parking lot. The cooking retains its spirit, though its notions of bar food give way more each year to a conventional restaurant menu. In late summer a magenta slab of duck breast shared its plate with a ripe quarter-moon of peach and a lopsided square of bloomy-rind cheese teetering between solid and liquid. The same entree was served at the restaurant’s larger, brassier Sherman Oaks outpost, and it was a perfect trio. Something about the combination’s indulgent genius made me miss Trois Mec, the closed tasting-menu restaurant in the same strip mall as the original Petit Trois that once rewired ideas about fine dining in America. I still hold out hope for its revival. In the meantime, I’m here for Petit Trois’ evolving synthesis of Lefebvre’s styles.
These days most of us eat on a patio set up in the restaurant’s parking lot. The cooking retains its spirit, though its notions of bar food give way more each year to a conventional restaurant menu. In late summer a magenta slab of duck breast shared its plate with a ripe quarter-moon of peach and a lopsided square of bloomy-rind cheese teetering between solid and liquid. The same entree was served at the restaurant’s larger, brassier Sherman Oaks outpost, and it was a perfect trio. Something about the combination’s indulgent genius made me miss Trois Mec, the closed tasting-menu restaurant in the same strip mall as the original Petit Trois that once rewired ideas about fine dining in America. I still hold out hope for its revival. In the meantime, I’m here for Petit Trois’ evolving synthesis of Lefebvre’s styles.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
All Day Baby
Silver Lake Eclectic $$
One of the most effective tools that Lien Ta and Jonathan Whitener employ in their arsenal of talents is an element of surprise. Exhibit A: At All Day Baby, their daydream of a corner diner in Silver Lake, they found their approach to breakfast and lunch — biscuits, salads, sandwiches, righteously smoked chicken — wasn’t drawing as fervid an audience at dinnertime. Their solution? In late summer they introduced Tet-a-Tet, a Vietnamese-inspired menu interwoven with occasional Mexican flavors. Chicken liver pâté with lemongrass chile crunch and baguette circles the notion of a deconstructed banh mi; a whole fish is bathed in green curry and fish sauce coconut caramel. Oxtail stew over hominy with pickled jalapeño and salsa macha fits in seamlessly. The dishes have deservedly clicked with customers. During the day, Whitener is crushing it with his loco moco using teriyaki-glazed Spam and breakfast sausage. In an alternate universe, pastry chef Thessa Diadem has the staff and bandwidth to make her marshmallow-capped sweet potato sticky buns every weekend; in this world, keep an eye on Instagram for their infrequent appearance.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Kuya Lord
Hollywood Filipino $$
Carving into a spiral slice of “lucenachon” — Lord Maynard Llera’s nickname for his version of Filipino-style roast pork belly, its skin crackling and its rolled center stuffed with lemongrass stalks, red onion and fennel fronds — is a full-circle moment at Kuya Lord. In 2019, after stints as sous chef at Bestia and as culinary director for the h.wood group, Llera planned to open a restaurant serving food that bridged the flavors of Lucena City, a port town in the Philippines’ agriculturally abundant Quezon province where he grew up, and his professional experience in American kitchens. When the pandemic delayed his plans, he held near-weekly pop-ups out of his home in La Cañada Flintridge. Combinations of roasted chicken, fried pork belly stacked in neat rectangles, garlic rice and pancit arrayed on trays channeled the spirit of kamayan, the communal meals spread on banana leaves and eaten by hand. In June Llera realized his dream: He welcomed customers to his sunlit 28-seater in the Melrose Hill section of Hollywood. The finesse and potency of his cooking have transitioned seamlessly. You taste these qualities most thrillingly in the prawns simmered in garlicky crab paste with calamansi juice and fish sauce; the flavors swell in a sour, salty, umami-booming crescendo.
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(Ricardo DeAratanha/Los Angeles Times)
Yangban Society
Downtown L.A. Korean $$
Katianna and John Hong met working at Mélisse in Santa Monica. After years in the fine-dining realm, the couple opened their first restaurant with a retuned philosophy; they’ve mined their personal narratives as a reclamation of their Korean American identities. So much of the cooking lands in the sweet spot of smart, surprising combinations and abject pleasure. A rippling, flaky square biscuit covered in curried gravy with ground beef and pork has been an early signature; same with the avocado and Shinko pear salad with its head-clearing hot mustard vinaigrette. The congee pot pie is incredible: Its chicken stock porridge hints of ginger and its pastry cap brings to mind crackling youtiao. Add roasted abalone to the pot pie and you have one of the city’s great new luxury dishes.
The flow of Yangban Society’s tiered Arts District space has been a work in progress. Should the restaurant and its separate upstairs market area that the Hongs call the “Super” — where customers purchase beverages separately and maybe shop for Korean snacks — eventually merge into an easier-to-navigate experience? Probably. Most significantly, the food is immediately accomplished and, in its freshness and individualism, beautifully of Los Angeles.
The flow of Yangban Society’s tiered Arts District space has been a work in progress. Should the restaurant and its separate upstairs market area that the Hongs call the “Super” — where customers purchase beverages separately and maybe shop for Korean snacks — eventually merge into an easier-to-navigate experience? Probably. Most significantly, the food is immediately accomplished and, in its freshness and individualism, beautifully of Los Angeles.
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(Yasara Gunawardena / For The Times)
Grand Central Market
Downtown L.A. Eclectic $$
There is no rush of sensation quite like entering the halls of downtown Los Angeles’ 105-year-old landmark, long a juncture of what the city has been, what it is becoming and what we’re hungry for right now. Life cycles play out among its daily throngs. The latest outpost of Broad Street Oyster Co., tidily replicating the warm lobster roll that made the Malibu original famous, replaces Prawn Coastal, the seafood stand run by legendary Campanile co-chef Mark Peel, who died suddenly in 2021. Follow one trail of neon signs for vegan tonkatsu at Ramen Hood, beef panang at Sticky Rice and a lengua taco from Roast to Go, which has been in operation since 1952. Turn nearby corners to find kimchi-braised pork belly at Shiku or a statuesque chicken katsu sando from Moon Rabbit. I have two habitual stops for manna to enjoy later: DTLA Cheese and Kitchen, for whatever the latest pungent rarity Lydia Clarke has in her case, and Nicole Rucker’s peerless Fat + Flour, for a slice of pie mounded with fruit from the best farmers in California.
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(Annie Noelker / For The Times)
Smorgasburg L.A.
Downtown L.A. Eclectic $$
Smorgasburg L.A. is the city’s great incubator of culinary talent. We convene on Sundays in Row DTLA’s back lot to plug in, to mingle, to eat our faces off. The lineup of vendors revolves continually, guided by general manager Zach Brooks’ curatorial mastermind. This year some of my favorite pop-ups and food trucks showed up regularly. Friends and I would split up, order and reconvene to share pork belly breakfast burritos from Jonathan Perez’s Macheen, lamb barbacoa flautas from Steven Orozco Torres’ Los Dorados, bundles of chicken curry and rice from Celene and Tara Carrara’s Bungkus Bagus and a couple of dessert flan tacos from Evil Cooks. And there’s so much more to try. Having a presence at Smorgasburg empowers a vital continuum. We fall in love with what we taste. We follow these chefs beyond the market as they grow their businesses. And then we return, hungry to see who and what is happening next.
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(Yasara Gunawardena / For The Times)
Bestia
Downtown L.A. Italian $$$
Filed in the life-moves-too-fast category: Bestia turned 10 this year. In the decade since Ori Menashe took California-Italian cooking by the scruff and clobbered it with fermented chiles, smoked anchovies and frizzled breadcrumbs, Los Angeles and the world have changed profoundly. The restaurant has matured in pace. An early emphasis on charcuterie gave way to antipasti like scallop crudo arrayed with cured cucumbers, olives and fresh mint; the pizza crust is tangier and less doughy; and Genevieve Gergis’ tarts and other kinetic sculptures are more experimental, successfully so. Two things haven’t changed. Pastas, their flavors darting every which direction from supporting ingredients that always manage to mingle well, remain the menu’s core strength. And the concrete bunker of a dining room, housed in a converted Arts District warehouse, is as rambunctious and loud as ever.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Konbi
Echo Park Japanese $$
Akira Akuto and Nick Montgomery hatched their tiny Echo Park business out of its takeout chrysalis this year, and it took off in two new directions. In the summer they debuted their second location at Culver City’s Sony Pictures Plaza, where their riffs on Japanese convenience-store sandos — pork or eggplant katsu, the egg salad that cornered Instagram — remain at the center of the menu. In addition to salads brightened with shiso dressing or miso vinaigrette and Kiyoshi Tsukamoto’s magnificent pastries (including the famous chocolate croissant, best consumed hot), they’ve introduced ice creams to the mix. Try the houjicha flavor, with its swirl of smoky honey caramel.
