Such a treasure we have here in Los Angeles with the incredibly talented food critic, Jonathan Gold. Reporting for the Los Angeles Times, he has produced his latest 'list', along with a very cool interactive map. Check out Jonathan Gold's 101 Best Restaurants. Download, embed, bookmark this page! Do whatever you need to do to have this on hand. It is a must for any foodie. My favorite Los Angeles restaurant, Providence, receives the #1 position. If you happen to not have a subscription to the Los Angeles Times, you may not be able to catch the link. Never fear, scroll down below for the list.
Check out Jonathan Gold's 101 Best Restaurants on latimes.com
101
Apple Pan
(Susan Gerbic)
One of L.A.'s greatest culinary legacies is the California
lunchroom burger, the multi-layered composition of iceberg lettuce,
pickles and slightly underripe tomatoes, neatly arranged and slicked
with a sweet, thick dressing on a lightly toasted bun. The thin,
slightly charred beef patty becomes basically another texture in this
sandwich, more valuable for its crunch and it savoryness than for its
juice. The lunchroom burger is essentially a short-form essay on
crispness. When you want the mediocre version of this, you get a Big
Mac. When you are seeking greatness, turn to the Apple Pan, a homey
1940s institution imitated everywhere from Duluth to Bahrain. No matter
how many waiting people may be crowded in behind you, the countermen
will always draw you another cup of coffee from the gas-fired urn.
100
Dae Bok
(John H. Kim)
If you have contemplated a meal of blowfish, your dreams were
probably shaped by the popular conception of fugu, the notorious fish
of death. In Japan, fugu chefs are specially certified, and expensive.
Exquisitely orchestrated fugu meals often last hours. The Korean
conception of blowfish, on the other hand, is as the centerpiece of a
pleasant evening of alcohol and conversation, sipping black-raspberry
wine around a communal tabletop caldron of brick-red broth and
vegetables, slipping meaty pieces of simmered blowfish from their
curious V-shaped bones. Cooked as a jiri, soupy stew, blowfish may
remind you a bit of the texture of frog's legs. When you're almost
finished, the waitress reappears to mix the dregs of the pot with rice,
chopped vegetables and a little oil, and leaves it to fry into a
crisp-bottomed porridge of joy.
99
Comme Ça
(Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times)
Why doesn't Los Angeles have brasseries? We do, actually,
except they call themselves gastropubs and serve kale salad and
pan-roasted Brussels sprouts instead of giant crocks of choucroûte.
Sauerkraut has never done well here in the land of Meyer lemons and
year-round asparagus. But still, Comme Ça is more or less a brasserie in
the classic sense, with plateaux of chilled seafood, escargots
persillade and crisp sautéed skate Grenoblois, except that you can also
get a nicely turned Aviation No. 1 if you want — this is where the L.A.
cocktailian thing kicked off a few years ago — and the bloody-rare
cheeseburger is profound. The obsessions of owner David Myers run more
toward Japan than toward boeuf bourguignon these days, and the sleek,
theatrically lighted dining room may be a bit less chic than it used to
be, but when you're in the mood for steak frites, frisee aux lardons or
an oozing, cheese-intensive onion soup, Comme Ça is where you want to
be.
98
Fab Hot Dogs
(Sherrie Gulmahamad)
We may not have the Coney joints you see on every block in
some Detroit neighborhoods, the number of stands you see in Chicago, nor
the concentration of street vendors you see in New York, but Los
Angeles really is a hot dog town. Look at the enormous lines outside
Pink's, Dog Haus or the vendors who materialize outside nightclubs at 2
a.m. Or better, stop by Fab's, Joe Fabrocini and Susie Speck Mayor's
fragrant museum of the hot dog arts, where you can admire not just
standard dogs but Carolina-style slaw dogs, Italian dogs from northern
New Jersey, rippers and cremators, Hatch chile dogs and a close
facsimile of both Oki Dogs and the street cart dogs sold in New York's
Central Park — made, like everything here, with the artisanal,
natural-skin, small-production franks that Fab's imports from New
Jersey. Do you require tater tots with your franks? Say no more.
97
El Parian
(Mariah Tauger / For The Times)
The first Counter Intelligence column I ever wrote for The
Times was of El Parian, a lunch hall just west of downtown famous for
its Guadalajara-style birria: roasted kid hacked into chunks and served
in a strong consommé that tasted like amplified pan drippings. When the
waitress came to take your order, she didn't ask you what dish you
wanted, she asked you whether you wanted a full order or just half —
crunchy parts, stewy parts, tiny ribs, parts that look as if they come
from a joint of beef. With a basket of freshly patted corn tortillas and
a Modelo served so cold ice crystals sometimes form on the surface of
the beer, primal Mexican food doesn't get any better than this.
96
Ciro's
(Patrick T. Fallon / For The Times)
You could have any number of tequila-powered arguments about
which restaurant and which dishes best represent old-school East L.A.:
the giant burritos at El Tepeyac or the bean-and-cheese at Al and Bea's;
the grilled meat at La Parrilla or the tamales and carnitas at Los 5
Puntos. But for me, it always comes down to the iron-barred, split-level
dining room of this East L.A. institution, where the chile verde tastes
like a trip to grandmother's house, the enchiladas are first-rate and
the tiny flautas, the house specialty, are tightly rolled and very
crisp, buried under layers of chile sauce, thick guacamole and tart
Mexican sour cream. When I am trapped in an airless restaurant that
charges $150 for its tasting menu, my thoughts tend to wander toward the
juicy avocado salsa that Ciro's brings out free.
95
Nickel Diner
(Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times)
The last time I visited the Nickel, musicians were playing
outside on the sidewalk; all banjo, slap bass and tight bluegrass
harmonies. From inside the restaurant, where I was contemplating a plate
of pulled-pork hash and a mug of black coffee, it was impossible to
tell whether the band was Mumford & Sons or a band that sounded like
Mumford & Sons, whether they were spare-changing or filming a
video, and whether they were sanctioned by the restaurant, a fragrant
diner on a block still dominated by flophouses, or whether they just
found it a convenient place to busk. In a neighborhood transitioning
from a skid row past to a luxury loft future, Nickel Diner is an
institution that respects both worlds. Proprietors Monica May and
Kristen Trattner seem to know everybody on the street, from the artists
to the homeless guys in rehab. The menu includes the pancakes, fried
eggs and bacon without which there would be rebellion in the streets,
but Nickel Diner also bakes its own bread, prepares elaborate cakes and
maple-bacon doughnuts, and makes delicious fried catfish with corn
cakes. The lunch crowd may come for the Lowrider Burger, but they don't
seem to mind the candied pecans in the chicken salad.
94
Kobawoo
(Cathy Chaplin / GastronomyBlog.com)
In Koreatown, a novice soon learns, most decent restaurants
specialize in a dish or two. You go to one place for grilled clams,
another for pork belly and a third for barbecued duck. Kobawoo, a
polished, destination restaurant in the inevitable mini-mall, is a great
place to go for crisp seafood pancakes, game hen stuffed with ginseng
and sticky rice, and pig's feet pressed into a cool, gelatinous terrine.
The home-style pindaeduk, mung-bean pancakes, are a big draw — the
pancakes are ethereal beneath their thin veneer of crunch, melting away
almost instantly in the mouth like a sort of intriguingly flavored
polenta. But Kobawoo is most famous for its version of bossam: boiled
pork belly you wrap up into leaves with raw garlic, sliced chiles and a
salty condiment made from tiny fermented fish. Bossam, a fabulous dish,
may sound more compelling after somebody presses a glass of cold soju
into your hands.
93
Bulgarini Gelato
(Stefano Paltera / For The Times)
It's not quite like going to visit the mad scientist in his
mountain lair, but a trip to Bulgarini, on an Altadena hill so steep
that Henry Ford once used it to test the engines of his new cars, can
sometimes feel pretty close. You've never been to a shop quite like
Bulgarini, dominated by a massive old espresso machine and decorated
with obscure homages to the AS Roma soccer team, and you've probably
never tasted gelato like Bulgarini's: pistachio flavored with nuts
hand-carried back from the Sicilian pistachio village Bronte; rich
goat's milk gelato spiked with roasted cacao nibs; apricot sorbetto that
captures the elusive, almondy essence of the fruit; or bitter, intense
gelato made with salted Florentine chocolate. House policy at Bulgarini
mandates a three-scoop minimum, at $2.50 per.
92
Cacao
(Cacao Mexicatessen)
Cacao, it must be said, has a fairly open mind on what might
go into a taco, so if you're one of those guys who feels options should
be limited to carne asada, chicken and pork al pastor, the restaurant
probably isn't for you. They make carnitas out of duck, for one thing,
neatly splitting the difference between the classic Mexican preparation
and French duck confit, and sometimes they make chicharrones out of duck
cracklings just to mess with your mind. Sea urchin has found its way
into the tacos, as have hibiscus flowers, huitlacoche and the occasional
suckling pig. Cacao expanded a bit and finally got its beer and wine
license, so you can make an evening out of it if you're so inclined.
Cacao is a neighborhood restaurant in a fairly gentrified neighborhood.
But if suffering good coffee, folksy music and the bourgeois presence of
duck is the price one has to pay for access to Cacao's fig mole,
vegetarian-friendly menu and mushroom-stuffed chiles rellenos, sometimes
sacrifices have to be made.
91
Sapp Coffee Shop
(Julian Fang)
Sapp, which features neither regional cooking nor dizzyingly
late hours, may not be the sexiest restaurant in Thai Town. You will
find neither wild boar nor sataw beans; cassia buds nor crispy pork. But
for decades now, Sapp has been perhaps the most dependable lunchroom in
Hollywood, cheery on the drizzliest day, with clove-scented roast duck
noodles, great Isaan-style grilled chicken, a version of the
pig's-ear-enhanced pork salad nam sod that is as sparkly in flavor as it
is gray in appearance. Boat noodle soup has become almost a religion in
Thai Town, with a half-dozen places claiming superior authenticity, but
Sapp's version is magnificent: a musky, blood-thickened beef soup
screaming with chile heat; tart lime juice in lockstep with the
funkiness of the broth.
90
Krua Thai
(Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
If it's 2 in the morning and you're eating noodles in North
Hollywood, chances are pretty good that you have washed up at Krua Thai,
where the smoothies are banging, the Barbie-box-pink yen ta fo noodles
are properly stinky and the wide, slippery pad kee mao have enough of a
fresh-chile sting to help you forget the earlier evening woes. Pad Thai
may be a dish a lot of us got tired of when Duran Duran was still on the
charts, but the ultra-spicy, tamarind-soured, fish-sauce-laced
house-special version here is about as good as it gets, a powerful dish,
truly exotic, sweet and squiggly and delicious, stocked with both tofu
and big shrimp — the dish made vivid again after 30 years as a cliché.
