These are the 101 best restaurants in California
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The enormousness of “California,” as a territory and an ideology, is hard for any mind to contain. It’s beautiful. It’s complicated and divided and challenged. Among one of a thousand ways to define the Golden State: culinary juggernaut.
Our spectrum of influence — from chefs, farmers, impresarios and dreamers who reimagined restaurant cooking into something synced with the seasons and personal identity, to the capitalists who gave birth to fast food — has shaped and kept reshaping how Americans eat over the last century.
Los Angeles alone is boggling enough in its magnitudes for a critic to eat and think through. I’ve wandered a lot in my career, though. As the world emerged from the grip of COVID-19, a professional curiosity surfaced: What was happening in the rest of the state? What had remained and what was changing?
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Our journalists independently visited every spot recommended in this guide. We do not accept free meals or experiences. What should we check out next? Send ideas to guides@latimes.com.
Inquisitiveness evolved into a fevered question: What restaurants altogether tell the richest, broadest story of dining in California right now?
The riddle can never be perfectly solved, and yet: This is a guide full of delicious answers.
A year of driving up and down the California coast — steering inland and back, watching winter mountains bloom green and then fade to brown again by late spring — unfolded in a blur of taquerias, tasting menus, strip malls, remote highways, tostadas, dumplings, nigiri, falafel, pho, kebabs … .
Moments crystallized. The triangles of buttery, corn-filled pasta that trumpeted high summer in a rustic dining room on a hilly corner of San Francisco’s Financial District. The new owner who revived a 91-year-old diner in downtown Sacramento with a burger she calls “Southern Daddy” and her calling-card sweet potato pie. The glamour-soaked San Diego dining room, all golds and greens and chiaroscuro lighting, that set a cinematic mood for an evening of modern Vietnamese cuisine.
Attempting a statewide survey stemmed organically from the 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles project that The Times has published annually since 2013. I’ve written or co-written six of them now. “Best” is a word for headline catnip that I live with but don’t love. “Essential” has always been more of a guiding precept for me. I want readers — you — to know about places for their incredible food, but I trust these very human endeavors also speak to something larger about dining and life in Los Angeles.
Seven years in, L.A. feels like my home home. The San Francisco Chronicle employed me nearly 20 years ago; the Bay Area is a mainstay in my adult life. I’ve never been keen on the “L.A. versus S.F.” tribalism. Isn’t it kind of staggering that this wild state, slightly smaller than Morocco and currently the fourth-largest economy on the planet, has two uniquely different and world-class urban hubs?
And there’s so much more of California to see and taste.
Too much, in fact, to fit into the usual framework. Yes, this is a list of 101 restaurants that serve many kinds of foods at every price tier. (I did leave off the three most famous tentpoles in California fine dining: Chez Panisse, Spago and the French Laundry. You know them. Go if they call to you.) Many of the entries put forth “extra helpings” — corresponding pillars of excellence that also deserve recognition. It’s the whole blessed state. There’s a lot to recommend.
These travels have likewise spurred fresh, deeper guides to popular destinations such as San Francisco, San Diego and Palm Springs. More are coming.
No single person could filter through the infinite possibilities; gratitude goes to the many food-writing peers and some well-fed friends who gave me guidance at every major intersection.
I did not rank these restaurants. This isn’t about numerals or symbol ratings. It’s one glimpse into our cultures and diversities — into cuisines that uphold traditions, or disrupt with originality, or inhabit some fruitful middle ground. Any endeavor like this is an invitation to savor and to debate. I crisscrossed plenty of California. It still feels like a beginning.
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Mendocino County
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Cafe Beaujolais
Mendocino Californian $$$
(Bryan Meltz / For The Times)
A moment of recognition for the California institutions that have charmed visitors in rural destinations for generations. The unincorporated seaside hamlet of Mendocino, with a population under 700, doesn’t look much different than when its streets stood in for the New England town where “Murder, She Wrote” was set in the 1980s and early ’90s. The cast then surely ate at Cafe Beaujolais, which opened in a Victorian-era farmhouse in 1968. It gained national prominence when Margaret Fox bought the restaurant in 1977, serving breakfasts and lunches with sense-of-place freshness. Ex-Angelenos Peter and Melissa Lopez have owned the restaurant since 2016; their son Julian is executive chef. Locals and travelers come for the cottage-quaint vibes, the genial longtime staff and a dinner menu that hits its New American marks: duck confit balanced with kumquat gastrique, a just-made pasta or two sauced with restraint, a classic block of short rib melting over saffron risotto.
Extra Helpings: For lunch in the area, Cafe Beaujolais serves handsomely charred pizzas at its on-property offshoot, the Brickery, or head to Fort Bragg to decide where the fish and chips are better: Sea Pal Cove or its nearby rival, Noyo Fish Company. For another dinner option in Mendocino, check out the Southern-inflected vegetarian menu at Fog Eater Cafe.
