Jonathan Gold’s 101 Best Restaurants: 75-51
More: 1-25 | 26-50 | 75-101
75 Ración
When you wander into Ración after a movie in Old Town Pasadena, you may be expecting the basic tapas you find everywhere in Los Angeles. Instead, there are crisp, gooey chicken croquettes, grilled leeks with smoked olive oil, lamb meatballs, duck sausage-stuffed squid and pintxos (bruschetta, more or less) of crab salad accented with anchovy, squid griddled with lemon and onions, or sliced tongue with pickled scallions. Loretta Peng and chef Teresa Montano are serving their version of Basque-style tapas, the stuff of San Sebastian's back alleys, inspired by rather than exactly duplicating Basque flavors. Montano's cooking is becoming more assured by the month. The wine list includes not one but three Txakolinas, as well as Basque ciders and the hard-to-find Rueda from Belondrade y Lurton, which is among the most delicious of all Spanish whites.
74 Mo-Chica
Do we mourn the original Mo-Chica in the La Paloma complex two miles south? Indeed we do. The vortex of Peruvian flavors, sushi-quality seafood, skilled chef and working-class customers marked a special moment in the democratization of cuisine. But Ricardo Zarate is building a restaurant empire now. And the food at this Mo-Chica is really good, mostly Peruvian classics reinterpreted as cocktail snacks, which is to say papas a la huancaina, carapulcra, tiradito and lomo saltado reduced in size, zapped with Peruvian chiles and served with Pisco sours and Peruvian beer. If you've been yearning to try an alpaca burger, at Mo-Chica you have your chance.
73 The Sycamore Kitchen
Many people come here for the sticky pecan rolls, the walnut galettes or the chewy peanut-coconut bars, and it is hard to blame them. The Sycamore is the breakfast-lunch restaurant of Quinn and Karen Hatfield, and it is a chance to taste Karen's pastries without the expense or trouble of the tasting menu at their restaurant Hatfields. There are salads too, big ones with perfect greens and tiny sparks of things like hazelnuts and blue cheese; bruschetta topped with things like homemade ricotta and a mosaic of citrus fruit; and sandwiches stuffed with turkey, cherry mostarda and just-ripe Camembert. The BLTs are enhanced with oozing slabs of pork belly. The potato chips are disks of the purest crunch. And if you get there before they sell out, you should also get the pastry called kouign amann, a.k.a. buttercup, whose perfect caramelization should be taught at every cooking school in the world.
72 Taco María
The first thing you should know about Taco María is that it doesn't serve tacos, not at dinner anyway. It's a prix-fixe tasting menu restaurant from Carlos Salgado, who used to cook at highbrow places like Coi and Commis in the Bay Area, and now runs this tiny dining patio in the new OC Mix design center. Four courses, plated as beautifully as anything you'll see at Alma or Providence, run $52, which is not expensive for this level of cooking. Salgado calls what he does "Chicano cuisine," which also may not prepare you for dishes like his delicate asparagus velouté with Meyer lemon zest, spring garlic and warm curls of chicharrones; roast guinea fowl with mole; or his trompe l'oeil chorizo made with spiced mushrooms instead of meat. Then again, if he sold his fiery kanpachi aguachile from the window of a truck parked in Santa Ana, he might have a line of mariscos-crazed regulars stretched around the block.
71 Plan Check
Recreational space travel may be some years in the future, and none of us is yet commuting in flying cars, but at least we can all experience the burger of the future, warmed in a high-tech oven before it is seared on the griddle, frosted with seaweed-enhanced cheese, flavored with a translucent square of ketchup leather and tucked into an otherworldly crunch bun. Ernesto Uchimura's creation is a burger, except that it's not quite a burger, except that it really might be, like the re-engineered sports cars that drive better than the real thing. Anyway, there is Japanese whiskey to drink with it, if you're into that sort of thing, homemade sodas and French fries sizzled in rendered suet. Awesome.
70 The Grill on the Alley
It is hard to believe that the Grill on the Alley is turning 30 this year, its upscale homage to places like Musso's and San Francisco's Tadich Grill nearly as ancient, at least in Hollywood terms, as its inspirations. If it is possible to measure out one's life in whiskey sours, cowboy rib-eyes and Caesar salad, then many of us have done that here, although I suspect some of the Hollywood players who populate the restaurant at lunchtime may just be pushing their Cobb salads or whitefish around their plates. (Perhaps, if fashions were otherwise, they might have ordered the corned beef hash well done.) But everybody looks good at the Grill, which is lighted as carefully as a George Hurrell photograph.