89
Mo-Chica
(Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)
If you want a pisco sour, you're in the right place: The
foamy, tart, lightly bitter version of the Peruvian national cocktail
flows like water. Ricardo Zarate is a chef's chef, so you will find
artfully deconstructed versions of Peruvian dishes like papas a la
Huancaina, which is presented as a bacon-wrapped terrine of neat potato
slices lightly drizzled with the traditional sauce of cheese and
amarillo chile; or the Chinese-Peruvian stir-fry lomo saltado,
reinvented as a construction of sautéed tomatoes, onions and sliced
filet mignon supporting a Lincoln Log superstructure of stacked French
fries. Zarate's original Mo-Chica was everyone's feel-good restaurant
story for a while, a popularly priced lunch counter in a community-owned
market that just happened to serve the best Peruvian food in town —
ceviche and tiradito with all the rustic flavor of Lima but using
sushi-bar-quality fish. So as good as this sleekly modern Mo-Chica may
be, and as skillfully as Zarate translates Peruvian classics into bar
snacks, its success may be bittersweet.
88
Musso & Frank
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
Musso's, if you look at it a certain way, is a living museum
of 1920s American cuisine: the avocado cocktails, crab Louie, jellied
consommé, grilled lamb kidneys and Wednesday sauerbraten that William
Faulkner and Charlie Chaplin used to enjoy, presumably after they had
lubricated their insides with gin. If you grew up in Hollywood, the
waiters are likely the same ones who used to bring you flannel cakes
when you were a kid. Mixology has made great strides in the last 94
years, but Manny is still the guy you want making your martini. And
although you can undoubtedly find more dependable steaks and chops and
sautéed petrale sole in Los Angeles now, it always feels like a
privilege to slide into one of the booths underneath the faded mural and
contemplate your first bourbon of the evening.
87
Rocio's Mole de los Dioses
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
L.A.'s best mole may be a subject for debate, and the
conflict between regional styles will never be resolved, but there is no
doubt that Rocio Camacho makes more kinds of mole than anybody else in
town — not just the seven traditional moles of Oaxaca or moles from
Puebla or the Distrito Federal, but versions based on almonds or
hibiscus blossoms, tamarind or coffee, tequila or pistachio nuts. Get
the mole sampler and spend the evening comparing her Oaxacan black mole
with her mellower mole Poblano; with the spicy, smoky mancha manteles;
or with her signature mole de los dioses, which has a funky, toasty hint
of the corn fungus huitlacoche. Is the sauce of cactus and sunflower
seeds technically a mole at all? We will leave that for the scholars to
decide.
86
Patina
(Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times)
You pull up in front of Walt Disney Concert Hall, in the
manner you have seen in so many car commercials. You walk into the
intimate whale-ribbed dining room carved out of the Frank Gehry
structure and are led to an ironed white tablecloth set with heavy
silver. The thick wine list is rich in hidden treasures if you are
willing to consider Corbières or Slovenian Pinot Gris instead of Napa
Chardonnay. And then your first course is set down in front of you, a
mosaic of a dozen or more kinds of turned seasonal vegetables, set
upright in rows that may remind you of ranks of chessmen, each cooked in
its own little pot before final assembly, then glazed with a reduction
of the combined juices. It is a lot of work, this mosaic — you are not
going to be replicating it at home. It reminds you that you are in a
grand restaurant celebrating big things, that you are in an
agriculturally abundant part of California and that it is possible to be
festive without resorting to oversized hunks of meat. Does it matter
that some of the vegetables are overcooked, that the pink sauce is
without flavor and that you wish somebody had thought to add a few snips
of tarragon, a scattering of Maldon salt, a touch of citrus zest —
anything that might possibly transform the dish into something alive?
Perhaps not. The occasion has been noted.
85
Newport Tan Cang Seafood
(Cathy Chaplin / GastronomyBlog.com)
When friends stagger back from the San Gabriel Valley
mumbling of lobster, lips numb with chile and their hearts filled with
glee, they have almost certainly just come from this converted Marie
Callender's, where even strong men are defeated by the parade of sautéed
pea shoots with garlic, crunchy salt-and-pepper squid and then the
gargantuan house-special lobster, five pounds or more, fried with heaps
of chile, black pepper and chopped scallion, enough to haunt your
fingernails for days. What Newport serves is Southeast Asian-inflected
Cantonese food, kind of Chiu Chow but kind of not, although as far as I
can tell, the Cambodian-born owners haven't quite figured it out either.
84
Mayura
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
Mayura, in a strip mall a block or two north of Culver City's
studio district, may be the last place in Los Angeles you would expect
to find a restaurant specializing in the cooking of Kerala, a region on
south India's Spice Coast. Even if you have eaten in other local
southern Indian restaurants, a lot of the food may be new to you:
saucer-shaped rice-flour saucers called appam; an obscurely flavored
fish curry with undernotes of tamarind and garlic; the peppery, buttery
cashew-rice dish ven pongal; or even avial, a Kerala-style dish of
julienne vegetables sautéed with coconut, as useful as a condiment as it
is satisfying as a main dish. Mayura, oddly enough, also functions as a
halal Indian restaurant, with a separate kitchen dedicated to cooking
meat (and no alcohol). It's not the best food in the house, but you can
get the usual plates of chicken tikka and vindaloo as well as Pakistani
dishes like haleem and nehari, which seems to both confuse and satisfy
the Muslim and Hindu clientele.
83
Ración
(Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times)
We are all becoming comfortable with the idea of San
Sebastian as one of the great food cities of the world, a smallish
Spanish metropolis with a freakish concentration of Europe's best
restaurants and bars that are the answer to a tapas-lover's sweatiest
dream. Ración, run by Border Grill vets Loretta Peng and Teresa Montano,
is no Arzak, but it is a nice place to drop in for a glass of Txakolina
or Basque cider and a supper of Basque-inspired tapas: crisp, gooey
chicken croquettes; lamb meatballs glazed with caramelized tomato sauce;
tiny squid stuffed with duck sausage; Spanish cured meats; or pintxos
of sliced tongue with pickled shallots. The food is inspired by rather
than duplicative of Spanish cooking.
82
101 Noodle Express
(Cathy Chaplin / GastronomyBlog.com)
Beef roll? Did somebody say beef roll? Because while
millenniums of gourmands may consider Shandong to be the heartland of
Chinese haute cuisine, nearly everybody at 101 Noodle Express dives past
the pumpkin-shrimp dumplings, the hand-torn noodles and the famous
Dezhou chicken right to that brawny, steroidal composition of crisp,
flaky Chinese pancakes with cilantro and sweet, house-made bean sauce
rolled around fistfuls of long-braised beef. Are these Chinese burritos
as unwieldy as edible softball bats? Probably. But a meal at 101 Noodle
without a beef roll is as unthinkable as a visit to Lawry's without
prime rib.
81
Mantee
(Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
Southern California is home to a lot of Lebanese-Armenian
restaurants, most of which serve satisfying versions of raw kibbeh,
fattoush salad and other classics of the Middle Eastern table. But
Mantee, which is run by Jonathan Darakjian, a chef whose family owns one
of the best Armenian restaurants in Beirut, brings a different kind of
edge to the cuisine, so the flaky pastry called borek oozes cheese when
you prod it with a fork, prosaic baked feta is transformed into a kind
of Armenian queso fundido and the namesake dish, a superheated platter
of tiny beef dumplings sizzling in a bath of garlicky yogurt, is grand.
The kebabs are no different from what you'll find in any other Middle
Eastern restaurant, but if you're in the mood, the peppery soujak
sausages will be brought to you aflame.
80
Mariscos Jalisco
(Mariah Tauger / For The Times)
If you have been to a street-food competition in Los Angeles,
and there have been quite a few over the last few years, you have
witnessed the coronation of the Mariscos Jalisco truck, which wins these
things so frequently that it should probably just accept a lifetime
achievement award and hang it up. Raul Ortega and his signature tacos
dorados de camaron, fried tacos with shrimp, are just too formidable. If
life were just, Ortega would be a wealthy man, and you would see his
face plastered on airport concessions, glossy chain restaurants and
cerveza ads. So it is sometimes surprising to roll up to his battered
truck, parked in the same location for more than a decade, and have him
personally hand you a taco, ask if you might want to try a plate of
ceviche or aguachile and gesture toward a spot on a low wall where you
might sit and eat. You crunch into one, the fiery salsa runs down your
chin and you are content.
79
Border Grill
(Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
Twenty-five years on, Border Grill may be less a restaurant
than it is an institution, the photogenic face of 1980s Mexican cuisine
sustained into another age. A lot of Mexican chefs make their own
tortillas, compile encyclopedic tequila lists, serve sustainable seafood
and shop at the farmers market now. The most exciting Mexican cooking
here now is regional, featuring the dishes of a single town. Mary Sue
Milliken and Susan Feniger, as their critics point out, are no more
Mexican than Ori Menashe is Italian or Jordan Kahn is Vietnamese. But
while they aren't redefining Mexican food, at least at this point, they
prepare it extremely well, transforming the taco, the tostada and the
homely enchilada into dishes almost unrecognizable to El Cholo
partisans; the charred skirt steak and the pescado Veracruzano have
crazy soul. Border Grill is the rare mainstream restaurant whose tacos
don't make you yearn for a truck parked by an auto-parts junkyard
somewhere in East L.A.
78
Chichen Itza
(Annie Wells / Los Angeles Times)
The first time I ate at Chichén Itzá, I booked a flight to
the Yucatan almost as soon as I got home. Because if the Yucatecan
cooking was this good at this restaurant stall in La Paloma, a
community-run marketplace just east of USC, I could only imagine how
delicious it might be in the place of its birth. The food in Mérida
turned out to be great, of course. But so is Chichén Itzá, named for the
vast temple complex north of Cancún, whose menu is a living,
habanero-intensive thesaurus of the panuchos and codzitos, sopa de lima
and papadzules, banana-leaf tamales and shark casseroles that make up
one of Mexico's spiciest cuisines. From the banana leaf-roasted pork
cochinito pibil to the cinnamon-scented bread pudding caballeros pobres,
the cooking of Gilberto Ceteno junior and senior is as fresh as a
marketplace restaurant in Mérida.
77
Meals by Genet
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Fairfax Avenue's Little Ethiopia district has grown denser
over the decades, and whether your taste runs toward the vegan, the
old-school incense-scented or full-on party cuisine, it has never been
easier to find a decent Ethiopian meal. But year after year, we find
ourselves returning to Genet Agonafer's bistro, a softly lighted dining
room whose gentle beef tibs, her crisp-skinned fried trout, her vegan
stews and her minced raw beef kitfo owe much to the virtues of careful
home cooking. And her dorowot, a two-day chicken stew vibrating with
what must be ginger and black pepper and bishop's weed and clove, may be
as rich and complex as a Oaxacan mole but cuts straight through to the
Ethiopian soul.