Extra Helpings: For lunch in the area, Cafe Beaujolais serves handsomely charred pizzas at its on-property offshoot, the Brickery, or head to Fort Bragg to decide where the fish and chips are better: Sea Pal Cove or its nearby rival, Noyo Fish Company. For another dinner option in Mendocino, check out the Southern-inflected vegetarian menu at Fog Eater Cafe.
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Harbor House
Mendocino Californian $$$$
(Bill Addison/Los Angeles Times)
The fabled ends-of-the-earth dining destination — remote and otherworldly, yet so grounded in excellence the experience defies parody — does actually exist three hours north of San Francisco, in an unincorporated Mendocino County community called Elk. Matthew Kammerer was cooking in the Bay Area with a dream to open an inn and restaurant up the coast. He toured a property, originally built with logging money in 1916, and laughed in delight at the perfection of its perch overlooking enormous sea stacks and waves crashing through a cove. After a renovation, he brought Harbor House Inn back to life in 2018.
Redwood lines the 20-seat dining room with floor-to-ceiling windows that outline the fairytale view. Dinner brings the surroundings inside. Through a dozen or so courses, you might taste Dungeness crab that steams in kelp and remember the salty-sweetness of the ocean air; smoked black cod recalls the whiff of wood burning in a fireplace. Leaves and herbs that decorate plates mirror the landscape greens. Menus fluctuate daily according to the local fishermen’s catch, foraged ingredients and the produce and animals tended on the inn’s 320 acres. Those kinds of details can make the eyes of jaded food people roll. So I’ll say it plainly: Kammerer and his devoted team cook extraordinary food, modern in its Japanese inflections: cured rockfish sharpened with wakame, buttery koshihikari rice paired with red abalone, a sauce incorporating miso made from shelling peas for gentle umami. Ultimately, the flavors honor the place, a slip of land at the fringe of the continent that couldn’t be anywhere else but California.
Redwood lines the 20-seat dining room with floor-to-ceiling windows that outline the fairytale view. Dinner brings the surroundings inside. Through a dozen or so courses, you might taste Dungeness crab that steams in kelp and remember the salty-sweetness of the ocean air; smoked black cod recalls the whiff of wood burning in a fireplace. Leaves and herbs that decorate plates mirror the landscape greens. Menus fluctuate daily according to the local fishermen’s catch, foraged ingredients and the produce and animals tended on the inn’s 320 acres. Those kinds of details can make the eyes of jaded food people roll. So I’ll say it plainly: Kammerer and his devoted team cook extraordinary food, modern in its Japanese inflections: cured rockfish sharpened with wakame, buttery koshihikari rice paired with red abalone, a sauce incorporating miso made from shelling peas for gentle umami. Ultimately, the flavors honor the place, a slip of land at the fringe of the continent that couldn’t be anywhere else but California.
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Jumbo's Win Win
Mendocino American $
(Bill Addison/Los Angeles Times)
In August 2024 Scott Baird left behind his life as a San Francisco cocktail ace to open a restaurant in the wooded thick of Anderson Valley wine country. The premise of the place (Jumbo is a nickname for his younger son) is “roadside burger stand.” Yes, the 120-year-old building with checkered floor tiles summons an old-timey food hall, and the kitchen turns out righteous smashburgers, hand-cut fries and wedge salads with extra-herby dressing. But the purview has quickly deepened. Baird procures whole cows and creates a second weekly menu filled with Mexican flavors, a nod to the contributions of his kitchen team, many of whom are from Michoacán: Plush tacos made from fresh masa might cradle chopped skirt steak or tongue, or beef cheek might be joined by quesadillas de rajas and strawberry-laced tres leches for dessert. Other weeks he cures pastrami for teetering sandwiches or shaves dry-aged prime rib for fresh dips. Seafood-themed nights on weekends have proved popular enough with the locals to become a regular event. That’s the thing about this place: Baird is engaging with the tiny local community, responding to its tastes and creating an affordable hangout for young families, wizened winemakers and those of us passing through. The sense of welcome is palpable, and an ideal match for the honest cooking.
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Greater Sacramento
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Jim-Denny's
Sacramento American $
(Angela DeCenzo/Angela DeCenzo/For The Times)
One of California’s longest-standing diners is having a renaissance moment thanks to N’Gina Guyton, who took over the 91-year-old downtown Sacramento institution in 2023 after the too-sudden closure of her local restaurant South. The building maintains its nearly century-old demeanor: whitewashed exterior, Art Deco sign advertising hamburgers and chili in neon, 10-seat red Formica counter with chrome stools over a checkered floor. Guyton, a heartening daily presence behind the counter, wisely edited the menu: two burgers (one pure Americana bacon cheeseburger and the other lovably flamboyant with additions of hot links, saucy slaw and onion rings), fried chicken and tempura-battered cod sandwiches, a few hot dog variations and sides that range from chili cheese fries to roasted Brussels sprouts. Oatmeal-cinnamon pancakes join a few breakfast staples, including a breakfast burrito with a deep-fried potato pancake in the mix. Every dish tastes considered, with Guyton reconstructing American icons her way. Sitting in her company, finishing the meal with a Chantilly-topped slice of pecan pie, one feels the mantle of California diner culture in safe, sure hands.