69 Corazón y Miel
It still feels odd to spill through the doors of this former cocktail lounge, and you might want to temper your enthusiasm for sangrita-backed tequila shots if you're the one driving home from Bell. But Eduardo Ruiz's wonderland of chopped-and-channeled street food and cheesy Mexican booze has mellowed into a pretty serious restaurant, the slithery pigskin salad and giant turkey legs tempered by long-roasted pork shoulder, braised Argentine short ribs and wild-boar chilaquiles. Open your mind: That carnitas terrine with Coca-Cola gelee may be exactly what you crave.
68 La Casita Mexicana
La Casita is twice the size it used to be, you'll be happy to hear. You can get a glass of wine now (although you'll still want the alfalfa drink), and you can call for a reservation if you want one. Jaime Martin del Campo and Ramiro Arvisu's modest cenaduría has evolved into the showcase it has always deserved to be, the place to go for lengthy Lenten meals or a quick plate of morning chilaquiles, lavish feasts of vegetables pulled from nearby community gardens or straightforward plates of carne asada, fish grilled in hoja santa leaves or an improbably good version of chiles en nogada, the meat-stuffed chile lavished with pomegranate seeds and sweet cream that is Mexico's national dish.
67 Gjelina
It is a cool night, and you have made it past the throng at the bar, and you are out on the patio at Gjelina, not far from the fire pit, contemplating the wonder of a crisp little pizza with shaved asparagus and egg, or fennel salami and caramelized fennel, or eggplant, green zebra tomato, garlic and parmesan, or maybe a plate of grilled pork collar with house-made kimchi. There are a lot of vegetables here — Travis Lett's vaguely Italian cooking has what you might call a co-dependent relationship with the farmers market. The scene, heavily populated with actors, may be as crunchy as the wood-fired pizza crust. Gjelina is everything that might persuade a snowbound New Yorker to change coasts.
66 Langer's
Everyone knows that Langer's serves the best pastrami sandwich in Los Angeles. Guidebooks say so. National magazines say so. The MTA Red Line disgorges so many Langer's-bound fressers that it has sometimes been called the Pastrami Express. Distinguished chefs flirting with putting pastrami on their menus rarely do so without at least a nod to the noble deli masters of Westlake. Still, if you haven't been to Langer's in a few years, you might be surprised to see the long lines outside the delicatessen on a Saturday afternoon, supplicants waiting for their shot at the No. 19, a baroque concoction of hand-cut pastrami, Swiss cheese, cole slaw and Russian dressing on double-baked rye bread. The Westlake neighborhood may have lost its last vestiges of Jewishness sometime before the Vietnam War, but the pleasures of pastrami will not be denied.
65 Playground
Is the most attitudinous gastropub in Los Angeles located in Echo Park? It is not. Playground is in downtown Santa Ana, which may be the few blocks of Orange County that most bring to mind the words "urban grit." You will have heard of maybe two or three of the beers on their lengthy tap list, you will wonder how Lime Truck vet Jason Quinn managed to score A5 Miyazaki rib-eye cap to grill and you will wonder why he serves his grilled octopus with pickled pig's tongue. Did all the good new chefs in Orange County come from the world of food trucks? It is beginning to seem that way.
64 Bucato
Bucato's mission, broadly defined, is to combine strong pungencies and seasonal vegetables with the suppleness of fresh, well-cooked pasta — mixed by hand, rolled out by hand and shaped by hand. Evan Funke's Italian training came in Emilia-Romagna, home to egg-enriched pasta, but the noodles he prefers are made with only flour, water and salt: hand-rolled pici, like thick, Tuscan spaghetti, with a long-cooked rabbit sauce; corzetti, flexible pasta coins from Liguria, with a mortar-ground walnut sauce; or a delicious but anti-Roman cacio e pepe that breaks every known rule. Bucato is a great place to stop into for a glass of Vermentino and a snack of fried squash blossoms stuffed with goat ricotta. And on the patio on a warm night, it is easy to imagine that you are on the terrace of an Italian country restaurant instead of outside a former industrial laundry in downtown Culver City.