76
Hannosuke
(Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)
In the rush to quantify báhn mì specialists and artisanal
gastropubs, we often overlook the Japanese supermarket food court, short
on amenities but frequented by customers who know how Japanese food is
supposed to taste. And if you are a strict empiricist, the sauce-brushed
tempura on the tendon, rice bowl with tempura, basically the only dish
here, may seem to lack the crispness and the featherweight crunch that
you might expect from a branch of a famous Tokyo tempura bar. But
Hannosuke's aesthetic takes hold in an instant. That slightly sogged-out
crunch — it's still really crunchy, expressive of the roasty, nutty
flavors of the expensive sesame oil used for frying, of the subtle
sweetness of prawns and Tokyo eel.
75
Corazon y Miel
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
A young chef's recipe for success did not used to include
opening a tequila bar in Bell, a working-class suburb famous chiefly for
the corruption of some of its elected officials. It's a long haul from
the Westside for a fizzy shot of Ron Bull and a plate of roasted chicken
hearts with honey. But Eduardo Ruiz, who comes from the head-to-tail
wonderland of Animal up on Fairfax Avenue, is made of sterner stuff. And
his chefly interpretation of Mexican bar snacks — hot potato chips with
battleship-gray charred scallion dip; seared slices of carnitas terrine
with cubes of Coca-Cola gelee; pigskin two ways; knots of bacon and
roasted jalapeños with mayonnaisey corn salad — is at the vital edge of
Los Angeles cooking at the moment.
74
Attari
(Noms Not Bombs)
If you have ever asked an Iranian American where to have
dinner out on the Westwood Tehrangeles strip, she will probably mumble
the name of one kebab house or another, followed by a plea to come eat
at her mother's house instead. But lunch? That's easy. The leafy patio
of Attari is a bit of pre-revolutionary Tehran cafe society transplanted
into a sleepy office courtyard, all Chanel handbags, exquisitely
tailored clothing and rituals of decorum that rival anything out of an
Ernst Lubitsch film. Attari is the house of osh, the nourishing Iranian
soup that was, in the restaurant's first year, the only dish on its
menu. Now everyone is here for mashed eggplant with yogurt, chopped
salad and Attari's sandwiches: lengths of toasted French bread dressed
with fresh tomatoes, lettuce and a smattering of spiced, super-tart
Iranian pickles. Get the sandwich stuffed with kuku, a vivid-green
frittata that breathes the essence of fresh spring herbs. On Fridays,
abgoosht is the mandatory order, an intricate stew of lamb and grains
mashed into a thick, homogeneous paste with the texture of refried beans
(its expressed essence is served separately as soup).
73
Golden Deli
(Golden Deli Group)
Is there better pho? Perhaps. Pho Thanh Lich in Westminster
has better noodles, and the broth at Pho Filet in South El Monte has
more flavor. Are there better spring rolls? Doubtful, although the ones
at Brodard in Garden Grove are pretty good. But Golden Deli has been the
default Vietnamese noodle shop in the San Gabriel Valley for more than
30 years, a cramped, eternally crowded storefront whose clones now have
clones, where the pho and especially the crackly fried spring rolls
called cha gio have always been worth the discomfort. The prospect of
Golden Deli's bun thit, noodles tossed with fish sauce, grilled pork and
fresh herbs, is always a happy one.
72
Sqirl
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
This was a year when the ideas of craft and homespun virtue
crashed over the land like a sticky wave of artisanally gathered honey,
and pop heroes began to include micro-distillers and baconistas as well
as actors and banjo players. Making great preserves from superb
California fruit is not a new idea, but Jessica Koslow, a former
world-class figure skater, is very good at it, and her tiny, East
Hollywood cafe exists to reanimate the flavors she preserves: rice
porridge with toasted hazelnuts and jam; rice tossed with tart sorrel
pesto and preserved lemon; fried eggs with puréed tomatillos and
house-fermented hot sauce; or even the astonishing "Hamembert" plate
with Mangalitsa ham, oozing wedges of Camembert cheese, and an artfully
charred length of baguette. Sqirl shares its minimalist premises with
the championship barista of G&B Coffee, if you care to linger on one
of the curbside packing crates that double as chairs with a perfectly
made cappuccino.
71
Little Dom's
(Robert Lachman / Los Angeles Times)
When you are a teenager in a land without meatball subs,
Little Dom's is what you think Italian restaurants are going to be like
when you grow up: faded dark-wood places with slouchy booths and dim
lighting and frosty highballs near to hand. Brandon Boudet, who also
runs Dominick's and Tom Bergin's, is a master at taking the unloveliest
aspects of Italian American food and elevating them into cuisine. Other
guys may debate the authenticity of chicken parm or spaghetti and
meatballs; Boudet makes good ones, not quite your grandmother's, but
close enough. To the casual eye, Little Dom's may resemble a South
Jersey joint, but Boudet is from New Orleans, and the place is modeled
on neighborhood Creole Italian places from that city, so along with the
burrata salad you get oyster po' boys, crawfish garnishing grilled fish,
and fried shrimp with artichokes. There are complicated Italian
American egg dishes for breakfast too.
70
Valentino
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
If you're an old-school gourmand in Los Angeles, you probably
have a relationship with Valentino, which was the first restaurant here
to serve white truffles, balsamic vinegar or radicchio, the first to
fetishize great olive oil, the first as devoted to ancient Italian
vintages as the Le and La places were with Bordeaux. (I will never
forget my first taste of Quintarelli Amarone here, which is as close as I
had gotten to a sweet, musky taste of heaven.) Will you eat better if
you are known to the house? Certainly. This is among the last of the
great host-driven Italian restaurants, a place where some regulars have
never seen a menu and the waiter's job is to solidify your abstract
desire into fish and pasta and wine. Valentino is very expensive; the
wine bar within, serving some of the same food and a crack at the
spectacular wine list, is less so.
69
Hunan Mao
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
There are nearly a dozen Hunan restaurants in the greater San
Gabriel Valley, and the best of them, including this one, tend to
specialize in the funkier side of the cuisine: the steamed and smoked
meats, the simmered organs, the fermented vegetables and the oily,
fearsomely hot dishes that make Hunan a paradise of peasant cuisine. The
house-smoked Hunan ham has the smoky punch of first-rate barbecue, at
its best coarsely chopped and sautéed with dried long beans, a handful
of garlic cloves, and the vivid red and green chopped chiles that
dominate almost everything here. Is the restaurant named for the
Hunan-born Chairman Mao? It is, and you should probably try its version
of "Mao's braised pork," a sweet, slightly spicy clay-potful of
thick-cut braised pork belly and garlic — almost unbearably rich, and
soft enough to collapse at the touch of a chopstick. Or just get a
steamed fish head and call it a day.
68
Grill on the Alley
(Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)
Everybody looks good at the Grill, which is as elegantly
lighted as a George Hurrell print. Everybody eats well there too — the
steaks are good; the martinis are perfect; the Caesar salad, the steak
tartare, and the corned-beef hash are sublime. It is the Beverly Hills
version of Musso & Frank, with show business moguls instead of set
designers, stars instead of character actors. Are the regulars eating
this delicious food or just pushing it around their plates? It's hard to
say. But assuming that you are eating, you will also find this town's
essential rice pudding: touched with cinnamon, drizzled with heavy
cream, coaxing the nutty, rounded essence out of every grain of rice.
67
Bierbeisl
(Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times)
Los Angeles hadn't been lacking the flavors of Austria; not
exactly. Austrian-born chef Wolfgang Puck always kept the odd
kaiserschmarrn or bone-marrow soup on the menu at Spago, and
Austrian-born winemaker Manfred Krankl, back when he was the first
sommelier at Campanile, introduced the city to the strange and glorious
world of Austrian wines. Even Austrian-born ex-Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger ran an Austrian-influenced restaurant in Venice for a
while. But Bierbeisl, Bernhard Mairinger's emporium of schnitzel,
milk-poached weisswurst and creamy goulasch is a purely Austrian
restaurant of a sort we have never quite seen here, with a schnapps list
and blueberry kaiserschmarrn for dessert. Sausage tasting menus with
beer pairings? Be still my heart.
66
Gjelina
(Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times)
It is a cool night, and you have made it past the throng at
the bar, and you are out on the patio at Gjelina, not far from the fire
pit, contemplating the wonder of a crisp little pizza with shaved
asparagus and egg. You may have worked your way through a few vegetables
— there are a lot of vegetables here — roasted beets with their tops,
perhaps, and there may be duck confit or a bean and barley stew yet to
come. Gjelina is cheerful, boozy and known for both its extremely
good-looking customers (a lot of young actors tend to show up here late)
and Travis Lett's decent organic-fetish Italian food. The scene may be
as crunchy as the wood-fired pizza crust, but relax: It's Abbot Kinney.
65
Coni's Seafood
(Mariah Tauger / For The Times)
Aficionados of Mexican seafood in Los Angeles have for years
been obsessed with the peregrinations of Mr. Sergio Peñuelas, the ronin
chef long associated with the Mariscos Chente chain. The restaurants
always had great shrimp dishes, supposedly made with seafood a member of
the family brought herself from Mazatlan a couple of times a week, but
Peñuelas is a master of pescado zarandeado, an elusive dish of marinated
snook cooked by shaking it over charcoal until the flesh caramelizes
but does not char. Pescado zarandeado is apparently a difficult art —
many Sinaloan or Nayarit-style kitchens in town attempt it but few
consistently do it well. All you really have to know is that
Coni'Seafood, not far from the Hollywood Park racetrack, seems to be
Peñuelas' permanent home and that you should probably try the fiery
shrimp ceviche called aguachile as well.
64
Plan Check
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
Looking for the gearhead version of a modernist hamburger?
Check out Ernesto Uchimura's model, layered with ketchup leather, pickle
shavings, homemade American cheese scented with kombu seaweed, and a
microscopically thin layer of fried cheese, tucked into a bun sprinkled
with white specks that look like sesame seeds but crunch like breakfast
cereal. What you taste is salt, juice and the crunchy char of
well-cooked meat. The Plan Check Burger has been carefully engineered to
resemble the great bar burgers of your youth, and it re-creates them in
3-D, in Imax and with stereophonic Dolby sound. The French fries are
cooked in melted beef fat and gently dusted with smoked salt, and every
piece of fried chicken is the crunchiest. It's all very retro-futurist,
with a long list of Japanese whiskies to boot.
63
Langer's
(Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)
"I've always pushed the pastrami," the late Al Langer told me
once. "And you want to know why? Because it costs me a little less than
corned beef." But even after the great deli man's demise, the
institution he founded continues to serve the best pastrami sandwiches
in America, in a part of Los Angeles now better known for its pupusas
than for its knishes. The rye bread, double-baked and served hot, has a
hard, crunchy crust. The long-steamed pastrami, dense, hand-sliced and
nowhere near lean, has a firm, chewy consistency, a gentle flavor of
garlic and clove, and a clean edge of smokiness that can remind you of
the kinship between pastrami and Texas barbecue. Norm Langer, Al's son,
recommends the No. 19, with pastrami, swiss cheese and cole slaw. I like
my pastrami straight.