Extra Helpings: Diner burgers — we all have our opinions. In San Francisco, the location of Sam’s Burgers, now officially called Sam’s Pizza & Burgers, on Broadway forever has my devotion. I would never fight Angelenos over their zeal for Apple Pan, but let me also suggest Pie ‘N Burger in Pasadena, and a towering diner-style Colossal burger with pastrami for takeout from Hawkins House of Burgers in Watts.
Extra Helpings: Diner burgers — we all have our opinions. In San Francisco, the location of Sam’s Burgers, now officially called Sam’s Pizza & Burgers, on Broadway forever has my devotion. I would never fight Angelenos over their zeal for Apple Pan, but let me also suggest Pie ‘N Burger in Pasadena, and a towering diner-style Colossal burger with pastrami for takeout from Hawkins House of Burgers in Watts.
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Kru
Sacramento Japanese $$
(Angela DeCenzo/Angela DeCenzo/For The Times)
At his 20-year-old, always-booked restaurant, Buu “Billy” Ngo and his team have created a model of modern Japanese dining that enduringly checks several desired boxes: sushi, heady small plates in sync with the farming region and a generally compelling beverage program. Behind the wide sushi counter, a corps of chefs crack out rolls of shrimp tempura, spicy tuna and green apple, among a dozen crowd-pleasing combos. I’m more closely scanning the daily nigiri specials, eating my way through several varieties of mackerel among scallops and uni from Hokkaido. The same menu lists the daily specials that glide through the seasons, from summer’s ripe stone fruits enriched with ume-infused ricotta to winter’s braised beef cheek, so tender the meat has halfway vanished into the mushroom rice porridge underneath. Back to drinking: It’s a no-lose proposition. Japanese ingredients accent classic cocktails (say, Nikka Coffey gin and yuzu bitters in a martini), there are long lists of Japanese whiskies but also a few non-alcoholic concoctions that sidestep overt sweetness. Diners rightly come to Kru for special occasions, but if I lived in the city, I’d regularly vie for a solo spot at the bar, order a couple of dishes and ask beverage manager Jose Carrasco too many questions about his unusually deep (and affordably priced) sake program.
Extra Helpings: For a more casual Japanese option, Binchoyaki is an excellent izakaya: Lunch centers bentos; dinner goes deep on yakitori and traditional pub fare. The restaurant is near two other daytime standouts: Mecha Mucho, rocking sandos and donburi for takeout, and Southside Super, which owners Phuong Tran and Seoyeon Oh describe as an “Asian diner and deli” serving a seasonally changing menu of Vietnamese and Korean dishes. Their dak galbi and chicken pho sustained me on a chilly spring afternoon.
Extra Helpings: For a more casual Japanese option, Binchoyaki is an excellent izakaya: Lunch centers bentos; dinner goes deep on yakitori and traditional pub fare. The restaurant is near two other daytime standouts: Mecha Mucho, rocking sandos and donburi for takeout, and Southside Super, which owners Phuong Tran and Seoyeon Oh describe as an “Asian diner and deli” serving a seasonally changing menu of Vietnamese and Korean dishes. Their dak galbi and chicken pho sustained me on a chilly spring afternoon.
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Magpie
Sacramento New American $$
(Angela DeCenzo/Angela DeCenzo/For The Times)
For all the platitudes repeated infinitely about seasonality in California dining, I find relatively few restaurant menus as dedicated to the moment as Janel Inouye and Ed Roehr’s ever-changing lineup, served in their humming, comfortably spare dining room in midtown Sacramento. Chef-partner Brian Hawley leads the kitchen. He imagines the agricultural bounty surrounding the state capitol into springtime fried asparagus with egg salad and a sauce made from uni fished from the waters near Fort Bragg, or a crisp-skinned trout over summery creamed corn, or a tortellini soup full of bright, chunky vegetables to stave off the first chill of autumn. Nothing about their place — or the crew of servers led by Inouye — rings uptight or precious. You want a burger? They make a great, thick, bistro-style brute lacquered with cheddar. Enjoy it with a glass of local Pinot, or bartender Carmen Artrip’s riff on a Manhattan made with cherry brandy, Ancho Reyes chile liqueur, cacao and Campari called Chocolate Orchard. I come back for the roast chicken, especially for the vegetable plate alongside, filled perhaps with crisp-roasted potatoes sweetened with caramelized onions or steamed peas rolling among grilled fennel. It’s an edible timetable, whatever moment of the year.
