The thick wine list at Patina is rich in hidden treasures if you are willing to consider Corbières or Slovenian Pinot Gris instead of Napa Chardonnay. Read more.
If you want a pisco sour, you're in the right place: The foamy, tart, lightly bitter version of the Peruvian national cocktail flows like water. Read more.
Comme Ça is more or less a classic brasserie, with plateaux of chilled seafood, escargots persillade & sautéed skate Grenoblois, except that you can also get a nicely turned Aviation No. 1. Read more.
One of L.A.'s greatest culinary legacies is the California lunchroom burger, the multi-layered composition of iceberg lettuce, pickles and slightly underripe tomatoes. Read more.
Border Grill is the rare mainstream restaurant whose tacos don't make you yearn for a truck parked by an auto-parts junkyard somewhere in East L.A. Read more.
Gjelina is cheerful, boozy & known for both its good-looking customers & Travis Lett's decent organic-fetish Italian food. The scene may be as crunchy as the pizza crust, but relax: It's Abbot Kinney. Read more.
Michael Cimarusti’s raw materials come from all over the world, but his sense of seasonality, his easy multicultural flavor palette and his unfussy use of California produce is solidly L.A. Read more.
If you have contemplated a meal of blowfish, your dreams were probably shaped by the popular conception of the notorious fish of death. Here it's the centerpiece of a pleasant evening. Read more.
A nice place to drop in for Basque-inspired tapas: crisp, gooey chicken croquettes; lamb meatballs glazed with caramelized tomato sauce; tiny squid stuffed with duck sausage; or Spanish cured meats. Read more.
Specializes in cooking Kerala: saucer-shaped rice-flour saucers called appam; an obscurely flavored fish curry with undernotes of tamarind and garlic; the peppery, buttery cashew-rice dish ven pongal. Read more.
Get the mole sampler and spend the evening comparing Oaxacan black mole with mellower mole Poblano; with the spicy, smoky mancha manteles; or with the signature mole de los dioses. Read more.
Nickel Diner bakes its own bread, prepares elaborate cakes and maple-bacon doughnuts and makes delicious fried catfish with corn cakes. Don’t miss the Lowrider Burger. Read more.
Musso's, if you look at it a certain way, is a living museum of 1920s American cuisine: avocado cocktails, crab Louie, jellied consommé, grilled lamb kidneys and Wednesday sauerbraten. Read more.
Get your Carolina-style slaw dogs, Italian dogs, rippers, cremators, Hatch chile dogs—made with artisanal, natural-skin, small-production franks imported from New Jersey. Read more.
The waiter will show you how to mix a soju bomb. Sobriety is not considered a virtue here. Read more.
Ludovic Lefebvre is one of the greatest pure chefs ever to cook in Los Angeles. Trois Mec is the first place that has ever been his own, like a private club that happens to serve delicious cuisine. Read more.
Their menu is a living, habanero-intensive thesaurus of the panuchos and codzitos, sopa de lima and papadzules, banana-leaf tamales and shark casseroles that make up one of Mexico's spiciest cuisines. Read more.
It feels a bit like a grand steampunk machine dedicated to turning out roasted bone marrow with laksa leaf, kon loh mee noodles with barbecued pork, grilled lamb belly and fried chicken wings. Read more.
Not just a sushi bar. You expect expensive wild sea bream to be treated reverently at a sushi bar. You do not expect the same care to be taken with a carrot. Read more.
Sapp's boat noodle soup is magnificent: a musky, blood-thickened beef soup screaming with chile heat; tart lime juice in lockstep with the funkiness of the broth. Read more.
Try the crunchy fried fish with homegrown turmeric, mango salad lightened with coconut water or soft-shell crab with the legendarily stinky sataw bean. Read more.
There’s some delicious meat and seafood here: Wagyu sashimi, bone marrow flan, thinly sliced veal tongue in salsa verde, and real Kyushu beef. Read more.
The most famous restaurant in the observable universe, reinvented by Wolfgang Puck and his new chef, Tetsu Yahagi. The thick prime rib steak sings with the flavors of blood, age and char. Read more.
At Guelaguetza, you'll find tlayudas, like bean-smeared Oaxacan pizzas, the size of manhole covers; thick tortillas called memelas; and delicious, mole-drenched tamales. Read more.
