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These are the 101 best restaurants in Los Angeles

By Bill Addison

and Jenn Harris

Photography by

Myung J. Chun

Dec. 3, 2024 9:23 PM PT

For Subscribers

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There is no such thing as the quintessential Los Angeles restaurant.

That’s the soul-deep beauty of dining in our city. The street stand where burnt-orange birria juice drips onto your T-shirt from your third taco defines the L.A. experience as much as the holiest omakase counter, the scrappiest natural wine bar and the latest steakhouse-style burger sensation.

Some chefs arrange lettuces among summertime peaches so otherworldly in flavor they all but cross into science fiction. That describes our glory with salads — as do the stinging lime and crisped rice of nam khao tod, and the specific tang of dried mint and pomegranate molasses in fattoush made by careful, practiced hands.

It’s the collective greatness, the sum of our exquisite differences, that makes L.A. remarkable. Perhaps such a thought can comfort in dark times.

The 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles, now in its 12th year, is a guide to excellence but also the annual family photo:: The calendar flips and we don’t look quite the same as before.

Food columnist Jenn Harris joins me as co-author of this 2024 edition. After several cycles of tackling the 101 project solo, I’ve been traveling more to report on dining across California, so our two-person approach to surveying L.A.’s paragons made wonderful sense. We crisscrossed the region for months, checking in on stalwarts and swapping notes on potentially overlooked contenders. We agreed a lot and debated plenty (especially about pizza). We asked ourselves over and over: Which mix of restaurants tells the most compelling, complete and delicious story about Los Angeles? This is our answer.

The lineup includes 27 new entrants. They’re bright lights, braving fresh perspectives, in a time of economic upset for the restaurant industry that has witnessed dozens of closings over the last year.

Among the newcomers: the Silver Lake cafe rewriting the Persian menu playbook with intricate stews and a giant meatball; the downtown Arts District bistro where Japanese and French flavors meet in a bowl of spaghetti or a billowing pot pie; and a stall at the Mercado La Paloma where masa made from heirloom Mexican corns receives its due as an art form.

Additionally, Jenn and I welcome five honorees to the 101’s Hall of Fame list. These are icons with names you’ll likely recognize, run by chefs who’ve fundamentally shaped L.A. dining. We also point out seven of our favorite new places for drinking — mostly wine and spirits, but including a Studio City shop serving Middle Eastern-inspired coffee brewed in sand.

If our dining culture defies easy categorization, at its finest it also embodies creative possibility and connection at the table. Our lives, it seems to me, could use these virtues more than ever.

— Bill Addison, restaurant critic

Showing Places

Locol

Watts Soul Food $

By Jenn Harris

What is the purpose of a restaurant? Is it purely sustenance? Does it exist to serve the people of its neighborhood? These are questions I find myself pondering while digging into a piece of fried chicken at Keith Corbin and Daniel Patterson’s Watts restaurant. Patterson, who founded the Michelin-starred San Francisco restaurant Coi, and Roy Choi originally opened Locol in 2016 with a menu full of reimagined fast-food favorites and a mission to create employment opportunities for the surrounding community. It closed in 2018 but recently was reopened by Patterson and Corbin, a former Locol kitchen manager who is now the executive chef and co-owner with Patterson of Alta Adams. Locol operates under their nonprofit, Alta Community, and aims to employ Watts residents and trainees from a nearby youth center. This means that service is always youthful and friendly, and you’ll likely spy a patient manager training team members during your visit. The two chefs have commented that economic empowerment, not food, is the highest purpose of the business. But the new menu, which may not always reflect the day’s offerings (they may be out of a few things), still satisfies with smoked brisket and ribs, oxtails and fried chicken sandwiches. Corbin is making dishes inspired by the food he’s now known for at his California soul destination Alta Adams, but at a lower price point. The sentiment behind Locol can best be described in a quote featured above the front doorway: “We are here!” And that is a very good thing, since the foldies, the stuffed tortillas the original Locol was known for, are still griddled to toasty, cheesy perfection.

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Kang Kang Food Court

Alhambra Chinese $

By Jenn Harris

When I wait in line to order at the Kang Kang Food Court in Alhambra, I like to chat up the people around me. Usually there’s someone who has driven from Westwood, Long Beach or maybe even Palos Verdes, willing to make the trek for a plate of Kang Kang’s sheng jian bao. The small pan-fried bao, as you’ll find the dumplings listed on the menu, are a popular street food in Shanghai. Part yeasted bun, part potsticker and a juicy pork dumpling all in one, they’re notoriously difficult to make, which may be why there are only a handful of versions around Los Angeles. The bao at Kang Kang are the gold standard, with crusty bottoms, thin chewy tops, fluffy midsections and a generous filling of juicy pork and hot soup. Each person at the table is given their own styrofoam ramekin of vinegar for dipping. Co-owner Chin Yu Yeh posted a poem on the dining room wall that includes instructions on how best to eat the dumplings. First, make a small bite. Then “blow up” the heat by blowing on the dumpling. Slowly sip the juice from the small hole, then enjoy. I once saw an impatient diner take a big bite and send hot juice flying across the table. Not me, though. It definitely wasn’t me.

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Mario’s Butcher Shop

Newport Beach Butcher Shop Sandwich Shop $

By Jenn Harris

The feelings I harbor for the sandwiches at Mario’s Butcher Shop in Newport Beach border on obsession. I can’t help but feel a certain way about a place that blasts Anita Baker and the Whispers and piles thick slices of smoked bologna onto a soft roll with an obscene amount of yellow mustard and white onion. Chef-owner Mario Llamas approaches your paper-wrapped lunchtime sandwich with the same bravado you’d expect from someone who cares about stars from that tire company, smoking his own pastrami and curing the various meats for his Italian sub. He prepares Niman Ranch steaks to your liking on a wood-burning grill for the “special” steak sandwich. Dressed with chimichurri and served on good, crusty bread, it’s an homage to the time the chef spent cooking at an Argentine steakhouse in Guadalajara. Mario’s is the busiest place in the Plaza Newport shopping center, with many people stopping in for a sandwich and supplies for dinner. There’s a refrigerator full of Wagyu Bolognese, fresh pasta, smoked salmon candy dip and other grab-and-go items next to vacuum-sealed packages of beef cheek, spleen and marrow bone. And I appreciate any place that prioritizes Have’A corn chips over those neon orange triangles.

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Crossroads Kitchen

Beverly Grove Vegan $$

By Bill Addison

An enduring mystery of dining in Los Angeles: Why, with the state’s agricultural blessings, doesn’t the city have more vegan restaurants that focus on vegetables? Crossroads Kitchen certainly serves plenty of pasta dishes and Italian-leaning entrees that rely on meat substitutes. But crucially, chef-owner Tal Ronnen and his team also luxuriate in the seasons, arranging artful plates by which you can mark the calendar. Fried artichokes over saffron and lemon sabayon in the spring segue to summertime salads of tomatoes and stone fruit carved into half-moons and parsnips chiseled into bronze pegs with roasted grapes for fall. The restaurant has the in on next-level plant-based cheese, including Climax blue cheese, with just the right hit of funk, scattered over a riff on carpaccio made with pears. Crossroads now has locations in Calabasas and Las Vegas, but I’m forever loyal to the cozy, clubby Melrose Avenue original that’s long been an entertainment industry hangout.

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Surawon Tofu House

Koreatown Korean

By Bill Addison

Some restaurants we treasure for the mercurial talents and seasonality on display; others, like Surawon, we value for their comforting constancy in a precarious world. Sun Los Lee studied traditional tofu-making in Korea and found that using black soybeans imparts to the bean curd flavors hinting of sesame and peanut. Meals at her Koreatown stalwart center on soondubu jjigae, stews that arrive boiling like a lake of lava. Both classic white tofu and the black-soybean variation are made in-house, and the latter is my definite preference. It’s one of many customization options, including additions of kimchi, oysters, oxtail, vegetables, intestines and an assorted mix of pork or beef with seafood. Among levels of heat, which range from “plain” to “extra spicy,” I find “spicy” to release endorphins without feeling punishing. Lee’s tofu stew brings immense solace on rainy nights and tough days. Come with a group and, beyond individual soups, share the crisp-edged grilled mackerel, an even crunchier seafood-leek pancake and the bibimbap sizzling in a stone pot.

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Origin

Koreatown Korean Barbecue $$

By Jenn Harris

If you’re serious about Korean barbecue, you likely have a favorite restaurant for specific cuts of meat. Soowon Galbi is the place for 48-hour-marinated short ribs. If you’re looking for the sweet soy char of bulgolgi, head to Gwang Yang BBQ. At Origin Korean BBQ, the cuts sizzling on every grill are the garlic-seasoned prime short rib and shaved pork belly. The short rib is moderately marbled and tender, fragrant with garlic and the smoke from the grill. The pork curls up as soon as it hits the heat, the thinness ensuring that each piece has just the right amount of fat with crispy edges. Each of the barbecue sets comes with a vat of brisket soybean paste stew crowded with bricks of tofu and ramen noodles. It’s reason enough to visit. Origin is part of the On6thAvenue group, which also runs Quarters BBQ across the Chapman Plaza. Perhaps it’s the newness of Origin that fills the dining room with a certain energy, attracting parties of mostly 20-somethings unbothered by the plumes of smoke from the tabletop grills and the decibel level. With soju and Terra beer flowing, there’s a celebration at every table.

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Nok's Kitchen

Westminster Laotian $$

By Jenn Harris

Nokmaniphone Sayavong’s Laotian-style grilled sausages are brute links of pork with a pronounced texture, intense spice and sour zing. Each bite is its own adventure. One piece may surprise with a quarter clove of garlic while another might be embedded with a whole piece of diced scallion. The bitter, floral sharpness of lemongrass is ever-present. The former restaurant server started selling sausages during the pandemic and opened her small restaurant in a Westminster strip mall in 2022. She coarsely grinds pork butt and aromatics for the sausages, building on recipes her mother taught her when she was a child in Laos. Dishes spark with acid and heat, whether it be the fish sauce and Thai chiles in the larb rib-eye or the lime-and-chile-intensive dipping sauce that accompanies the skewers or bits of fried pork belly marinated in coconut milk and ginger. She makes a version of the crispy rice salad you can find at many Thai restaurants, served with nuggets of cured sour pork and peanuts. Only Sayavong’s rice is arranged in crunchy clumps that are soft in the middle and with a faint coconut flavor. It encourages an even more zealous appreciation for carbohydrate-intensive salads.

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Bistro Na's

Temple City Chinese $$$

By Jenn Harris

Your meal at Bistro Na’s is meant to be regal, or as close to regal as one can come in a Temple City strip mall. This is food fit for an emperor, with a menu bound like an ancient text and dishes inspired by Chinese imperial kitchens. There are platters of pork feet jelly, golden soup teeming with the jewels of the sea. Shrimp are fried and lacquered with a sticky glaze made from sweet hawthorn and dried chiles. The Peking duck requires a table reservation and preordering one week in advance. Making the duck is a three-day process that involves marinating, scalding the skin and hanging and drying the bird multiple times before it’s roasted. The finished duck is presented whole to the table, impossibly plump with shiny skin the color of warm honey. Each crisp square of skin seems to shatter, then melt on the tongue. There are gossamer chun bing for wraps and a third course of soup or deep-fried bones. I prefer the soup, a calming respite between bites of lavish skin, shrimp and the rest of your royal feast.

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Las Segovias

South Gate Nicaraguan $

By Jenn Harris

Brick-sized Nicaraguan tamales, known as nacatamal, are superior to just about every other steamed leaf- or husk-wrapped tamale. I’m confident that you’ll reach the same conclusion with your first bite of nacatamal at Las Segovias in Huntington Park. Green olives and raisins peek out from the masa filled with bone-in pork ribs or chops. Once you dig a little deeper into the center, there’s a lump of rice, potato and slivers of tomato. All the components, including the pork bones, take on a decadent, custardy texture and the bittersweet taste of sour orange. The quesillo is served in a plastic bag, similar to the way it’s sometimes packaged on the streets of Nicaragua. The corn tortilla is thick and almost cake-like, blistered and folded around a blob of soft, mild white cheese and crema that oozes out the back. There are bowls of indio viejo, with strands of shredded beef suspended in a thick, savory gravy, and big platters of grilled meats alongside mounds of gallo pinto and triangles of fried cheese. Everything is better with a spoonful or three of the house condiment, diced onions soaked in a vinegar chile sauce that tastes a lot like Tabasco. After you eat, you can browse the sandals, clothing and snacks in a small marketplace at the rear of the dining room. The refresco of choice is cacao, a tall glass of milk flooded with crushed, whole cacao beans that drinks like a slightly grainy chocolate milk. “It’s very nice,” my server says, handing me a Big Gulp-sized cup with a straw. Yes, it really is.

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Tokyo Fried Chicken

Downtown L.A. Fried Chicken $

By Jenn Harris

For years, Tokyo Fried Chicken Co. was a tiny operation in a strip mall in Monterey Park. Visits required advance coordination with friends and a volunteer to arrive an hour early to get on the waitlist. I experienced a pinch-me moment last year when owners Kouji and Elaine Yamanashi closed the original location and opened a restaurant in downtown Los Angeles with counter service and ample seating. Now, you walk up to the counter and trays of chicken appear in less than 10 minutes. Kouji’s chicken is never changing: giant pieces of bone-in karaage battered and fried like one might find all over the American South. Scabrous and golden, the batter cracks to release the flavors of soy, garlic and ginger emerging in a flood of hot juice from the chicken. Thighs, drumsticks and wings are served in sets with rice polished with chicken fat, pickles, a side and dipping sauce. I favor the shredded cabbage salad, craving the cool freshness of the cabbage and the ginger tang of the dressing. Chicken is always the priority, but lately I’ve been starting lunch with an order of potato chips and onion dip and the chicken skins dusted with chile.

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Lasita

Chinatown Filipino $$$

By Bill Addison

The Filipino restaurant and natural wine bar in Chinatown’s Far East Plaza run by Chase Valencia, his wife, Steff Barros Valencia, and chef Nico de Leon remains centered on two dishes. Inasal, a chicken specialty of the western Visayan Islands in the central Philippines, soaks up a pungent cocktail of lemongrass, ginger, garlic and calamansi juice before being grilled. Pork belly lechon is rolled like porchetta and filled with similar herbs and spices. Lasita bills itself as a rotisserie, though in its fourth year that label doesn’t convey the breadth of the cooking. Grilled branzino stuffed with lemongrass and ginger or pork chop with a spicy-sweet barbecue glaze may be on the menu one week; soon they’re replaced by snappy grilled shrimp over sweet corn puree and whole dorade in a summery sweet-and-sour plum sauce. Vegans can feast on pancit dishes threaded with vegetables and a sizzling mushroom variation on the chopped pork dish sisig. Chase freely gives advice on wines: He looks for ones that he thinks of as “cutters” — high-acid whites and meant-to-be-served-chilled reds that especially slice through the salty, garlicky density of the meats.

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LOS ANGELES, CA - November 1, 2024: Udon Mussels with creme fraiche, garlic and bacon. (Ron De Angelis / For The Times)

n/soto

Mid-City Japanese $$$

By Bill Addison

While securing reservations at Niki Nakayama and Carole Iida-Nakayama’s kaiseki showcase n/naka remains one of the toughest feats in the known universe, their Mid-City izakaya led by head chef Yoji Tajima slips far more quietly under the radar. I keep a running list of dishes by which to persuade people of n/soto’s many merits. Ease in with a plate of crudités alongside mochi flatbread (crisp but also enticingly elastic) and a smoky eggplant dip that calls to mind Persian kashke bademjan. A warm, gingery bowl of just-set tofu settles the senses. In the summer, look for cooling creations like King crab meat and uni dolloped with avocado dressing in an edible cup made of rice flour. Chillier nights call for mussels tangled in garlicky udon with crème fraîche and bacon. Skip the sushi for a donabe full of impeccably steamed rice and changing options such as autumnal mushrooms or soft-boiled egg and chicken thigh. In the spirit of izakaya, the beverage program is full of smart options that the staff can discuss in depth. Lead bartender Reed Windle, in particular, devises intricate cocktails that marry the Japanese-California ethos, driven by fruits and spices: Check out his Time Goes So Fast, which whirls together rye, anise hyssop, herbal Benedictine, aged sake and sake vermouth.