Extra Helpings: To further luxuriate in Sacramento’s growing seasons: Chris Barnum-Dann changes the themes of his tasting menus every five weeks at ultra-ambitious Localis, always keeping the time of year in mind. And look to the small plates at Canon in East Sacramento for calendar-specific creations like yellow peaches over Parmesan mousse with ribbons of country ham.)
Extra Helpings: To further luxuriate in Sacramento’s growing seasons: Chris Barnum-Dann changes the themes of his tasting menus every five weeks at ultra-ambitious Localis, always keeping the time of year in mind. And look to the small plates at Canon in East Sacramento for calendar-specific creations like yellow peaches over Parmesan mousse with ribbons of country ham.)
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Nixtaco
Roseville Mexican $
(Jyotsna Bhamidipati/For The Times)
For years Patricio Wise straddled careers between finance and restaurants. In 2010 the banking business brought him from Monterrey, Mexico, where he and his wife, Cinthia Martinez, owned a steakhouse, to Roseville, a town 18 miles northeast from the center of Sacramento. Six years later, after first dipping back into cooking by selling tacos at farmers markets on weekends, Wise and Martinez opened Nixtaco as their full-time gig. It has grown into a smash — the kind people drive distances for, the rare taqueria for which weekend reservations are smart planning. In the crush of success, Wise has never abandoned what’s most important to him. His team nixtamalizes blue and yellow corn on site, pressing the masa into small, precise discs lined up on planchas. He channels his nostalgia for dishes such as atropellado, a Monterrey specialty of meat simmered with chiles, tomatoes and onions, into a shredded pork belly filling he translates as the “road kill taco.” I stay close to the more traditional takes (a riff on a gobernador with shrimp, bacon and molten Oaxacan cheese; a simple, soulful rajas con crema with corn), though the mix also includes spins on spicy fried chicken tacos and a half-dozen vegan variations, among them fried avocado with pickled onions and chipotle-peanut aioli. The range doesn’t diminish the essential respect shown to the form. In April, Wise and Martinez transformed Cantina Pedregal, their short-lived finer-dining restaurant in nearby Folsom, into a second Nixtaco.
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Noroc
Sacramento County Eastern European $$
(Angela DeCenzo/Angela DeCenzo/For The Times)
Solyanka is a chunky soup — loved across Slavic, Baltic and other post-Soviet swaths of the world — dense with smoked meats, vegetables and the occasional bobbing olive. Some versions swing overtly sour with pickles; the one at Noroc, a restaurant 12 miles northeast of downtown Sacramento, tastes fantastically like an Italian American chopped salad reconstructed into brothy spoon food. Follow it with mamaliga, a polenta-adjacent cornmeal dish, here shaped into cakes, enriched with crumbled feta and sour cream and paired with tender hunks of pork roasted with mushrooms and garlic. Alexandru and Ludmila Sirbu, who are married, grew up in Moldova, the landlocked country between Romania and Ukraine. They’ve entrusted their family recipes to chef Maria Savchuk, who is Ukrainian, and the result is the most comforting, attuned and enlightening Eastern European cooking I’ve experienced in California.
The menu has some broadly familiar tentpoles: pelmeni or vareniki, the dumplings available vegetarian or stuffed with meat; the cheese-gushing cutlets that became known in midcentury American dinner party circles as chicken Kiev. Keep looking, though, for mititei (skinless beef and pork sausages faintly perfumed with allspice); crisp butterflied Cornish hen dyed apricot-orange from its paprika marinade; and the wonderful placinte, crackly soft layer pies made either savory with farmers cheese or cabbage, or sweet with apples or, my favorite, sour cherry.
The menu has some broadly familiar tentpoles: pelmeni or vareniki, the dumplings available vegetarian or stuffed with meat; the cheese-gushing cutlets that became known in midcentury American dinner party circles as chicken Kiev. Keep looking, though, for mititei (skinless beef and pork sausages faintly perfumed with allspice); crisp butterflied Cornish hen dyed apricot-orange from its paprika marinade; and the wonderful placinte, crackly soft layer pies made either savory with farmers cheese or cabbage, or sweet with apples or, my favorite, sour cherry.