Try the Spanish fried chicken with cumin, pappardelle with nettles and asparagus with lemongrass, and don’t forget the glass of Sancerre. Read more.
You’re here for an astonishing quantity of meat, charcuterie ranging from potted duck with blueberries to the intense house-cured bacon, and a menu of simple, butcher’s food. Read more.
Chef Jordan Kahn keeps it weird and proud with nominally Vietnamese-based cuisine, and the results are often as delicious as they are startling. Read more.
Specialties include pot roast, Kansas City steaks and an iceberg wedge salad frosted with blue cheese. Don’t forget to try the chicken with kaffir lime leaf, either. Read more.
Raul Ortega might personally hand you a taco, ask if you want to try a plate of ceviche or aguachile. His signature tacos dorados de camaron, fried tacos with shrimp, are just too formidable. Read more.
A fusion of complex, ritualized Japanese kaiseki cuisine with modern California small-plates cooking, like the black cod served under smoldering sheets of the Japanese cedar hinoki. Read more.
The luxury ingredients and luxury prices seem not to dissuade diners who are happy to face down $175 asparagus dinners, showers of truffles and caviar, and even the standard $125 prix fixe. Read more.
We recommend the astonishing "Hamembert" plate with Mangalitsa ham, oozing wedges of Camembert cheese, and an artfully charred length of baguette. Read more.
A restaurant that makes beef-heart tartare seem not only possible but desirable; that makes a craveable specialty of pork boiled with cabbage. Read more.
Michael Voltaggio agonizes over every gram of sea-bean chimichurri on the beef tartare, every plate of potato charcoal with crème fraîche and every scoop of wood-smoke ice cream that leaves the line. Read more.
Delivers in every way a seafood house can deliver, with tanks full of spider crabs, exotic reef fish and Santa Barbara spot prawns, and a kitchen prepared to braise sea cucumber and sun-dried abalone. Read more.
We recommend the tendon, rice bowl with tempura, expressive of the roasty, nutty flavors of the expensive sesame frying oil, of the subtle sweetness of prawns and Tokyo eel. Read more.
Try the Rotgut Mekong whisky, stinky natural Gamays from the Loire, fearsome yet delicious nam prik, or pounded salads from the area around Chiang Mai. Read more.
The house-smoked Hunan ham has the smoky punch of first-rate barbecue, coarsely chopped and sautéed with dried long beans, garlic cloves, chopped chiles. Read more.
The basic impression is of Italian cooking translated into an odd American dialect, in which grilled anchovies are laid so beautifully on the plate that you suspect there's an art director. Read more.
You will eat beef and chawan mushi and other things you may not associate with sushi because this is less a sushi bar than a kind of kaiseki restaurant, exquisitely seasonal, exquisitely Japanese. Read more.
Try the chefly interpretation of Mexican bar snacks, including seared slices of carnitas terrine with cubes of Coca-Cola gelee and pigskin two ways. Read more.
The dorowot, a two-day chicken stew vibrating with what must be ginger and black pepper and bishop's weed and clove, cuts straight through to the Ethiopian soul. Read more.
John Shook and Vinny Dotolo have a pretty good sense of what tastes good, be it melted cheese with chorizo or calves' brains with the French curry vadouvan Read more.
The cooking—the puffy pies at Pizzeria Mozza, perfected northern Italian dishes at Osteria Mozza, charcuterie and grilled meats at Chi'Spacca or focaccia at Mozza2Go—comes from an Italy of the mind. Read more.
The chef, Nicola Mastronardi, is a master of the big, hardwood-burning ovens, of roast porchetta and cuttlefish salad, of the flavors of salt, clean ocean and smoke. Read more.
Go straight for the crabs fried with chile and garlic; the crocks of Old Alley Pork, braised into pig candy; the smoked fish; the stone-pot fried rice; or the pan-fried pork buns. Read more.
Stunning bistro cooking: braised pork belly with favas and polenta, a gorgeous ballotine of rabbit with sprigs of fresh tarragon, tarte flambé, fried pig's ears, roasted marrowbone with radish. Read more.
The cooking here includes both handcrafted pasta — the pappardelle with pheasant and the handmade spaghetti with Sicilian almond pesto are wonderful — and steak, fish and duck. Read more.
If you should happen across a special of lamb innards or one of the gigantic sweet-sour braised pork shanks, make sure to order one the second you sit down. Read more.
