TOP 10 DISHES

Mirch Ka Salan is less a dish than a force of nature, a thick vegetable stew the approximate yellowy tan of a camel’s flank, heady with the scents of garlic and ginger, bound with a pungent, grainy mortar of ground spice, that is one of the specialties of the Pakistani-Muslim restaurant Shahnawaz. Garnishes of lemon, cucumber and fresh shredded ginger are served alongside the mirch ka salan in a gleaming metal salver; in a straw basket are smoking-hot ovals of freshly baked naan bread with which to scoop up the stew. What we’re talking about here is essentially a stew of jalapeno chiles, dozens of them where you might expect to see okra or spinach floating among the spices. The house beverage at Shahnawaz seems to be ice water served by the pitcherful, and you can see why this is so.

12225 Centralia Ave., Lakewood, (310) 402-7443.

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Korean Barbecue. Dinner at Soot Bull Jeep is an atavistic thing: not just good liquor and platters of raw meat, but also smoke, and fire, and showers of small cinders that can leave your shirt looking like a cartoon bulldog after an encounter with an exploding cigar. The restaurant is one of the few in town that use the traditional live hardwood coals for their tabletop barbecue in place of the more common gas grills, and the meat takes on a delicious savory tang. Short ribs turn nicely chewy, but retain their juice; pork loin is marinated in a spicy chile paste that blackens and turns crisp; bits of marinated Spencer steak become sweet and tender. Soot Bull Jeep is the archetypal big-city Korean barbecue, noisy, smoky, loud, and always crowded, with all the bustle you’d expect in the heart of a great city.

3136 West 8th St., Los Angeles, (213) 387-3865.

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Green Fish-Ball Curry was one of the best things I ate last year, delicately chewy quenelles with tiny eggplants in a green coconut-curry sauce as thick and rich as sweet cream, one of the most delicious dishes at L.A. Food Court at Thailand Plaza, one of the great restaurant ideas of the decade. The Food Court, essentially eight Thai restaurants grouped around a central seating area, was a living thesaurus of Thai cuisine, 400-odd dishes from every part of Thailand, a more persuasive argument for the rude vitality of multicultural Los Angeles than a hundred government-funded plays at the Taper. I probably ate at L.A. Food Court 30 times in the first few months it was open, and at each meal, I found something new and terrific. It seems as if the Food Court is in decline these days--several of the original restaurants have dropped out (including the Isaan-style Renu Nakorn, which may be the best Thai restaurant in the United States), much of the menu is now unavailable, and the quality of the cooking can be spotty. The restaurant is sometimes sparsely attended, even on a weekend night, and the Thai rock band on the Food Court’s stage seems to have lost a little verve, though it has gained the Thai Elvis. Anyway, if there is a Los Angeles institution worth encouraging, it is this one . . . let’s hope for ’94.

5321 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, (213) 993-9000.

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Steamed Stuff Chicken. Charming Garden, across a courtyard from Harbor Village, is a clean, bright place, spare of ornament, with fresh tablecloths and formal service, waitresses rushing in and out of the warren of banquet rooms off to one side. It is also the most serious Hunan-style restaurant in Southern California, the place to go for bubbling bowls of chilied tofu, fragrant hot-smoked pomfret, shredded bits of pork stir-fried with twice their weight in fresh red chiles. But the unpromising-sounding “steamed stuff chicken,” which comes to the table wrapped in an ovenproof plastic bag, is especially tremendous, a whole red-cooked chicken, fragrant with soy and spice, enveloped in a puff of anise-scented steam. You’ve heard of chicken so tender it falls off the bone? This chicken is so tender that the bone itself has partially dissolved, and the calcium-enriched flesh has absorbed so much flavor that it seems like something else apart, a chicken evolved.

111 N. Atlantic Blvd., Monterey Park, (818) 458-4508.

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Spring Rolls at Golden Deli, cha gio , are crusty, golden things, four inches long and as thick as a fat man’s thumb, five to an order, sort of crudely rolled in a manner that suggests rustic abundance rather than clumsiness, and perfectly, profoundly crisp. You wrap them with leaves of romaine lettuce into bursting green tacos, along with fistfuls of mint, cilantro, opal basil, and an odd, elongated herb with a powerful metallic taste, also a few shreds of marinated carrot and turnip, a slice of cucumber. You dip the bundles into little bowls of nuoc cham , which is the thin, sweetish garlic-fish sauce that Vietnamese use as ubiquitously as Americans use catsup, and you bite through the vegetable-crunchy herbs to the many-layered rice-paper crispness of the spring roll wrapper, hot oil, the garlicky, black-pepper-laced forcemeat of crab and minced pork inside. Golden Deli has a long and complicated menu, but it is difficult to contemplate a meal here without at least one order of these.