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Restaurant Josephine
Auburn French $$
(Angela DeCenzo/Angela DeCenzo/For The Times)
During a weeklong dining sprint through Sacramento, my most outstanding all-around meal was technically in Auburn, Calif., a town founded during the Gold Rush 33 miles northeast of the state capitol. Chefs Eric Alexander and Courtney McDonald, who are married, opened Restaurant Josephine in 2021, one tenant in a commanding brick building constructed in the late 1800s. In every way, the couple land their California-French bistro aesthetic. Customers file around the zinc-and-marble bar as soon as the staff unlocks the door to sip variations on Vespers and Manhattans or hot chocolate spiked with Chartreuse. Chalkboards all over the dining room list handwritten specials — perhaps chickpea gnocchi with lamb ragout, a superbly textured beef cheek terrine with horseradish cream and, for dessert, a strawberry-covered pavlova — to augment a menu of classics like garlicky escargots, moules frites scented with lemon thyme or pork chop over creamed cabbage accented with bacon, prune and apple. Alexander works in cool nods to his Lithuanian heritage, including a springtime version of vareniki filled with English peas, farmers cheese and green garlic, and tiny, tender preserved pine cones as a novel garnish for textbook duck liver mousse.
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Smoke Door Lake Tahoe Saryo
North Lake Tahoe Japanese $$$
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
The restaurant resembles a cabin, angled on a small triangular lot in North Lake Tahoe with a California address, though the Nevada state line technically slices through the tip of the building’s southeast corner. Tyler Burges is adept at straddling borders. He chose the location to create an ambitious dining destination for the area, which had stayed in his memory from childhood vacations. Burges grew up in San Diego and honed his craft in the Bay Area, working at the Restaurant at Meadowood in Napa and Saison in San Francisco. He partnered with restaurateur Ryu Amemiya to open the first Smoke Door in Yokohama, a port city south of Tokyo, building the menu around American-style barbecued meats. In Kings Beach, they reverse the emphasis, centering Japanese ingredients and techniques that involve smoke. A 10-course tasting menu veers through sashimi; eggplant cooked in embers; cauliflower hung high above a flaming grill to slowly char; seared Wagyu served with barbecued salts; and a final savory course of rice and greens cooked in a donabe and glossed with smoke-infused oil.
Without being overly strict in its traditionalism, the cooking meets its aims: Dinner feels like a special night out, buoyed by an invested service team and long, appealing lists of cocktails and sake. Diners can also opt for an a la carte menu at the bar or an abbreviated prix fixe menu at lunch. If you’re visiting, try to arrive in the area early enough to stop for a few moments at Kings Beach, a three-minute drive away, to take in a sweepingly majestic view of the lake and snow-peaked mountains.
Extra Helpings: Three recs from two days of eating in nearby Truckee: Great Gold for pizza and pasta; Tangerine Bistro for French onion soup plus a warming, stripped-down version of cassoulet; and very good croissants and savories like curried beef hand pie from Sierra Bakehouse, which operates only on Fridays.
Without being overly strict in its traditionalism, the cooking meets its aims: Dinner feels like a special night out, buoyed by an invested service team and long, appealing lists of cocktails and sake. Diners can also opt for an a la carte menu at the bar or an abbreviated prix fixe menu at lunch. If you’re visiting, try to arrive in the area early enough to stop for a few moments at Kings Beach, a three-minute drive away, to take in a sweepingly majestic view of the lake and snow-peaked mountains.
Extra Helpings: Three recs from two days of eating in nearby Truckee: Great Gold for pizza and pasta; Tangerine Bistro for French onion soup plus a warming, stripped-down version of cassoulet; and very good croissants and savories like curried beef hand pie from Sierra Bakehouse, which operates only on Fridays.
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North Bay, Napa and Sonoma
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Auro
Calistoga New American $$$$
(Bryan Meltz/For The Times)
In the center of Rogelio Garcia’s menu — the fourth of seven tasting-menu courses — a tetela arrives. Made from a duo of masa doughs, two of its points are yellow and the third is a purplish shade of blue corn. Garlicky mushrooms reduced in red wine comprise the filling. Underneath are puréed Ayocote beans encircled by a fermented red pepper sauce, sweet-taut from dates and sherry vinegar. The dish is gone in a few forkfuls, though its sneaky complexities linger. At Auro, set on the hilltop property of the Four Seasons Napa Valley and overlooking the hotel’s immaculate vineyard, Garcia doesn’t compose dinners exclusively around Mexican flavors. But they show up in his most cogent plates, and they give his cooking a sum and substance that distinguish him from the equally technical pageantry flaunted at Napa Valley’s many fine-dining cathedrals. Dry-aged shima aji, sculpted into a lovely rose shape and garnished with beautiful things like cucumber blossoms, comes into focus with a first spoonful of ingredients underneath. Lime and orange juices, jalapeño, avocado … ceviche! The meat course, maybe Waygu rib-eye or, more interestingly, venison, is really the canvas for mole negro. Garcia’s grandmother first taught him the secrets, and among the dried chiles, chocolate, seeds and nuts he honors the seasonal cycles with subtle additions of fruit: summertime plums or figs, apples in the fall, blood oranges to counteract winter’s doldrums. On the beverage side, lead sommelier Derek Stevenson is a cheering presence on the floor, pouring rare local vintages from serpentine decanters while sharing stories about his favorite winemakers.