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ARTESIA, CA - OCTOBER 27, 2024: Maharaja Thali meal set with many components at Bhooke in Artesia (Ron De Angelis / For The Times)

Bhookhe

Artesia Indian $$

By Bill Addison

The nearly 100-item menu at Bhookhe, as with many other Indian restaurants along Pioneer Boulevard in Artesia, veers through some of the subcontinent’s most popular categories: pan-regional snacks; curries, including a smattering of North Indian classics like palak paneer; and Indian Chinese favorites such as tangy-sweet gobi Manchurian. Zero in on the vegetarian maharaja thali, though, as an immersion into the flavors of Rajasthan, where chef Pooja Dwivedi and her co-owner husband, Anshul, were raised. Where to start, among the tray’s nearly two dozen components? Point your spoon toward gatte ki sabji, soft squares of chickpea dumplings submerged in a yogurt sauce so finely spiced you’ll drink it like a lassi. Then graze through half a dozen small breads made from different flours (cornmeal and pearl millet among them), ideal for dunking in warm ghee or soupy dal. Garlicky chutney, tense with kachri, a tiny, wild melon, and green chile pickle ignite forkfuls of rice. The kitchen frequently changes up dishes on the maharaja thali, particularly seasonal vegetables, to pique the interest of return customers. There are a lot of us.

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Hakata Izakaya Hero

West Los Angeles Japanese $$

By Bill Addison

Along a stretch of Westwood otherwise rich in Persian restaurants and groceries, it can be easy to miss the black-painted façade of Hiroki Chiya’s five-year-old izakaya. Open the door to find its tiny room brimming nightly with a multigenerational crowd. This is an establishment that, rather than leaning into a Japanese California interpretation of izakaya, hews more closely to the modern concept of the genre in Japan: casual and gently rowdy, a place to gather after work for eating and drinking in groups. As Chiya’s menu explains in words and illustrations, his pub’s name refers to the Hakata central district in Fukuoka, the sixth-largest city in Japan, built on the northern shore of Kyushu island. Its repertoire includes tonkotsu ramen, the broth of pork bones simmered for hours until the stock basically transforms into meat milk. Chiya often fashions an extra-intense version made from pork head and knee simmered for over 24 hours, which appears frequently on his handwritten list of specials. Some other favorites: teba gyoza (excellent fried chicken wings stuffed with minced chicken); cool wilted cabbage scented with yuzu; tempura such as kibinago (a small, silvery fish in the herring family that runs in the springtime); and Fukuoka-style pork belly skewers cradled in lettuce with tomato and soft herbs. Ask one of the composed, fast-moving servers about seasonal sake selections, though know that you can also sip Chateau Montelena Chardonnay with your tempura and ramen.

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Mackerel and yellowtail sashimi in tomato water

Mr. T

Hollywood Restaurant and lounge

By Jenn Harris

Angelenos are fickle creatures. Restaurants from around the world have attempted moves here, only to find that we’re unfazed by their popularity elsewhere. Mr. T, the two-year-old location of the Paris bistro with the same name, has carved a niche for itself in the middle of the buzzy Sycamore District. At the bottom of the glass tower that houses Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, smartly dressed patrons flood the patio during breakfast and lunch. An impressive case boasts François Daubinet’s pastries. You can taste the butter in his croissants, and they shatter on contact. A few of the Paris restaurant’s dishes make appearances for dinner, like the mac and cheese with mimolette flambé set aflame at the table, but chef Alisa Vannah, who previously cooked at République, has made the restaurant her own. Vannah’s cooking is a quiet luxury, demure but powerful in its intention and flavors. Mackerel and yellowtail are dressed in a tomato water seasoned like dashi, with bonito, white soy and a shiver of yuzu. Lumpia are plump with chicken and shrimp. Treat Daubinet’s desserts as mandatory caps to the evening. His custard is nearly deliquescent, flooded with the sharp tang of passion fruit. Chocolate mousse is rich and fleeting, impossibly smooth before it vanishes on the tongue.

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Stir Crazy

Hollywood Wine Bars $$

By Bill Addison

The conception of a successful small restaurant — the physical and psychological dimensions, how the experience makes diners feel contained and secure rather than cramped and claustrophobic — is a specific art. Macklin Casnoff, Mackenzie Hoffman and Harley Wertheimer poured their tastes and hospitality knowhow into an enveloping 500 square feet along Melrose Avenue that for roughly 30 years housed a coffeehouse of the same name. The result: minimalist space, maximum impact. A warming renovation that serves form and function. A casual, Euro-Californian menu. An incredible wine program led by Hoffman. The kitchen team, under Caroline Leff, keeps a few perennial dishes in rotation. Among them is a celery salad with walnuts, aged Gouda and raisins that nicely pings between sweet and savory, soft and crunchy. As a main course, a link of mildly spiced German-style sausage, sourced from Mattern’s Sausage & Deli in Orange County, is presented with a mound of Japanese-style potato salad creamy from Kewpie mayo and a healthy dollop of mustard. Both dishes are forthrightly delicious, and the kind of untaxing combinations I could eat once a week, alongside a glass of Austrian Zweigelt that pitches cherry right down the middle. That’s precisely the aim.

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Lalibela

Little Ethiopia Ethiopian $$

By Bill Addison

Tenagne Belachew’s quiet haven is one of the places I most consistently bring out-of-towners for lunch. We build our meal around the 11-dish “veggie utopia,” uplifting in its chromatics of salads, simmered vegetables and thick lentil purees spiced to profound, molecular levels. Sometimes I veer to bozena shiro, a bubbling chickpea stew laced with a bit of minced meat, or yebeg alicha wot, a mild and creamy lamb sauté. Always, though, I return to the “special kitfo,” beef tartare glossed in butter infused with mitmita (a rounded, cardamom-forward spice blend) and matched with fluffy curds of fresh cheese and pureed collards. Little Ethiopia, in general, is a treasure. Meals by Genet, reopened in early 2024 for weekend dinner hours, has ascended to the 101 Hall of Fame. I sometimes can’t decide between the dulet (raw minced beef liver, tripe and other cuts in spiced butter) at Messob; a vegetarian platter followed by a cup of fortifying, freshly roasted coffee at Rahel Ethiopian Vegan Cuisine; or turmeric-stained alicha tibs at Awash just technically outside the neighborhood. Most often, I return to Lalibela.

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Post & Beam

Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw Californian Southern $$

By Jenn Harris

I think of Post & Beam as one of the beating hearts of the city, a sort of central hub where the biscuits and the shrimp and grits possess a gravitational pull that directs people straight to the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw mall. It’s been this way since Brad Johnson opened the restaurant in 2011, then handed the keys over to John and Roni Cleveland in 2019. The food celebrates the flavors and spirit of Southern cooking, where black-eyed peas share real estate on the table with catfish rubbed with jerk spice over a mound of dirty rice. The shrimp and grits, a dish most emblematic of Lowcountry cuisine, is long-cooked into something luxurious. The coarsely ground corn transforms into a smooth, creamy porridge studded with tiny squares of sweet red peppers. The way I feel about the braised oxtail grilled cheese borders on obsession. Brunch here is cheery. Parties merge and mingle over bottomless mimosas and plates of pecan pie French toast. It’s worth noting that the best seats in the house are at the bar, opposite the pizza oven, where you can watch trays of biscuits rise and turn a pale golden. These are the biscuits against which I judge all others, with flaky layers you can peel away and a tender crumb. With two to an order, you can eat one for brunch and one on the drive home.

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Tacos La Carreta

Whittier Mexican $

By Bill Addison

Late in 2020, José Manuel Morales Bernal began serving tacos from a food truck on the northern fringes of Long Beach. They mirrored the style his father had learned growing up in a town called El Verde in Mexico’s Sinaloa state. The quick success his son found led to the opening of a taqueria, its menu nearly identical, in a Whittier strip mall in early 2023. The foremost Sinaloan glory: a chorreada, which begins by crisping a corn tortilla on the comal and sprinkling on Monterey Jack and, crucially, asiento, a rendered paste made from the remnants of frying chicharrones. Its taste crisscrosses the nutty, caramelized purity of homemade ghee with the explicit richness of pork. Morales makes three meats: carne asada, adobada and tripa. Mixing the asada or adobada with tripe lands the flavors in a sweet-spot juncture of smoke, seasoning and funk. Consider the same combination when ordering the Sinaloan pellizcada, a medium-large round of masa, thicker than the average tortilla but thinner than a sope. Morales drives to Tijuana weekly to pick up pellizcadas made by a vendor in Mazatlán. The number he needs to order, he told me recently, keeps growing and growing.

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Sincerely Syria

Sherman Oaks Syrian $

By Bill Addison

Adham Kamal, raised in As-Suwayda (sometimes also spelled Sweida) in southwestern Syria, brings to Los Angeles the surprisingly delicate, deep-down-marinated shawarma he learned to make as a teenager. He now operates in four locations: Sherman Oaks, Pasadena, Anaheim and the first local stand he ran near the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, then called Hollywood Shawarma. The menu at his operations comes down to two choices: spiced lamb and beef, referred to as lahme (meat) in Arabic, or lemony chicken, called djej. Each has a traditional sauce: tahini-based tarator for lahme, toum (whipped garlic paste) for djej. The hardest decisions concern size and form. There are three options: a handheld stuffed pita or 12- and 24-inch versions, made using flour tortillas, that come with fries. Think small is my advice, and ask for the wrap to be rolled using only one round side of a pita. It’s about proportions. A shawarma wrap is not a burrito. It is meant to be compact and intense. A crowning touch: Kamal and his staff finish them on the griddle, searing every angle until they’re browned and crackling.

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El Bacano

North Hollywood Dominican $

By Bill Addison

Siblings Deany Santana and Jonathan Santana worked together years ago in their family-run Dominican restaurant in Anchorage; in summer 2023 they reunited to serve their mother’s and grandmother’s recipes from a 16-seat storefront in a North Hollywood strip mall. They unlock their doors at noon but plate a quintessential Dominican breakfast that greatly comforts at any time of day: mangú (mashed plantains) with los tres golpes, or “the three hits” — two fried eggs, slices of griddled salami and thin rectangles of queso frito. A staffer will ask if you prefer the plantains green or ripe, and my answer is the one the Santanas recommend: a smooth yet textured mixture of the two. Deany often can be viewed through the kitchen window tending pots of various meats infused with lime juice, onions, garlic, oregano and other spices. I’m especially partial to Santana’s chicken, Jonathan’s renaming of the classic Dominican pollo guisado. The bird is richly browned and simmered with thinly sliced peppers in a bit of liquid that forms a brothy, potent gravy. Start with an empanada, its half-moon shape shattering into flakes to unleash a lava flow of yellow cheese and diced salami.

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Sobar

Culver City Japanese $$

By Jenn Harris

At Sobar, Masato Midorikawa’s Culver City restaurant, your bamboo sieve of noodles comes with a set of instructions. First, taste the noodles bare. Next, sprinkle some yuzu salt onto one bite. Then try matcha salt on another. Only then should you dip your noodles in the provided bowl of cold or hot broth. This is the way to fully appreciate ju-wari, a style of soba made from only buckwheat flour and water. Each morning, Midorikawa mixes the flour and water, then uses a machine he developed with a partner in Japan to make every tray of noodles to order. The earthy flavors are deeper and more intense than soba made with the addition of wheat flour, and the speckled gray noodles are denser and more brittle. The yuzu salt heightens the nuttiness of the buckwheat, while the matcha salt is more subtle and grassy. There’s a small menu of appetizers and sashimi to help round out the meal. The kakiage, served as a tangled cylinder of fried onions and shrimp, is the preferred soba sidekick, but there’s karaage, agedashi tofu and assorted Japanese pickles too.

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Hu Tieu De Nhat

Garden Grove Vietnamese $$

By Bill Addison

Orange County’s Little Saigon — overlapping Westminster and Garden Grove, and home to one of the largest Vietnamese populations in the United States — has enough culinary density for its own edition of 101 Best Restaurants. Previous recommendations in this guide have included Brodard Chateau, with its famous nem nuong wraps and its sweeping menu; Pho 79, where oxtail meat is a coveted addition to the spiced broth; and Ngu Binh, where Mai Tran and her family present dishes from Thua Thien Hue, a province in central Vietnam famous for its royal cuisine, including bánh ít kep bánh ram (two-tiered dumplings of glutinous rice dough filled with shrimp and pork and then set on discs of lacy fried dough).

Another for the short list: Hu Tieu De Nhat, a nine-table storefront in Garden Grove’s Koreatown community. The specialty is hu tieu, a noodle soup vital to Saigon’s street-food culture that distills Chinese, Vietnamese and Cambodian influences. Concentrate on the “Nam Vang” section of the menu, choosing from among three noodles: egg, rice or “glass” made from potato starch. Order them in combinations to accentuate the bouncy, squiggly contrasts. Bowls arrive arrayed with shrimp, pork belly, ground pork, fishcake and quail eggs. “Soup or dry?” the server asks. If there are two of you, try one of each. The broth, flavored with pork bones and dried shrimp, comes on the side for the dry version: You might add it a little bit at a time, along with crucial condiments like pickled garlic and a chile oil reminiscent of XO sauce. It might take a minute to tune your seasonings, but when your chopsticks finally plunge into your hu tieu, the tastes and textures are symphonic.

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Camphor

Downtown L.A. French $$$

By Bill Addison

When is a bistro also not a bistro? When chef Max Boonthanakit turns soupe à l’oignon inside out, setting down toast covered with gently broiled Comté, Gruyère and caramelized onion mousse in a moat of duck broth. When a tableside pan that in traditional settings might hold boeuf Bourguignon instead arrives full of roasted maitake and shimeji mushrooms over basmati rice, all soused on Madeira. When roasted chicken is reconstructed into circles with preternatural textures closer to pâté, and beef tartare arrives glossed in lemon aioli, with lightly battered basil or mint leaves on the side as chips, Camphor, by design, resists fitting neatly into any category. Nearly every surface in the dining room has been painted white; walls and ceilings and tabletops take on a pearlier glow as daylight dims. The gracious staff helps decipher the ambiguously worded menu. It’s how you find understated knockouts like lentils simmered in a smoky broth made with lamb and spices — a dish introduced by Boonthanakit’s former co-chef Lijo George, who departed the restaurant this year. The luxury burger is just that, dripping in smoked Gouda and tomato remoulade and more caramelized onions. At the restaurant’s elegant bar, chase its excesses with a martini-adjacent cocktail splashed with absinthe and celery bitters.

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Monk's chirashi-sushi from Yess Aquatic restaurant

Yess Restaurant

Downtown L.A. Japanese $$$

By Jenn Harris

The dining room at Yess is a remarkably serene space, pure pale wood and smooth concrete, with the scents and sounds of a five-star spa. Junya Yamasaki’s cooking is equally subtle but purposeful, his interpretation of Japanese food ambitiously leaning into the plurality of Southern California with sustainable seafood in mind. A cold block of tofu is doused in a salsa macha infused with red miso, black vinegar and mirin. During a mid-autumn meal, he served squares of sweet Weiser Farm Bonny melon with slivers of lemon drop chile that popped with citrus-y heat. It was a dish so understated yet profound that it was the most talked-about plate on my table, maybe only second to the spiny lobster sandwich that appears with a whole tail and a knife pierced through the middle of the bun. Yamasaki treats the tail like katsu and makes a lobster salad out of the leg meat. Both are layered onto a buttery roll and doused with a bisque made from the head of the crustacean. Sous chef Giles Clark is opening an all-day cafe and wine bar next door, adding some casual daytime vibes to the overall Yess operation. With Benedictine bacon sandwiches and perfect fruit tarts, it’s quirky, but with the same careful precision acting as the throughline between the sister restaurants.