Back in Echo Park, Akuto and Montgomery relaunched indoor dining at year’s end, renaming the restaurant Konbi Ni. They’re serving breakfast, lunch and dinner at the eight-seat counter; based on a recent Japanese-style preset morning meal involving fish, jeweled fruit and vegetables in various forms, I’m wondering if reservations are about to be as in demand here as for our top-flight sushi bars.
Back in Echo Park, Akuto and Montgomery relaunched indoor dining at year’s end, renaming the restaurant Konbi Ni. They’re serving breakfast, lunch and dinner at the eight-seat counter; based on a recent Japanese-style preset morning meal involving fish, jeweled fruit and vegetables in various forms, I’m wondering if reservations are about to be as in demand here as for our top-flight sushi bars.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Pijja Palace
Silver Lake Indian $$
Have you recently driven by the Silver Lake strip mall where the legendary Happy Foot Sad Foot sign spun for 30-plus years? During dinner hours, crowds swarm the parking lot for one of the year’s breakout sensations — a sports bar that serves Indian American dishes. Owner Avish Naran crisscrosses influences with a we-do-what-we-want irreverence that feels innate to the city, though there is nothing else quite like Pijja Palace in Los Angeles.
In a room that gives off the air of a business-class lounge in a Scandinavian airport, surrounded by 13 screens playing whatever game happens to be on that night, you might start with the “green” wings dressed in a cilantro-mint-chive chutney. The early hit is malai rigatoni, its sauce a gentle mixture of cream and tomato masala carrying the reedy twang of coriander seed. Naran and executive chef Miles Shorey do their best to eschew labels, but I’d couch their pies in the vein of East Coast-style bar or tavern pizzas — thin, chewy-crisp crusts with plenty of sauce and cheese all the way to their blackened edges. Don’t go too crazy with the build-your-own combinations: A relatively mild vindaloo sauce topped with chicken tikka and tandoori onions is plenty.
In a room that gives off the air of a business-class lounge in a Scandinavian airport, surrounded by 13 screens playing whatever game happens to be on that night, you might start with the “green” wings dressed in a cilantro-mint-chive chutney. The early hit is malai rigatoni, its sauce a gentle mixture of cream and tomato masala carrying the reedy twang of coriander seed. Naran and executive chef Miles Shorey do their best to eschew labels, but I’d couch their pies in the vein of East Coast-style bar or tavern pizzas — thin, chewy-crisp crusts with plenty of sauce and cheese all the way to their blackened edges. Don’t go too crazy with the build-your-own combinations: A relatively mild vindaloo sauce topped with chicken tikka and tandoori onions is plenty.
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(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
Rocio's Mexican Kitchen
Bell Gardens Mexican $
“La diosa de los moles,” “mole queen,” “mother of moles”: Each of the nicknames that RocĂo Camacho has earned over the years honors her command of laborious, symphonic moles. Camacho has worked in kitchens throughout the region for decades and partnered on projects in Sun Valley and Paramount, but currently she makes the restaurant she opened in Bell Gardens in 2015 her sole professional home. The menu details a dozen moles. Some are tenets; others are fantasias. Her mole Oaxaqueño, its dozens of ingredients alchemized into a substance as glossy as fresh-churned earth, is as distinctive as an autograph. From there, dabble in her moles made with pistachio and mint or cranberry and rose. When I peered through the open kitchen window at dinner to catch a glimpse of Camacho, a staffer caught on and said, “She’s here in the mornings, making moles, because all the recipes are her secrets.” I returned for chilaquiles blanketed in dusky-bright pipian rojo during breakfast hours a couple of days later, and there she was.
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(Carter Hiyama / For The Times)
n/soto
Mid-City Japanese $$$
“Accessible” can be an overused and twisty word in food writing, but in its most basic definition it aptly describes the new Mid-City restaurant from Niki Nakayama and her wife, Carole Iida-Nakayama. While their tiny flagship n/naka never stops showing up on listicles about the world’s hardest reservations, at n/soto prime-time seating can be secured by planning only a week out, sometimes less. Its izakaya model — small to midsize plates that incorporate myriad culinary techniques, matched with a thoughtful beverage program — is familiar as a universal template for dining in Los Angeles. The couple knew they’d need to give n/naka their nightly attention, so Yoji Tajima, whose Beverly Hills sushi restaurant Yojisan closed in 2020, leads n/soto’s kitchen. Among the 50-plus items on the menu, much of it micro-seasonal and changing by the week if not the day, look for a constant: a bowl of freshly made oboro tofu. The soothing, savory custard seasoned with tosa joyu, a soy-based sauce enriched with shaved bonito, sets the mood for the sculptural plates of sashimi, smoky chicken thigh skewers and the exceptional shrimp-stuffed agedashi mochi ahead.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Pizzeria Sei
Pico-Robertson Pizza $$
Through a plexiglass window, from a seat at the counter in a tiny Pico-Robertson dining room, watch how William Joo crimps the edges on his neo-Neapolitan pizzas. When they emerge from the black-tiled oven, smoldered by burning almond wood, the corniciones will have flared into jagged starburst patterns. Ripping into the crust, however scorching, becomes irresistible. An alumnus of Daniele Uditi’s Pizzana — a brand in national expansion mode that arguably ushered in L.A.’s current golden age of pizza — Joo is a meticulous craftsperson forging his own style, pie by pie. He fully sidesteps the soupy centers often associated with Neapolitan pizzas; his creations slide from the paddle to the plate bubbling in the middle. Start with a Margherita to appreciate its essential character: the exact sweetness of the tomato sauce, the pleasing ratio of fior di latte, the head-clearing basil leaves and the sprinkle of sea salt that heightens it all. I’m also fond of the Bismarck, with its egg in the center bleeding yolk over the surrounding slices of prosciutto cotto.
Reserve as far ahead as you can and expect prime slots to be booked; I’ve made peace with savoring Joo’s handiwork in the middle of the afternoon.
Reserve as far ahead as you can and expect prime slots to be booked; I’ve made peace with savoring Joo’s handiwork in the middle of the afternoon.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Villa's Tacos
Highland Park Mexican $
When I’m lifting one of Victor Villa’s queso tacos out of a takeout container, I have an inkling of how an alien god might feel plucking a landmass right out of the ocean. This thing looks like a continent; curls of cheese have seized along its borders into a craggy coastline. The blue corn tortilla, pressed to order, forms thick, soft ground for layers of grilled chopped steak or chicken leg meat with onion, cilantro, crema, flurries of cotija and a cloud of guacamole. It’s unwieldy and overwhelmingly delicious, and it’s vital to splotch the top with salsa (there are at least seven to try) to tame the richness. Villa and his crew form an efficient assembly line of tacos under tents set up outside Block Party bar in Highland Park. Ivy Queen and Megan Thee Stallion blast from the speakers. “Tacos Estilo Los Angeles” reads the motto splashed across the setup’s canopy. Indeed. In a city fueled by tacos, Villa’s maximalist style feels particularly born of this place and time.
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(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles)
Sichuan Impression
Alhambra Chinese $$
Restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley are far from monolithic, but Sichuan cuisine has plainly dominated the region’s culinary narrative in the last decade. In the years since Chengdu Taste taught us that the cooking traditions of the Sichuan province are about far more than Scoville meltdowns and tingling ma la, we can debate the nuances of spicy cumin lamb and dan dan noodles from various menus. We can name our favorite hot pot chain. (My hand is raised for Xiao Long Kan.) When the question arises of where to start, or which menu most eloquently conveys the range in heat and flavor of the cuisine, my answer is Sichuan Impression.