Extra Helpings: You’re after more affordable greatness in Napa Valley? Start with quesabirria tacos and a torta ahogada at the much-recognized Tacos El Muchacho Alegre, or a suadero mulita at Mothers Tacos. The fluorescent-orange Joella’s Deli truck is justly famous for its righteous fried chicken sandwich, and the cheesesteak slicked with roasted garlic mayo is among the best versions I’ve had outside Philadelphia.
Extra Helpings: You’re after more affordable greatness in Napa Valley? Start with quesabirria tacos and a torta ahogada at the much-recognized Tacos El Muchacho Alegre, or a suadero mulita at Mothers Tacos. The fluorescent-orange Joella’s Deli truck is justly famous for its righteous fried chicken sandwich, and the cheesesteak slicked with roasted garlic mayo is among the best versions I’ve had outside Philadelphia.
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El Molino Central
Sonoma Mexican $
(Bill Addison/Los Angeles Times)
A molino is the specific mill used to grind nixtamalized corn into masa, which has been the focus of Karen Taylor’s businesses for decades. In 1991 she started Primavera, a Bay Area wholesale operation built around tamales and tortillas, and a name under which she sells life-giving chilaquiles for breakfast on Saturday mornings at San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza farmers market. Nearly 20 years later she translated what she’s learned about fresh masa into a tiny restaurant in the Boyes Hot Springs section of Sonoma County. With counter ordering and only one table inside, most customers dine on a beautifully tiled covered patio or green picnic tables a few feet away. The casual setting belies the finesse of the cooking, much of it done by chefs long employed by Taylor, many of them women from disparate parts of Mexico. A portion of the menu flows with the seasons: Light-handed sopes filled with chicken tinga and chile rellenos filled with epazote-scented creamed corn arrive in summertime; winter is for butternut squash and caramelized onion enchiladas; and spring brings lamb barbacoa tacos over thick, fragrant tortillas. Among perennials, look for the chicken tamale steamed in banana leaves and covered in chef Zoraida Juarez’s mother’s recipe for mole — hers is the color of red clay, hitting the palate sweet before its many toasted spices and chiles slowly reveal their flavors.
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The Marshall Store
Marin County Seafood $
(Christopher Reynolds/Los Angeles Times)
Late winter or early spring is a superb time to visit the Tomales Bay area in West Marin. Neon-green grass, coaxed out by recent rains, usually covers the surrounding hills, and the temperatures stay mostly in the 50s and 60s. It feels good to bundle up a little here. The bay’s protected status produces some of the state’s finest oysters: medium-small, often with flavors somewhere between briny and buttery. Eat a dozen of them raw, and then a few more of them grilled, looking out on the water at the Marshall Store, a shoreline oyster bar run by some of the same people who operate Tomales Bay Oyster Co. three miles down the highway. Marshall Store isn’t exactly a secret: Any time of year, particularly on weekends, a line to order trails out the door. It moves steadily, giving you time to make decisions before reaching the counter: grilled oysters with barbecue sauce, or garlic butter and bacon, or Rockefeller style? (I like the latter.) Maybe a tri-trip or Dungeness crab sandwich to split, or a smoked trout salad with little gems and avocado? Tables under roadside tents shield you from the sun, but perching on the deck, squinting at the rocking sailboats and breathing salt air between bites, is the real move.
Extra Helpings: Plenty of people will think it’s heresy to recommend Marshall Store over nearby Hog Island Oyster Co. Check out both at lunchtime to decide for yourself, and for dinner hang with the locals at Saltwater Oyster Depot in Inverness.)
Extra Helpings: Plenty of people will think it’s heresy to recommend Marshall Store over nearby Hog Island Oyster Co. Check out both at lunchtime to decide for yourself, and for dinner hang with the locals at Saltwater Oyster Depot in Inverness.)
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Mustards Grill
Napa American $$
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Cindy Pawlcyn trailblazed her way into Napa Valley when she opened Mustards Grill in 1983, bringing to the then-nascent wine country dining scene a city sensibility: steaks and burgers grilled over almond wood, ahi tuna crackers racy with wasabi cream, the much crowed-over “Mongolian” pork chop bathed in a hoisin marinade. Generations of staunch regulars haven’t exactly encouraged her to forge new culinary paths, and from a certain angle the menu — and the cooking — might seem stuck in another era. But then I order a salad of soft greens with chunky blue cheese dressing, and I wonder if I’ve ever had a better version. A rustic entree of braised rabbit over a pool of polenta, earthy with wild mushrooms and gilded with crisp pancetta, makes me wish more restaurants would return to these kinds of comforts. Managing partner Sean Knight sweeps in to see if we’d like guidance with wine, and when I tell him I’m a Burgundy drinker wanting a Chardonnay from California that I could really fall for, he returns with a 2022 Patria from Sonoma that hits all the flinty-tart-toasty marks I could want. Mustards exists both out of time and right in the moment. The room full of linen-covered tables feels especially welcoming at lunch.