Park's pretty much has the top end of K-Town barbecue to itself. The quality of the galbi, the pork belly and the spicy galbi soup is superb. Read more.
The great specialty is cherrywood-smoked Copper River salmon with mango, a dish that certain local sushi masters would rather die than serve. (It's their loss: The dish is stunningly good.) Read more.
Don’t miss the Guadalajara-style birria: roasted kid hacked into chunks and served in a strong consommé that tastes like amplified pan drippings. Read more.
Must have: the tiny flautas, the house specialty, are tightly rolled and very crisp, buried under layers of chile sauce, thick guacamole and tart Mexican sour cream. Read more.
Some delicious examples: pistachio flavored with nuts hand-carried back from the Sicilian pistachio village Bronte, or rich goat's milk gelato spiked with roasted cacao nibs Read more.
Cacao has a fairly open mind on what might go into a taco. They make carnitas out of duck. Other ingredients include sea urchin, hibiscus flowers and huitlacoche. Read more.
The ultra-spicy, tamarind-soured, fish-sauce-laced house-special version of pad thai here is about as good as it gets, a powerful dish, truly exotic, sweet and squiggly and delicious. Read more.
Modeled on neighborhood Creole Italian places from New Orleans, so along with the burrata salad you get oyster po' boys, crawfish garnishing grilled fish, and fried shrimp with artichokes. Read more.
Some strange, some wonderful: encapsulated olives, air breads, deconstructed Spanish omelets, mozzarella balls that explode into liquid, cotton candy mojitos. Read more.
Go for the Bäco, Josef Centeno's signature creation, a kind of flatbread sandwich halfway between a Catalan coca and a taco pumped up on 'roids, slicked with a goopy, vaguely Mediterranean sauce. Read more.
Suzanne Goin’s resinous herbs and precise splashes of acidity make vegetables dance and bring out the deep, fleshy resonances in braised pork cheeks and her notorious short ribs. Read more.
Head to a deserted parking lot late at night and wait for the appearance of the Kogi truck, from which you will soon purchase enormous, great-tasting plates of Korean short-rib tacos. Read more.
Chef John Sedlar treats his tortillas, with flowers pressed into them as if into a scrapbook, as seriously as he does his sweetbreads with huacatay or his snails with Jabugo ham. Read more.
Chef Sergio Peñuelas is a master of pescado zarandeado, marinated snook cooked by shaking over charcoal until the flesh caramelizes but does not char. Also recommended: the fiery shrimp aguachile. Read more.
The gearhead version of a modernist hamburger: layered with ketchup leather, pickle shavings, homemade American cheese scented with kombu seaweed, and a microscopically thin layer of fried cheese. Read more.
Favorite: The long-steamed pastrami, dense, hand-sliced and nowhere near lean, has a firm, chewy consistency, a gentle flavor of garlic and clove, and a clean edge of smokiness. Read more.
Cooks County is a restaurant you could visit three times a week and then come back for oxtail hash and cheese biscuits at Sunday brunch. Read more.
Their brisket is a paradigm of meat, beef that disappears so quickly that if it weren't for the feeling of satisfying fullness you might swear that you had less eaten it than dreamed it. Read more.
The first rule of the kitchen seems to be: Don't mess too much with the fish. That means the Santa Barbara sea urchin isn't a source of intriguing richness, it's a sea urchin. Read more.
Nobu Matsuhisa is one of the one or two most important chefs ever to come out of Los Angeles, combining izakaya cooking and Peruvian flavors into a style that inspired chefs all around the world. Read more.
If you dare, try the tacos with chiles torreados, ultrahot chiles grown in Armando De La Torre's backyard, sautéed until they practically melt from the heat, served in a fresh tortilla. Read more.
Specialty: pasta, handmade, whole-wheat rigatoni more or less in the style of cacio e pepe, cooked extremely al dente and tossed with cheese and a punishing handful of black pepper. Read more.
Thi's pancetta-spiked take on the Vietnamese caramelized sea bass clay pot is surpassed only by the bass heads and tails, crisped on the grill, served with sweetened fish sauce for dipping. Read more.
Tsujita, a spinoff of a revered Tokyo ramen restaurant, is so far ahead of its competition that the others may as well not exist. Read more.