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Villa’s Tacos

Highland Park Mexican $

By Bill Addison

No two queso tacos ever look exactly alike emerging from the griddles at Villa’s Tacos. Sometimes the blue corn tortillas fuse with cheese to form the jagged rhombus shapes of continents. On others the cheese runs like thinned crêpe batter that seizes into lacy edges. But at either location — the always-busy taqueria in Highland Park or the popular counter in Grand Central Market — the result is salty-crisp deliciousness. Then taqueros pile on cotija, onion, squiggles of crema and guacamole. Among meats, I will always favor the hashed chicken thigh meat bathed in mesquite smoke. For second and third tacos, look to fragrant chopped asada, nubbly chorizo or a nicely piquant vegan option of half-pureed black beans scattered with cactus salad. “Tacos estilo Los Angeles” is Victor Villa’s motto for his more-is-more taco philosophy. Like the city he invokes, the closer you look, the more stories you find. Among a half-dozen or so salsas, for example, look for a ruddy mulch labeled “jiquilpan.” It’s based on a recipe dense with smoked chiles that Villa’s father was taught in Michoacán.

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Cassia

Santa Monica Vietnamese French $$$

By Jenn Harris

I’ve happily followed the breadcrumbs of Bryant Ng’s career, from his time making pizzas with Nancy Silverton at Pizzeria Mozza to the now-shuttered Spice Table in downtown L.A., where he served fried soft-shell crabs with salted egg and smoldering beef rendang. There are echoes of his former kitchens woven into the menu at Cassia, in the flatbread that accompanies the chickpea curry, spotted with golden bubbles, chewy and crisp like both pizza crust and naan; in the Hainanese chicken leg served over rice kernels plump and slick with duck fat. Ng continues to merge the idea of a grand French brasserie with his own Chinese-Singaporean narrative. And you’ll spot plenty of nods to the decades his family spent cooking Chinese American food in Los Angeles, as well as wife and partner Kim Luu-Ng’s Vietnamese heritage. Sunbathing prawns are inspired by the ones a friend made in Vietnam — spicy, a little sweet and deeply savory with chicken powder. Ng dresses dan dan noodles in a tahini-leek sauce hot with roasted chile oil. Fried calamari rings are buried in cereal crumbs, mirroring the cereal prawns you’ll find all over Singapore. At Cassia, which in 2019 won The Times’ Gold Award, Ng has perfected his syncretic style of cooking, and every plate feels immensely personal.

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Found Oyster

East Hollywood Seafood Restaurant

By Jenn Harris

Seafood-centric restaurants with raw bars aren’t quite the anomaly they once were in Los Angeles, but a meal at Ari Kolender’s petite Found Oyster remains unparalleled. Opened just before the pandemic, it’s a narrow slice of New England in East Hollywood, next to a vegan grocery store and just down the street from the Church of Scientology’s big blue building. Parking is rarely easy, and it’s likely there will be a wait for a seat, but a chilled glass of wine helps pass the time and you’ll be handsomely rewarded for your efforts. The seafood platters are grand and inviting, with a lower tier of oysters fanned out on crushed ice with a plate of the day’s crudo in the center. The top layer is crowded with crab cocktail, Ritz crackers and peel-and-eat prawns rubbed with enough spices to stain your fingers red. I make dining companions order their own scallop tostada, greedy for my own bubbly fried shell covered in sweet scallop, tart yuzu and fragrant basil. The lobster bisque roll is as advertised, brimming with chunks of lobster. And I don’t think I’ve ever skipped the wedge salad. But I always make room for a few of the specials scribbled on the chalkboard out front. Fried spot prawn heads with togarashi? A Caesar schnitzel sandwich? Grilled salmon collar with espelette butter? Yes, please.

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Macheen

Boyle Heights Mexican $

By Jenn Harris

Breakfast burrito culture in Los Angeles is as limitless as tacos. Do you want yours bursting at the seams and crusted with cheese? With equal parts pastrami and eggs? There are thousands of places to indulge your particular craving for egg and cheese in a tortilla. The place contributing the loudest to the breakfast burrito conversation may be Macheen, siblings Ana and Jonathan Perez’s daytime restaurant inside Milpa Grille in Boyle Heights. The soft-scrambled eggs and Swiss cheese form a creamy, cheesy base for chile-dusted tater tots and brisket, longaniza, fried chicken, mushroom al pastor or Brussels sprouts. The flour tortillas are griddled until just charred but never really toasted, still stretchy and chewy. It was Jonathan’s tacos that first drew me to his roaming taqueria nearly a decade ago. The menu is more streamlined now, with blue corn tortillas you can fill with the same crispy pork belly, birria and fried chicken at lunch. I would jump at the chance to taste his taco de pollo en mole blanco again but appreciate the groove he’s settled into since becoming a permanent location in 2023. Knowing there is a breakfast burrito waiting for me, whenever I want one, is a luxury.

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Borit Gogae

Koreatown Korean Barbecue $$

By Bill Addison

“Set menu with barley rice,” reads the modest description for the centerpiece meal at this two-year-old Koreatown breakout hit. For $30 per person, the staff delivers a near-overwhelming deluge of dishes to the table. Soups, mild pumpkin porridge, salad with bouncy cubes of acorn jelly and a few crunchy mung bean pancakes precede a spread of banchan-style seasoned vegetables (among them tea leaf, spinach, various mushrooms and an evolving selection of kimchi) arrayed on a woven basket. Bowls of barley rice also arrive, in which you assemble your lunch or dinner from the many elements, similarly to bibimbap, finishing with sesame oil and gochujang to taste. This is one of the most nourishing dining experiences in Los Angeles, and for gilding you can order extra meat options such as deeply savory grilled short rib patties. “Borit gogae” translates as “barley hump” and refers to a time of food scarcity in mid-20th century Korea. Owners Bu Gweon Ju and Sung Hee Jung, who are siblings, have reclaimed the phrase as a celebration of abundance, and the local community keeps the dining room full throughout the day.

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My 2 Cents

Mid-Wilshire Soul Food Californian $$

By Jenn Harris

When I think of the dishes integral to this city’s taco identity, Alisa Reynolds’ oxtail tacos at her California soul restaurant are some of the first that come to mind. The velvety strands of oxtail are braised for six hours until the meat is slack, succulent and nearly spreadable. She places a heap in a warm corn tortilla with roasted tomatoes and showers the taco with wisps of curly kale and slivers of raw red onion. The meat juices run wild and mix with a drizzle of whiskey reduction, the two creating a heady dressing for the taco, and anything else on your table. Regardless of how you feel about meat pressed into a loaf (lifelong stan here), her turkey meatloaf burger is ingenious. She coats the slab in panko, then fries it until a crisp crust forms. Nestled between two slices of Texas toast with fresh shaved apple, it’s one of Los Angeles’ great sandwiches. Reynolds’ sister Theresa Fountain, with whom she opened the restaurant in 2013, is responsible for all the desserts. I typically find myself with little room for something sweet after lunch, but I never leave without a slice of her vegan sweet potato pound cake. Reynolds has called My 2 Cents a gift to the city. I couldn’t agree more.

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Bar Chelou

Pasadena French $$

By Bill Addison

Chelou is a French word that various translation apps interpret as “weird,” “strange,” “unexpected” or “dodgy.” You get the idea. One might occasionally apply such an adjective to Douglas Rankin’s modernist plates. In his hands a pile of sinewy lamb ribs, for example, arrives dotted with buckwheat groats and tiny edible flowers, taking the form of a curious (and also delicious) floral arrangement. But mostly I’d just say the man excels at flavor combinations. Dill and bottarga blast awake the flavors in a brothy bowl of shelling beans. Shredded carrots anchor a salad pooled in coconut-ginger dressing with lime leaf and scattered Thai basil … but then Rankin piles on a maniacal hill of potato sticks. A signature rainbow trout entree is presented sauced in twinned nouvelle cuisine squiggles of garlic-chive oil and pil pil (traditionally made by blending salt cod, garlic and olive oil) and served over rice pilaf caramelized in corn juice to achieve a ragged sort of crispness. Housed in the same 99-year-old Spanish Colonial Revival complex as the Pasadena Playhouse, the restaurant inhabits its name with a central oval bar and a louche, dimly lit vibe to the open dining room. Cocktails laced with absinthe or yellow Chartreuse feel wholly appropriate.

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Pizzeria Bianco

Downtown L.A. Pizza $$

By Jenn Harris

The most compelling plate of produce in Los Angeles may be the antipasto platter at the downtown L.A. outpost of Chris Bianco’s Phoenix pizzeria. The chef has a hands-off approach when it comes to the produce in Southern California. “You just need to not screw it up,” he says. A recent platter showed off a bounty of baby squash halved and caramelized in the oven until the bitter skins turned sweet; blistered Romano beans from Harry’s Berries; Hypha Farms king trumpet mushrooms as meaty and tender as a steak; and garlic-strewn chunks of Weiser Family Farms potatoes cooked until the texture resembled custard. It’s a mandatory precursor to the pizza that inevitably follows. Bianco changed the way America thinks about pizza when he started Pizzeria Bianco in 1988 out of a grocery store in Phoenix. He applies that same don’t-screw-it-up approach to pizza, with a golden, nutty crust that cracks when you fold it but still has a nice chew. The Rosa is the one I can’t seem to quit. The crust gets a sprinkling of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, finely shaved ribbons of red onion, fresh rosemary and crushed, roasted pistachios. It just works.

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Ladyhawk

West Hollywood Mediterranean $$

By Bill Addison

The mezze platter at Charbel Hayek’s debut restaurant at the Kimpton La Peer Hotel in West Hollywood is the swiftest, most celebratory introduction to the restaurant’s elegant Lebanese cooking. Give the black-lacquered tray a spin, turntable-style, to reach hummus in two variations; baba ghanouj jeweled with pomegranate seeds; muhammara, ruddy with roasted red pepper and walnuts; labneh, its creaminess offset with minced makdous (pickled eggplant); falafel, dark as rich soil on the outside, spring green with herbs on the inside; and cubes of fried potatoes radiating garlicky heat. The feast, which includes hot-from-the-oven Arabic bread and costs $130, presumably is designed for groups to kick off their meal, but I’ve seen couples split it as dinner, with plenty of leftovers for the next day’s lunch. It’s a viable strategy, to which I might only add a clever roast chicken entree. Whipped toum (garlic sauce) and tiny pickles flank the bird. They’re classic flavors in a Lebanese chicken shawarma, deconstructed here for universal appeal — an implied directive in a hotel restaurant — while still shouting out Hayek’s home country.

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Pine & Crane

Downtown L.A. Taiwanese $$

By Bill Addison

Vivian Ku’s three Taiwanese restaurants — the original Pine & Crane in Silver Lake, its second location in downtown L.A. and her slightly more casual spinoff Joy in Highland Park — can be, and usually are, mobbed at any given time of day. Each has a slightly different fast-casual menu that quells cravings for shrimp wontons with satisfying snap, dan dan noodles plunged in peanut-sesame sauce and comforts like minced pork over rice gently revved with soy-braised egg and daikon pickles. Her connection to the Taiwanese dining culture in the San Gabriel Valley, where she gathered with relatives growing up, animates the spirit of her cooking. She credits her penchant for light, clean flavors to her grandmother, who immigrated to Taiwan from China in 1949 before the family moved to America. The DTLA outpost holds special appeal because it also serves riffs on Taipei-style breakfast dishes every morning, including crunchy-soft fan tuan wrapped tightly with soy egg and pork floss, savory “thousand-layer” pancake wraps that make great on-the-go meals and dan bing (rolled egg crepe crunching with corn kernels and shaved cabbage). An extensive beverage program centered around but not limited to Taiwanese whiskies draws me back downtown in the evenings.

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Barsha

Hermosa Beach Tunisian Mediterranean

By Jenn Harris

I had my first brik a decade ago, at a long-shuttered restaurant in downtown L.A. appropriately named the Briks, a melting pot of Middle Eastern and Spanish influences with a focus on the phyllo-wrapped pastry ubiquitous across Tunisia. The savory fillings vary, but the exterior should be fried and golden, and you’ll typically find an egg in the center. At Barsha, chef Lenora Marouani’s brik is closer to a triangular egg roll, with a bubbly wonton wrapper shell that encases soft potato, chopped tuna and capers. The filling is bunched into the center, with long, crisp shards of pastry at all three corners. To dip, there’s a smoky harissa aioli smeared on half the plate. It’s the preferred way to begin a meal at Marouani and husband Adnen’s Hermosa Beach restaurant. Inspired by Adnen’s Tunisian roots, the menu encompasses chickpea stew, shakshuka and turmeric-stained chicken mosli. The couscous that accompanies the lamb meatballs is about triple the size of the Moroccan variety, submerged in a savory tomato stew and served with a spoonful of cool labneh. A true neighborhood staple as well as a citywide destination, it’s just the sort of place where I’d be lucky to be a regular.

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Damian

Downtown L.A. Mexican $$$

By Bill Addison

An oval huarache piled with fried artichokes and spread with potato puree. Glossy costillas enmoladas served with pickles and wraps inspired by Korean bo ssam. Salmon tostadas spread with Sungold tomato sauce and smoky, glassy chicatana ants (a luxury ingredient in Oaxaca and other regions of Mexico). Damian remains the rare Los Angeles bridge linking Mexico City’s alta cocina momentum with Southern California’s culture and bounty. I was sad to see the restaurant discontinue brunch this year; it was one of L.A.’s great weekend meals that admittedly never quite found a steady audience. Its disappearance reminds me to return more often for dinner — for the incredible cooking led by Jesús “Chuy” Cervantes, the unflagging hospitality and the gorgeous, mod setting in a former Arts District warehouse. For a daytime meal Thursday through Sunday, there’s always Ditroit, the taqueria around back also run by Enrique Olvera’s restaurant group, Casamata. Seize on its peerless fish flauta dressed in crema, punchy salsa verde and cabbage slaw with a sprinkling of cotija.

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Poncho’s Tlayudas

Historic South-Central Mexican $

By Bill Addison

It is Friday night. It is time to head to South L.A. for the once-a-week pop-up serving one of our city’s defining dishes. Among billows of mesquite, under a tent in a shrubbery-filled yard, Alfonso “Poncho” Martínez will be grilling and folding tlayudas in the style he grew up loving in Oaxaca’s Central Valley. He begins by swabbing his masa canvas (always imported from his home state) with asiento, a toasted lard he renders himself, before spreading over frijoles refritos, shredded cabbage and cheese yanked into short strings. Choose among three meats: chorizo; tasajo, a thin cut of flank steak salt-cured overnight before grilling; and moronga, a miraculously light, herb-laced blood sausage made from a family recipe of Martinez’s wife and business partner, Odilia Romero. (She co-founded the organization Comunidades Indigenas en Liderazgo, or CIELO, which hosts Poncho’s Tlayudas weekly.) I like all three meats combined, which Martínez and his crew cheerfully accommodate. Soft and crackling, fragrant and dense, this tactile masterwork coaxes all your senses into play.

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Dulan's on Crenshaw

Hyde Park Southern $$

By Jenn Harris

Greg Dulan remembers his father, Adolf, teaching him to make fried chicken with a brown paper bag and a cast-iron skillet. The method creates a golden, rugged landscape of well-seasoned crunch and meat that drips when you take a bite. The Dulans have been serving that same fried chicken, and an array of soul food dishes, since Adolf and his wife, Mary, opened Aunt Kizzy’s Back Porch in Marina del Rey in 1985. The family expanded its soul food empire with restaurants in Inglewood, Gramercy Park and Crenshaw. Greg, who runs the Dulan’s on Crenshaw, reopened the restaurant earlier this year after a substantial remodel. A large kitchen absorbed the old hot bar, where patrons used to line up at the counter to watch their plates being assembled. The macaroni and cheese is some of the best in the city, the noodles completely engulfed in cheese. Once the collard greens are long gone, you’ll want to gulp, not sip the pot likker. I appreciate the new space, especially the blown-up picture of Greg’s grandparents Zady and Silas, who watch over you while you eat your fried chicken.