63 Little Sister
The latest hero on the anti-fusion block is Tin Vuong, chef and owner of the Manhattan Beach restaurant Little Sister. Vuong grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, worked his way up through grand hotel kitchens and has spent the last couple of years as chef at the Hermosa Beach gastropub Abigaile. His beef tartare melds Korean raw-beef dish yuk hwe, Sichuan peppercorns, French bone-marrow paste, Vietnamese herbs and Indonesian-style cassava chips. His salt-and-pepper lobster comes straight out of Hong Kong too, but its fragrance hints at the lush, tropical flavors of southeast Asia. And the takes on nem nuong, banh xeo and chao tom come straight out of Little Saigon. There has always been a dark vein of anarchy just beneath the beachy surface in the South Bay, and in his own quiet way, Vuong wants to blow your mind.
62 The Hart & the Hunter
Whatever cultural tide it was that brought us gourmet pimento cheese, garage sale crockery in expensive restaurants and French wine decanted into jelly jars has probably passed. But it can't be denied: However ironically the Southern grandma-cooking revival may have been, the food was pretty good. It turns out that you don't have to have skinny jeans and interesting facial hair to enjoy fried chicken skin with homemade Tabasco sauce, crab dip or lemon ice box pie. And when you're ready for cheese grits, hushpuppies or feather-light angel biscuits with blackberry preserves, the Hart & the Hunter will be waiting for you.
61 Matsuhisa
There may not be another Los Angeles chef whose name is invoked as frequently as that of Nobu Matsuhisa, whose introduction of the sushi chef into the traditional restaurant line may have been one of the most important innovations since Escoffier and whose marriage of Latin flavors with modern Japanese technique sometimes seems to have inspired half the restaurants in Los Angeles. And as flashy as his Nobu restaurants can be, as vast as his global empire has become, the heart of Matsuhisa's cooking still seems to be in his modest original sushi bar, the place where new-style sashimi with heated olive oil, turbo-charged ceviche and Ferrari-sleek tiradito first learned to speak Japanese.
60 Marouch
The Lebanese kitchen is at the center of Middle Eastern assimilation, the place where flavors from the Mediterranean and central Asia, Europe and the Levant come together into a cuisine as shimmeringly multicultural as that of Los Angeles itself. And at the center of Lebanese cooking here are Serge and Sosi Brady, whose splendid array of the garlicky small dishes called mezze, their roast chicken and barbecued quail, fried sardines and grilled sausages, Lebanese wine and house-made jallab have defined the local Lebanese-Armenian kitchen in Hollywood for more than 25 years. The photomurals of the Cedars of Lebanon have become a bit tattered, but the cooking becomes more vibrant year after year.
59 Colonia Taco Lounge
Your table is covered two-deep with tiny plastic plates. You have seen the bottom of a michelada or two. You are at Colonia Taco Lounge, the newest and possibly most consequential restaurant from Guisados founder Ricardo Diaz, a land of horchata-battered shrimp tacos, lamb barbacoa tacos, cheese and chayote tacos and tacos made with chicken tesmole, an herb-intensive Oaxacan preparation thickened with corn. The best tacos in the house may be the ones made with florets of battered, fried cauliflower — crunchy, soft and then crunchy again; the sulfurous funkiness of the vegetable mellowed and made soulful by the sharpness of the capers in the salsa and the merest touch of cream. Are we living in the golden age of the California taco? We may be.
58 Din Tai Fung
The Din Tai Fung experience, it could be argued, is essentially that of waiting in line; the keen anticipation of xiao long bao, Shanghai-style soup dumplings, drawn out into a soft note of purest longing. The miracle is that when you finally pop the plump, round dumpling into your mouth, searing the top of your mouth when it bursts into a flood of fragrant broth, the moment is as exquisite as you'd dreamed it might be, although the flavor melts away far more quickly than the pain. XLB is a fixture on the menu of every restaurant that even pretends to serve Shanghai-style cooking in the San Gabriel Valley, but the version at Din Tai Fung, the first U.S. branch of the most famous dumpling parlor in Taipei, is on a level by itself. If you're into that sort of thing, note that the new Glendale location also offers XLB with truffles.
57 Sqirl
Last year, when the crafty do-it-yourself aesthetic seemed poised to overtake the Earth, Jessica Koslow's tiny Virgil Village cafe seemed like the most important restaurant in town for a few minutes, the embodiment of a subculture that held coffee, well-made jam and impeccably grilled toast as proxies for the small things that could be controlled in a world controlled by huge corporations. An individual couldn't do much to combat global warming, but she could make sure that the apricot preserves she consumed were made with ripe, sustainably grown fruit; that her rice was seasoned with organic yogurt and local sorrel, and that her fried eggs, sourced from pastured hens, were splashed with house-fermented hot sauce. A year later, doubled in size and splashed with paint, Sqirl is just a really good place to have lunch. And somehow, that's OK.