62
Cooks County
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
Daniel Mattern and Roxana Jullapat, Campanile veterans who
most recently were in charge of the kitchen at Ammo, operate in the
tradition of Los Angeles pan-Mediterranean cooking, sometimes called
urban rustic cuisine, although the occasional sharp North African edge
seems all their own. Mattern's cooking incorporates not just the seasons
but also the microseasons of Southern California produce — you can tell
the moment green garlic gives way to sweet spring onions by the garnish
on the steamed clams, and the people who come here tend to come here a
lot. Cooks County is a restaurant you could visit three times a week and
then come back for oxtail hash and cheese biscuits at Sunday brunch.
61
Bludso's
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Kevin Bludso, as you probably know, is the muscle behind a
fancy new barbecue restaurant up on North La Brea Avenue that also
serves craft beers and the kind of cocktails fancied by mustachioed
dandies. But you might as well tool down to Compton when the urge for
barbecue strikes, because the brisket that issues from the battered
steel smokers behind Bludso's original restaurant is a paradigm of meat,
beef that disappears so quickly that if it weren't for the feeling of
satisfying fullness you might swear that you had less eaten it than
dreamed it.
60
Kang Ho-dong Baekjeong
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
Kang Ho-dong is a former wrestler turned TV personality, like
a Korean Kim Kardashian in a singlet. Kang Ho-dong Baekjeong is the
local branch of a restaurant chain he runs on the side, a concrete
bunker of tabletop grills fitted into the Art Deco Chapman Market night
life complex. The restaurant has no sign in English but is easily
identified by the life-sized cardboard cutouts of Kang Ho-dong flanking
the entrance. On weekends, the wait for a table is often two hours. The
menu is short, basically a pamphlet listing various cuts of meat of
surprisingly high quality. Unless you have a specialist's agenda, you
will probably order one of the two beef set-course dinners, which
include the eggs and cheese corn that cook in special wells set into the
grill. The waiter will show you how to mix a soju bomb. Sobriety is not
considered a virtue here.
59
The Hungry Cat
(Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)
When soft-shell crabs come into season, the Pacific
langoustines are running or it is time to strap on the bibs and dive
into a dozen oysters or a pile of Maryland blues, the Hungry Cat,
Suzanne Goin and David Lentz's oddly shaped seafood restaurant, is
probably the first place to turn. Because the first rule of the kitchen
seems to be: Don't mess too much with the fish. That means the Santa
Barbara sea urchin isn't a source of intriguing richness, it's a sea
urchin, and the first-of-season Alaskan halibut may be served with
risotto, yellowfoot mushrooms and ramps, but it still looks and tastes
recognizably like a fillet from a creature pulled pretty recently from
the sea. Is the $25 lobster roll exactly the same as the one you paid 12
bucks for last summer in Point Judith? It is not. But the split, crisp,
rectangular object is as close as you are going to get on this coast.
58
Matsuhisa
(Los Angeles Times)
Nobu Matsuhisa is one of the one or two most important chefs
ever to come out of Los Angeles, not only combining izakaya cooking and
Peruvian flavors into a style that inspired chefs all around the world
but also redesigning the modern restaurant kitchen as a system running
through sushi chefs instead of the guys at the stoves. His influence is
so pervasive that we barely notice it anymore. And while the various
permutations of his up-market brand Nobu may be more luxurious,
Matsuhisa, the well-worn Beverly Hills restaurant that launched an
empire, still has all the immediacy, even if you do end up with the same
omakase menu of sashimi salad, "new-style" sashimi with garlic, uni
shooters and miso-marinated cod the restaurant has been serving for half
of forever. Matsuhisa is why a hot night out in Los Angeles involves
sushi instead of sole meuniere.
57
Guisados
(Mariah Tauger / For The Times)
Into the locavore thing? You might want to try the tacos with
chiles torreados at this Boyle Heights taquería, which is to say
ultrahot chiles grown in Armando De La Torre's backyard, sautéed until
they practically melt from the heat, served in a fresh tortilla made
from nixtamal ground several times a day in his brother's tortillería
next door. Guisados, specializing in tacos de guisados, Mexico
City-style tacos of carefully prepared stews instead of grilled meats,
is a neighborhood hangout that has become the Eastside restaurant most
likely to be visited by folks from west of the river, drawn by the tacos
stuffed with griddled shrimp with tamarind, spicy chicken tinga, or
diced pork chops in chile verde. This is one of the few taquerías in Los
Angeles where you can take a vegetarian: You'll find delicious tacos of
stewed calabacita; sautéed mushrooms with onion and cilantro; and
sizzled panela cheese.
56
Superba Snack Bar
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
If you were to invent a restaurant whose specialties include a
cauliflower T-bone, you probably couldn't do any better than Superba
Snack Bar, an open-ended shoe box of a restaurant at the heart of
Venice's new Rose Avenue restaurant row, in a neighborhood where the
fixed-gear bicycles outnumber the Priuses. Jason Neroni's style is what
you might call abstracted Italian, which is to say that it incorporates
tastes and textures associated with Italian cooking without actually
duplicating an Italian dish. That cauliflower T-bone is a formidable
slab of the vegetable, flecked with char and smeared with a purée of
basil, citrus and olives, a Sicilian-esque preparation that is probably
as close to hedonistic as a vegan dish can get. If Superba has a
specialty, it is probably pasta: handmade, slightly stiff and leaning
toward excess, whole-wheat rigatoni more or less in the style of cacio e
pepe, cooked extremely al dente and tossed with cheese and a punishing
handful of black pepper. It doesn't quite taste like anything you'd get
in Rome. It tastes like Venice Beach.
55
Starry Kitchen
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Starry Kitchen is a restaurant enriched with so many levels
of meta that it can be hard to keep straight without a scorecard. It was
founded as an occasional pop-up in chef Thi Tran and co-owner Nguyen
Tran's North Hollywood apartment courtyard before moving to a converted
fast-food place in a food court. But the restaurant seems almost settled
as a semi-permanent evening pop-up in Tiara, Fred Eric's lunch
restaurant in the Fashion District, so you can count on finding Sichuan
wontons and double-fried chicken wings, although you should probably
call a day or two in advance, especially if you want to reserve one of
the few Singapore-style chili crabs served each night. The fried rice is
made with slivers of roast pork belly and the dried-seafood components
of XO sauce, which makes the rice expensive at $15 but also an
irresistible umami bomb. Thi's pancetta-spiked take on the Vietnamese
caramelized sea bass clay pot is surpassed only by the bass heads and
tails, crisped on the grill, served with sweetened fish sauce for
dipping.
54
Tsujita
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
Like Ginza Sushiko in the early 1990s or Rex among Italian
restaurants a decade before that, Tsujita, a spinoff of a revered Tokyo
ramen restaurant, is so far ahead of its competition that the others may
as well not exist. The broth is a complex composition of chicken, fish
and kurobuta pork; the diaphanous noodles — order them cooked hard — act
more as texture than as substance; they add little weight to the thick,
milky brew. If anything, the tsukemen, chewy noodles served plain with a
dipping sauce of greatly reduced broth, are even better, the essence of
wheat, pig and smoke. Even the simmered egg, its yolk a vivid,
reddish-yellow custard, is superb. Tsujita's biggest flaws? Lines are
long, and ramen is served only at lunch. In the evenings it becomes a
noodle-free izakaya. Thankfully, there is now an all-ramen Tsujita annex
with a slightly different menu — no tsukemen! — right across the
street.
53
Tar & Roses
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
I am still waiting for the moment when restaurants begin to
feature wood sommeliers, dudes who come around to your table and explain
the provenance of that day's fruitwood or hickory. Maybe they could be
identified by little hatchets hanging from their necks. And if that day
ever comes, you will probably see it first at Andrew Kirschner's
small-plates restaurant Tar & Roses, where almost everything passes
through the big wood-burning oven and a line on the menu identifies the
firewood of the day. Will it be the smoky lick of almond on the singed
lettuce salad with sardines and burrata; of cherrywood on the charred
baby carrots with thickened crème fraîche and chermoula; or oak on the
roasted English peas? Is it even possible to tell which kind of logs are
involved in your next giant pork chop with greens? Tar & Roses,
which also has a terrific, mostly Italian, wine list, may also mark the
first time in our nation's history when cauliflower became more
delicious than prime steak.
52
Soban
(Soban Korean Restaurant)
When you finish describing your latest Koreatown finds to a
Korean friend, the pubs hidden away behind unmarked apartment courts,
the barbecued meat palaces and the grills specializing in exotic
invertebrates, she will always come back with the dinner she ate at her
mother's house last week — or, barring that, the restaurant dinner she
begrudgingly admits tasted a lot like something her mother might have
cooked. On such occasions, the restaurant invoked is often Soban, a
modest place on the western end of Koreatown known for the quantity and
quality of its banchan — you get 15 or so of the tiny vegetable dishes
before your entrée — but also for its compelling eun dae gu jorim,
braised cod with chile; pots of spicy braised shortribs; and especially
the like ganjang gaejang, raw blue crabs marinated in an elixir of what
seems to be a distillation of the animal's sweet juices. Alcohol is
neither served nor tolerated, setting it apart from pretty much every
other restaurant in Koreatown.
51
Picca
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
Peruvian cuisine is one of the most captivating in the world,
a complex ballet between seafood from the chilly Humboldt Current and
the produce of the high plains; between pre-Columbian culinary
traditions, European technique and mostly Asian cooks. One can only
imagine the possibilities inherent in the choice among 50 kinds of
potatoes. Ricardo Zarate, a Peruvian chef who worked in sushi bars for
decades before breaking out with a Peruvian lunch counter near USC,
envisions Picca as an updated anticucheria, a Peruvian bar specializing
in grilled beef heart, but expanding the idea to chicken wings, sea
scallops, Santa Barbara spot prawns, even cherry tomatoes with burrata
and black mint. Zarate's conceit here is the opposite of Nobu
Matsuhisa's: Instead of inflecting Japanese small-plates cuisine with
Andean flavors, he's filtering Peruvian cooking through the aesthetics
of the izakaya, so that the meals you've been used to eating in L.A.
Peruvian restaurants become delicate, prettily arranged plates meant to
be shared.