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Delmy’s Pupusas

Atwater Village Salvadoran $

By Jenn Harris

Ruth Sandoval started Delmy’s Pupusas in 2007, named for her mother, who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s during the Salvadoran civil war. She serves variations on El Salvador’s national dish, popping up weekly at farmers markets including Silver Lake, Atwater Village, Echo Park, Torrance and Hollywood. In a city like Los Angeles, there’s a pupusa for every persuasion. I’m partial to Sandoval’s harina de maiz, which is almost cake-like in the middle. The pupusas bake on the hot griddle until they’re splotchy with crisp brown spots and the insides are ready to burst. A filling of ground chicharrón takes on the consistency of creamy grits. There’s even a blue corn masa plant-based pupusa stuffed with vegetables from the surrounding farmers markets. My go-to order at any pupuseria, including Delmy’s, is the cheese and loroco, which features the bitter flower buds that are native to Central America. A splash of red salsa and a scoop of zesty curtido complete the pupusa trifecta of cheese, acid and crunch. And after pupusas, there are sweet, fried plantains with a black bean puree for dipping.

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INGLEWOOD, CA - OCTOBER 22, 2024: A trio of the tacos de desebrada "Chikali Style" (with beans and guacamole) on house made flour tortillas at Asadero Chikali in Inglewood. (Ron De Angelis / For The Times)

Asadero Chikali

Inglewood Mexican $

By Jenn Harris

Earlier this year, I described the carne deshebrada with refried beans from the East Los Angeles Asadero Chikali stand for our guide to the 101 Best Tacos in the city. It was the taco I was handed when I asked the taquero to surprise me with his go-to order. It’s still the taco that comes to mind when someone asks for my favorite in all of Los Angeles. The meat is tangled with stewed tomato, onion and peppers. It’s my preferred filling for the exemplary flour tortillas, rolled by hand and cooked on a flat-top until mottled with toasty brown bubbles. They’re buttery, slender and surprisingly sturdy; I could eat a stack on their own. Asadero Chikali (Chikali is the locals-only nickname for the border city of Mexicali) recently opened its first bricks-and-mortar restaurant in a small strip mall in Inglewood, not far from SoFi Stadium. There, the tacos come with a tray of salsas and pickled onions. Though I can’t seem to quit the deshebrada, I always get at least one carne asada “Chikali style,” with the bits of smoky meat served under a dollop of guacamole and beans. And I never leave without a dozen tortillas to go.

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Majordomo

Chinatown Korean New American $$$

By Jenn Harris

Majordomo is a no-skip-record of a restaurant. You could blindly point to a spot on the menu and know that whatever arrives will be something you’ll still be thinking about on the drive home. It’s the type of L.A. restaurant that has felt relevant since it opened in 2018, on a hip, industrial stretch in northern Chinatown. The clientele look like they sauntered off the pages of a Copenhagen street fashion blog into its warehouse location. Chef David Chang has figured out the Midas touch for a dining room that’s constantly buzzing. I imagine his celebrity helps, with multiple podcasts and series involving Chang and famous friends. It’s more likely his brazen approach to cooking that launched his Momofuku restaurant group with locations around the country. His smoked bo ssam is a boulder of smoked pork shoulder you tear at with tongs and stuff into perilla leaves painted with scallion oil, kimchi and ssamjang. The mushroom crispy rice features a crunchy bottom that rivals the best tahdig in town. Dessert is a fiery spectacle, prepared tableside with fried doughnuts, rum flambé and vanilla ice cream.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this guide described Majordomo’s bo ssam as pork belly, but it is in fact pork shoulder. The entry has been updated to reflect this change.

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Danbi

Koreatown Korean $$

By Bill Addison

John Kim, Patrick Liu, Alex Park and Yohan Park made a wise decision this year when they shut down their “Korean tapas” concept Tokki, housed in one of the corner spaces in Koreatown’s restaurant-filled Chapman Plaza complex, and reconceived it as Danbi. Under the direction of chef Lareine Ko, the menu ditches a misguided globalization of Korean flavors in favor of a streamlined collection of dishes that totter more thrillingly between tradition and innovation. Her version of haemul pajeon showcases tiny fried scallops that crackle against the pancake’s crunch. She pairs pine nut-scattered beef tartare with bone marrow for textural commentary (hot and cold, softly chewy and basically molten) and, for warming balm, fans the thinnest, milkiest slices of pork over rice in rich broth. Ko has a fantastic pastry counterpart in Isabell Manibusan, who has a talent for reimagining Korean staples in a California dessert context. She capped the end of summer with a corn flan (think cheese corn transformed into sweet custard) and riffed on the idea of a popular ice cream bar called Melona in an icy honeydew semifreddo. It’s been a year when locally and nationally we’ve seen an acceleration around notions of modern Korean cuisine. Danbi has joined the conversation with plenty to contribute.

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Henry's Cuisine

Alhambra Cantonese $$

By Jenn Harris

Dinner at Henry’s is a chaotic, bustling affair, where families rotate lazy Susans crammed with sticky honey-and-garlic pork chops, tiger prawns over glass noodles and mountains of fried rice flecked with bits of salty fish. Each table is its own grand Cantonese banquet. Brrring, brrring! Every 10 minutes, a chef slams his hand onto a bell, twice in quick succession, to let servers know that another plate of the deep-fried salted pig’s feet is ready. This is the dish on everyone’s table, the tiles of crispy skin like glass and the meat cured to pink, tender perfection. A woman presents a 4.5-pound live lobster like we’ve just won a prize on a game show. It reappears later, fried, cut and covered in mounds of crispy sweet garlic, chiles and green onion. The kids at the next table tangle their chopsticks, reaching for the last piece of pork skin. I zone out while excavating a piece of lobster from a claw. Can someone please pass the chow fun? Is there any more beef curry stew? Regardless of who’s at the table, you can fight over the crispy pig skin like family.

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LOS ANGELES, CA - OCTOBER 27, 2024: Original Thai Boat Noodle with Beef, Kanom Tuay (steamed coconut milk) and Thai Iced Tea at Mae Malai in Los Angeles. (Ron De Angelis / For The Times)

Mae Malai Thai House of Noodles

Los Feliz Thai $

By Bill Addison

Malai Data began serving her superlative version of boat noodles — a recipe gleaned from her mother-in-law, who’s made the dish professionally in Bangkok for decades — from a stand in front of Silom Supermarket in Thai Town in late 2022. By year’s end she had a lease for a space two blocks away, in the shopping complex at Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue. The short menu, including basil-scented egg rolls and respectable pad see ew, is roundly satisfying, but the boat noodles are the irrefutable star attraction. Data’s servings are small and under $10, as is customary: In Bangkok part of the fun is going from stall to stall, tasting each cook’s tweaks. My order at Mae Malai: thin rice noodles (among five options), as the server recommends; pork over beef; and “spicy” rather than “Thai spicy.” At this level, the chile heat races across the taste buds as a big first sensation and then retreats, balancing the broth’s sweetness and vinegary thwack. Spices like star anise and white pepper glint like fireflies at dusk. Green onions and fried crumbles of pork skin rustle against the teeth, and bites of the bowl’s solo pork meatball bounce around the palate. The noodles feel squiggly, and they’re gone quickly, until only the must-sip liquid dregs remain, tingly and the color of black coffee. Other worthy bowls of boat noodles exist in Los Angeles, but this one rates as a master class.

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Kuya Lord

Hollywood Filipino $$

By Bill Addison

Behold the behemoth “Kuya Tray,” the fastest and most comprehensive introduction to the cooking at Lord Maynard Llera’s 28-seat Melrose Hill restaurant. Sized for two, each platter contains canary-yellow spiced rice, sauteed vegetables, achara (pickled green papaya) and a choice of six meats or seafood. I’ll point you to a hypnotically spiral slice of “lucenachon,” Llera’s nickname for his version of Filipino-style pork belly stuffed with lemongrass stalks and fennel fronds, or to blue prawns simmered in garlicky crab paste. In the afterglow of last decade, which witnessed the brightest-ever spotlight turned on modern Filipino cuisine, Llera, who won the James Beard Foundation award this year for Best Chef: California, stepped into the arena as a gripping new expressionist. He keeps the menu restaurant concise, but it still harbors two relative sleepers: mami, a sustaining egg noodle soup with pork belly and garlic-chile oil; and laing, a delicious mulch of taro leaves braised in coconut milk and shrimp paste for nine hours. Llera, true to his individualism, adds smoky katsuobushi with pickled chile as an umami bump at the end.

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Yang's Kitchen

Alhambra Taiwanese

By Jenn Harris

Chris Yang’s Alhambra restaurant somehow bridges the divide between what my 89-year-old grandmother considers “good enough to wait for a table” and my graduate school friends’ proclivities for orange wines and kid-friendly brunch food. This is a restaurant that operates without borders, seamlessly transitioning from hash browns with smoked salmon belly when the sun’s out to grilled cabbage dripping with bagna cauda and a perfectly cooked 20-ounce rib-eye for dinner. It’s become my favorite place for lunch, serving as a weekday staple for balanced sets of dry-aged barramundi, plenty of farmers market vegetables and miso soup. On weekends, Yang’s Kitchen is the place to indulge in grilled slabs of sourdough sesame toast smeared with chicken liver mousse and jam, plus giant cornmeal mochi pancakes made with a blend of rice flour and cornmeal for the perfect chewy bite. On specific Monday evenings there are burgers. Wine night happens Thursday through Sunday, with flights from Jordan Chen. Where else can you sip a chilled Serbian red wine while dining on smoked pork jowl char siu and cold noodles with Dungeness crab? And there’s soft serve too.

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Si! Mon

Venice Panamanian $$

By Bill Addison

Last year Panamanian chef José Olmedo Carles Rojas partnered with Louie and Netty Ryan (whose projects include Hatchet Hall and Menotti’s Coffee) on a restaurant in the space that formerly housed Venice LGBTQ+ icon James Beach. As Si! Mon settled into its first year, the cooking has come into focus: This is a rare-for-L.A. feat of reimagined Central American flavors in a finer-dining setting. Carles Rojas and executive chef Christian Truong frame seafood strikingly. Surf clams wade in ceviche sunlit by culantro leche de tigre. Coconut milk and charred scallion oil add creamy-spicy contrasts to beautifully pleated shrimp dumplings. Miso butter and dried shrimp salt amplify the flavors of grilled branzino without overpowering the fish; be generous with the side of smooth salsa made from mild green cachucha chiles. Cocktails dip into the expected realms of rum and passion fruit. This martini drinker is very happy that the version on the menu labeled “very MF cold” delivers on its promise. Whether you sit on the semi-enclosed patio or the more cloistered dining room, look around at the clusters of lush plants and the ceiling pattern based on Panamanian Indigenous prints. They suggest the country’s tropical climate without ever devolving into kitsch.

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Mori Nozomi

Sawtelle Japanese $$$$

By Bill Addison

Glutted may be too strong a word to describe the state of omakase counters in Los Angeles, but we certainly can lay claim to the most lavish number of extravagant sushi options in the city’s history. Amid the profusion, Mori Nozomi easily rates as the most exciting sushi arrival of 2024. Chef-owner Nozomi Mori grew up near Osaka. She began her career in luxury retail stores (Gucci, among others) before traveling and eventually moving to Los Angeles in 2017. She landed a job making sushi, where customer interaction came with the territory, and knew she’d found her calling. In her Sawtelle space, established in the former location of Mori Sushi (no relation), she and her all-female team serve eight guests per night. Sweet, sharp, buttery, chewy, briny: Their selection of rarer, seasonal Japanese seafood hits all the top-flight omakase signifiers. The meal follows the very L.A. sequence of kaiseki-inspired small plates before nigiri, with some choices — an elegant kegani ankake (hairy crab with rice, presented in the shell), an assertive red miso soup, a finale of dashimaki tamago straight from the pan — that punctuate Mori’s individualism. The tea geek in me hopes that the restaurant’s very cool idea for a tea pairing will eventually include more freshly steeped examples and fewer chilled brews or sips diluted with sparkling water. That small detail aside, this should be the next place where L.A.’s sushi lovers vie for reservations, which already book out in a digital blink.

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Birdie G’s

Santa Monica American $$$

By Jenn Harris

Jeremy Fox’s Santa Monica restaurant never ceases to surprise me. His Hungarian-inspired dumplings are pillowy balls of ricotta cheese tossed in a bright Sungold tomato sauce with fresh basil, lots of Parmesan and a sprinkle of fennel pollen. His matzo ball soup, heavy on the dill, is better than my grandmother’s. Why not smear nduja onto fried matzo? The hot, porky funk of the salami paste is the perfect match for the humble cracker, now deep brown and extra savory after a dip in the fryer. The hoshigaki you see hanging along the pass and over the main dining room is massaged by hand every other day to soften the persimmon pulp and bring the natural sugars to the surface as the fruit dries. Sweet, candy-like slices of the persimmons that were hung in 2022 are splayed over a yam casserole that tastes like the holidays. Fox’s cooking is playful and wildly creative, capable of delivering comfort and nostalgia in ways you’ve likely never imagined. At the end of a recent dinner, while we finished off the last remnants of Cookies and Cream ice cream fashioned from trimmings of the restaurant’s chocolate cake, a friend turned to me, half dazed, and asked what kind of food we just had. All I could answer was “joy.”

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Bridgetown Roti

East Hollywood Caribbean $

By Bill Addison

Free the shrimp roti from its wrapper paper and you notice the bundle has already been cut in half. Its colors and patterns mesmerize for a few seconds: The flaky folds of paratha seem to barely contain spice-crusted shrimp, a saucy aloo (potato) sofrito, streaks of bright green herb-chile sauce and purple veins of turmeric-tinged cabbage slaw. The flavors are as blinding as the colors; crunchy textures bump against smooth ones. Fans of Rashida Holmes’ Caribbean American cooking have waited nearly three years for moments like this — when her breakthrough pop-up finally transitioned to a permanent location. Bridgetown Roti debuted in July in a cheering East Hollywood storefront, with Joy Clarke-Holmes (Rashida’s mother) and Malique Smith as partners. Holmes channels the richness of Bajan and Trinidadian cultures in not only rotis but also delicate cod fish cakes dabbed with garlic aioli, callaloo simmered to melting surrender in coconut broth with peppers and her inimitable savory patties (curried oxtail for the win). Oh, and hands down the creamiest, crustiest, most superlative baked macaroni and cheese in Los Angeles.

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Vespertine

Culver City Eclectic $$$$

By Bill Addison

“This is the Obsidian Mirror,” croons the server, motioning to the earthen dish placed in front of us. Its surface does, indeed, shimmer black and reflective. We’re instructed to use an iridescent shell to eat the dish, scooping to the bottom of the bowl to excavate layers of mussel gel and then smoked mussel cream suspending fileted mussels, salted plum and water chestnut. The textures are slippery and smooth, with the occasional juicy crunch, and the overall effect brings to mind shellfish pâté overlaid with gelée, but refashioned in ways most of us could never conceive. It is as beautiful as it is delicious.

In April Jordan Kahn reopened Vespertine, his polarizing modernist restaurant that employs the arts — theater, music, painting, dance, perfumery; I could even argue for literature in the description of courses — in ways that no other restaurant does in California, possibly the world. Dinner in architect Eric Owen Moss’ Culver City building, aptly named “Waffle,” costs $395 per person. If you enjoy haute cuisine as high culture, and you can swing the bill, go for the operatic experience. (Go early; the evening runs about four hours.) Service and atmosphere can feel rigid in their idiosyncrasies, but the evolution of the cooking delivers far more tangible pleasures than pre-pandemic Vespertine. Four years ago, what you were fed could come across as alien and hostile. While Kahn still pushes food to the furthest edges of abstraction, there are more moments of warmth and relatability now too. You will leave satiated, and perhaps a little confounded. I’ve come to believe that’s the point.

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Dear John's

Culver City Steakhouse $$$

By Jenn Harris

I experience a sort of existential shift every time I part the heavy red curtains of Dear John’s. My eyes widen to acclimate to a darkness so deep it sucks the tension right out of my shoulders. My ears perk up at the sound of ice dancing around a shaker. My body relaxes as it hits the cool leather of the banquette. Within seconds, I’m enveloped in a cocoon of familiarity and calm. Whatever else is happening in the world, my martini, made just the way I like it, is on its way. Here, the perfect creamed spinach exists; chicken parm gets the chicken Kiev treatment, with warm mozzarella that oozes from the center; tater tots are made “bougie” with petite dollops of caviar; and the chopped salad contains an entire deli case of ingredients.