Lynn Liu and Kelly Xiao, both natives of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, opened their first restaurant in Alhambra in 2014. Start with a round of cold dishes — including pickled cucumbers, bamboo shoots and the famous fuqi feipian, or “couple’s dish,” with sliced beef shank and tripe in a broth prominently scented with ginger and star anise — followed by the boiled fish with rattan pepper, which is at once subtle and potent, and the wobbling hill of pork steamed with rice flour and pumpkin.
Lynn Liu and Kelly Xiao, both natives of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, opened their first restaurant in Alhambra in 2014. Start with a round of cold dishes — including pickled cucumbers, bamboo shoots and the famous fuqi feipian, or “couple’s dish,” with sliced beef shank and tripe in a broth prominently scented with ginger and star anise — followed by the boiled fish with rattan pepper, which is at once subtle and potent, and the wobbling hill of pork steamed with rice flour and pumpkin.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Post & Beam
Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw American $$$
At the crown-jewel restaurant of Baldwin Hills Crenshaw shopping plaza, John and Roni Cleveland serve cheering dishes inflected with the flavors of the American South: shrimp and grits with shrimp butter and beef bacon, jerk catfish over dirty rice, a scarf-it-down grilled cheese rich with braised oxtail meat and smoked mozzarella. For brunch? More oxtail, in the form of hash with poached eggs and mustard hollandaise, and pecan-pie-inspired French toast with bourbon caramel. Since its inception in 2011 — when founder Brad Johnson opened the restaurant with L.A. native chef Govind Armstrong leading the kitchen — part of Post & Beam’s mission has been to nurture Black culinary talent. To that end, the Clevelands regularly host Martin Draluck (formerly the restaurant’s chef de cuisine) and his Black Pot Supper Club. The event, inspired by the culinary legacy of enslaved chefs James Hemings and Hercules Posey, builds on the Hemings & Hercules dinners Draluck co-created with Brian Dunsmoor that were featured on the Netflix series “High on the Hog.” The menu might include head cheese or rabbit braised in Madeira, and the table conversations sparked by the historical dishes could be occasionally difficult and very meaningful.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Mini Kabob
Glendale Armenian $$
Chef Alvard Martirosyan, her husband, Ovakim, and their gifted, social-media-savvy son Armen have been achieving near perfection with skewered meats for 27 years. Their Armenian-style kebabs, marinated thoroughly so the seasonings seep down to a cellular level, emerge from the flames smoky and always juicy. The Martirosyans’ tiny Glendale restaurant remains a takeout operation; a family member meets you at the door behind a folding table to hand over your order. For a glimpse inside, watch Armen on Instagram or TikTok shaping meat onto saber-like skewers for luleh kebabs, the restaurant’s specialty. My favorites rotate: Lately I’ve been pairing a beef luleh with the chicken thigh shish imbued with spiced yogurt and flecked with Aleppo pepper. If you’re making your meal a car picnic — it’s the move, honestly — ask for a side of the off-menu fried potatoes. They’re best hot, swiped generously through garlic sauce.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Courage Bagels
East Hollywood Bagels $
I understand that I might be ruining this hack as I type, but I have found the line is shortest at Courage Bagels around 9:15 a.m. on weekdays. The wait to reach the ordering window is often no more than 10 minutes, and usually I can find a seat under an umbrella at one of the tables arranged along the sidewalk. A staffer calls out customers’ names as he rushes through the restaurant’s door; it has no outside handle, so he aims to pass off takeout boxes and dash back inside before the door swings fully shut again. My carton will contain Winter in Sardinia — a sandwich layered with sardines, herbs, lemon and a literal fistful of capers — and also half of a purposely burnt bagel pounded with everything seasoning and draped with smoked salmon.
Arielle Skye began selling her compact, smoky-crisp, Montreal-inspired bagels from the back of a bicycle nearly six years ago. She expanded to the Silver Lake farmers market, and then in October 2020 she and her now-husband, Chris Moss, moved into the Virgil Village space previously occupied by Super Pan bakery. So Courage Bagels isn’t an overnight success story, but it has blossomed into an undeniable phenomenon. They really are worth the wait, no matter when you show up.
Arielle Skye began selling her compact, smoky-crisp, Montreal-inspired bagels from the back of a bicycle nearly six years ago. She expanded to the Silver Lake farmers market, and then in October 2020 she and her now-husband, Chris Moss, moved into the Virgil Village space previously occupied by Super Pan bakery. So Courage Bagels isn’t an overnight success story, but it has blossomed into an undeniable phenomenon. They really are worth the wait, no matter when you show up.
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(Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times)
Mother Wolf
Hollywood Italian $$$
For Mother Wolf, Evan Funke went Hollywood in every sense. His loud, posh, 200-seat spectacle in a 1930s-era Art Deco building rages nightly with a Negroni-clutching who’s-who crowd. Funke, an L.A. native who learned from Wolfgang Puck at Spago and whose father is an Academy Award-winning special effects photographer, has an insider’s instinct for coddling the Tinseltown elite. Angeleno restaurant obsessives also know he’s a perfectionist in the kitchen. The challenge he’s given himself with Mother Wolf is a rich one: Can he manage the vortex of power and glamour he’s created while maintaining the culinary ambitions of his Rome-inspired menu?
I find rewarding answers in his fried squash blossoms; the supplì al telefono stretchy with buffalo mozzarella; a pizza covered with prosciutto and artichokes; and a correct, barnyard-y spaghettone alla gricia, the unjust underdog of the Roman pasta repertoire. A restaurant of such glamorous scale needs a strong third act, and Funke wisely hired Shannon Swindle, one of L.A.’s most gifted pastry pros. Among other seasonal desserts, order the maritozzo, a fluffy sweet bun filled with cream in a shape that resembles Pac-Man with his mouth full, hiding a surprise of ripe, macerated strawberries that lightens the whole affair.
I find rewarding answers in his fried squash blossoms; the supplì al telefono stretchy with buffalo mozzarella; a pizza covered with prosciutto and artichokes; and a correct, barnyard-y spaghettone alla gricia, the unjust underdog of the Roman pasta repertoire. A restaurant of such glamorous scale needs a strong third act, and Funke wisely hired Shannon Swindle, one of L.A.’s most gifted pastry pros. Among other seasonal desserts, order the maritozzo, a fluffy sweet bun filled with cream in a shape that resembles Pac-Man with his mouth full, hiding a surprise of ripe, macerated strawberries that lightens the whole affair.
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(Stephanie Breijo/Los Angeles Times)
Pine & Crane
Downtown L.A. Taiwanese $$
In June, Vivian Ku opened her second location of Pine & Crane, in downtown L.A. It’s larger and sleeker than the beloved Silver Lake flagship, with a calming indoor-outdoor design adjacent to a small park. Most important, the new outpost serves breakfast. Its morning menu revives many of the Taiwanese staples that Ku and her crew mastered at Today Starts Here, the takeout pop-up they operated for nine months recently in Chinatown. If you’re in a pre-workday rush, the “thousand-layer” pancake folded with egg, chile sauce, basil and melted American cheese binding the crisp-soft pastry is ideal on-the-go fuel. Or settle in for a bowl of savory soy milk garnished with youtiao (batons of fried dough snipped into crisp squares), daikon rice cakes freckled with diced shiitake and hand pies stuffed with scrambled egg, chives and vermicelli noodles. Dinner options of three-cup chicken fragrant with basil, lu rou fan (minced pork over rice with soy egg) and nourishing wonton soup? As strong as ever.
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(Silvia Razgova / For The Times/Silvia Razgova)
Jitlada
East Hollywood Thai $$
Few modern restaurant legends have endured like the story behind Jitlada: Chef Suthiporn “Tui” Sungkamee, who died in 2017, and his sister Sarintip “Jazz” Singsanong took over the long-running restaurant and introduced a then-untranslated back page full of radically spicy Southern Thai specialties. Those dishes have been incorporated into its 10-page English menu for a while now, but their written accessibility doesn’t mean the kitchen has diminished their incandescence. As a masterclass on regional Thai cooking, Jitlada is indispensable. The choices can overwhelm, true, though reconnecting with an old favorite can feel like rediscovering a beloved novel. It happened for me recently after ordering kaeng kung yawt khaam awn, shrimp and young tamarind pods in a soupy curry lit up with turmeric. There were shadings in its fiery, fruity-sour intricacy I’d missed before. I never forget the effect of the herbaceous jungle curry with lamb; it’s so visceral with capsicums that its ingestion borders on supernatural possession.