50
Manhattan Beach Post
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
Manhattan Beach, perhaps better known for the excellence of
its beach volleyball than for that of its kitchens, has quietly become
the restaurant center of the South Bay. For the first time perhaps since
the 1980s heyday of St. Estephe, Westsiders are heading south just to
eat. And this sprawling restaurant overseen by David LeFevre, best known
for his long term at downtown's Water Grill, is perfectly emblematic of
the modern L.A. restaurant: open kitchen, cured-meat plates, small
plates, obscure pale ales and all. The recession may be on, and everyone
is on a diet, but you'd never know it here, with people tearing into
soft hunks of braised hog jowl in fish-sauce-infused caramel, barbecued
lamb belly, and Brussels sprouts with hazelnuts. LeFevre can cook, and
he has confidence in his palate, whether it is seasoning broccoflower
with a simple squeeze of lemon and a little chile or going medieval on a
plate of sword squid with lemon curd. But whom are we kidding? You're
probably there for a crack at the impossibly rich bacon cheddar
biscuits, and I can't say that I blame you.
49
Le Comptoir
(Mariah Tauger / For The Times)
The "secret" restaurant has always been an essential
component of the Los Angeles dining scene, and if you ever managed to
make it into the unmarked steakhouse on Fairfax Avenue, the fabulous
robata hidden inside a Westside teriyaki house or the loft space housing
Wolvesmouth, you know. So when you pull into the deserted parking lot
behind a wine storage facility, climb onto the loading dock and walk
down a dark corridor into what used to be the back room of Palate, the
restaurant and wine shop that closed suddenly last year, you will
understand the aesthetic of Le Comptoir, Gary Menes' permanent pop-up: a
metal counter, a few stools and an array of portable cooking equipment
crowded into a corner of the box-strewn chamber. And you may appreciate
his cooking — simple yet evolved, based mostly on precise arrangements
of up to 20 vegetables, each separately cooked, most of them plucked
just hours earlier from Long Beach backyard farms, served to everyone in
the restaurant at the same time. His signature dish is a perfectly
fried egg with greens. There is no staff, per se, just ex-Marche cook
Menes and a single assistant cooking, serving, clearing and washing up
in front of you, then frying doughnuts for dessert. Take someone you
really like talking to. It's going to be a long night.
48
n/naka
(Glenn Koenig / Los Angeles Times)
It is almost startling to realize that n/naka may be the
first dedicated kaiseki restaurant in Los Angeles, serving expensive,
many-coursed seasonal meals, at least the first outside the Japanese
expatriate community, and that the sheer level of cooking in this modest
bungalow eclipses what you find in grand dining rooms whose chefs
appear in national magazines. The chef is Niki Nakayama, who is as
devoted to the produce from her organic garden as she is to seafood, and
it is occasionally difficult to ascertain whether the most impressive
bit of a dish is the chewy slab of Japanese halibut fin or the
thimble-sized cucumber garnishing the fish, whose texture has been
transformed into something almost luxurious through a hundred tiny
slashes of her knife. Nakayama uses lots of Western touches, but there
is a stillness to her cooking. It is fascinating how a course of fried
pompano fillets served with sautéed peppers and chips of their
deep-fried bones — you tuck them into lettuce leaves and dunk them into
bowls of sweet-sour vinegared broth — can resemble the Hong Kong-style
dish of flounder with crispy skeletons, recall the flavors of Sicilian
seaside cooking and be eaten like Korean ssam, but still seem purely
Japanese.
47
Post & Beam
(Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
Food-obsessed Angelenos have watched Govind Armstrong grow up
in the city's kitchens, from his beginnings as a teenage apprentice at
Spago to a run with Benjamin Ford, to his own low-key dining room at
Table 8. So his fresh take on African American dishes at Post & Beam
is new yet utterly familiar: smoked baby backs, roast salmon,
buttermilk fried chicken and greens cooked down with ham hocks with an
understated chefly flair. Plus hand-stretched pizza.
46
The Bazaar
(Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
There may not be a restaurant in Los Angeles that divides
foodists quite like the Bazaar, a vast, crowded hotel restaurant that is
the local vanguard of modernist cuisine. Some people think the
restaurant represents the pinnacle of José Andrés' art, that the gifted
chef is expressing something vibrant and real with his encapsulated
olives, air breads and deconstructed Spanish omelets, all inspired by
Andres' mentor Ferran Adria. Others may be happy to taste the delicious
Catalan roast-vegetable dish escalivada and first-rate Jabugo ham but
find the tricks — mozzarella balls that explode into liquid, cotton
candy mojitos, Philly cheesesteaks that too closely resemble Hot Pockets
— to be silly, especially when combined with the relative lack of
seasonal produce. But the kitchen under chef de cuisine Joshua Whigham
is admittedly first rate, able to breathe real life even into prosaic
dishes like pa'amb tomaquet, the simple length of tomato-rubbed bread
that appears with almost every meal in Catalonia. And the multiplicity
of dining spaces, including what the Jetsons might have imagined as a
dessert bar, and the ease of moving between them, may make an evening at
the Bazaar an ultimate first date.
45
Marouch
(Mariah Tauger / For The Times)
I sometimes dream of living close to Marouch, close enough
anyway to drop in at noon for grilled quail and a beer and midafternoons
for a Lebanese sweet and a thimble of thick Turkish coffee; close
enough that I didn't feel the compulsion to buzz through the mtabal,
muhammara and makanek from the mezze menu every time I stopped in so I
could order the home-style Armenian daily specials instead. The second
time you drop by Marouch, you may feel as if you live there. The third
time, you are making plans to bring all your friends. Year after year,
Serge and Sosi Brady's restaurant becomes nothing but better.
44
Din Tai Fung
(Annie Wells / Los Angeles Times)
If you get six local dumpling aficionados together to talk
about the San Gabriel Valley, you will get six different opinions about
where to go for the best Shanghai-style soup dumplings, xiao long bao.
One dude may plump for the XLB at Dean Sin World, another may prefer the
sweetish Wuxi-style dumplings at Wang Xing Ji. The old-school guy
always brings up Mama Lu's, and the woman who equates a thicker dumpling
skin with soulfulness will mention Mei Long Village, only to be
interrupted by the churl who goes for the XLB at next-door J&J
instead. But the dumpling they will all compare their favorites with,
and the place they sneak off to when they think nobody's looking, is Din
Tai Fung, the perpetually crowded outlet of a Taipei-based chain that
practically created the modern XLB cult when it opened here a decade
ago. Din Tai Fung really does have good soup dumplings, tender and
swollen with hot broth, zapped with fresh ginger, perfectly elastic and
almost engineered — you could inspect a dozen steamersful without
spotting a leak.
43
Fig
(Ann Johansson / For The Times)
If you could design a perfect chef for Los Angeles, he might
seem a lot like Ray Garcia, an Eastside guy who seems to spend almost as
much time proselytizing for healthful eating in local schools as he
does in the kitchen. At a local hog-cooking contest, he delighted the
judges by serving pozole, tamales and a pig-infused version of Mexican
squeeze candy. He has a forager on his staff, but his connection to the
nearby Santa Monica farmers market is intimate. His menu, which includes
both spinach-leaf lasagna and bacon-wrapped bacon, a salad of beets and
oranges and a plate of tongue with tomatillo, manages to be satisfying
to both the transgressive big-meat guys and the Gaia-conscious vegans;
the carb-lovers and the gluten-free. Even in this casual hotel-lobby
restaurant, Garcia cooks as if he comes from L.A.
42
The Sycamore Kitchen
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
The Sycamore Kitchen is the breakfast-lunch project of Quinn
and Karen Hatfield, which is to say it is the sandwich-shop offshoot of a
restaurant with a Michelin star. And it turns out that obsessive
perfectionism can work pretty well in informal cafes. So a turkey
sandwich becomes almost more than a turkey sandwich, with thick slices
of nicely brined bird layered on dense house-made bread with thin
slivers of just-ripe Camembert cheese, a few leaves of arugula and a bit
of cherry mostarda. A BLT is enhanced with soft, oozing slices of
braised pork belly. And if you get there before they sell out, you
should also get the pastry called kouign amann, a.k.a. buttercup, whose
perfect caramelization requires enough sugar and expensive salted butter
to send its glycemic index screaming into the red.
41
Hatfield's
(Annie Wells / Los Angeles Times)
The rush of feverish attention paid to Karen Hatfield's
Sycamore Kitchen was surprising, in a way. Because Hatfield's, the
restaurant she runs with her chef husband, Quinn Hatfield, is one of the
quietest successes in Hollywood, a fancy place better known for the
soup shots at its bar and for stuffing yellowtail into its croque madame
than for its exquisitely seasonal vegetarian tasting menus, beef ribs
two ways or its signature date-crusted lamb. Hatfield's is the grown-up
version of what half of the restaurants in Silver Lake are trying to be.
40
Hart & the Hunter
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
There exists, in 2013, a newish school of cooking we'll call
Ampersand Cuisine, which is to say a whimsical, vaguely ironic take on
traditional cooking often featured at restaurants that name themselves
after children's stories either real or imagined. And looked at a
certain way, the Hart & the Hunter, which is indeed named after one
of Aesop's fables, could be the restaurant equivalent of a drummerless
band in vests, the South filtered through the not-South, especially when
you are handed a plate of fried chicken skin served with a little
bottle of hand-made Tabasco, a hot biscuit with a spoonful of pimento
cheese or a steaming bowl of black-eyed peas. Is irony edible? Chefs
Kris Tominaga and Brian Dunsmoor are betting the lemon ice-box pie will
convince you that it just may be.
39
La Casita Mexicana
(Patrick T. Fallon / For The Times)
Jaime Martin del Campo and Ramiro Arvizu are the barons of
Bell, star chefs of Spanish-language media who map the produce of local
community farms onto dishes from their native Jalisco and Michoacan.
Have you ever found transcendence in a plate of chilaquiles? This is a
good place to try. La Casita is especially worth visiting during Lent
and in the season leading up to Christmas, when they prepare feasts of
the seasons' traditional foods.
38
Son of a Gun
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
If you're a couple of Florida guys and you have a successful
meat restaurant, what you're looking for is probably a boat. Since docks
in Hollywood are hard to come by, Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo apparently
settled for a fish restaurant you might tie a boat up to, a place with
peel-and-eat shrimp, smoked fish spread, shrimp sandwiches on white
bread and even smoked steelhead eggs with dots of maple-flavored cream
and shards of pumpernickel toast. The most popular dish? Definitely the
fried chicken sandwich, with cole slaw and what must be the only aioli
on the planet spiked with Rooster hot sauce. You could have predicted
the long communal table and the Dark and Stormys, but the uni with
burrata probably comes as a surprise.
37
Angelini Osteria
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
Gino Angelini's mega-trattoria RivaBella may be getting most
of the attention these days, and the late La Terza probably displayed
his artistry to more obvious effect, but Hollywood has always loved his
osteria the most of all his restaurants, a place whose comfortable
versions of pan-Italian trattoria classics like saltimbocca, pollo alla
diavola, Roman tripe and his grandmother's gooey green lasagna keep the
loud dining room busy, and where whatever diet you happen to be on at
the time will be accommodated without a fuss. Some nights, it feels as
if everybody in the room knows one another, but you're in on the party
too. Some people arrange their weekly schedules around Angelini's
specials: kidney stew on Tuesdays; braised oxtails on Wednesdays, liver
alla Veneziana on Thursdays.