I wasn’t around in the early 1960s, when Frank Sinatra and his celebrity pals filled the dining room. But Hans and Patti Röckenwagner and partner Josiah Citrin breathed new life into the space when they saved the building from demolition in 2019. An initial two-year lease has been extended through 2028 and I, like many customers, am happy to delay this Hollywood ending.

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Heritage Barbecue

San Juan Capistrano Barbecue $$

By Bill Addison

Pitmaster Daniel Castillo — who founded Heritage Barbecue in San Juan Capistrano with his wife, Brenda Castillo — and executive chef Nicholas Echaore are among the handful of practitioners forging a regional vernacular for barbecue in Southern California. What does that mean, exactly? At the most basic level I’m talking about sunny afternoons where people wait in long lines for fanned slices of brisket, spare ribs and sausage links slow-cooked to their melting points, served on trays with sides of potato salad, beef-speckled beans and milky, crunchy slaw. But Castillo and Echaore also approach their work with an open-ended question: In what context does smoked meat fit into dishes from all sorts of cultures? They answer by barbecuing Santa Maria tri-tip, which makes an excellent filling for a taco built on a Sonoran flour tortilla made using tallow rendered from brisket trimmings. They glaze pork belly in the manner of char siu, sometimes slipping into their version of a banh mi or musubi. Brisket may take on the flavors of teriyaki or pastrami seasonings; beef ribs sometimes steep in galbi marinade. The Heritage team renders these expressions to uniform deliciousness, and their respectful imaginings keep pushing our ideas of barbecue into new possibilities.

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INGLEWOOD, CA - SEPTEMBER 19: Jollof rice plate with braised short rib at Two Hommes in Inglewood, CA on Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Two Hommés

Inglewood West African Southern $$

By Jenn Harris

It’s difficult to put a finger on the cuisine at Two Hommés, Abdoulaye Balde and Marcus Yaw Johnson’s Inglewood restaurant. Though the two describe it as “an Afro-centric eatery,” the menu actually circles the globe. Honey berbere chicken bites are all juice and crunch, glowing with the Ethiopian spice blend. The crudo, regardless of the day’s fish, is fresh and tart, vibrant with pickled onion and the flavor of passion fruit alongside nicely fried tostadas. Lamb dibi, a mustardy grilled lamb found throughout Senegal, is used as a filling for quesadillas. The shredded, smoked lamb shoulder mimics strands of birria between the toasted tortillas with bits of sweet fried plantain and Oaxacan cheese. Mountains of garlic noodles are springy, garlicky and a tad sweet. You can order the noodles or jollof rice as the base for a platter with a number of proteins, including short ribs braised in root beer until the glaze resembles caramel and hulking filets of fried catfish. The jollof platter, served with appropriately named “bomb azz black beans,” arugula salad and plantains, is quite the feast.

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LOS ANGELES, CA - OCTOBER 25, 2024: Koji-Roasted Green Circle Chicken at Camelia in The Arts District in downtown Los Angeles (Ron De Angelis / For The Times)

Camélia

Downtown L.A. French Japanese $$$

By Bill Addison

Having built Tsubaki, their tiny Echo Park izakaya, and next-door sake bar Ototo into community havens, Courtney Kaplan and Charles Namba wanted a third project that gave them room for creative growth. They reenvisioned a lofty space in downtown’s Arts District, once occupied by long-running Church & State, into a Midcentury Modern vision of an enveloping bistro: globe lighting that casts a butterscotch glow on the grainy wood paneling and handsome brick floors. The menu splices French and Japanese cuisines, a choice that reflects their hospitality backgrounds and their inspiration derived from Tokyo’s thriving French restaurant culture. In the kitchen, Namba and his team take the synergy dish by dish. A composition such as scallops over dashi-lime cream with maitake and king trumpet mushrooms, chestnut-date puree and Tokyo negi threads the two cuisines with surgical dexterity. To sharpen the soft flavors of beef cheeks simmered in red wine, wasabi cleverly replaces the more traditionally Gallic horseradish. A tall, hefty dry-aged cheeseburger with fries? No twists necessary, it’s simply a fantastic burger. Kaplan, one of L.A.’s most gifted beverage pros, has the chance to flex her knowledge of wine as well as sake. The notes on her list detailing current obsessions (say, a consideration of ancient vines versus ancient strains of rice) are always absorbing; I could read a book full of them. Open since July, and honing its strengths month by month, Camélia has emerged as one of the most exciting new restaurants in Los Angeles.

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Petit Trois

Hollywood French $$$

By Jenn Harris

The concepts of time, calories and overindulgence do not exist at the Petit Trois marble counter. Ludo Lefebvre created a place of pure excess that operates uninhibited by such conventions. I relish the pools of hot garlic butter that seethe under knots of escargot and dunk my torn pieces of baguette until they’re saturated and my fingers are shiny. Mounds of blush chicken liver mousse dwarf thick slices of toast shellacked with butter. A stark white sauce au vin jaune cascades over cylinders of leeks, a true celebration of the sharp, pungent wine. Lighter but just as lavish is the crab cake supreme, plump and drowning in sweet and salty nuoc mam. Lunch at the counter always seems to stretch lazily into the afternoon, my attention alternating between my own plate and the chefs working a mere few feet in front of me, arranging double cheeseburgers in pools of Bordelaise. I stare in awe at two swanky businessmen on the patio, who ordered a burger each for their serious lunch meeting. In about an hour, they’ll likely be slumped over their office desks, happy but too full to really function. You can have the burger, the crab cakes and whatever else your heart desires at Petit Trois’ more spacious Sherman Oaks location too, but I prefer the original, where my elbows brush against my neighbor’s at the counter and I can pretend I’m in a cramped, impossibly chic Paris bistro in the 6th arrondissement.

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Dolan's Uyghur Cuisine

Alhambra Uyghur

By Bill Addison

Among the constellation of cuisines that light up the San Gabriel Valley, Bugra Arkin’s restaurants in Alhambra and Rowland Heights (with a third location in Irvine) illuminate a culture specific to the autonomous Xinjiang territory in northwest China. The cooking of the Uyghurs, the region’s Turkic-speaking Muslims, culls centuries of spice trade influences, including from modern-day India, Tibet, Afghanistan and Iran. Most tables hold orders of the “big plate chicken” heaped with potatoes, chopped red and green peppers, slivers of garlic and dried chiles. Wide, looping noodles hide underneath. Currents of Sichuan peppercorns and star anise flow through the broth. It’s superb, as are stir-fried lamb freckled with cumin seeds; manta (plump pleated dumplings) filled with earthy diced pumpkin and minced onion; and laghman, long noodles nearly as thick as taffy, buried under stir-fried vegetables and tender beef strips. For fun, throw in quyash qatlima, a pinwheel-shaped savory pie full of spiced meat and oozing mozzarella. With murals of Uyghur life and details like globe-shaped glass lamps patterned in starbursts and other geometries, Arkin evokes his culture as much in the dining room’s aesthetics as in the food he serves.

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Alta Adams

West Adams Californian Soul Food $$

By Jenn Harris

What makes a pancake a really good pancake? I found myself mulling that very important question during a recent brunch at Keith Corbin and Daniel Patterson’s West Adams restaurant. Before then, I’d thought that Corbin’s biggest flex was his oxtails, a supremely satisfying dish with an undercurrent of umami that comes from braising the meat in a Iiquid fortified with miso and soy. Or was it his fried chicken, magnificently crisp, juicy and well seasoned? My cornmeal pancakes arrived as big and wide as my car’s spare tire, impossibly fluffy and with lacy edges that resembled the crunchy parts of a really good cookie. The accompanying brown butter maple caramel sauce gleefully transformed breakfast into dessert. Brunch has quickly become my favorite meal here, mostly due to that short stack of pancakes. But also because you can order the fried chicken as three or six pieces, with a buttermilk waffle or in a biscuit sandwich dripping with honey. And those oxtails come heaped over a bowl of creamy grits.

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Mini Kabob

Glendale Armenian $$

By Jenn Harris

I don’t know that I’ve had a juicier piece of chicken kebab, a more succulent beef cutlet or a more precisely seasoned lule than what I’ve eaten out of the takeout containers at Mini Kabob. What the Martirosyan family is preparing out of their itty-bitty storefront in Glendale should be classified as meat magic. They grind chicken and beef on the premises and incorporate just enough fat that the juicy lule kebabs succumb to the slightest touch of a fork. The lamb chops are plump, tender and kissed with smoke. The beef cutlets are loosely packed with fresh herbs, hand-formed, then seared in a pan until a deep brown crust forms around the patties. Each plate comes with hummus, a mountain of rice and a few grilled jalapeños and tomatoes with their skins blistered and blackened. I’ve eaten the kebabs in my car parked down the road, and countless times at home. Showing up at a friend’s house with bags of food from Mini Kabob is one of the greatest expressions of love in L.A. Make sure there’s plenty of garlic sauce, the smooth paste capable of perfuming your entire body and clothing for the rest of the day.

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Sushi Kisen

Arcadia Japanese $$

By Jenn Harris

Kisen, tucked into the corner of a crowded Arcadia strip mall, feels like two restaurants in one. The main dining area is a raucous room where you can order grilled chicken and plates of vegetable tempura for the kids who can’t seem to stay in their seats and cucumber rolls for your sister who doesn’t eat raw fish. The sushi bar is a serene omakase experience where the chef will design a personalized procession of nigiri and small bites based on your appetite and penchant for stronger or milder fish. It’s on par with some of the most compelling sushi bars in the city, without the sticker shock at the end. I like sitting at the bar during lunch, where I can marvel at how the chefs manage overflowing bowls of chirashi for the dining room while simultaneously creating a semblance of calm, focused attention for patrons at the bar. My chef nods approvingly when I tell him I favor kohada, sardines and all kinds of mackerel. He rewards me with a Japanese sardine scored with a million knife cuts, which melts on my tongue, and a slab of silver-skinned kohada tucked into a sleeve of crisp seaweed. I appreciate the excellence without a smidge of stuffiness.

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Fat + Flour

Culver City Bakery $$

By Jenn Harris

The scent of butter and sugar grips you as soon as you walk through the doors of Nicole Rucker’s Culver City cafe. Inside the pastry case are slices of pie with chunks of sunset-colored peaches spilling from the middle, wedges of custard pie with burnished meringue tops and mountains of cookies and brownies alongside cheddar and chive scones. This is the place I recommend most in the entire city. To taste Rucker’s fruit, cream and custard pies is to experience the sweetest parts of Southern California. The peaches taste like they were just plucked from the tree, sun-ripened and glutted with natural sugars. Passion fruit custard beneath a bouffant of meringue is so addictively sharp, it makes my mouth pucker. Her crusts are buttery and flaky, creating perfect squiggly rims around each pie. If you see egg salad behind the counter, order it. The white bread is the soft, squishy variety and the egg salad is well-seasoned and velvety. But if you’re planning on something savory before or after dessert, know that the short menu of sandwiches isn’t always available. Rucker has turned the area opposite the counter into a mini superette, where you can find various condiments, snacks and gifts for food-minded friends. What she’s created is nothing short of a destination-worthy wonderland of fat and flour, sugar and love.

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Bavel

Downtown L.A. Middle Eastern $$$

By Jenn Harris

When you go to Langer’s, you order pastrami. Howlin’ Ray’s? The fried chicken sandwich. Ignoring a specific dish at a certain restaurant can be blasphemous. Here is the dilemma with Bavel, Genevieve Gergis and Ori Menashe’s Levant-spanning Arts District restaurant. To experience it best, you need as large a group as you can manage. I wouldn’t dream of starting a meal without swiping a hot puffy pita through silky hummus blasted with spicy duck paste. The natural next course is a plate of oyster mushroom kebabs tart with lemon and sumac. The malawach bread, with its abundant flaky layers and side of strawberry zhoug, is non-negotiable. I crave the breaded and fried quail painted with chile oil more than I do some of this town’s best fried chicken. I still see stars when I take that first bite of lamb neck shawarma. Whatever seasonal fruit Gergis has turned into a tart, cobbler or ice cream is the one to order. When Bavel opened nearly seven years ago, it was the restaurant name on everyone’s lips. It’s still a tough weekend reservation and just as raucous at 5 p.m. as it is at 10:30 p.m. And in case you’re still wondering, it’s pronounced “buh-vell.”

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Komal

Historic South-Central Mexican $

By Jenn Harris

The tortillas at Fátima Júarez’s new restaurant and molino in the Mercado La Paloma are a revelation. Delicate but supple, they taste of the sun and soil, earthy and bursting with the sweetness of summer corn. Júarez sources, nixtamalizes and grinds different heirloom Mexican corn varieties to make fresh masa for a short menu of antojitos. Chalqueño corn from the state of Mexico and Oaxacan blue bolita are featured in tlacoyos, griddled corn cakes stuffed with ayocote beans and generously garnished with nopales and salty crumbles of queso fresco. The best way to appreciate Júarez’s fresh masa (besides a stack of tortillas you can order by the dozen) may be the flor de calabaza quesadilla. The folded tortilla is brimming with Oaxacan cheese and a corn sofrito. Júarez’s mole, the culmination of a childhood spent in Oaxaca, is dusky and intricately spiced, noticeably sweet and redolent with toasted chiles. After I finished my molotes de platano, I took a warm tortilla, rolled it into a loose cigar and dipped it into the leftover mole for dessert. There’s already talk of a weekly tasting menu. But for now, sampling all the antojitos is a great way to spend a lunch break.

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LOS ANGELES, CA - SEPTEMBER 05: Mom's green chicken enchilada at Bar Ama in Los Angeles, CA on Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Bar Amá

Downtown L.A. Tex-Mex $$

By Bill Addison

Josef Centeno named his 12-year-old downtown Tex-Mex bastion in honor of his great-grandmother Gabina Cervantes Martinez. She made her family Tejano dishes alive with fresh vegetables from the farmers market or her garden — an ethos that resonates through the decades in Centeno’s adaptive, borderless Los Angeles kitchen. Peaches are sauteed with hazelnuts and goat cheese in the summer; coconut butter and pomegranate molasses gloss sweet potatoes come wintertime. His mom’s weekday staple recipe, green chicken enchiladas blasted with tomatillo salsa and bubbling with cheddar and Monterey Jack cheeses, has become one of the city’s enduring comfort foods. They soothe even more alongside guacamole, queso (including a gold-standard vegan version) and a limey margarita. The genius of Bar Amá, and Centeno, is the sureness behind his culinary unpredictability. An inspired lobster ravioli in green mole with the unorthodox nip of tarragon might appear on the menu, as will bäcos, his longtime signature flatbreads, perhaps folded around fried shrimp or twangy chicken escabeche with Thai-chile aioli. His whimsies, backed by commanding skills, keep us guessing and returning.

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LONG BEACH, CA - OCTOBER 30, 2024: Family Mashawi Feast at Ammatoli in Long Beach with 6 kebabs and grilled veggies. Served with vermicelli rice, two sides, and one large salad (fattoush, greek, tabbouleh) (Ron De Angelis / For The Times)

Ammatolí

Long Beach Middle Eastern $$

By Bill Addison

The calming, sun-drenched corner restaurant in downtown Long Beach, run by chef Dima Habibeh and her family, continues to grow in dimensions and ambitions. In her cooking, Habibeh — born to a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother and raised in Jordan — poignantly evinces her origins. Solo diners will be happy at the plant-draped bar, rapt by garlicky chicken shawarma at lunch or sea bass over spiced rice with caramelized onions and nuts, with perhaps a glass of white wine from Lebanon’s Bekka Valley, at dinner. Even better is gathering a crowd for a spread that begins with too much mezze: hummus with pine nuts, yielding grape leaves, labneh dyed fuchsia from pureed beets, fried kibbeh stuffed with ground beef or spinach, fattoush sharpened with sumac, a mix of the savory hand pies called fatayer. Kebabs and rotisserie chicken on a bed of subtly smoky freekeh might arrive next, followed by crunchy-cheesy knafeh scented with orange blossom syrup and date cake for dessert. To that end, the Habibehs recently debuted a third room, all white walls and curving ceramics, designed for group dining. I don’t know of a more gracious setting for consummate Levantine cooking in Southern California.