56 Shanghai No. 1 Seafood Village
A lot of local restaurants serve Shanghainese food, which is understandable. Eastern China has one of the great culinary traditions of the world. But Shanghai No. 1 is a full-on Shanghainese restaurant, in the sense of being a bit of Shanghai transplanted directly to Los Angeles, a branch of a small Shanghai-based chain, down to the rhinestone-studded velvet banquettes, the lacquered walls, the massive chandeliers and the thick, glossy, full-color menu with nearly the weight of a September Town & Country. You could browse for hours, but the waiters know that you are going to get the braised Old Alley pork, the crab with garlic, the stone pot fried rice, maybe the steamed chicken with scallion oil and the shen jian bao, which are slightly doughy soup dumplings whose bottoms are pan-fried to a crisp. Lunchtime dim sum is much better than you might expect — the morning crew unexpectedly speaks Cantonese among themselves.
55 The Hungry Cat
Where should I go before a play at the Pantages? Where should I go after the Hollywood Bowl? What's good for oysters near the Cinerama Dome? Some weeks it seems that every question that pops up in my email box can be answered with a referral to Suzanne Goin and David Lentz's seafood-intensive Hungry Cat, whose cocktails are as assured as the langoustines and sea urchin from the raw bar, whose first wild salmon and halibut of the season tends to show up before it makes it anywhere else, and whose takes on Maine-style lobster rolls and clam chowder are reliably delicious.
54 Bludso's
You would not be sad if your afternoon brought you to the uptown Bludso's Bar & Que, which serves a pretty close approximation of Kevin Bludso's Texas-style barbecue along with Pabst Blue Ribbon on tap. But you might as well drive down to the original in Compton, which shares a dining room with a storefront church and where the brisket, coarse hot links and beef ribs are fever-dream good, all smoke, animal and salt. Most of Bludso's barbecue is sold to go, but five will get you ten that your order never makes it out of the parking lot.
53 Post & Beam
If you follow restaurants in Los Angeles, you have known about Govind Armstrong since he was a teenage prodigy on the line at the original Spago. In Venice, his Willie Jane is the most accomplished Southern dining room in town. But it is probably Post & Beam where you find Armstrong at his best, a happy place of shrimp 'n' grits, buttermilk-fried chicken and sweet potato pie that may be the most ambitious restaurant ever to open in the Crenshaw district. If you want to understand the power structure of South Los Angeles, you could do worse than to eavesdrop over smoked-salmon hash and a bloody mary at Post & Beam after church on a Sunday afternoon.
52 Chengdu Taste
If your experience of Sichuan food is mostly from the Chongqing-style kitchens in the San Gabriel Valley, you will probably find Chengdu-style cooking lighter, cleaner and less likely to wake you up in the middle of the night with chile-oil induced nightmares. The food is flavored with a vast array of fresh, dried, pickled and ground chiles, but the vivid scent of Sichuan peppercorn comes to the front, and the sensation is of numbness rather than pain. Even a half-dozen visits aren't quite enough to exhaust the menu here — as soon as you check toothpick lamb, tea-smoked duck and garlic leeks sautéed with dense house-cured bacon off your list, you still have sliced fish with tofu pudding, flour-steamed pork and numb-taste wonton yet to try. It is almost impossible to visit without a taste of boiled fish with green pepper, a seriously addictive dish whose complex of chiles can make your lips buzz like a Las Vegas marquee. The wait for a table will be long.
51 Allumette
American kids used to want to be astronauts or baseball players when they grew up. These days, I suspect a fair number of them want to be chefs at the kind of tasting-menu restaurants that serve spring peas with juniper or gnocchi with wood pigeon. In his scant 18 months behind the stoves, Miles Thompson has transformed Allumette from a clubby beer-and-burger joint to a buzzy showplace for his vegetable-intensive modernist cuisine. And you have left the world of kale salad far behind — left it behind for the pleasures of poached monkfish liver served with peeled sea grapes, turnips with rhubarb gel, suckling goat with candied carrots and hops, or whatever else may show up on his constantly shifting tasting menus. (The menus are reasonably priced at $45 and $60, although that still makes Allumette the most expensive restaurant in the history of Echo Park.) I'm not sure even Thompson knows quite where his multi-layered conceptions are taking him, but it is going to be an interesting ride.
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