36
Alma
(Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times)
Nobody has quite put a name on the new modernist school of
cooking popping up at places like Noma in Copenhagen or Coi in San
Francisco, a kind of cooking that incorporates intense locavorism, the
techniques of so-called molecular gastronomy and a sense of culinary
narrative that doesn't end when the plate is put down in front of you.
But Ari Taymor's former pop-up has the improvisatory quality of those
famous kitchens, and when you make it to the barely marked storefront,
next door to a downtown taxi-dance parlor, you never quite know what
you're going to find — seaweed-tofu beignets, perhaps, or spare
arrangements of foraged greens, or scallops with nightshade berries or
shriveled, butter-soaked carrots that somehow manage to taste better
than meat. This is a modest but sure step toward the cuisine most often
seen in restaurants with six-month waiting lists.
35
Rustic Canyon
(Los Angeles Times)
As pure an exponent of urban rustic cooking as there has ever
been on the Westside, the wine bar Rustic Canyon more or less
functioned as a restaurant arm of the Santa Monica farmers market, a
restaurant where you knew that the Persian mulberries or fat Delta
asparagus you'd been eying that morning would somehow make it onto your
plate. Under new chef Jeremy Fox, who became nationally famous as the
chef at the vegetarian restaurant Ubuntu in Napa, Rustic Canyon is still
working the farm-to-table thing but has jolted the superb produce into
something resembling a cuisine instead of some sugar snap peas on a
plate — serving that asparagus with fried pheasant egg and ultra-dense
bone-marrow gravy, pumping up a pozole with green garlic or garnishing a
profoundly black gumbo with peppery nasturtium blossoms. Fox has been
jumping from kitchen to kitchen lately. Let's hope this is the beginning
of a beautiful friendship. Zoe Nathan makes the splendid desserts.
34
Lukshon
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
It is sometimes difficult to explain Sang Yoon to people from
out of town, who tend to see the chef as a guy who runs a successful
burger bar. "But there is bacon marmalade," you tell them, "and he won't
allow ketchup. And he started the disclaimer 'Changes and modifications
politely declined' thing," but they have already drifted off, and you
know it is only seconds before you are asked about the next cool taco
truck. But Yoon is important. The whole gastropub phenomenon stems
directly from his Father's Office. And Lukshon, his pan-Asian
restaurant, is perfected in a hundred little ways that escape the casual
observer, including the precise acidity of the sticky Chinese pork
ribs, the aromatics in the reinvented Singapore Sling and the
deconstructed shrimp toast, which he turns inside out by dredging
delicate cylinders of chopped rock shrimp in tiny croutons, then
deep-frying them to a delicate crunch. Like Roy Choi, David Chang and
Bryant Ng, he is part of a great new wave in American cooking,
American-raised Asian guys classically trained in European techniques,
veterans of the best American kitchens, who decided to re-project their
vision of American cuisine through the lens of Asian street food.
33
Kiriko
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
Of the fine sushi bars in Los Angeles, Kiriko is perhaps the
least forbidding, a place where you know you can get perfect shirako or
sea snail in season but still treats mackerel with great respect, where
you can find all the shiso pesto and sauteed monkfish liver you care to
eat but still find a half-dozen species of silvery fish you've never
before seen. The great specialty of the restaurant is actually
cherrywood-smoked Copper River salmon with mango, a dish that certain
local sushi masters would rather die than serve. (It's their loss: The
dish is stunningly good.) And while great sushi is never cheap, Ken
Namba's traditional yet creative sushi and sashimi surpasses most of
what is sold at twice the price.
32
Vincenti
(Los Angeles Times)
Vincenti was born from the late Mauro Vincenti's Rex, the
restaurant that did more than any other to introduce Los Angeles to
Italian alta cocina. Its first chef was Gino Angelini of the famous
osteria. Its proprietor is Vincenti's widow; its chef, Nicola
Mastronardi, is a master of the big, hardwood-burning ovens, of roast
porchetta and cuttlefish salad, of the flavors of salt, clean ocean and
smoke. Vincenti is the spiritual center of Italian fine dining in Los
Angeles.
31
Shanghai No. 1 Seafood Village
(Mariah Tauger / For The Times)
The walls are covered with red velvet, and the black velvet
of the banquettes is punctuated with rhinestones. The chairs are
overstuffed. The chandeliers are blinding. If you want to be accurate
about it, Shanghai No. 1 Seafood is less a Shanghai-style restaurant
than it is an actual Shanghai restaurant, one of a small upscale chain
in the Chinese city, that just happens to have been plunked down in San
Gabriel instead of a posh shopping center in Pudong. And the
restaurant's menu, a thick, glossy document stuffed with glistening
pictures of spiked sea cucumber, is the Chinese restaurant menu
equivalent of a September Town & Country, except instead of estates,
there are red-cooked squid and live fish and fried prawns, reproduced
in excruciating detail. The cooking is not altered to suit the Western
palate, and many of its most stunning effects may whiz straight over the
heads of diners not actually raised in eastern China. So skip the
shark-lip casserole and go straight for the crabs fried with chile and
garlic; the crocks of Old Alley Pork, braised into pig candy; the smoked
fish; the stone-pot fried rice; or the pan-fried pork buns called sheng
jian bao. Cantonese-style dim sum, prepared by an entirely different
crew, is served afternoons.
30
Church and State
(Christina House / For The Times)
Before the downtown Arts District began to resemble an
open-air crane showroom, before the influx of bars and fancy
coffeehouses, Church and State was a loud artists' bistro, absinthe on
tap, strings of Christmas lights hanging all year round, that happened
to attract a pretty distinguished series of French-trained chefs. The
kitchen is home at the moment to Tony Esnault, a Ducasse veteran who won
four stars from the Los Angeles Times for his cooking at Patina, and
the bistro cooking is stunning: crisp snapper filets on a meltingly soft
bed of razor-thin confit bayaldi, braised pork belly with favas and
polenta, and a gorgeous ballotine of rabbit shocked into life with
sprigs of fresh tarragon. You can still find the tarte flambé, fried
pig's ears, bouillabaisse and roasted marrowbone with radish from the
regime of Walter Manzke, and the restaurant will never be without its
snails in garlic butter or cheesy onion soup, but the classics are if
anything even more carefully prepared. Church and State is still
probably the best bistro downtown.
29
Drago Centro
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
Celestino Drago is an old-fashioned man, devoted to his
craft, devoted to the outdoors and devoted to his family, each member of
which seems to be running a restaurant somewhere in Los Angeles. Three
generations of Angelenos have grown up on his handmade pasta and his
risottos. I have never seen him happier than when he was crouched over a
long counter, dressing a flock of doves. Drago Centro, opened at the
depths of the financial crisis, is among the most majestic restaurants
downtown, a double-height dining room looking out onto the cityscape, a
view that is about command. The cooking here, led by chef de cuisine Ian
Gresik, includes both handcrafted pasta — the pappardelle with pheasant
and the handmade spaghetti with Sicilian almond pesto are wonderful —
and the meatier pleasures of steak, fish and duck.
28
Sotto
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
Sotto is a different kind of Italian restaurant, a nominally
southern Italian place dedicated to local produce and sustainable and
artisanally produced meat, and a shrine to the awesome heat of its
15,000-pound oven. You can get the hot, fresh bread with headcheese or
puréed lardo instead of olive oil; clams cooked with fresh shell beans
and the awesomely spicy Calabrian sausage 'nduja; or a Sunday-only
porchetta practically radioactive with fennel and garlic. Chefs Steve
Samson and Zach Pollack may be pizzaioli in public, and the wood-oven
pizza is pretty good, but they really seem to be abbatoir jocks instead.
If you should happen across a special of lamb innards or one of the
gigantic sweet-sour braised pork shanks, make sure to order one the
second you sit down. Even the pastas tend to be southern things we
haven't seen locally, like the twisted noodles called here casarecce
(which means nothing more than "homemade") with a thick paste of
simmered lamb thickened with egg yolk and sheep cheese.
27
Park's BBQ
(Mariah Tauger / For The Times)
If you are keeping score at home, you can probably divide the
history of Koreatown barbecue into the era before Park's and the decade
or so since Park's opened its doors. There has always been decent
Korean barbecue in town, but the modernist Park's may have been the
first place equally devoted to aesthetics and to food, where the
fragrance of hardwood charcoal in the tabletop barbecues went into the
meat and not into your hair, where patrons sprung for ultra-prime Wagyu
beef and where the pork came from a special Japanese breed. The quality
of the galbi, the pork belly and the spicy galbi soup is superb. Park's,
distantly related to a Seoul restaurant known for its celebrity
clientele, pretty much has the top end of K-Town barbecue to itself.
26
Guelaguetza
(Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)
Guelaguetza been a part of L.A. life for so long that it is
easy to forget how special it is: a serious Oaxacan restaurant serving
impeccable pre-Columbian cuisine in the heart of Koreatown, a mezcal
selection with distillates you rarely see this side of the border and a
center of Oaxacan dance where a show comes along with dinner. Hungry for
green, yellow or red mole, or chile-fried crickets? They've got those
too. At Guelaguetza, you'll find tlayudas, like bean-smeared Oaxacan
pizzas, the size of manhole covers; thick tortillas called memelas; and
delicious, mole-drenched tamales. The black mole, based on ingredients
the restaurant brings up from Oaxaca, is rich with chopped chocolate and
burnt grain, toasted chile and wave upon wave of textured spice.
25
AOC
(Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times)
Suzanne Goin's wine bar has been an institution for so long
that it seems almost odd to drop into its new grown-up location with its
big patio, like running into a high school crush who has become a
renowned oncologist. Ordering the same old bacon-wrapped dates feels a
bit awkward. But then you settle in with a bowl of wood-oven clams with
green garlic and a glass of Sancerre, and it seems like old times. Or
Spanish fried chicken with cumin, pappardelle with nettles and
asparagus, suckling pig confit with lemongrass, and then maybe a second
glass, of Faugères, just because. Is it still hard to land a table? You
bet.
24
Salt's Cure
(Glenn Koenig / Los Angeles Times)
If you want to know whether Salt's Cure is serving the lamb
neck with mussels, which it should, always, you go over to its Twitter
feed and click on the newest link, which takes you to its Facebook page
and a picture of the current blackboard menu posted on the restaurant's
wall. It is what art critics used to call low-tech futurism. And Salt's
Cure is pretty low-tech, just a dining counter, a few tables and Zak
Walters and Chris Phelps at the range: two guys, a bar back and an
astonishing quantity of meat, charcuterie ranging from potted duck with
blueberries to the intense house-cured bacon, and a menu of simple food,
butchers' food, steaks, chops and braised animal parts; half chickens
and the occasional fish. The most popular meal at Salt's Cure is
probably the weekend brunch: smoked fish on toast, sweetly dense oatmeal
pancakes and cinnamon rolls drenched in butter.