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(Katrina Frederick / For The Times)
Rossoblu
Downtown L.A. Italian $$$
Steve Samson’s restaurant in downtown’s City Market South complex, now in its sixth year, has been slowly moving away from its original premise as a reclamation of his childhood spent in food-obsessed Bologna. The menu of blended Italian-Californian sensibilities was never doctrinaire, but in a town teeming with pasta and pizza restaurants I valued the regional specificity. Traces of Bologna remain in two staple dishes: the wonderful minestra nel sacco, a soup of Parmigiano-Reggiano dumplings cooked in a cloth bag and served in chicken and beef broth; and tagliatelle al ragù, in which the sauce clings to the strands without smothering them. Dough maestro Francesco Allegro, a native of Puglia, ensures that the concise, seasonally shifting pasta options continue to be a focal point. Share two or three of them, followed by the grigliata — a duet of bone-in pork chop and sausage that sings of char and salt and succulence.
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(Silvia Razgova / For The Times)
Gish Bac
Arlington Heights Mexican $$
Southern California is home to the largest Oaxacan population outside Mexico. Among dozens of restaurants that serve absorbing surveys of Oaxaca’s regional specialties, I am continually drawn back to Maria Ramos and David Padilla’s restaurant in Arlington Heights. Ramos comes from a family of barbacoa masters and she honors her heritage in two glorious Oaxacan variations: barbacoa roja, which is goat stained with guajillo chiles and served in its ruddy, head-clearing broth; and barbacoa blanco, a less saucy version of steamed lamb fragrant with oregano and cumin. Come with a group for weekend breakfast and try both of them along with an order of enmoladas dipped in Ramos’ mole negro; the sauce is nearly sentient in its intricate flavors and glossy, determined ooze across the plate. In a town more crowded than ever with excellent tlayudas, Gish Bac’s signature still stands out. It’s a circle of life layered with pureed black beans, shredded cabbage covering half-melted threads of Oaxacan string cheese, grilled steak and chicken, the chile-marinated pork called cecina, avocado, tomato rounds and slivers of nopales arranged like spokes radiating from a wheel’s center. Note: The restaurant is cash only.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Northern Thai Food Club
East Hollywood Thai $
The strategy at “Nancy” Amphai Dunne’s 12-seat restaurant in Thai Town has always been to interact with her over the steam table, surveying the dishes inspired by the cooking of Chiang Rai, Thailand’s northernmost province. Point and choose sai ua, rough-textured pork sausages packed with minced lemongrass; gaeng kanoon, a soup of jackfruit, pork ribs and cha-om, an herb that resembles dill and tastes almondy; and nam prik ong, a warm ground-pork dip with flavors that race with tomato and shrimp paste. A few months ago Dunne introduced a separate menu of soupy rice porridge available during dinner hours. It’s comfort food with a sneak attack: The broth tingles with makhwaen seeds grown in Northern Thailand that have a similar but gentler spicy-numbing effect as Sichuan peppercorns. Among options to add pork meatballs, squid or scallops, try the porridge scattered with hunks of mild fish.
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(Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times)
Lalibela
Little Ethiopia Ethiopian $$
In Little Ethiopia I seek out the dulet (raw minced beef liver, tripe and other cuts in spiced butter) at Messob; a vegetarian platter followed by a cup of strong, freshly roasted coffee at Rahel Ethiopian Vegan Cuisine; and the turmeric-stained alicha tibs or garlicky chicken cutlet over spaghetti at Awash just a half-mile outside the neighborhood. Most frequently, though, I return to Lalibela. Tenagne Belachew worked in several of the area’s restaurants before opening her own place with her seven children. Lunch is my favorite time of day, when the dining room is quiet and I order one dish from the breakfast menu — say, quanta fir-fir, a combination of shredded injera and dried beef simmered in spiced tomato sauce. If I’m with friends, we build our meal around the 11-dish “veggie utopia” spread over injera; usually we add yebeg alicha wot, a mild and creamy lamb sauté, and the special kitfo, beef tartare glossed with mitmita (a staple Ethiopian spice blend here ringing with cardamom) and eaten with fluffy curds of fresh cheese and pureed collards.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Selva
Long Beach Colombian $$
Carlos Jurado — a veteran chef of Los Angeles restaurants, including stints at Vespertine and Border Grill — had drifted toward consulting and recipe development before partnering with restaurateurs Geoff and Karna Rau. In leading his first kitchen, Jurado returns to foods he’d loved growing up; his parents relocated from Colombia to Long Beach when he was 3, and he started making regular trips to see family in South America when he was a teenager.
The quickest route to happiness at Selva is via the bandeja paisa, a one-platter feast synonymous with Colombia. Thick, ruddy slices of steak fan across one edge of the plate. A spiral of other meats and sides — grilled chorizo or morcilla, extra-crisp hunks of pork belly, golden lobes of plantain, smoky beans, white rice, a griddled arepa filled with corn and queso, a fried egg, sliced avocado — ends with a tuft of pickled onions arranged in the center like a bull’s-eye. Colombians tend to enjoy their hot dogs, called super-perros, with toppings as layered as geological strata. For Jurado’s joyride version, a link of taut, paprika-stained Colombian chorizo peeks out from beneath a topsoil of crumbled cotija, charred onions and peppers, jalapeño jam, aioli mixed with salsa verde (a mulchy, punchy Colombian version called ajĂ) and, finally, smashed Lay’s chips dusted with chile powder. This is, as you might imagine, a two-handed, face-planting commitment to polish off.
The quickest route to happiness at Selva is via the bandeja paisa, a one-platter feast synonymous with Colombia. Thick, ruddy slices of steak fan across one edge of the plate. A spiral of other meats and sides — grilled chorizo or morcilla, extra-crisp hunks of pork belly, golden lobes of plantain, smoky beans, white rice, a griddled arepa filled with corn and queso, a fried egg, sliced avocado — ends with a tuft of pickled onions arranged in the center like a bull’s-eye. Colombians tend to enjoy their hot dogs, called super-perros, with toppings as layered as geological strata. For Jurado’s joyride version, a link of taut, paprika-stained Colombian chorizo peeks out from beneath a topsoil of crumbled cotija, charred onions and peppers, jalapeño jam, aioli mixed with salsa verde (a mulchy, punchy Colombian version called ajĂ) and, finally, smashed Lay’s chips dusted with chile powder. This is, as you might imagine, a two-handed, face-planting commitment to polish off.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Flavors From Afar
Little Ethiopia International $$
Co-founder Christian Davis describes the mission of Flavors From Afar this way: “We highlight cooks and chefs who are refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants making cuisines from around the world.” Each month features a new chef who works with the in-house team, led by program instructor Kenna Copes, to translate the home-cooked dishes of their culture to a professional kitchen setting. In the past year chefs in residence have served soup joumou, a bright, brothy beef and squash dish eaten to commemorate the end of French colonial rule in Haiti; gorgeously pleated Afghan mantu swathed in tomato sauce and mint yogurt; and individually sized variations on maqluba, the Palestinian rice dish flipped upside-down on the plate to reveal its layers. There’s also a steady “classics menu” featuring potato-and-cheese flautas, Somali-style chicken fried rice and other favorite dishes from past contributors.
The restaurant is an arm of co-founderMeymuna Hussein-Cattan’sTiyya Foundation, which assists families of refugees, immigrants and displaced Indigenous communities. Nearly half of the profits from Flavors From Afar go to Tiyya’s support programs. To keep up with the featured cuisines, many of which are otherwise uncommon even in L.A.’s vast dining landscape, the plant-filled dining room in Little Ethiopia warrants monthly visits — and an Instagram follow.
The restaurant is an arm of co-founderMeymuna Hussein-Cattan’sTiyya Foundation, which assists families of refugees, immigrants and displaced Indigenous communities. Nearly half of the profits from Flavors From Afar go to Tiyya’s support programs. To keep up with the featured cuisines, many of which are otherwise uncommon even in L.A.’s vast dining landscape, the plant-filled dining room in Little Ethiopia warrants monthly visits — and an Instagram follow.