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Yangban

Downtown L.A. Korean American Jewish $$

By Jenn Harris

When Katianna and John Hong opened their Arts District restaurant, it had the restless spirit of a wild child, ever-evolving and experiential. It was partly due to the nature of the couple’s cooking, drawing heavily from their Korean American backgrounds while weaving in the Jewish influences of both their childhoods. There was previously a deli case and market in addition to the dining room. It must have been a logistical nightmare to pull off, but I miss the frenetic energy that sparked whenever I shared a dinner with friends. Now, the dining room feels more formal, and darker — a grown-up version of the Yangban I used to know. Many of the same dishes still crackle with that original magic, like the twice-fried chicken wings that leave your fingers sticky with soy-garlic glaze, the mandu plump with matzo ball filling or the avocado and pear salad with nostril-singeing mustard vinaigrette, now served as a small banchan offering, though I wish I could still order the full salad. A series of newer small bites, such as the acorn beignet topped with a slice of Benton’s ham, feels more in line with the couple’s time spent cooking at fine-dining restaurant Mélisse in Santa Monica. Yangban is still evolving, and I’m looking forward to following along. The restaurant just announced that it’s closing to add a bar and plans to reopen in early Spring.

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Pizzeria Sei

Pico-Robertson Pizza $$

By Jenn Harris

The first time I had Japanese-style Neapolitan pizza was at a tiny pizzeria in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. The pizza seemed suspended in a pillow of crust, leopard-spotted like something you might find in Naples but puffier and reminiscent of fresh mochi. What William Joo is making at his Pico-Robertson pizzeria is a nod to what you’ll find in both Japan and Italy, but with a style all his own. While the most traditional Neapolitan pies are wet in the middle, Joo’s pinched, puffy crusts careen into centers that are damp but don’t collapse under the toppings. The Margherita Special showcases ultra-milky buffalo mozzarella and tomatoes left chunky for nice globs of acid. Another frequent special is the Mala Lamb Sausage, a smoky, savory pizza tricked out with Pecorino and smoked provola, crumbles of cumin-spiked lamb sausage and cilantro flowers. The mala spice powder scattered over the crust will leave your lips tingling. Seats at Joo’s monthly pizza omakase dinners sell out in a flash, so if eight to 10 courses of pizza sounds like your idea of a good time, follow the business on Instagram to learn when new dates will be announced.

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Holy Basil

Atwater Village Thai $

By Bill Addison

Since 2020, food obsessives have been converging at the window in downtown’s Santee Passage food hall from which Wedchayan “Deau” Arpapornnopparat serves visceral, full-throttle interpretations of Bangkok street food. His pad see ew huffs with smokiness from the wok. The fluffy-crackly skin of moo krob pops and gives way to satiny pork belly underneath. Now comes the blockbuster sequel, which Arpapornnopparat opened with his wife, Tongkamal “Joy” Yuon, early this year. The space might be small, with much of the seating against a wall between two buildings, but the cooking is tremendous: Arpapornnopparat leaps ahead, rendering a short, revolving menu of noodles, curries, chicken wings, fried rice and vegetable dishes that is more experimental, weaving in elements of his father’s Chinese heritage, his time growing up in India and the Mexican and Japanese flavors he loves in Los Angeles. One creation I’ve thought about all year: fried soft-shell crab and shrimp set in a thrilling, confounding sauce centered around salted egg yolk, browned butter, shrimp paste and scallion oil. In its sharp left turns of salt and acid and sultry funk, the brain longs to consult a GPS. But there is no map. These are flavors from an interior land.

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Sushi Kaneyoshi

Downtown L.A. Japanese $$$$

By Bill Addison

Park in the structure adjacent to the 1960s-era Kajima building in Little Tokyo. A security guard will wave you toward an elevator that descends to the basement level and opens into a waiting room. At 7 p.m. sharp, the staff begins ushering diners to their counter seats in a calming, windowless room lined with at least five shades of polished woods. In a city where omakase is arguably the favored form of fine dining, Sushi Kaneyoshi draws the hardest-to-please connoisseurs. They know Yoshiyuki Inoue will be serving the kinds of fish with seasons that last just two weeks, and that the rice receives equal consideration to the seafood. (I once asked, “Are there times when Yoshi-san flavors his shari differently, depending on the fish he’s serving?” The reply that came from Inoue: “We do not change the flavor of the sushi rice. Instead, we prepare the fish in a way that complements the sushi rice.”) Dinners start with appetizers like tempura belt fish beaded with caviar and chawanmushi laced with meat from Hokkaido hairy crab. Then, with showmanship and artistry, Inoue and his assistants launch into a procession of Edomae-inspired nigiri. At one point, he’ll likely hand each person pressed sushi folded into a sheet of nori that crackles like the thinnest potato chip. By the time Inoue looks you in the eye and nods as he places a square of fudgy tamago on your plate, you’re under the master’s spell.

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TORRANCE, CA - NOVEMBER 01: Chef's choice iwashi maki at I-naba in Torrance, CA on Friday, Nov. 1, 2024. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Sushi Inaba

Torrance Japanese $$$$

By Jenn Harris

Yasuhiro Hirano’s iwashi maki resembles a pane of stained glass, a small round neatly divided into sections of silvery sardine with a shiso-wrapped square of green chives and yellow ginger in the center. The shiso cranks up the brightness of the vinegar-cured fish and helps the pickled ginger pop with sweet heat. It’s one of the opening bites of Hirano’s omakase, equal parts whimsical and technically precise. He soaks clumps of komochi konbu (herring eggs on kelp) in dashi for days, leaving each tiny orb bursting with the smoky, marine taste of his stock. Hirano’s shari has a pleasant sharpness, a result of his using two types of red vinegar to season the rice. His unfussy ingenuity is on full display in a tiny dab of “guts sauce” served over a slice of raw sanma. Made from cooking down the innards of the pike mackerel with soy sauce, its bitter, livery smack is unparalleled. The eight-seat counter, hidden within the larger I-naba restaurant, has the austerity of a traditional Japanese space, minimal and framed in blond wood. Hirano’s demeanor may appear to match the surroundings, until he opens his mouth. He’s quick to let you know that your hat is cool and compliment your choice of sake. And if you’re lucky, he’ll bring out his guitar for a few songs post-tamago. He does a particularly entertaining rendition of Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off.”

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Osteria Mozza

Hancock Park Italian $$$

By Bill Addison

In spring my partner booked a reservation at Nancy Silverton’s Melrose Avenue flagship to celebrate a colleague’s 20th birthday. I watched this singer take her first-ever bite of the restaurant’s legendary raviolo, her fork cutting the pasta so the yolk in the center ran onto the plate, bleeding into a slick of browned butter. “Oh, wow,” she said, and the muscles on her face stretched into reflexive joy. Mine did too. I was absorbed in my own ricotta-filled pasta — bauletti, parcels tinted green from pureed English peas, pinched into squares and served in lemony broth. Our shared dessert was a handsome bookend to the season: almond-crusted cornetto (an Italian pastry in which the croissant meets brioche) with jeweled roasted cherries and almond gelato. Her delight reminded me how much Osteria Mozza gets right, night after night: consummate service; a wine program that’s biblical in scope and depth; market-dictated salads laced with herbs, followed by an entree like duck confit with rightly acidic pear mostarda. Since opening in 2007, the selection of mozzarellas has illustrated the infinite degrees by which milk can wobble between cream and cheese. Given her status as empire builder and global food ambassador, Silverton entrusts the restaurant group’s culinary director Liz Hong, on-site executive chef Kirby Shaw and their team with the institution’s day-to-day excellence. They keep 17-year-old Mozza relevant in L.A.’s hyperdrive dining culture.

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Kismet

Los Feliz Californian Mediterranean $$

By Bill Addison

Pre-2020, daytime dining was a cornerstone of Sarah Hymanson and Sara Kramer’s nearly 8-year-old Los Feliz restaurant. This fall, the pair returned to the light with Saturday and Sunday brunch and their signature platter of small dishes to start the day. As with everything Kismet, the lineup revolves with the findings of its market coordinator, Anna Polacek; a recent spread included a few soft dates; kale tahini paired with pomegranate molasses, ideal for dipping Bub & Grandma’s barbari bread; herbed cucumbers over labneh; two halves of an egg with the requisite jammy yolk; feta and walnuts drizzled with honey; and cherry tomatoes with creamy beans, which I alternated in bites with plump green olives. If there is breakfast in the sweet hereafter, I hope it looks and tastes like this. If you’re sharing a meal, maybe throw in an order of homey challah French toast doused in blueberry-studded maple syrup. Dinner maintains Hymanson and Kramer’s elegant aesthetic for matching herbs and seasonings from the Levantine canon with California produce — and a couple of higher-food-chain staples like lemony chicken and pine nut hand pies. The pair released their cookbook this year, as colorful and as uplifting as their cooking. I’m grateful to know I can replicate the Persian-style crispy rice and their “stewy cranberry beans + greens” at home, but mostly I’ll keep relying on the experts at the restaurant.

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Rustic Canyon

Santa Monica American $$$

By Bill Addison

Like the ebb and flow of California harvests to which its menu so closely hews, Rustic Canyon has had its own seasons of change. Last summer Zarah Khan, then executive chef, made the most intricately spiced and cloudlike dal I’ve tasted in a restaurant. When she departed soon after, chef-owner Jeremy Fox (who also runs Birdie G’s across Santa Monica as part of Josh Loeb and Zoe Nathan’s Rustic Canyon Family restaurant group) stepped in, redirecting the menu toward a careful swirl of Italian, Japanese, Mexican and French flavors. Chef de cuisine Elijah DeLeon now builds on Fox’s aesthetic with his own vision. A late September meal mirrored the week’s weather: bay scallops surrounded by barely liquid tomatoes and bits of fried bread, a salad built around pears and dates, softly curried roast chicken with plums, an herbed pork chop covered in slices of poached quince. Was it summer or fall? The world isn’t always easily definable, but one thing came through clearly: Rustic Canyon is having another grand moment.

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ANAHEIM, CA - OCTOBER 22, 2024: Spread of dishes including the Tuesday special: Kusa & Grape Leaves with Meat along with popular sides like hummus, muhamara, baba ghanouj, and tabbouli at Al Baraka in Anaheim (Ron De Angelis / For The Times)

Al Baraka Restaurant

Anaheim Palestinian $$

By Bill Addison

From the kitchen, Aref Shatarah wheels out a cart full of dishes that his wife, Magida Shatarah, just finished preparing. Among them is kufta with tahini. Are those a few straggling fries sticking out of the appealingly murky sauce? Yes, and when I slide in a spoon, I lift out richly seasoned ground beef that’s been patted into the bottom of the pan and baked. Lemon blazes through the tahini; the sauce also lights up bread, rice or whatever it touches. Every dish from Magida’s hands reveals similar exacting definition. Since 2021, Al Baraka has distinguished itself among the culinary riches of Anaheim’s Little Arabia district with a repertoire of Palestinian dishes more commonly seen in home kitchens than on restaurant menus. Whatever else you may order — tabbouleh that tastes as bright as it looks, molokhia (a soothing soup of pureed jute mallow), kubba laban (beef and bulgur croquettes in satiny yogurt sauce) — be sure to scan the list of daily specials. Saturdays, for example, mean an enduring favorite: mshakhan, in which roast chicken, browned from spices and heat, is piled on flatbread with onions stained purple from sumac. This is an autumn feast commonly eaten by hand, composing bites of bread, chicken and onion, to taste and assess the year’s first local pressings from the land’s ancient olive groves. Magida’s skillful cooking safeguards such traditions.

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Sonoratown

Mid-Wilshire Sonoran $

By Bill Addison

Jennifer Feltham and Teodoro Díaz-Rodriguez Jr. shifted their phenomenal Sonoran-style taquerias into expansion mode over the last year. Crowds never let up at the tiny eight-year-old original in downtown. This summer, they debuted a michelada bar at their Mid-City outpost, where you can also snack on loaded nachos alongside your tacos and quesadillas. They opened a third location in Long Beach in September. What hasn’t changed is their attention to quality and consistency. Julia Guerrero ensures the excellence of Sonoratown’s flour tortillas: thin, flaky, durable yet delicate, almost buttery with lard. My order usually involves the famous Burrito 2.0 and at least one chivichanga, a mini-bundle swaddling shredded chicken or beef cooked down with tomatoes, Anaheim chiles and cheese into a dense, gooey guisado. Another prize on the concise menu: the caramelo, elsewhere sometimes fashioned from two tortillas bound by cheese. In this case, a large-format taco engulfs Monterey Jack, pintos and cabbage for crunch, plus avocado and spicy red salsas. Meat options make for the toughest decision: Classics include costilla (short rib and chuck robed in mesquite smoke), grilled chicken, tripe and chorizo. Cabeza, a new entrant, simmers to such tenderness that the clove-scented molecules transform into beefy custard.

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Funke

Beverly Hills Italian $$$

By Jenn Harris

Evan Funke’s trilevel Beverly Hills restaurant is a temple of pasta, in very much the same vein as his Felix and Mother Wolf. But the eponymous restaurant may be the most theatrical of the three, with a sprawling open kitchen and pasta laboratorio on one level, a second dining room and a rooftop bar. More than a year in, reservations are still notoriously difficult to procure and the clientele no less stylish or connected. I almost take the pastas for granted, knowing the tomato and chile in the arrabbiata will reach a luscious harmony between the strands of al dente spaghetti. I’m always wowed by the sfincione palermitano, the round of dough painted with a jammy tomato and onion sauce, then dressed with a racy cheese, wild oregano and breadcrumbs. It starts off crisp, then fades into an airy pillow. And the prime rib-eye cap, well crusted and served alongside crispy potatoes, may be the most satisfying meat-and-potatoes dish in the city. Dinner is the antithesis of light, but save room for one of Shannon Swindle’s desserts. The seasonal crostata is always worth it.

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LOS ANGELES, CA - AUGUST 23: Shima Aji Tart, Yuzu Kosho, Keluga Caviar at Melisse on Saturday, August 23, 2024 in Santa Monica, CA. (Jordana Sheara / For The Times)

Mélisse

Santa Monica American $$$$

By Jenn Harris

Mélisse chef-owner Josiah Citrin once described his restaurant as “classic fine dining,” a term one might associate with a stuffy Eurocentric meal that lasts hours and can cost a month’s rent. Now in its 25th year, Mélisse is a jewel box within his larger Citrin restaurant, 14 cozy seats opposite an open kitchen. What he and chef-partner Ken Takayama and head sommelier Maja Kuemmerle are engineering is more a splendid extravagance that pushes the boundaries of anything remotely classic or rigid. A quenelle of strawberry sorbet floats in the center of lush orange tomato soup. Clear noodles fashioned from tomato consommé are chewy and a joy to eat. The lamb course is presented as both a textbook perfect herb-crusted chop and the filling for a fried spring roll with a bright cilantro and mint emulsion. To operate a restaurant in Los Angeles for 25 years is remarkable. Yet this is a team that’s still ambitiously reaching forward, and we’re eager to see where they take it next.

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Chi Spacca

Hancock Park Italian $$$

By Jenn Harris

In a city replete with excellent pizzerias and bakeries, Nancy Silverton’s focaccia di Recco remains one of the most impressive feats of flour, water and dairy. It’s a style of bread she fell in love with in the Ligurian town of Recco, then obsessed over for two years before introducing it to the menu at Chi Spacca. It’s made with dollops of salty cheese between two gossamer sheets of dough. A special pan is used to ensure the top of the bread is a bubbly, cracker-like landscape with boulders of cheese hiding beneath the surface. You will spot one on nearly every table. What follows will undoubtedly be a procession of meat in its many glorious forms. The affettati misti board is a long row of fat-speckled and -rimmed slices of cured pork alongside disks of fried pig’s trotter. The bistecca Fiorentina is a staggering 50 ounces of steak. Silverton and executive chef Armen Ayvazyan have a knack for delivering maximum impact with little to no flash. A recent special of grilled mackerel over Umbrian lentils dressed with olive oil was, just like the focaccia, the trotters and everything else on the table, stupefyingly great.