23
Trois Mec
(Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
If it is 7:59 a.m. on Friday and you are an ambitious foodist
in this town, you are probably at your computer, worrying whether it is
set to precisely the right time. Because at 8 a.m. sharp, and not a
second sooner, Trois Mec releases its tables for the week, and if you
don't get through within a minute or so, you'll be sitting at the
counter at an undesirable time or possibly shut out from dining at all.
You don't make a dinner reservation, you buy tickets, as if you were
going to see a hockey game. There is one set menu per night, although
vegetarians can be accommodated. If something comes up or you don't like
duck, you can give your tickets away, but you can't return them: You're
stuck. There could not be a less convenient way to dine. But it may be
worth the trouble to get into Trois Mec, a miniature, unmarked
restaurant in a barely converted pizzeria. Ludovic Lefebvre is one of
the greatest pure chefs ever to cook in Los Angeles, a protégé of Pierre
Gagnaire and Alain Passard who came to California to take over the
stoves at the late l'Orangerie and whose short run at Bastide showed
Angelenos things they had never tasted before. He introduced the concept
of the pop-up, and his 10 short runs in L.A. bakeries and diners were
both oversubscribed (he famously crashed Open Table) and rapturously
received. Trois Mec is the first place that has ever been his own, like a
private club that happens to serve barbecued carrots with yogurt and
braised lamb belly with deconstructed harissa, and a mashed potato dish
he devised to exorcise the demons he experienced working in the
potato-intensive kitchens of Joel Robuchon.
22
Red Medicine
(Red Medicine)
I don't think I'd let Red Medicine babysit my kids. If you
were planning a surprise party, they'd blab to the honoree. As they have
shown with their Internet vendettas toward both no-shows and my
estimable colleague, the rules of restaurant decorum don't seem to
bother them much. And the sound levels frequently top 90 decibels. As
they say on the reality shows, they're not here to make friends. Yet of
all the local chefs who aspire to the global circuit, the one where
scraped meat and woodruff and a sense of culinary narrative that could
be lifted from a Christopher Nolan film, Jordan Kahn is the one who gets
it. And even though his detractors, and there are plenty of them, fail
to see what New Nordic presentations and ingredients like buttermilk,
uni and sequoia shoots have to do with the nominally Vietnamese-based
cusine, Kahn keeps it weird and proud, and the results are often as
delicious as they are startling.
21
Jar
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
Suzanne Tracht is one of the most versatile chefs in Los
Angeles, adept at both the urban rustic style of cooking that is still
packing them in at places like Bestia and Rustic Canyon, and at
Asian-accented new American cuisine. So it is almost odd to find her at
what she is now calling a modern American chophouse, a place whose
specialties include pot roast, Kansas City steaks and an iceberg wedge
salad frosted with blue cheese. But she's not slumming. Jar, which looks
like a set from a Doris Day movie, is as timeless as a well-fitted
A-line skirt. This is to say, your grandparents would have liked it,
although they may not have understood why the chicken was scented with
kaffir lime leaf or why they had just been served sautéed pea tendrils
instead of actual peas.
20
Mélisse
(Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)
Los Angeles has not been kind to formal French restaurants,
to heavy tablecloths, to kitchens that work as if Michelin stars are at
stake. If you're splashing three bills on dinner here, you're probably
not going for sushi. So it is almost by force of will that Josiah
Citrin's Mélisse, which may well be the most formal restaurant to open
in Los Angeles since the 1980s, maintains its momentum. The luxury
ingredients and luxury prices seem not to dissuade diners who are happy
to face down $175 asparagus dinners, showers of truffles and caviar, and
even the standard $125 prix fixe, which is a bargain only by Parisian
standards. Citrin's customers look like the parents of the people who go
to Animal.
19
Hinoki and the Bird
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
David Myers' cooking at Sona was ethereal — dreamy. Hinoki
and the Bird, the luxe Century City restaurant he runs with chef Kuniko
Yagi in a Bond-villain skyscraper basement, is more muscular, a fusion
of complex, ritualized Japanese kaiseki cuisine with modern California
small-plates cooking: black cod served under smoldering sheets of the
Japanese cedar hinoki, roast pumpkin on toast with miso and goat cheese,
plain grilled rice balls, and lobster rolls made with buns dyed black
with charcoal-enriched flour. In Singapore, locals would ride a
half-hour on the subway to experience a grilled skate wing like the one
served here, crusted with a fragrant paste of chiles and fermented
seafood. Desserts here lean toward Japanese austerity, and the odd
Japanese-influenced cocktails, designed by Sam Ross, are among the best
in town.
18
Bestia
(Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times)
How good is Bestia? It is a restaurant that makes beef-heart
tartare seem not only possible but desirable; that makes a craveable
specialty of pork boiled with cabbage; that grills Mediterranean sea
bass, serves it with a heap of boiled rapini and otherwise leaves it
alone. A roaring wood oven is at the center of the arts district
restaurant, and a big curing room is filled with charcuterie, but what
Ori Menashe's cooking represents is a new, anti-California cuisine, a
style of Italian food whose flavors are neither amplified nor perfected
but are simply presented as themselves. You may think the chunky
cavatelli pasta tossed with chopped black truffles, sausage and cheese
is rather bland. I think it may be one of the most purely Italian things
I have ever tasted in Los Angeles, food from a region where truffles
are as common as onions. The sentiments do not necessarily contradict
one another. The pastry chef here is Genevieve Gergis, Menashe's wife,
and her signature dessert is an intensely chocolatey budino finished
with olive oil, sea salt and caramel.
17
Night + Market
(Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
Rotgut Mekong whisky, stinky natural Gamays from the Loire,
fearsome yet delicious nam prik, pounded salads from the area around
Chiang Mai: Night + Market is the most unlikely of L.A.'s great Thai
restaurants, a specialist in northern Thai street food in the nightclub
district of the Sunset Strip, orchestrated by young chef Kris
Yenbamroong. (Visiting superstar chefs often visit when they are in
town.) Pig's ear has become almost a cliché everywhere in town; here you
will also find fried tail, braised hock and Isaan-style grilled "toro,"
fatty collar, as well as practically every other part of the pig,
served out in portions carefully calibrated to the consumption of Thai
beer. Care for an ice cream sandwich for dessert? It will be served
Thai-style: a scoop of ice cream captured inside a thick slice of
charcoal-grilled bread.
16
Sea Harbour
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
Although Hunan and Shanghai and Dongbei dining rooms have
been flourishing in the San Gabriel Valley recently, fueled by a rush of
immigration from China's north, ambitious Hong Kong-style seafood
palaces, often thought to be the pinnacle of the Chinese restaurant
experience, have all but disappeared. If you're a chef good enough to
manage an enormous seafood kitchen at this point, you can probably make a
better living in Shenzen. But Sea Harbour, related to restaurants in
Vancouver, Canada, and Hong Kong, delivers in every way a seafood house
can deliver, with tanks full of spider crabs, exotic reef fish and Santa
Barbara spot prawns ready to be dispatched for the table, a kitchen
prepared to braise sea cucumber and sun-dried abalone to unsurpassed
lusciousness and a team specializing in barbecue. The morning dim sum is
the best in Southern California, a riot of color, texture and exotic
tastes ordered by checking them off a paper menu. If you want to spend,
you can blow thousands of dollars on conpoy and bird's nest here, washed
down with vintage Bordeaux, but if you stay away from the allure of the
tanks, you can get away for very little. It is the best of Hong Kong
that we've got.
15
Tasting Kitchen
(Ann Johansson / For The Times)
A few years on, I think we can finally dismiss the rumor that
The Tasting Kitchen was essentially Casey Lane's performance art
project, a pop-up slated to disappear after 100 or 200 or 420 days. When
it opened, it seemed odd that a restaurant like that would make plain
bread and butter seem like the most desirable dish in the world, refuse
to serve G&Ts unless somebody remembered to make the tonic water or
serve only the kinds of Italian reds that might show up on a Masters of
Wine exam. Even if you'd been eating pasta your entire life, you were
probably confused by the appearance of corzetti with fennel pollen or
gigli with squash blossoms in the dreamlike candlelit room. The basic
impression is of Italian cooking translated into an odd American
dialect, in which grilled anchovies are laid so beautifully on the plate
that you rather suspect there's an art director. At least they've
stopped embossing the menus with a number indicating the day of service.
It reminded me a bit of a convict counting his days left until parole.
14
Baco Mercat
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
A Bäco is Josef Centeno's signature creation, a kind of
flatbread sandwich halfway between a Catalan coca and a taco pumped up
on 'roids, slicked with a goopy, vaguely Mediterranean sauce and stuffed
with things like fried veal tongue, spicy fava bean fritters, or a
combination of pork belly and crunchy, porous cubes of what Centeno
calls beef carnitas. On the days Centeno put his Bäcos on as a special
at Opus or Lazy Ox, news flashed across social media like a comet. So
the fact that Bäco Mercat has an actual menu of Bäcos should be enough.
But Centeno's kitchens were where the local convergence of haute cuisine
and pub food began, and his menu here reads almost like a graduate exam
in culinary post-structuralism, mixing flavors and structures from
Spain, France and western China; Mexico and Peru. There are craft
cocktails, with a special emphasis on homemade soda pop and the 18th
century cooler called the shrub.
13
Ink
(Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times)
Do you want to see excessive concentration? I mean
hand-wringing, micro-focused, Kobe-on-the-bench concentration? Then you
should probably get a kitchen-view seat at Ink, where Michael Voltaggio
agonizes over every gram of sea-bean chimichurri on the beef tartare,
every plate of potato charcoal with crème fraîche and every scoop of
wood-smoke ice cream that leaves the line. Voltaggio, whose snarling
passion, good looks and devotion to his chef brother have made him a
hero to people who have yet to taste a single mouthful of his cooking,
could probably get by as a celebrity chef, but the devotion to craft at
this anti-meat-and-potatoes restaurant with black-stained walls is
staggering.
12
Spice Table
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
The Spice Table, one hears, is slated to close sometime this
year, evicted to make way for a Metro station. And although the
restaurant is certain to endure in some form — Bryant Ng's highly spiced
grill cooking, inspired by Singapore's satay masters, is both vital and
popular — it will still be a big loss for the city. The warren of
dining rooms in the old brick building, scented with turmeric and wood
smoke, feel a bit like a grand steampunk machine dedicated to turning
out roasted bone marrow with laksa leaf, kon loh mee noodles with
barbecued pork, skewers of grilled lamb belly and crunchy fried chicken
wings tinted with south Indian curry. Ng cooked at Campanile and Daniel,
and was the opening chef de cuisine at Pizzeria Mozza — he knows his
way around a pile of logs. And if somebody should mention grilled tripe —
it often runs as a special — don't hesitate. It draws a lot of smoke
and crunch from the flames.