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(Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times)
Angry Egret Dinette
Chinatown Eclectic $$
Wes Avila never stays still. When he’s not overseeing the menu at Yucatán-themed Ka’teen at the Tommie Hollywood hotel, he’s devising the day’s out-of-left-field specials at Angry Egret Dinette, his project in Chinatown’s Mandarin Plaza. Maybe one afternoon will bring a teetering burger that calls forth backyard barbecues; the next day he’ll pile a tostada with surf clam, halibut and uni and spackle them with salsa negra and salsa macha so the seafood is downright gritty with texture and spice. Waffles with mascarpone cream and breakfast burritos like Hey Porky’s (roasted and shredded pork shoulder with scrambled eggs, black beans, queso Oaxaca and salsa verde) are mainstays for breakfast, which is my favorite meal at Angry Egret Dinette. The shaded courtyard setting has been a draw since the darkest days of 2020; now there’s a cozy indoor dining area with floor-to-ceiling windows too.
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(Shelby Moore/For The Times)
Sun Nong Dan
Koreatown Korean $$
It’s good to remember now and then that Sun Nong Dan’s initial focus was seolleongtang (the restaurant spells it “sulung tang” on the menu), a silvery-milky beef broth known as a curative and designed to be seasoned to taste at the table. But then word spread about the galbi jjim — a crimson mass of short ribs, gochugaru-flecked potatoes and chewy rice cakes that can easily feed four — and the cheese option. A server brings the stew in a stone pot on a wooden platter, sprinkles over a few fistfuls of white shreds, pulls out what is essentially a welding blowtorch and takes aim until the cheese melts. The staffer performs this task with the straightest face; everyone else in the restaurant gapes. Sun Nong Dan, first housed in a strip mall on Sixth Street in Koreatown, now has four locations across the region. The ubiquity of the flambé moment has all but transcended Instagram. I love the original but note the outposts stay busy; the galbi jjim in takeout form doesn’t come with cheese, and no one wants to miss out.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Ngu Binh
Westminster Vietnamese $
Orange County’s Little Saigon — bestriding Westminster and Garden Grove, and encompassing the U.S.’ largest Vietnamese population — could and should have its own 101 best restaurants list. Previous recommendations in this guide have included Brodard Chateau, with its tapered nem nuong and its exhaustive menu, and Pho 79, where long-simmered oxtail meat is a key addition to the oniony spiced broth.
Add another to your roster: Ngu Binh in Westminster, where Mai Tran prepares dishes from Thua Thien Hue, a province in central Vietnam famous for its royal cuisine. BĂşn bò Hue dac biet (spicy noodle soup abundant with several cuts of pork and beef), bánh bèo (slippery rice cakes textured with minced shrimp and crunchy pork skin) and bánh Ăt kep bánh ram (dumplings of glutinous rice dough filled with shrimp and pork and then set on a disc of lacy fried dough) are excellent immersions into Tran’s regional specialties. A new location in Fountain Valley, alternately referred to as Ngu Binh 2 or V-Land, has an expanded menu of translucent dumplings and tables outfitted with big comfy wicker chairs.
Add another to your roster: Ngu Binh in Westminster, where Mai Tran prepares dishes from Thua Thien Hue, a province in central Vietnam famous for its royal cuisine. BĂşn bò Hue dac biet (spicy noodle soup abundant with several cuts of pork and beef), bánh bèo (slippery rice cakes textured with minced shrimp and crunchy pork skin) and bánh Ăt kep bánh ram (dumplings of glutinous rice dough filled with shrimp and pork and then set on a disc of lacy fried dough) are excellent immersions into Tran’s regional specialties. A new location in Fountain Valley, alternately referred to as Ngu Binh 2 or V-Land, has an expanded menu of translucent dumplings and tables outfitted with big comfy wicker chairs.
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(Silvia Razgova / For The Times)
Dulan’s
Inglewood American $$
When the line at Dulan’s has inched along enough that I can gaze at the entire topography of the restaurant’s steam table — with its mountains of baked and fried chicken, bogs of greens and foothills of mashed potatoes and black-eyed peas — I’m looking first for the oxtails piled like boulders. They look sturdy, but the long-simmered knobs yield their pot-roast-rich meat at the slightest nudge. Perhaps requesting rice underneath would be wisest for capturing their gravy; I’m far too attached to sides of vinegared collards and mac and cheese. The recipe for the fried chicken, all righteous crunch and saline juice, traces the lineage of Adolf Dulan, who ran the legendary Aunt Kizzy’s Back Porch in Marina del Rey before opening the first Dulan’s in 1999. He moved to Los Angeles from Oklahoma as part of the second wave of the African American Great Migration. Adolf died in 2017, but the Dulan family honors his culinary legacy. This food is integral to the soul of Los Angeles.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Bar Amá
Downtown L.A. Tex-Mex $$
I imagine Josef Centeno wearing a gardener’s expression of patient concentration while dreaming up vegetable dishes in his downtown kitchen. He flashes on saffron honey drizzled over squash-blossom fritters as a color-coordinated garnish. He bakes cotija before crumbling it over sliced peaches to amplify the cheese’s saltiness and match the fruit’s ripe density. I lead with these types of very Californian pleasures because they can be easily overlooked on a menu otherwise full of Tex-Mex standards. A son of San Antonio, Centeno does his hometown proud with tart-sweet margaritas; guacamole with warm chips and nachos during happy hour; and tangy, cheesy green chicken enchiladas based on his mother’s recipe. Puffy tacos, cradling chicken picadillo or carne guisada, collapse in a cloud of masa and should be eaten in seconds. Along with his alchemist’s queso, in which traditional Velveeta fuses with three other cheeses into molten gold, these dishes make clear why Tex-Mex as a regional cuisine should be a source of national pride. If the presence of local produce prepared with global-mind imagination tangles the equation? I’m more than happy to roll with Centeno’s Tex-Cal-Mex revolution.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Connie and Ted’s
West Hollywood Seafood $$
The swooping front patio canopy constructed during the pandemic’s darkest months has been disassembled, and customers have returned inside Connie and Ted’s squiggly building — an ode to the Googie coffee shops of midcentury Los Angeles — that is now a West Hollywood icon in its own right. As for the last nine years, the simplicity of the restaurant’s New England-style seafood stands on its own merits. When I disengage from automatically ordering milky-porky chowder and the fish and chips, I delight in the freshness of the New England clam boil; grilled Rhode Island swordfish with only a lacquer of herbed oil; and bouillabaisse, a frequent Wednesday-night special, served with rouille properly buzzing with garlic and saffron.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Tokyo Fried Chicken Co.
Downtown L.A. Japanese $$
Kouji Yamanashi spent several years polishing the recipe for the phenomenal fried chicken he serves at his Monterey Park pub. A cross between karaage and Southern-style gospel bird, he brines drumsticks and boneless tenders in soy, ginger and garlic before frying them in rice bran oil. The well-seasoned batter isn’t addled by too many spices; it’s all about the flaking, near-greaseless crunch. To complete the spread: yams in a not-too-sweet glaze that calls to mind barley malt syrup, collards simmered in dashi, curried corn, and yuzu lemonade or a chocolaty porter. I hope for the return of pre-pandemic dinner sets, when the kitchen fried wings and thighs as well. As the menu stands, though, a meal at one of the restaurant’s seven tables — recently available again after two years primarily focused on takeout — feels like coming home.