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Saffy's

East Hollywood Middle Eastern $$$

By Bill Addison

Labels settle easily onto restaurants, and it would be understandable to think of Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis’ East Hollywood blockbuster as “the fancy kebab place.” It’s true there is nowhere else where meat on sticks is imagined quite like Saffy’s ground veal and Ibérico pork seasoned with floral-sweet baharat, lime and poppy seeds, or its lamb shashlik marinated in labneh and sparked with paprika and cumin. But the dozen-plus appetizers are equal portraits of technique and outside-the-box combinations. Roasted celery root set on a fluffy ring of allium cream, for example, is forested with curry leaves, strands of sauerkraut, spicy-sweet apple harissa and dried rose petals. The flavors and fragrances leap between India, Africa and Eastern Europe. Saffy’s also has quietly become a daytime restaurant: Breakfasts of shakshuka or smoked salmon tartine jump-start the day and, returning to the kebab theme, chicken shashlik zinged with herb chutney and tahini in a pita makes for fortifying lunch-meeting fuel.

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Azizam

Silver Lake Persian $

By Bill Addison

The cooking of Iran has historically been a cuisine with distinct expressions inside and outside the home. Family settings often involve dishes that can be exceptionally labor-intensive or stews so nuanced and subtle they defy professional kitchen standardization. Most restaurant menus are purposefully designed around crowd-pleasing, fire-kissed kebabs, creamy dips and snowdrifts of seasoned rice heaped on platters. Cody Ma and Misha Sesar have poignantly narrowed the divide at the Silver Lake cafe they opened in March. The star among their concise mix of mazeh (cold small plates), sandwiches and mains is the kofteh Tabrizi, a giant beef-and-rice meatball riddled with herbs and steeped in a tomato-based sauce electric with Persian dried lime. Your spoon soon finds its sweet, secret heart: a filling of dried apricots, prunes, barberries and walnuts. Look to turmeric-marinated chicken over rice for sheer comfort. In the several years that Azizam previously ran as a pop-up, Ma and Sesar mined an exploratory streak in their cooking, finding the similarities and differences in their individual families’ regional recipes. I’m betting as they settle into the restaurant’s early success, we’ll see more intricate khoresht (seasonal stew) specials like a brothy June stunner of lamb neck with apricots.

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Knife Pleat

Costa Mesa French $$$$

By Jenn Harris

The dining room at Knife Pleat, with its tall, curved columns, soft light and plush purple banquettes, is an opulent cocoon in the retail maze that is South Coast Plaza. Yassmin Sarmadi and Tony Esnault’s restaurant is tucked into a corner of the shopping center known as the Penthouse, with high-fashion neighbors that mirror its luxury. Esnault spent years cooking in fine-dining restaurants in France before leading kitchens in New York and Los Angeles. He imparts a distinctly French sensibility to seasonal four- and six-course dinners, a three-course lunch and Saturday afternoon tea. Pearl barley mimics risotto under a sunflower foam with chanterelles. A sliver of duck breast, its skin still crisp, is plated just so in a small pool of duck jus alongside enough charred corn relish to provide the exact number of perfect bites. Esnault’s greatest triumph may be his signature légumes de saison, which makes an appearance on his vegetable-forward Flora menu. Radish, snap peas, orange and purple carrot, green onion, celery and broccolini are individually roasted, braised, steamed or left raw to coax out the purest flavors. This is food as art, thoughtful, executed with precision and a pleasure to eat. I never miss the annual Nowruz dinner, inspired by and overseen by Sarmadi’s mother, Shamsi Katebi.

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LOS ANGELES, CA - SEPTEMBER 05: Avocado and mentaiko rice, left; cod dosirak, right, and various banchan - rolled egg, bottom left, fermented cucumber and melon and sesame green beans at Perilla LA in Los Angeles, CA on Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Perilla L.A.

Chinatown Korean $

By Bill Addison

If you could eat lunch from only one Los Angeles restaurant for the rest of your life, where would it be? My answer comes easily: Perilla LA. Jihee Kim’s banchan, so full of geometries and colors and so urgent in flavor, brings this class of Korean dishes center-stage. Eaten collectively, they land in the Venn diagram linking light, nourishing and compelling. Expect straight-from-the-farmers-market produce prepared in intuitive variations of freshness and fermentation — garlicky eggplant, sesame-speckled green beans, complex kimchi made from collard greens or daikon — and perennials like her stunning seaweed-rolled omelet cut into circles with hypnotic, spiraling centers. Small portions of the day’s banchan selection also come over rice as part of a compartmented dosirak tray, served with warm doenjang-marinated chicken or cod. My dream hack: Swing by on a Monday, enjoy a dosirak at one of the shaded tables outside Perilla’s tiny gabled home in a converted garage, then take home four or five banchan to eat midday for the remainder of the week.

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SANTA MONICA, CA - OCTOBER 09: The canard a la presse five course meal with canape, salad, duck leg confit, duck breast with side of Brussels sprouts and kale and creme brulee at Pasjoli in Santa Monica, CA on Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Pasjoli

Santa Monica French $$$

By Jenn Harris

There is a point during dinner at Dave Beran’s Santa Monica restaurant when the attention of the entire room shifts to a table in front of the kitchen. Beran makes a show of breaking down a duck and stuffing the carcass into a medieval-looking contraption that compresses the cartilage, bone and tissue into a pink goo that’s then transformed into a luxurious gravy. The chef is charismatic and fluid in his movements while he chats up a captivated audience, some of whom have actually ordered the duck and some who have not. Pasjoli, like many restaurants around town, is finding a groove that feels right for its particular place in time. Beran recently switched the dining room’s a la carte menu to two prix fixe options, one centering around the duck and another that reads like a greatest-hits list for the five-year-old French bistro. Longtime favorites such as the foie brioche can still be ordered for the table. The new format straddles the line between destination dining and the kind of neighborhood restaurant everybody wants to have down the street. There’s a $65, three-course menu for diners who can make it in before 6 p.m. And at the bar, you can order thick burgers dripping with marrow aioli and what I strongly believe is the best grilled cheese sandwich in the known universe.

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Orsa & Winston

Downtown L.A. Italian Japanese $$$$

By Jenn Harris

If you were to come up with a chef who embodies the spirit of Los Angeles, whose career and cuisine have matched the ebbs and flows of the city, whose restaurants help codify what an L.A. restaurant could and should be, it’s Josef Centeno. He centered dishes around vegetables, served bubbly, mottled flatbreads and made his own shrubs before it was the thing to do. With Orsa & Winston, he applies his signature category-bending approach to fine dining, blending Japanese and Italian cuisines into something singular.

Each course comes with its own epiphany. Crudité is reimagined as a tangle of sweet, crunchy snap peas, waxy green beans and slivers of pink radish dressed with a creamy miso and anchovy vinaigrette under ribbons of shaved black truffle. A crudo course is presented as bluefin tuna bathed in watermelon aguachile with pops of finger lime, pluot and cucamelons. His rice porridge, a longtime favorite that’s now an optional add-on, is a cross between congee and risotto, restorative yet decadent. On my last visit, a split prawn, uni, caviar, ikura, scallop and abalone were arranged neatly over the top. At $150 per person for five courses, it’s the most accessible fine-dining experience in the city.

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Tsubaki

Echo Park Japanese Restaurant $$

By Bill Addison

Courtney Kaplan and Charles Namba’s 32-seat Echo Park gem follows the izakaya playbook: two dozen or so raw, steamed, fried and grilled dishes informed by Namba’s L.A.-native penchant for combing the farmers markets, and matched with Kaplan’s mastery of sake. That’s the tidy summary of Tsubaki. It’s far more difficult to convey the drive and heart that animates the restaurant until you’re shoulder to shoulder with other diners in its tiny space. One server lifts the lid off a donabe full of clams, and the steam blasts scents of seaweed and cultured butter. Another parses the fine points of melon, mineral and umami flavors present in by-the-glass sake options. You split a potato croquette in half with chopsticks and find the filling of roasted corn, cotija, crema and lime evokes the flavors of elotes. Note how the chicken oysters on a yakitori skewer displays dots of yuzu kosho as distinct as the eyespots on peacock feathers. Tsubaki is my back-pocket restaurant for a dinner that impresses out-of-towners every time, including vegetarians. While Namba and Kaplan have been focused on opening their new bistro Camélia downtown, chef de cuisine Klementine Song has seamlessly steered the kitchen of their flagship. A meal here is as magnificent as ever.

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Here's Looking at You

Koreatown American $$

By Bill Addison

In October my best friend and I were having dinner at a clubby West Hollywood restaurant where the food was meh and the evening needed salvaging. I knew how. “Let’s head to Here’s Looking at You for a cocktail and a burger,” I said. HLAY, as the regulars call it, offers a late happy hour menu at its bar from 8:30 to 10 p.m., during which the kitchen cranks out thick, dry-aged cheeseburgers embellished with peppery mayo and the sweet sting of fried onions. Settling in, we learned of a second, recently added option — steak frites featuring a sirloin cap (also known as a baseball cut) smeared with pink fermented radish butter alongside curly fries. Both were stellar. Bar director Danny Rubenstein had dreamed up a wild cocktail based on corn whiskey and avocado-washed mezcal that he named Jolene, which I trust is in honor of Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter.”

HLAY meets us where we are: in need of a mood shift, out for a casual celebration, up for some ambitious cooking with hip-hop as the background. Owner Lien Ta ensures that the tone of the dining room, with its abstractly Midcentury Modern vibe, stays welcoming and convivial. Founding chef Jonathan Whitener took all the cuisines that live in our heads as food-loving Angelenos and managed to graft them onto one concise menu. Frog’s legs splattered with salsa negra. A crazy, unerring chopped broccoli salad that includes pickled ginger and all sorts of seeds and nuts to mix together. Tomatoes sprinkled with frizzled lap xuong and splashed with bagna cauda. Whitener died unexpectedly and heartbreakingly in February. But when the room is full, and diners are swiping signature shishitos through creamy tonnato just as the burgers start rolling out, the restaurant feels like it will always be part of our lives. Which I hope it will be.

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LOS ANGELES, CA - OCTOBER 11: BBQ platter with beef ribs, top center, brisket, sausage, pork belly, bottom right, Thicc burger and mac and cheese at Moo's Craft Barbecue in Los Angeles, CA on Friday, Oct. 11, 2024. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Moo’s Craft Barbecue

Lincoln Heights Barbecue $$

By Jenn Harris

It doesn’t matter if you’ve sampled the best barbecue in central Texas, enjoy debating the techniques of pitmasters or have read every Aaron Franklin book. There’s no denying that Moo’s Craft Barbecue is excellent barbecue, with a style that’s distinctly of Los Angeles. I’ve been following Michelle and Andrew Muñoz since they started a pop-up in their East L.A. backyard in 2017. The bark on Andrew’s brisket is as black as night, encrusted in a deluge of pepper. It jiggles like a pop star and has the smoky, meaty punch of good pastrami. His pulled pork is soft and supple, with a winning ratio of fat to meat and a slight vinegar tang. Michelle cleverly infuses a SoCal spirit into snappy sausage links engorged with queso Oaxaca and roasted poblanos, plus pork belly burnt ends sticky with a Korean barbecue-inspired glaze. Most tables at the couple’s Lincoln Heights restaurant overflow with platters of brisket and ribs, but make sure there’s at least one burger in the mix. The jumbo beef patty is tinged with smoke and encased in a black pepper crust with a blanket of American cheese and just the right amount of sliced white onion.

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Quarter Sheets

Echo Park Pizza Bakery $$

By Bill Addison

Condensing the scope of Aaron Lindell and Hannah Ziskin’s unbridled artistry to “pizza and cake” was probably always reductive. It was the easiest way to define the couple’s three-year-old Echo Park restaurant, a union of their talents originally hatched as a pandemic pop-up. Lindell oversees the pizza; Ziskin handles the sweets. Their chosen media happen to be infinitely adaptable — to seasons, curiosities and the freedom of imaginations. Lindell might pave a rectangular Detroit-style pizza with potatoes, olives, pistachios, cured lemon slices, mozzarella and Pecorino. On Wednesdays and Sundays he often bakes round, thin, charry-edged bar pies; my summer is not complete without one crowned with Jimmy Nardello peppers and sausage. Ziskin, meanwhile, still serves her now-famous spin on princess cake, but in her creative restlessness she’s also returning to the plated desserts of her days as an upscale-restaurant pastry chef. Mission fig semifreddo scented with sherry and fig leaf and garnished with candied walnuts? A big holy yes. With all her spare time, Ziskin also makes the just-salty-enough feta for a warm, brothy bean salad: It’s a headliner for an increasingly lengthy list of appetizers (vegetables seasoned in unpredictable ways, fluffy meatballs dusted with aged provolone) on the dine-in menu. Quarter Sheets began accepting reservations this year for the tiny, scruffy-chic dining room, and they tend to book as soon as they become available. Persevere, or wait in line for a walk-in table at the best pizzeria-that’s-more-than-a-pizzeria in Los Angeles.

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Antico Nuovo

Larchmont Italian $$

By Bill Addison

Shaved Sicilian bottarga blasts umami over piped Normandy butter alongside a crisp balloon of focaccia. Tiny cubes of veal tongue join silky beef cheeks in a ragù Bolognese that entangles pappardelle in meaty depths. Pancetta and rabbit rev the filling for tiny, ridged plin dell’ alta langa. A sauce of egg yolk and beef stock enriches satisfyingly bony, thin-cut lamb chops. Chef and owner Chad Colby operates the finest Italian restaurant in Los Angeles by defying a false American notion that the cuisines of Italy are nursery foods for adults. (Yes, I am saying we have a lot of safe, boring options in our pasta-choked city.) His dishes taste of the kind of farm cooking where every cut of an animal has recognized value. After opening Antico in Koreatown five years ago, Colby continues to find ways to push himself. Recently he’s tackled a recipe for bouncy-smooth, delicately spiced mortadella that takes three days to prepare; he serves it with extraordinary Vacche Rosse cheese (think extra nutty and complex Parmagiano) and syrupy, 25-year-old aceto balsamico. He also employs an unusually warm, committed and conversant staff — among them general manager and wine director Rachel Grisafi, who is masterful at decoding the mysteries of Italian varietals tableside. In the 2022 edition of this guide I noted that Antico was a great option for a last-minute special-occasion dinner. That’s not the case anymore, and needing to plan a week or two out for a reservation isn’t a bad thing. I’m glad more Angelenos know what we have in Antico.

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Anajak Thai

Sherman Oaks Thai $$

By Jenn Harris

How do you breathe new life into a neighborhood Thai restaurant that’s been open for four decades? You have your art director son take over the kitchen and introduce dry-aged fish, carnitas and Japanese coals to the mix. Ricky Pichetrungsi opened Anajak on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks in 1981. But his son Justin stepped in after Ricky had a stroke in 2019 and catapulted the restaurant onto the national dining scene with such gusto that it was impossible to ignore. Through his Thai Taco Tuesdays, where crowds line up for lap cheong-topped tostadas in the side alley, and menu additions like the rice- and wheat-flour-coated fried chicken gilded with caviar, Justin has managed to find the sweet spot in the middle of innovation and preservation. His Massaman braised beef is as comforting as a hunk of pot roast, surrounded by halved carrots and wedges of sweet potato. The rust-brown curry has the complexity and depth of a mole that’s been cooking for years. The nam jim seafood sauce that accompanies the sea bream is nearly neon green, with a smack of acid and funk that’s so electric you’ll ask for a spoon to scoop it all up. That tension between Justin’s intensely creative streak and the cooking that established the foundation for his family’s restaurant is what gives Anajak its edge, and its undeniable charm. And sommelier Ian Krupp’s thoughtful wine pairings are rarely obvious, and never miss.