11
Rivera
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
If food writers covered chefs the way that sportswriters
cover the Lakers, John Sedlar would be in the paper as often as Pau
Gasol — planting a roof garden, collaborating with Baja chefs, taking a
stab at Chinas Comidas, starting a tamale museum, closing one
restaurant, bottling high-end tequila and diving back into Rivera, his
home base, with renewed vigor. Sedlar was a prime mover behind modern
Southwest cuisine, Latin fusion, the pre-Columbian revival and the
ubiquity of tequila in bottle-service bars. Rivera sometimes operates
with five menus at a time, each exploring a different aspect of Mexican
or Spanish cuisine. You don't want to turn your back on him for too
long. He treats his tortillas, with flowers pressed into them as if into
a scrapbook, as seriously as he does his sweetbreads with huacatay or
his snails with Jabugo ham. And past the kitchen, past the bar, past a
casual-dining area where you can stop for a bite of corn flan with
squash blossoms and one of Julian Cox's cocktails after a game at nearby
Staples Center, lies Sedlar's inner sanctum, a hushed, intimate dining
room lined with glowing tequila bottles.
10
Shunji
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
Even by local standards, the home of Shunji, a Depression-era
building in the shape of a chili bowl, is unusual for a sushi bar. But
what is served by Shunji Nakao, one of the original Matsuhisa chefs and
founder of Asanebo, is pretty unusual for a sushi bar too —perhaps a
fat, sliced sea scallop in a miso emulsion; a tangle of slivered
sardines with a few drops of a soy-ginger reduction; a bowl of creamy
sesame tofu with a crumpled sheet of house-made yuba, tofu skin; or an
arrangement of vegetables in a bit of lightly jellied dashi. Nakao's
sushi is excellent, but you can get through an omakase meal of
exquisitely sourced Japanese fish here without seeing sushi at all. You
expect expensive wild sea bream to be treated reverently at a sushi bar.
You do not expect the same care to be taken with a carrot.
9
Jitlada
(Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times)
Into pain? Jitlada, in a way, marks the triumph of the Los
Angeles way of dining: a popular Thai restaurant frequented mostly by
non-Thais who come not in spite of the difficult, insanely spicy
regional dishes but because of them, endorphin bombs and all. I'm sure
that the chicken satay is ordered more often than the mudfish curry, the
mint leaf beef more than the beef sautéed with explosively fragrant
cassia buds, but probably not by much, and you will sometimes see famous
actors and musicians convening over the crunchy fried fish with
homegrown turmeric, mango salad lightened with coconut water and
soft-shell crab with the legendarily stinky sataw bean, which tastes
like lima beans but smells like a bad day at the petting zoo. Regulars,
even the vegans, know to skip past the regular menu to the typed pages
at the back, which lists the southern Thai specialties of Sungkamee
(call him Tui) and his sister Jazz Singsanong, including the curried
acacia blossoms served over a Thai omelet.
8
Cut
(Glenn Koenig / Los Angeles Times)
Where would you take a Chinese billionaire just passing
through town? I submit the answer is Cut. The restaurant, designed by
superstar architect Richard Meier, is as precisely aligned as a linear
accelerator, and the Tom Cruise-looking guy three tables over is
probably Tom Cruise. Dana Farner's wine list hides some great reds from
Spain and Argentina but is deep in Bordeaux and cult California Cabs,
and the staff won't blink when your friend pulls out the bottle of Opus
One (it is always Opus One) he picked up yesterday in the Napa Valley.
You'll have Wagyu sashimi, bone marrow flan and thinly sliced veal
tongue in salsa verde. Then the steak sommelier comes around to the
table with the real Kyushu beef wrapped in black napkins, and while the
$160 rib-eye is rich enough to satiate four people easily, he'll order
one for himself (you'll settle for the 35-day-aged Nebraska beef) plus a
spaniel-size truffled lobster just to taste. He will feel like the most
important man in the world.
7
Animal
(Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times)
Animal roared into existence as what seemed like a practical
joke: a pig-fixated restaurant on a kosher-intensive stretch of Fairfax
Avenue; a center of dude-friendly, maximally caloric munchies in an area
known for skate shops and comic book stores. Whatever Jon Shook and
Vinny Dotolo served had one ingredient too many, and that ingredient was
usually bacon. If you have paid for fried pig's ear, loco moco or fried
pigtails with an American Express card in the last few years, you have
experienced the influence of Animal. As it turned out, Animal's spicy
tendon chips and kung pao sweetbreads were what the public wanted to be
eating, especially other chefs. Shook and Dotolo have a pretty good
sense of what tastes good, be it melted cheese with chorizo or calves'
brains with the French curry vadouvan, even if it doesn't exactly come
from Escoffier. It may go without saying, but Animal is not quite the
place to bring your vegan friends.
6
Lucques
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
There may be more influential chefs than Suzanne Goin, but
her smart, light pan-Mediterranean cooking with occasional hints of
North Africa has become the lingua franca of a certain kind of
California cafe, and you see copies of her book, "Sunday Suppers at
Lucques," in a surprising range of homes. Her resinous herbs and precise
splashes of acidity make vegetables dance and bring out the deep,
fleshy resonances in braised pork cheeks and her notorious short ribs.
Everybody should try to make it to one of her famous prix fixe family
suppers at least once.
5
Kogi
(Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)
I don't care if you were born here: You're not an Angeleno if
you haven't headed to a deserted parking lot late at night, pulled a
cold drink out of a paper bag on the floor of your ride and waited for
the appearance of the Kogi truck, from which you will soon purchase
Korean short-rib tacos, kimchi quesadillas and other edible symbols of
the city's famous inclusiveness — enormous, great-tasting plates of food
drawn straight from the city's recombinant DNA. Kogi auteur Roy Choi,
once top of his class at the Culinary Institute of America, is probably
the only dude to win one of Food & Wine's Best New Chef awards for
his cooking on a truck. Followers keep track of Kogi's whereabouts on a
frequently updated Twitter feed, twitter.com/kogibbq, and the sudden
materialization of hundreds of people is an impromptu nightclub, a
taco-driven hookup scene with much better food.
4
Mozza, etc.
(Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times)
There used to be a guest book at Pizzeria Mozza in which
customers were invited to leave comments about their meals. Most of the
comments, as you might expect, were pretty positive, but there were more
than a few, usually written in Italian, complaining that the pizza
wasn't Italian at all. The fact that it was, with Pizzeria Bianco in
Phoenix, the best pizza in the United States, didn't seem to matter. It
didn't match up with any of the pizza that the visitors knew as
"authentic." And in a way, that's the magic of what some people call the
Mozzaplex, the complex of three restaurants and a takeout counter
overseen by Nancy Silverton with Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich. The
cooking, whether the puffy pies at Pizzeria Mozza, the perfected
northern Italian dishes at Osteria Mozza, the charcuterie and grilled
meats at Chi'Spacca or the focaccia at Mozza2Go, comes from a Italy of
the mind, as if the corner of Highland and Melrose were its own
denominazione di origine controllata. (Full disclosure: Silverton is a
family friend. Feel free to ignore any of this.)
3
Spago
(Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
The first responsibility of any great restaurant is to keep
you in the bubble, the soft-serve cocoon of illusion where you forget
the world exists for anything but your pleasure. And the newly
redesigned Spago, from the moment you toss your keys to the valet to the
moment you stagger back out again, gives good bubble. The thick prime
rib steak sings with the flavors of blood, age and char; the tagliatelle
with white truffles perfumes half the observable universe when its
glass dome is whisked away. Sommeliers beam at the brilliance of your
wine selection as if it weren't the sixth bottle of that Austrian
Riesling they'd sold that evening. Spago, the most famous restaurant in
the observable universe, might have coasted forever on its 1980s-era
fame, but Wolfgang Puck and his new chef, Tetsu Yahagi, reinvented it
for the second time, as a proto-modernist restaurant on the
international model: sea urchin served in its shell with a bit of rice
porridge and a splash of foamy yuzu kosho, sautéed black sea bass with
crisply fried scales, "marrow bones" stuffed with veal tartare, and cold
soba noodles with lobster. But you are still at Spago. All is right
with the world.
2
Urasawa
(Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)
You will pay more than a thousand dollars for dinner for two,
sometimes way more if you have expensive tastes in sake, and your
experience will be directed with a severity of which other sushi chefs
can only dream. The sashimi is presented on a kind of carved-ice stage
and glows as if it were in a Terrence Malick movie. You will eat beef
and chawan mushi and other things you may not associate with sushi
because this is less a sushi bar than a kind of kaiseki restaurant,
exquisitely seasonal, where you will experience translucent petals of
fugu, odd crabs and delicately scented Japanese leaves when they enter
their short seasons. The sushi comes only at the end, in a concentrated
spurt of shellfish and shiny things that leaves you gasping for breath.
Dine at Urasawa, and you will know what the weather is like in Osaka. It
has been years since Masa Takayama abandoned this high-toned Beverly
Hills sushi bar for the high life in New York, years since his protégé
Hiro Urasawa made the tiny, luxurious place his own, but you will still
find no better evocation of Japan in America. There is, one senses, an
enormous effort to maintain uninterrupted flow of bliss.
1
Providence
(Mariah Tauger / For The Times)
Why Providence? We are down with pop-ups, and with food
trucks and with chefs who shock the world with their inside-out
hard-boiled eggs. We like great bar snacks. We realize the difficulties
inherent in operating a Los Angeles restaurant as if it were in Seoul or
Wuxi, and we marvel at how persuasive the results can sometimes be. Our
lives have been enhanced by chefs who go it alone. But there is also
something to be said for the old-fashioned model, the great regimented
kitchens that function as a single, marvelous machine; a symphony
orchestra as opposed to a recital for trumpet, horn and bassoon. And
while Michael Cimarusti is a supremely creative chef, his restaurant has
many of the classic virtues: crisp, white tablecloths; a lovely but
understated dining room; and a staff intimately acquainted with his
cuisine. Cimarusti operates within the context of modernist seafood,
which means his raw materials come from all over the world, but his
sense of seasonality, his easy multicultural flavor palette and his
unfussy use of California produce plants his cooking solidly in L.A. He
is at home with modern techniques, with sous-vide, hydrocolloids and
mini-smokers, but unobtrusively, unless you start to think about the
wisps of smoked cherry with the eel. He doesn't make a big deal out of
it, but he serves only sustainable seafood. You will never see shark or
bluefin here, as much as his customers might desire them. And his
cooking is frankly delicious, especially as expressed in the relaxed
arc-form of a tasting menu.