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(Annie Noelker/For The Times)
Woodspoon
Downtown L.A. Brazilian $$
Natalia Pereira’s menu expresses the flavors from many cultures (African, Indigenous Brazilian and Portuguese among them) she knew growing up in Minas Gerais, an interior state of southeastern Brazil that, like California, experienced a gold rush that triggered mass immigration and often brutal societal shifts. An appetizer of favorite Brazilian fried street snacks illustrates the cuisine’s many global tributaries: It includes an oval, minted variation on Levantine kibbeh; Portuguese-influenced bolinho de bacalhau (cod croquettes); and shrimp and coconut pastels, crackling dumplings that bring to mind both empanadas and wontons. Pereira’s most beloved dish is arguably empadão de frango, which she translates as “Brazilian chicken pot pie.” You will know why when you crack the biscuity crown and spoon out the well of creamed poultry, olives, corn and hearts of palm. Lately I’ve been even more drawn to the complete meals she calls grelhas, especially the skewered, bacon-wrapped chicken arranged among ribboned collards, soft plantains, rice, beans and the ubiquitous Brazilian condiment of toasted cassava flour, farofa. Unwind in Woodspoon’s cozy Bohemian dining room full of mismatched chairs and pillows — an individualistic space that conveys Pereira’s artistic soul nearly as well as her cooking does.
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(Dylan + Jeni / For The Times/For The Times)
Majordomo
Chinatown American $$$
Five years feels like a long time ago and also a blink. David Chang christened Majordomo in January 2018; it was the first California restaurant in the Momofuku empire, and it landed raucously amid a maze of Chinatown warehouses. Everyone wanted to be there, to add their own shouts to the booming decibels in its hangar-like space. Executive chef Jude Parra-Sickels and his team continue to keep pace with a repertoire of dishes that has taken root nicely in Los Angeles. Summer isn’t summer without the tomato and stone fruit salad splashed with nutty sherry vinaigrette. I come anytime for the fried peppers stuffed with Allan Benton’s Tennessee-style sock sausage and the boiled chicken served in two courses — poached breast made in the image of Hainan chicken rice followed by soup teeming with hand-cut noodles. The service staff is full of caring pros, and cocktails like a Vesper laced with sake vermouth kick off dinner grandly. Do I miss some of the kitchen’s outrageousness from the early days — the globs of raclette shaved over short rib braised with Asian pear and daikon, the thrill of rock crab claws presented three ways? Yes. The menu is ready for a renewed infusion of energy.
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ANAHEIM, CA - NOVEMBER 02: Mansaf: lamb chunks placed over rice with a side of jameed (dry yogurt) with almonds and pine nuts from Al Baraka on Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2022 in Anaheim, CA. (Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)
(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Al Baraka Restaurant
Anaheim Palestinian $$
In August, Anaheim’s Little Arabia district received its official designation from the city after years of petitioning. Aref Shatarah and his wife, Magida Shatarah, quietly opened their first restaurant in the heart of the community in 2021. They distinguish themselves with a repertoire of Palestinian dishes more commonly seen in home kitchens than on restaurant menus. Start by scanning the daily special. On a recent Saturday it was mshakhan (also commonly spelled musakhan), roast chicken and onions piled on flatbread that’s stained nearly purple with sumac. The dish was traditionally consumed in autumn — eaten by hand, composing bites of bread, chicken and onion — to taste and assess the year’s first local olive oil pressings. Al Baraka’s crisp, rich, lemony-bright version, generous enough for three to share, conveys that essence. Come any morning of the week for a soul-warming Levantine breakfast of creamy, dense fatteh, or eggs and fried potatoes sparked with cumin.
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(Annie Noelker / For The Times)
Hotville Chicken
Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw American $
Nashville-style hot chicken swept in as a craze late last decade; rather than blaze and fade, the dish has begun blending into our chile-laden landscape. For a taste of the dish’s true lineage, head to Kim Prince’s restaurant at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw mall. She comes not just from hot chicken royalty but from its creators. Her aunt is Andre Prince, owner of Prince’s Hot Chicken in Music City; their family began selling hot chicken to customers in the 1940s. At Hotville, the spice paste is its own texture, at once slick and pleasantly sandy. The staff pleads with first-timers to start by ordering the chicken mild; with medium and spicy levels there is likely tingling, maybe even all-over prickling sensations, and certainly sweats. For hot chicken sandwich seekers, Price makes a slaw-crowned version she calls the Shaw, and on weekends the kitchen sends out buttery waffles; they bring a little sweetness to the burn.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Ipoh Kopitiam
Alhambra Malaysian $
In the year since Kenji Tang opened his homage to the coffeehouse culture of Ipoh, his hometown in Malaysia, the eternal lines trailing out the door have yet to wane. It’s one of the few lodestars for Malaysian cuisine in Los Angeles, and the crowds attest to the care evident in Tang’s cooking. I keep returning for the mulchy beef rendang, in which minced shallots and lemongrass pierce through as both textures and flavors; and the mellow groove of the creamy chicken curry with its high note of ground coriander. Order the curry paired with nasi lemak, rice simmered in coconut milk with pandan leaves and served with a few slivers of anchovy, boiled egg and fiery sambal pulsing with belacan (dried shrimp paste). Balancing its flavors takes more work than any other dish he makes, Tang once told me. But there’s profundity in the simple things too: A cup of Malaysian-style white coffee alongside toast sandwiched with kaya (coconut jam) conveys the restaurant’s truest spirit.
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(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
Taste of Tehran
West Los Angeles Persian $$
To experience the fuller glories of the Persian table in L.A. — baghali pokhte (fava beans with mint and pistachio sauce), chicken and herb stew with three kinds of citrus, the range of egg dishes called kookoo — you’ll likely need an invitation to someone’s home. That, or a copy of local author Naz Deravian’s book “Bottom of the Pot” under your arm as you wander Westwood’s brimming Iranian markets. Out in the world, among the neighborhood’s many kebab houses, we have Taste of Tehran. Chef and owner Saghar Fanisalek offers a reassuring mix of dishes — marinated meats singed over flames and served with snow banks of rice, yogurt and eggplant dips as tart as they are rich — all with uncommon finesse. An ideal amount of grated onion sharpens the beef koobideh, which is expertly shaped in undulating patterns on the skewer; the chicken kabob has deeply absorbed its lemony marinade; and the tahdig — that bottom-of-the-pot rice — shatters like crystal. Fanisalek’s tiny restaurant has tables that spill out onto the sidewalk of a busy corner. In the symbiosis of the cityscape, you’ll be people-watching while passersby watch back, appraising your feast with hungry eyes.
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(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
Crossroads Kitchen
Beverly Grove Vegan $$
Calamari, Bordelaise, Bolognese, homemade Italian sausage, vanilla ice cream: Crossroads Kitchen doesn’t bother to rechristen the plant-based foods it serves that mimic meat, dairy and eggs. Sometimes the language gives pause to vegan friends scanning the menu for the first visit, but I reassure them it’s entirely herbivorous. Sometimes it is boggling how few L.A. restaurants crack the code on vegan dining that carries a sense of occasion — but chef-owner Tal Ronnen and partner and executive chef Scot Jones solve the puzzle, particularly when a knowledgeable server drops off still-life plates such as halved baby eggplants filled with soft whole garlic cloves, drizzles of “tahini yogurt” and crushed pistachios. While I mostly prefer making meals of the season’s vegetables, I also always end up admiring one of the dishes sporting a yellow orb — a modernist holdover of yellow tomato Béarnaise transformed into a jiggly “yolk.” When it bursts and enriches strands of spaghetti carbonara at dinner or the already creamy center of a khachapuri filled with almond ricotta at brunch, the whole meal feels a little more special.
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(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
WangJia Restaurant
San Gabriel Valley Shanghainese $$
In the San Gabriel Valley, the cuisines of Shanghai and the surrounding Jiangnan region never quite bask in the same attention afforded to the Sichuan firebrands that have arrived over the last decade — nor the Cantonese and Taiwanese standard-bearers that preceded them. WangJia helps to adjust the spotlight, reminding diners that Shanghainese culinary traditions, in their varied and subtle nuances, have their place. The menu at WangJia Restaurant in San Gabriel spans nearly 150 items. Ask owner Lulu Luo and her son Kevin Ma for guidance. They’ll steer you to dissected crab and oval rice cakes in a sauce that tastes wonderfully of crab roe; massive yet spoon-tender lion’s head meatballs; and “red-braised” dongpo pork with squid and threadlike tea tree mushrooms. Above all, heed their advice and order xian rou cai fan, fried rice with salt pork and greens. The elegance of its seasoning makes the rice taste amplified, as if its pure, sweet flavor has been piped through surround sound.