Extra Helpings: Two other upper-midscale Napa restaurants that have a similar magnetic pull, both of which happen to be overseen by Christopher Kostow, chef of the glittering Restaurant at Meadwood that was destroyed in the 2020 Glass fire: Ciccio is a way-better-than-it-has-to-be take on a red sauce restaurant; the sausage pizza with creamed spinach will be excellent the next day even cold from a hotel fridge. And the cooking at the Charter Oak is Cal-Ital glory, with a great cheeseburger. Fight like everyone else for a table on its leafy, breathtaking patio.
Extra Helpings: Two other upper-midscale Napa restaurants that have a similar magnetic pull, both of which happen to be overseen by Christopher Kostow, chef of the glittering Restaurant at Meadwood that was destroyed in the 2020 Glass fire: Ciccio is a way-better-than-it-has-to-be take on a red sauce restaurant; the sausage pizza with creamed spinach will be excellent the next day even cold from a hotel fridge. And the cooking at the Charter Oak is Cal-Ital glory, with a great cheeseburger. Fight like everyone else for a table on its leafy, breathtaking patio.
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SingleThread
Sonoma County Californian $$$$
(Bryan Meltz/For The Times)
You have the means and the impulse to escape to the brushy, sun-baked beauty of the Bay Area’s wine country for a meal of pure luxury. In 2025, I am steering you to Sonoma over Napa. The minds leading the area’s most stratospheric restaurants aren’t necessarily dismantling the structures of fine dining, but they have a larkish sensibility that keeps diners guessing. These are three-hour meals where you stay tuned in. SingleThread sets the pace. Katina Connaughton and Kyle Connaughton, who are married, run their Healdsburg restaurant along with a small inn and a nearby 24-acre farm. She is the farmer; he is the chef. The menu loosely follows kaiseki, more closely mirroring Japanese cuisine in its seasonal spontaneity and array of cooking techniques than in any strict flavor parameters. If you know about SingleThread, it’s probably images of the opening hassan course, small, intricate bites set around a long wooden board lush with foliage. It looks and tastes like something Arthurian, a feast of Avalon. Dishes follow in which vegetables and fruits take turns at starring or supporting roles. Food can’t naturally be any more colorful. Likewise, service can hardly be any more professional: You feel part of choreography in which you have nothing to do but step into the performance. And, well, pay. Dinner begins at $450 per person. The option to take a farm tour is part of the experience. It is a serene way to breathe in Sonoma air and preview what might show up on your plate that night.
Extra Helpings: Further finest-dining pursuits in Sonoma: It took chef Douglas Keane and ace maitre d’ Nick Peyton a decade to resurrect their restaurant Cyrus, and they did it right. Their Geyserville building is a modernist stunner, and dinner involves transitioning to different locations throughout the night. And what will be the next big thing for star chasers? That’s Enclos, where chef Brian Limoges leads a team of Avengers-level talent and serves deliciousness like clam chowder, an homage to his childhood, reimagined as chawanmushi.
Extra Helpings: Further finest-dining pursuits in Sonoma: It took chef Douglas Keane and ace maitre d’ Nick Peyton a decade to resurrect their restaurant Cyrus, and they did it right. Their Geyserville building is a modernist stunner, and dinner involves transitioning to different locations throughout the night. And what will be the next big thing for star chasers? That’s Enclos, where chef Brian Limoges leads a team of Avengers-level talent and serves deliciousness like clam chowder, an homage to his childhood, reimagined as chawanmushi.
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Troubadour Bread & Bistro
Sonoma County French $$$$
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Morning to night, Melissa and Sean McGaughey — who are married and alums of SingleThread — pack a remarkable amount of enterprise into the 20-seat restaurant they run up the block from Healdsburg Square. Their day begins by setting up a bread counter: It’s an extension to Quail & Condor, the couple’s must-stop bakery half a mile away where the shattering baguettes call as strongly as danishes filled with rose geranium custard. During lunchtime at Troubadour, those breads hold the structure for jambon au beurre gilded with Brie, a hefty muffaletta and the classic comforts of chicken salad slicked with Duke’s mayo.
In the evenings, McGaughey and his small crew shift to more formal dinners, crafting seven-course prix fixes that are unabashedly French. They present steak tartare on plates painted with butterflies, and pour herb-bright sauces around bouillabaisse variations on the kind of Limoges collection one lands during antiquing jags. The staff has favorite, individualist producers of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir to recommend. In the intimacy of the size, the atmosphere takes on the spirit of a small inn, or a home restaurant. It’s the kind of place to which one dreams of returning, not for its grandiosity, but for the brief though real connection to the people making and serving the meal.