It is occasionally difficult to ascertain whether the most impressive bit of a dish is the chewy slab of Japanese halibut fin or the thimble-sized cucumber garnishing the fish. Read more.
A fresh take on African American dishes: smoked baby backs, roast salmon, buttermilk fried chicken and greens cooked down with ham hocks with an understated chefly flair. Plus hand-stretched pizza. Read more.
We sometimes dream of living close to Marouch, close enough anyway to drop in at noon for grilled quail and a beer and midafternoons for a Lebanese sweet and a thimble of thick Turkish coffee. Read more.
Din Tai Fung really does have good soup dumplings, tender and swollen with hot broth, zapped with fresh ginger, perfectly elastic and almost engineered. Read more.
The menu includes both spinach-leaf lasagna and bacon-wrapped bacon, a salad of beets and oranges and a plate of tongue with tomatillo. Read more.
The turkey sandwich is heavenly: thick slices of nicely brined bird layered on dense house-made bread with thin slivers of just-ripe Camembert cheese, arugula and cherry mostarda. Read more.
Known for the soup shots at the bar and for stuffing yellowtail into its croque madame. Read more.
The South filtered through the not-South: fried chicken skin served with hand-made Tabasco, a hot biscuit with a spoonful of pimento cheese or a steaming bowl of black-eyed peas. Read more.
Have you ever found transcendence in a plate of chilaquiles? This is a good place to try. Read more.
The most popular dish? Definitely the fried chicken sandwich, with coleslaw and what must be the only aioli on the planet spiked with Rooster hot sauce. Read more.
Some people arrange their weekly schedules around Angelini's specials: kidney stew on Tuesdays; braised oxtails on Wednesdays, liver alla Veneziana on Thursdays. Read more.
Try the seaweed-tofu beignets, spare arrangements of foraged greens, scallops with nightshade berries or shriveled, butter-soaked carrots that somehow manage to taste better than meat. Read more.
Under new chef Jeremy Fox, Rustic Canyon has jolted the superb produce into something resembling a cuisine; try the asparagus with fried pheasant egg and ultra-dense bone-marrow gravy. Read more.
Pan-Asian perfected in a hundred little ways, including the precise acidity of the sticky Chinese pork ribs, the aromatics in the reinvented Singapore Sling and the deconstructed shrimp toast. Read more.
Most famous for its version of bossam: boiled pork belly you wrap up into leaves with raw garlic, sliced chiles and a salty condiment made from tiny fermented fish. Read more.
Even strong men are defeated by the parade of sautéed pea shoots with garlic, crunchy salt-and-pepper squid and the gargantuan house-special lobster, fried with chile, black pepper and scallion. Read more.
Go for the beef roll: that brawny, steroidal composition of crisp, flaky Chinese pancakes with cilantro and sweet, house-made bean sauce rolled around fistfuls of long-braised beef. Read more.
Mantee brings a different kind of edge to Lebanese-Armenian cuisine. Try the platter of beef dumplings sizzling in a bath of garlicky yogurt. Read more.
Everyone is here for Attari's sandwiches: lengths of toasted French bread dressed with fresh tomatoes, lettuce and a smattering of spiced, super-tart Iranian pickles. Read more.
Jonathan Gold says: I will never forget my first taste of Quintarelli Amarone here, which is as close as I had gotten to a sweet, musky taste of heaven. Read more.
L.A.’s essential rice pudding: touched with cinnamon, drizzled with heavy cream, coaxing the nutty, rounded essence out of every grain of rice. Read more.
Don’t miss the ganjang gaejang, raw blue crabs marinated in an elixir of what seems to be a distillation of the animal's sweet juices. Read more.
Chef Ricardo Zarate is filtering Peruvian cooking through the aesthetics of the izakaya--meals you've been used to eating in L.A. Peruvian restaurants become plates meant to be shared. Read more.
You're probably there for a crack at the impossibly rich bacon cheddar biscuits, and we can't say that we blame you. Read more.
His signature dish is a perfectly fried egg with greens, and fried doughnuts for dessert. Read more.
Bernhard Mairinger's emporium of schnitzel, milk-poached weisswurst and creamy goulasch is a purely Austrian restaurant of a sort we have never quite seen here. Read more.
Tar & Roses, which also has a terrific, mostly Italian, wine list, may also mark the first time in our nation's history when cauliflower became more delicious than prime steak. Read more.