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(Trip Davis / Gjelina)
Gjelina
Venice Italian $$
Gjelina is still the place of choice for friends visiting from the East Coast — the ones you love the most, whom you battle through LAX’s traffic nightmares to collect. They want to sit on the restaurant’s patio and gape up at the milky blue sky over Venice. They yearn for the Gjelina vibes: the particular mishmash of micro-seasonal produce and broadly Italian recipes that bends L.A. stereotypes into something energizing. Gjelina Group executive chef Juan Hernandez and his team slyly tinker with the format created by Travis Lett (who left in 2019). A soft scramble with squash blossoms for breakfast may have become an omelet. Braised cranberry beans seasoned with soffritto and crisped prosciutto might also now pop with the musk of black lime. Raclette and fromage blanc give a pizza some edgier funk. Your new arrivals feel like they chose well, and now they want to wander Abbot Kinney.
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(Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times)
La Pupusa Urban Eatery
Pico-Union Salvadoran $
Sunny-side-up is the way to go for the eggs on La Mañanera, an ideal choice for late breakfast or early lunch when Stephanie Figueroa and Juan Saravia’s Pico-Union restaurant opens mid-morning. The runny yolks will merge with the salsa ranchera spooned over the top and flow like an estuary through a layer of curtido before reaching the cheese-filled pupusa underneath. Swipe every other forkful through crema for extra richness; there is a small cup of casamiento, a pilaf-like merger of rice and beans, on the side for grounding goodness. Figueroa and Saravia take fundamentals of Salvadoran cooking and rework them affectionately, smothering pupusas with their versions of al pastor and guacamole or transforming chorizo into a smashburger. It’s their contribution to the L.A. culinary conversation, and their charm speaks volumes. At the heart of the menu are excellent pupusas, balanced in density and crackle-gush ratios, filled with traditional blends of cheese and refried beans or outside-the-box additions like pepperoni.
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(Yasara Gunawardena / For The Times)
Jerusalem Chicken
View Park-Windsor Hills Palestinian $
After years of running the small local deli chain Orleans & York, Sami and Maria Othman founded their fast-casual Palestinian restaurant in View Park-Windsor Hills in 2021. An early menu experimented with soothing shakshuka and smooth fried kibbeh spheres filled with chopped beef that had a meatier texture than Lebanese and Syrian versions found around town. Items have been streamlined, though, in favor of falafel bowls, stuffed pitas and the standout namesake: spiced roasted chicken, universal and restoring. The variation permeated with lemon and garlic is obvious in its appeal, but the masterpiece is arguably Siti’s original chicken stuffed with hashweh — rice enriched with beef, mushrooms and baharat, a spice blend that includes cumin, cardamom and black pepper. Go liberal with the condiments: tahini, toum (garlic sauce) and especially shatta, the chile sauces that burn equally bright in red or green versions.
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(Yasara Gunawardena / For The Times)
Mayura Indian Restaurant
Culver City Indian $$
Mayura’s Indian menu goes on for pages; chicken vindaloo, gobi Manchurian and other restaurant ubiquities fill its columns. The key to accessing the kitchen’s greatness is to know that owner Padmini Aniyan grew up in Kerala, the coastal southwestern state of India. The verdant region has been a global center of spice farming and maritime trade routes for millennia, creating one of the world’s unique cuisines. Taste it in the Kerala chicken curry, in which coconut milk carries the flavors of lemony curry leaves, black pepper and cardamom. The uses of rice in Kerala extend far beyond boiled whole grains. As one example: appam, round flatbreads made of fermented ground rice and coconut batter. They look like American pancakes at the stage of cooking where the bubbles have just set and you’re ready to flip them. But they are their own pleasure: lacy yet fluffy, tangy but also innately sweet and made for swiping through gravy. Find appam and other Kerala-specific dishes listed under “Mayura Specials,” or ask Aniyan for her guidance.
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(Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times)
Fishing With Dynamite
Manhattan Beach Seafood $$$
Manhattan Beach’s star seafood bar has always been a tough reservation. Weekend dinner slots are usually booked weeks out, unless you’re hungry at 4:45 p.m. After nearly a decade on the scene, the restaurant and its patchwork elements feel as effervescent as ever. Its snug, always-full dining room lined with off-white clapboard gives an impression of New England in high summer. David LeFevre’s menu bounds through far-flung inspirations: Scallops in their shells arrive in a pleasantly stinging citrus marinade; chicharrón and harissa-spiked crema make for odd, winning garnishes for fish tacos; and a gorgeous porridge made of koshihikari rice is speckled with uni, crab and shrimp, plus an egg yolk to stir in and push the richness. If you eat too many fluffy squash rolls or fries swiped through malt vinegar mayo — well? You happen to be in the prettiest setting for an after-meal stroll.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Yang’s Kitchen
Alhambra Chinese $$
Christian Yang and Maggie Ho’s Alhambra restaurant has been a beautiful shape shifter through the pandemic. In the last year the concentration has been on breakfast and lunch — though a new dinner service just launched — and the cooking, as ever, shows little worry over labels or provenance. Compose a morning meal of soft-scrambled eggs, hash browns, bacon and avocado, or veer toward a Japanese-inspired set meal complete with miso soup, rice, soy egg, pickles and protein options (braised tofu, grilled steak, dry-aged steelhead trout marinated in yuzu and miso) that span the food chain. Even if you order prawn ceviche and smoked fish dip for lunch, throw in a jumbo cornmeal mochi pancake for its Venn-diagram texture of soft, stretchy and crisp.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Park’s BBQ
Koreatown Korean $$$
Come to Park’s with a group. A meal goes by in an exhilarating blur of fellowship and meat. Make decisions easy by asking for the “Taste of Park’s” that includes five cuts of beef. Deeply marbled ggot sal, hunks of short rib, tuiles of brisket, squiggles of bulgogi and a slab of galbi the length of a forearm hit the tabletop grill in rapid sequence. A server comes and goes, turning the meats, cutting them with scissors and moving any remaining cooked bits to the side to make room for the next round. There are additions to consider. Wagyu rib-eye cap is the splurge of choice, as primal and mineral in its pleasures as any chop at the premium steakhouses around town. Maybe cold noodles, or stone pot rice, or a seafood pancake? Depends on how much room you want to leave for more meat, or how much soju you’re drinking.
Literally dozens of barbecue houses line the streets of Koreatown. By all means, visit Soot Bull Jeep for the smokiest charcoal-fueled experience; Sun Ha Jang for the duck variations; and one of the latest top-dollar entrants for dry-aged beef. But for overall quality and hospitality, Jenee Kim’s operation is still the place to be.
Literally dozens of barbecue houses line the streets of Koreatown. By all means, visit Soot Bull Jeep for the smokiest charcoal-fueled experience; Sun Ha Jang for the duck variations; and one of the latest top-dollar entrants for dry-aged beef. But for overall quality and hospitality, Jenee Kim’s operation is still the place to be.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Elite
Monterey Park Chinese $$
The question of which restaurant makes the most superlative dim sum in the San Gabriel Valley will never have a static answer. Making the rounds is part of the fun. Elite debuted in Monterey Park in 2007. It has settled into the scenery over the years, not often the center of conversation, but on weekends the dim sum crowds are as clamorous as ever. The basics — plump har gow with delicate wrappers, siu mai that hold their shape elegantly, fragrant lotus-leaf-wrapped bundles of lo mai gai, baked barbecue pork bao with crackly domes — remain consistent and finely detailed. Diners order from a menu rather than selecting from carts; scan the sheet for hunks of spare ribs paired with cheung fun (steamed rice noodle rolls) twisted into corkscrew shapes and taro cakes pungent with conpoy. Dinner service is quiet to the point of seclusion.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Surawon Tofu House
Koreatown Korean $
Sun Los Lee grew up in a restaurant family; her parents took over the Prince in Koreatown in 1991, serving pajeon and fried chicken alongside martinis and highballs while maintaining the bar’s ageless, crimson-soaked kitsch from its days as the Windsor. For her own restaurant, Lee traveled to Korea to study traditional tofu-making and landed on an unconventional technique: She found that using black soybeans gives bean curd a flavor that hints of sesame and peanuts. At Surawon Tofu House, where small cauldrons of soondubu jjigae arrive boiling volcanically, choose between the typical white tofu or (my preference) the black-soybean variation. Both are made in-house. It’s one of many customization options the menu presents, including additions of kimchi, oxtail, vegetables, oysters, intestines and an assorted mix of beef or pork with seafood. Among levels of heat, which range from “plain” to “extra spicy,” I find “spicy” to be pulse-quickening but not punishing.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Holy Basil DTLA
Downtown L.A. Thai $$
There are tables at last in the Santee Passage food hall where its first tenants, chef Wedchayan “Deau” Arpapornnopparat and beverage pro Tongkamal “Joy” Yuon, opened a takeout window in late 2020. Even amid the endless expressions of Thai cuisine in Los Angeles, their versions of classic Bangkok street foods show off a level of attention that’s disarming. Eating them can feel like viewing a newly restored painting; the tiny details are both familiar and fresh. Strands of pad see ew retain unusual smokiness from the wok; lemongrass and other herbs perfume tom yum goong profoundly; the aromatics in the green curry have been stitched together so tightly you have to squint to pluck out single flavors. The menu numbers fewer than two dozen dishes, the better for Arpapornnopparat to master each of them. Yuon’s canned spin on Thai iced tea includes whole or oat milk, rather than the sweetened condensed stuff, so it’s refreshing and complex rather than cloying.