815 W. Las Tunas Drive, San Gabriel, (818) 308-0803.

Short Ribs. The original branch of the M & M, a small, window-barred restaurant in the heart of South Central L.A., is, simply, what you are hoping for every time you step into a soul-food cafe: a spare, well-scrubbed place, decorated with a state-map calendar from a Mississippi funeral home and a couple of hand-scrawled posters, that serves gargantuan portions of perfect Southern food. A jukebox is well stocked with soul oldies; Fiery sauce and pepper vinegar sits on the tables, a security guard hangs out in a corner, perpetually nursing a plate of chicken wings. The dining room always smells like Thanksgiving. In a part of town where “country” can sometimes be taken as an insult, M & M is country in the best sense of the word. And on the days they serve them, short ribs, which seem pretty long by anybody’s standards, are smoked and peppered like pastrami, glazed with brown gravy, intense and chewy and meaty. Call ahead to see what’s cooking.

9506 S. Avalon Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 777-9250.

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Pessret. In certain circles, Indian food is considered something too complicated for the Western palate to comprehend, as if a stew containing 37 spices were not superior, exactly, but more profound than, say, an Italian stew containing seven. And though a lot of Indian food, at least the vulgarized Punjabi kind found in most local Indian restaurants, seems more like tinctures of turmeric and grease, the pessret at Madhu’s Dasaprakash, a well-discovered South Indian vegetarian restaurant near the Cerritos Performing Arts Center, is the sort of dish that makes you think that those people may be right. At first glance, pessret looks like a working maquette for a Eero Saarinen structure, a beige, lentil-flour pancake with the dull, smooth sheen of a freshly pressed pair of gabardine slacks, as big around as a phonograph record and bent into a kind of ‘50s-curvilinear shape. Thin, crisp edges work to a slight, sour chewiness at the center. The pancake encloses a mixture of green chile and minced raw onion--a sort of elegant counterpoint of slight bitternesses--and the package is spicy-hot as an East L.A. taco.

11312 East 183rd St., Cerritos, (310) 924-0879.

Flautas. Ciro’s, an East L.A. institution longer than anyone can remember, is the answer to the perennial L.A. question: “Wheredja-go for flautas ?”--as opposed to “wheredja-go for tamales?” or “wheredja-go for chili fries?” And if you have trouble remembering what to order here, the menu lists “ SABROSAS FLAUTAS “ in type that is approximately the size of the rest of the entrees put together. Ciro’s flautas --what some other people call taquitos , more or less--are tiny things, piccolo flautas , that come six to an order, tightly rolled and very crisp, sauced with thick, chunky, fresh guacamole and a dollop of tart Mexican cream. The shredded meat inside is usually frizzled to a chewy, almost carne seca consistency, a little salty, with a smack of pure beef flavor that cuts through the strong tastes of corn and hot oil. It’s almost like visiting a friend’s grandmother who just happens to have terrific homemade flautas on hand.

705 N. Evergreen Drive, East Los Angeles, (213) 267-8637.

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Hundred-Layer Pancake, a lacy, golden disk of Chinese bread the size and shape of an upside-down skullcap, which pulls apart into strands as easily as a length of frayed rope, is the famous specialty of the Hunanese restaurant Wei Fun. When the pancakes first come to the table in their woven baskets, they are smoking hot, capable of doing serious damage to your fingertips, but ultimately too delicious to resist. Each freshly baked skein of pancake is supple yet crisp-edged, fragrant of toasted wheat, just right for swabbing a bit of pungent black bean sauce from the bottom of an emptied service plate. As you might at Tung Lai Shun or Campanile, at Wei Fun you are perfectly capable of feeling that one can indeed live by bread alone.

708 E. Las Tunas Drive, San Gabriel, (818) 286-6152.

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Fried Green Tomatoes. Johnny Reb’s is something of a Southern theme park on Long Beach’s northern edge, a noisy evocation of a pan-Dixie roadhouse that may have been around only a decade or so but feels as old as time. The plywood floor is worn through to near its last ply, and drifts of peanut shells reach almost ankle-high where they have been tossed down near the tables--this is the place to go for fried stuff. And though the fried catfish is exemplary, the fried pork chops juicy and crisp, the hushpuppies oniony and profoundly low-rent, the fried green tomatoes here are the kind that might inspire somebody to write a book--firm, bright-green things dipped in cornmeal and fried in grease, topped with crumbled bacon and as sweet, tart and savory as you could want.

4663 Long Beach Blvd., Long Beach, (310) 423-7327.