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Dunsmoor

Glassell Park New American Bakery $$

By Bill Addison

The question “What is American food?” has only one unambiguous answer: It’s the culinary sum of all of us. Every chef seeks their own meanings. Brian Dunsmoor, who grew up in Georgia and spent childhood summers in Colorado, has mused on his regional origins during the last dozen years of his cooking career in Los Angeles. At his Glassell Park restaurant, the dining room’s faded brick, ambered lighting and central burning hearth (from which most of the dishes emerge) take me back to my years as a critic covering Atlanta. His menu moves with the calendar in rhythm to California, but the flavors register as patently Southern. Smoked pork is as much a part of Dunsmoor’s seasoning repertoire as salt or acid: Wood-fire warmth permeates his ham hock terrine tanged with pear and apple chutney, a salad of chicories wilted in hot bacon vinaigrette and a mushroom-crusted pork chop finished with smoked lard and thyme. He also knows when subtlety is the better choice, as in a spring dish of Carolina gold rice suffused with shrimp butter and Parmesan that sings of earthy sweetness. His famous chile-cheddar cornbread, baked in cast-iron skillets and literally dripping in butter, rightly namechecks Edna Lewis; everyone should know her contributions as one of the 20th century’s defining Black chefs and cookbook authors.

Another sensation the kitchen team pulls from the hearth: an 8-ounce burger made from dry-aged beef with a thick veneer of Comté and a crown of onion jam or thick-sliced tomato (depending on the season). The restaurant makes 20 burgers a night and serves them only in the bar next door. Its hedonism is itself worth a trip to the bar, though I have also started with a burger before a full meal next door and finished the evening without room for grape buckle cake but also with no regrets.

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n/naka

Palms Japanese $$$$

By Jenn Harris

The dining room at n/naka feels like a portal to another dimension, a serene, minimal space where Niki Nakayama and Carole Iida-Nakayama carefully shape every aspect of your three-hour, 13-course dinner. It’s the appropriate setting for the Nakayamas’ interpretation of kaiseki, the multicourse Japanese style of dining that aims to employ various techniques and presentation to honor each ingredient. When Niki opened the restaurant in 2011, she helped pave the way for chefs to experiment with differing forms of tasting menus, introducing many diners to a world of high-end Japanese cuisine beyond sushi and ramen. With few distractions in the dining room, I’m hyper-focused on what’s in front of me: a square of watermelon spiked with sansho, tender Wagyu beef with wasabi creme, a piece of milky ika battered and fried like karaage. There are courses of sushi too, but the Nakayamas’ real strength lies in dishes that allow their more personal visions of cuisine to come through. A number of items are grown in the couple’s own yard, with the majority of the other ingredients coming from elsewhere in California; yes, those are slivers of avocado sandwiched between the tachiuo fish and a puddle of ponzu gelée. Dinner will transport you to Japan, with a few L.A. stops along the way.

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Barbacoa Ramirez

Arleta Mexican $

By Bill Addison

Steamy, fragrant, supple-ropy lamb barbacoa, when done right, is such a painstaking art that most local practitioners sell it only on the weekends. Some standouts must be mentioned: in Lincoln Heights, Josefina Garduño serves spicy consomé bobbing with chickpeas and wisps of meat alongside barbacoa tacos, and in frequent Boyle Heights pop-ups Petra Zavaleta of Barba Kush unwraps her Pueblan-style barbacoa from a swaddle of maguey leaves. Conversations around sublime lamb barbacoa should start up north, however, at the stand that Gonzalo Ramirez sets up on Saturday and Sunday mornings in the north San Fernando Valley, near the Arleta DMV. You’ll see him and his family wearing red T-shirts that say “Atotonilco El Grande Hidalgo” to honor their hometown in central-eastern Mexico. Ramirez tends and butchers lambs in the Central Valley. The meat slow-cooks in a pit overnight and, cradled in plush made-to-order tortillas, the tacos come in three forms: smoky, molten-textured barbacoa; a pancita variation stained with chiles that goes fast; and incredible moronga, a nubbly, herbaceous sausage made with lamb’s blood.

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Providence

Hollywood Seafood $$$$

By Bill Addison

Michael Cimarusti and Donato Poto’s paragon of sumptuous, celebratory dining reaches its 20th anniversary on June 17, 2025. In high-end restaurant years that’s about the age of a mature redwood. How has the duo achieved such longevity? By maintaining sky-high standards, kept aloft via Cimarusti’s command of seafood (including a decades-long commitment to sustainable fishing partnerships) and Poto’s pampering sense of hospitality.

Nine courses, plus flurries of one-bite extras to begin and finish dinner, propel the $325-per-person tasting menu. Dishes change nightly to reflect the day’s catch. A gorgeous mid-September plate, for instance, centered the meatiest hunks of Washington state Dungeness crab arranged among poached spot prawns, a squash blossom filled with scallop-crab mousseline, roasted zucchini and a peeled braised tomato, finished with broth made from shellfish heads. The next night the kitchen switched to California box crab, and if I were a billionaire I would have returned to discern the crustaceans’ sweet, subtle differences. A big secret to Providence’s luxury approach resides in the extra touches: the crusty, fragrant sourdough boule using red fife wheat from Tehachapi Heritage Grain Project; pile-it-on options including tableside cocktails and seasonal truffles shaved over handmade pasta or the blondest omelet; and the balletic, mind-reading service team. Among them is wine director David Osenbach, whose dry humor pairs superbly with the premier cru Chablis he’s pouring.

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LOS ANGELES, CA - SEPTEMBER 12: Amaebi tartare, (sweet shrimp from Hokkaido) with kaluga caviar and amaebi roe (natural teal color) dressed with yuzu juice and salt at Morihiro in Los Angeles, CA on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Morihiro

Atwater Village Japanese $$$$

By Jenn Harris

There are certain culinary experiences that make me feel lucky to be an Angeleno. Sitting at the sushi bar opposite Morihiro “Mori” Onodera while he expertly marries silvery-skinned fish and rice in the palm of his hand, raising his arms like a dancer to get the right angle, is high on that list. The most enthusiastic sushi obsessives will tell you that any great nigiri starts with the shari, and Onodera has earned a zealous fan base for his rice. When he opened Mori Sushi in West L.A. in 2000, it was an epoch in the city’s establishment as a mecca for sushi. Now at Morihiro, he mills his rice and seasons it with a red vinegar that gives the shari its trademark Champagne hue, the grains a loosely packed collection of individual flavor bombs hitting each piece of fish. It could be a pink-skinned barracuda, the edges curled up and slightly charred, or a tiger prawn brushed with just enough soy to tease out its marine sweetness — each is exactly the right temperature. Before the parade of nigiri, there is Onodera’s silky tofu, made with soy milk from Kyoto. Many of the evening’s bites are served on ceramic dishware he makes himself. It’s been decades since Onodera opened his first namesake restaurant, and he’s still setting the tone for sushi in L.A., and beyond.

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Holbox

Historic South-Central Mexican $$

By Bill Addison

A lunchtime line can stretch out the door of the Mercado La Paloma in Historic South-Central. What are all these people queued up for? They’re here to order at the counter of the stylishly angled marisquería where Gilberto Cetina approaches citrus-blasted, chile-ignited seafood with singular soul and finesse. Holbox, The Times’ 2023 Restaurant of the Year, is one of the city’s most significant dining destinations: affordable, relentlessly creative, an only-in-L.A. expression of third-culture cooking. I will urge you toward the smoked kanpachi taco; Cetina and his team smoke the heads and collars of the fish over applewood while simmering the separated meat with aromatics to create a deliciously filigreed and collagen-rich spread. The mixture gushes from its griddled tortilla, sealed with queso Chihuahua, garnished with salsa cruda and avocado and drizzled with peanut salsa macha. Baja scallop aguachile swirling in lime-serrano-cilantro marinade, tostadas heavy with uni and kanpachi and a bisque-like seafood stew showcasing delicate fish sausage also await. The mercado isn’t licensed to serve alcohol, but for a sense of occasion, make reservations for the $120-per-person tasting menus that Cetina serves only on Thursday and Friday nights.

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LOS ANGELES, CA - OCTOBER 30: Tower of hors d'oeuvres - Top: toasted baguettes, soft scrambled eggs, uni from Santa Barbara and Italian white truffles. Bottom: toasted baguettes with smoked tomatoes, tuna, caviar and corn beignets at Republique in Los Angeles, CA on Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

République

Hancock Park American $$$

By Jenn Harris

When the tower of starters hits the table, there’s an audible gasp. Shaved truffles cover tongues of uni balanced over soft-scrambled eggs on toast. Corn beignets are crowned with tiny dollops of jalapeño aioli, and crostini are covered in mounds of bluefin tuna with smoked heirloom tomato and caviar. Escargots swim in herb butter at the bottom of a piping-hot shot glass under a dome of pastry. Walter and Margarita Manzke’s Hancock Park restaurant thrills from the moment the doors open in the morning to a pastry case brimming with Margarita’s pastries, cakes, tarts and pie. At dinner, it’s Walter’s interpretation of California-French dishes that surprise and delight. Roast chicken was meant to taste this way, barely clinging to the bone and with a miniature pot of coq au vin sauce so viscous it coats the spoon. Liberty Farms duck liver with wild mushrooms and truffle is baked like a sausage roll in a pastry shell. Hospitality operates on another level, with staff who anticipate your every need. Wine director Sarah Clarke seems to have telepathic abilities, appearing out of nowhere with a nonalcoholic tea or the glass of bubbly you wanted. It’s the restaurant I reference most when making the case that L.A. is, in fact, one of the best food cities in the world.

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LOS ANGELES, CA - OCTOBER 22: Left: Bansang: soup, shepherd's purse rice, dried acorn jelly, anise hyssop, dooboo jang, pyogo mushroom and artichoke and doenjang omija. Deep fried sole with parae seaweed gim gochunaengi, gooseberry, ssam and at Baroo in Los Angeles, CA on Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2024. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Baroo

Downtown L.A. Korean $$$

By Bill Addison

The Times’ 2024 Restaurant of the Year centers on Kwang Uh’s lyrical modern Korean tasting menu, priced at $115 per person and reasonably paced to soothe Angelenos impatient with prix fixe dinners. The emphasis is on vegetables and herbs and seafood; one course features densely delicious short rib or pork collar meat alongside a singular bowl of rice seasoned with things like dried shepherd’s purse (a plant in the mustard family) and XO sauce fashioned from chorizo. Uh is a maestro of fermentation: In his hands, kimchi, pickles, soybean-based jangs and even buttermilk (paired in one sauce with lemongrass) open doors to unseen worlds of flavor. Traditional expressions of the cuisine define much of Korean dining culture in Los Angeles. Baroo stands alone in its innovations.

Many of the restaurant’s longtime fans (I’m among them) remember when the project began nearly a decade ago in an unassuming Hollywood strip mall, serving wild, satisfying grain bowls and pastas that sold for under $20. Mina Park, who is married to Uh, deserves no end of credit for refashioning the ephemeral, short-lived legend into a viable business. The Arts District room is comfortable and flatteringly lit. The service is gracious. Emphasizing Korean spirits, beverage director Jason Lee masterfully complements the cuisine. And Uh continues to evolve in his craft. With 24 hours’ advance notice, for example, you can order a vegetarian version of the tasting menu. Its many wondrous and detailed components channel Korean temple cuisine, and it is immediately one of L.A.’s most brilliantly realized feasts, plant-based or otherwise.

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Hayato

Downtown L.A. Japanese $$$$

By Jenn Harris

Dinner at Brandon Hayato Go’s seven-seat counter inside the Row DTLA is the most coveted reservation in Los Angeles. Slots open at the start of the month and disappear before the page can load. But if your name is plucked from the waitlist and you have the funds, the experience is unparalleled. Go prepares dishes in full view of diners while carrying on a conversation about the provenance and seasonality of each ingredient throughout the evening. His selection of sake is vast and his knowledge even broader, with some bottles not often seen outside of his dining room. Obsessive is too tame a word for Go’s inspection of each cluster of onion petals that darken for 90 minutes over hot embers, or the precise preparation of the kinmedai golden eye snapper, designed to soften the flesh in a way that won’t compromise the texture of the skin. A slab of grilled shiro amadai just breaks the surface of a light dashi with bits of junsai plant floating in the broth, the green twigs suspended in a forcefield of their own natural gelatin. Each element sings, as if it was harvested, raised or caught to end up on the dish in front of you. Halfway through dinner, guests merge into one party, sharing pours of sake and exchanging reservation waitlist stories. Dinner at Go’s hands is pure pleasure, likely the most transcendent dining experience in the city. And you’ll make a few new friends too.

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Kato

Downtown L.A. Taiwanese Californian $$$$

By Bill Addison

Hot pot. Stir-fried clams with basil. Newport Seafood’s famous peppery lobster. The dishes Jon Yao grew up loving in the San Gabriel Valley are the seeds from which his one-of-a-kind cuisine comes to light. A conception like smoky grilled lobster set over a buttery riff on shrimp toast, intensified with pepper relish and a fathomless black bean sauce, won’t visually resemble its source of inspiration. Yet the flavors contain not only Yao’s culinary DNA but also a collective memory of what it means to dine in Los Angeles.

There is arguably no more ambitious chef in the city than Yao, who strives constantly to grow in his artistry, his grasp of technique and his insight into his own identity. During a tasting menu of a dozen or so courses, expect sculptural plates and reductions distilled from so many ingredients you’ll forget them 10 seconds after the good-hearted server rattles them off. What matters, from cured tuna scented with coriander to a final cream puff balancing salted egg yolk and brown sugar, is that they delight.

Nearly three years ago Yao and his team moved into the airy, wood-and-concrete-lined space in Row DTLA. The restaurant started as a bootstrap operation in a West L.A. strip mall in 2016 and has expanded in every dimension. Managing partner Nikki Reginaldo leads an ever-more-gracious staff. Ryan Bailey, who co-owns the restaurant with Yao, has amassed a wine list of nearly 3,000 bottles — and like all the greatest sommeliers, his conversation and wit take the stress out of deciphering an overwhelming document. Bar director Austin Hennelly has my vote for the city’s greatest bartender; his non-alcoholic program alone changes the game.

This is Kato’s second consecutive year in the No. 1 position. Over the last few months Jenn and I ate at hundreds of restaurants, separately and together, to narrow down our rankings. We shared a meal at Kato as the project was winding down. By dinner’s end, our bowls of peach shaved ice scraped clean, we agreed without question: For its across-the-board excellence, and the only-in-L.A. spirit that animates every detail, Kato earns the crowning slot.

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These are the 101 best restaurants in Los Angeles

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Every 101 Best L.A. Restaurants list since they began in 2013

Locol

Kang Kang Food Court

Mario’s Butcher Shop

Crossroads Kitchen

Surawon Tofu House

Origin

Nok's Kitchen

Bistro Na's

Las Segovias

Tokyo Fried Chicken

Lasita

n/soto

Bhookhe

Hakata Izakaya Hero

Mr. T

Stir Crazy

Lalibela

Post & Beam

Tacos La Carreta

Sincerely Syria

El Bacano

Sobar

Hu Tieu De Nhat

Camphor

Yess Restaurant

Villa’s Tacos

Cassia

Found Oyster

Macheen

Borit Gogae

My 2 Cents

Bar Chelou

Pizzeria Bianco

Ladyhawk

Pine & Crane

Barsha

Damian

Poncho’s Tlayudas

Dulan's on Crenshaw

Delmy’s Pupusas

Asadero Chikali

Majordomo

Danbi

Henry's Cuisine

Mae Malai Thai House of Noodles

Kuya Lord

Yang's Kitchen

Si! Mon

Mori Nozomi

Birdie G’s

Bridgetown Roti

Vespertine

Dear John's

Heritage Barbecue

Two Hommés

Camélia

Petit Trois

Dolan's Uyghur Cuisine

Alta Adams

Mini Kabob

Sushi Kisen

Fat + Flour

Bavel

Komal

Bar Amá

Ammatolí

Yangban

Pizzeria Sei

Holy Basil

Sushi Kaneyoshi

Sushi Inaba

Osteria Mozza

Kismet

Rustic Canyon

Al Baraka Restaurant