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(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
Eat Joy Food
Rowland Heights Taiwanese $$
The Taiwanese menu at Eat Joy Food is as sprawling as the Pearl Plaza shopping center in Rowland Heights that houses the restaurant. Industry veteran Arthur Chen — who previously ran Cafe Fusion, a family-style Taiwanese restaurant in Arcadia — took over the space in October 2019. To whittle down the choices, ask the staff for direction on seafood specialties, a particular strength of the kitchen. They’ve led me to a three-cup casserole with calamari, drenched in the fragrance of basil; supremely fresh Dungeness crab sautéed with scallions and ginger; and steamed clams suspended in soft custard. I went hunting for a dish I love called o ah jian, a fantastically gooey Taipei classic of oysters, scrambled egg and gel made from sweet potato starch. The search ended happily: It was listed on the English menu as “Taiwanese street food stand oyster pan cake.”
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Madre
Torrance Mexican $$
Of the three Madre restaurants that Ivan Vasquez operates across the metro area, I will point you first to his palatial 7,000-square-foot space housed in an Old Town Torrance shopping complex. Bypass the two main rooms, which are vast to the point of impersonal, and settle into the bar area where most everyone else lands too. We’re all flattered by the amber glow of the backlit bar lined with over 500 bottles of agave spirits. Vasquez, a native of Oaxaca, is one of the nation’s greatest scholars of mezcal — and a steward of traditions. If you’re game, bartenders will line up a few bottles of mezcal on the bar and detail regional styles while you start sipping.
You’ll need food soon. Start with memelas, satisfying in their thick crunch and filling of black beans and queso fresco. Among moles, home in on the distinctive estofado, with its sharp turns of tomatillo, raisin, almond and green olive. Vasquez’s mother, after whom the restaurant is named and whose recipes serve as inspiration, made it twice a week for her family.
You’ll need food soon. Start with memelas, satisfying in their thick crunch and filling of black beans and queso fresco. Among moles, home in on the distinctive estofado, with its sharp turns of tomatillo, raisin, almond and green olive. Vasquez’s mother, after whom the restaurant is named and whose recipes serve as inspiration, made it twice a week for her family.
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(Silvia Razgova / For the Times/Silvia Razgova / For the Times)
Apey Kade
Tarzana Sri Lankan $
Chef Niza Hashim and her husband, Lalith Rodrigo, are natives of Colombo, Sri Lanka’s port-city capital. The name of their Tarzana restaurant translates from the Sinhalese language as “our store.” Among several restaurants in the San Fernando Valley that serve Sri Lankan food — on the whole a remarkable and complex cuisine that’s under-represented in Los Angeles — their menu is the most comprehensive and the most consistently delicious. For dine-in or takeout, call ahead an hour or two to request lamprais, pronounced lump-rice, a feast of chicken or beef curry with vegetables (or ask for it entirely vegetarian) and other sides warmed in a banana leaf. The steam when you unwrap this parcel carries the scents of sweet spice, coconut palms and floral rice. Idiyappam, or string hoppers, are made of thin rice-flour noodles steamed into pearly nests and served with kiri hodi, a golden spiced coconut-milk gravy; a salad of finely chopped greens; sambol; and chutney. You have a choice of curry: I suggest the fish. Its secret ingredient is a dried fruit that goes by many names: goraka, kudampuli, Malabar tamarind. It imparts a sour, smoky tanginess to seafood for which the palate has no other reference.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Skaf’s
Glendale Lebanese $$
To understand what makes the Skaf family’s cooking stand out among the region’s Lebanese restaurants, start with the kibbeh. Its raw form, kibbeh nayeh, was traditionally ground lamb pounded with fine bulgur and spices into a smooth gloss. Most Lebanese chefs and restaurants in America use beef instead. Skaf’s does too, though the silkiness is as close to the original lamb form as it is possible to re-create; ask for the spicy version and, using pita, scoop bites punctuated with onion slivers and fresh mint leaves. My Lebanese friends taught me how best to eat kibbeh labanieh, a tapered and fried variation served in garlicky yogurt soup with rice. Spoon a piece of kibbeh into a small bowl and crumble it a bit with your fork, then add as much rice and yogurt as appeals. It’s the kind of dish that helps the world feel a little lighter.
The same friends taught me a smart, common request for shawarma wraps, which are meant to be modestly sized, densely packed cylinders: Ask for them to be rolled in a single layer of pita, as in one half of a separated pocket. The thin ring of bread is still sturdy enough to contain the ingredients but equalizes the proportions. Crisp-edged chicken shawarma has a slight advantage over its beef counterpart, particularly with extra garlic sauce.
The same friends taught me a smart, common request for shawarma wraps, which are meant to be modestly sized, densely packed cylinders: Ask for them to be rolled in a single layer of pita, as in one half of a separated pocket. The thin ring of bread is still sturdy enough to contain the ingredients but equalizes the proportions. Crisp-edged chicken shawarma has a slight advantage over its beef counterpart, particularly with extra garlic sauce.
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(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Clark Street Diner
Hollywood Hills American $$
For 20 years the 101 Coffee Shop (known before that as the Hollywood Hills Coffee Shop) was a steady, low-key hang for actors, screenwriters and literary types, tourists and locals. Even if you never physically visited the place, it might look familiar. It’s where Vince Vaughn stands on a table and shouts at Jon Favreau about being “growns up” in the 1996 film “Swingers.” Grief poured out on social media in January 2021 when word spread that the 101 had closed. Then, nearly a year later, a new chapter began: Clark Street Bakery founder Zack Hall took over its space. He has navigated the community’s collective nostalgia with extreme care.
Juan Pablo Garcia, who was chef at the Brentwood outpost of Clark Street Bread, leads the kitchen. The breakfast and lunch diner classics are stealthy good, as in finely tuned and arguably better than they need to be. There’s nowhere in Los Angeles I’d rather eat a three-high stack of blueberry pancakes. Corned beef hash delivers satisfying proportions of crisp-soft spuds, salty wisps of meat and over-easy eggs. The spirit truly reanimating the scene, though, is the staff. Sally Stewart, with her ageless rock ’n’ roll energy (her husband is, in fact, a touring musician), had worked as a server at the 101 and returned. She practices a steely sort of patience when friends change their order three times in 90 seconds. I’m always happy when she walks up to our table.
Juan Pablo Garcia, who was chef at the Brentwood outpost of Clark Street Bread, leads the kitchen. The breakfast and lunch diner classics are stealthy good, as in finely tuned and arguably better than they need to be. There’s nowhere in Los Angeles I’d rather eat a three-high stack of blueberry pancakes. Corned beef hash delivers satisfying proportions of crisp-soft spuds, salty wisps of meat and over-easy eggs. The spirit truly reanimating the scene, though, is the staff. Sally Stewart, with her ageless rock ’n’ roll energy (her husband is, in fact, a touring musician), had worked as a server at the 101 and returned. She practices a steely sort of patience when friends change their order three times in 90 seconds. I’m always happy when she walks up to our table.
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