In the evenings, McGaughey and his small crew shift to more formal dinners, crafting seven-course prix fixes that are unabashedly French. They present steak tartare on plates painted with butterflies, and pour herb-bright sauces around bouillabaisse variations on the kind of Limoges collection one lands during antiquing jags. The staff has favorite, individualist producers of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir to recommend. In the intimacy of the size, the atmosphere takes on the spirit of a small inn, or a home restaurant. It’s the kind of place to which one dreams of returning, not for its grandiosity, but for the brief though real connection to the people making and serving the meal.
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San Francisco
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Atelier Crenn
San Francisco French $$$$
(Carolyn Fong/For The Times)
A server glides over with a domed ceramic pot in her hands. She sets it down and lifts the glass lid; a dry-ice fog ripples out, dissipating to reveal a tableau of leaves and flowers. Among the fauna sits a tartlet, its shell made from Koshihikari rice, filled with Dungeness crab sautéed in coconut oil, sparked with Fresno chiles and finished with avocado and an astonishingly silky lentil cream. A single bite, a moment of euphoria and then it’s on to the next delicious bit of theater.
Dominique Crenn is a force — of nature, of artistry, of personality — and she’s kept her mothership in a flow of creative self-discovery since opening in 2011 in Cow Hollow. You probably know if you’re in or out with Crenn from a basic description: The menu, written as a poem, orbits around seafood and vegetables, and dinner unfolds as a series of small courses. The price is $395 per person. From a critical vantage, I’ve always admired the happy medium Crenn achieves between cerebral leaps and undisguised pleasure, between modernism (dinner kicks off with a cocoa butter shell that gushes a play on a Kir Breton cocktail) and low-to-the-ground locavorism (the restaurant maintains a farm). Her secret weapon has long been Juan Contreras, her business partner and pastry chef. He matched her crab tart, for example, with a finale tostada made from rice, potato and masa, which he brushed with a coconut-based laminate to protect the crunch from layers of pistachio cream and raspberries that tasted of roses. This is also the rare restaurant in which the nonalcoholic pairing of teas and other potions are as interesting as the wines.
Extra Helpings: Atelier Crenn’s spiritual L.A. twin is Vespertine, Jordan Kahn’s much-dissected and equally expensive modernistic experiment in Culver City. In its 2.0 rendition, I like it more than I ever have, and for affordable Kahn there is his breakfast-lunch gem, Destroyer, across the street.
Dominique Crenn is a force — of nature, of artistry, of personality — and she’s kept her mothership in a flow of creative self-discovery since opening in 2011 in Cow Hollow. You probably know if you’re in or out with Crenn from a basic description: The menu, written as a poem, orbits around seafood and vegetables, and dinner unfolds as a series of small courses. The price is $395 per person. From a critical vantage, I’ve always admired the happy medium Crenn achieves between cerebral leaps and undisguised pleasure, between modernism (dinner kicks off with a cocoa butter shell that gushes a play on a Kir Breton cocktail) and low-to-the-ground locavorism (the restaurant maintains a farm). Her secret weapon has long been Juan Contreras, her business partner and pastry chef. He matched her crab tart, for example, with a finale tostada made from rice, potato and masa, which he brushed with a coconut-based laminate to protect the crunch from layers of pistachio cream and raspberries that tasted of roses. This is also the rare restaurant in which the nonalcoholic pairing of teas and other potions are as interesting as the wines.
Extra Helpings: Atelier Crenn’s spiritual L.A. twin is Vespertine, Jordan Kahn’s much-dissected and equally expensive modernistic experiment in Culver City. In its 2.0 rendition, I like it more than I ever have, and for affordable Kahn there is his breakfast-lunch gem, Destroyer, across the street.
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Aziza
San Francisco Californian Moroccan $$
(Gabriela Hasbun/For The Times)
Mourad Lahlou’s big, glitzy Moroccan-California restaurant, Mourad, closed in San Francisco’s SoMa district last fall — and where there’s loss, there’s also opportunity. His original, quirkier Aziza in the Richmond always held my heart. It has been open, in fits and starts, since 2001, and I can cop to some nostalgia: I had a memorable dinner here with a close friend days before she gave birth to her first child, and meals early in its run when I remember studiously absorbing Lahlou’s synapse-connecting inspirations with North African flavors. The energy here feels renewed. This is an ideal time either for an introduction or a reacquaintance. Gather a group in the recently refreshed dining room, where Moroccan lamps softly illuminate its clean lines and geometric tiles. The signature bisteeya encases braised chicken and ground almonds; cut into the pastry and scents of saffron and cinnamon billow through the shattering phyllo. Share a feast of grilled squid over hand-rolled couscous, with merguez vinaigrette adding its brash spice; lamb shank paired with buttery celery root purée; and salmon tagine given a one-two punch by red chermoula and preserved lemon. Regulars know that the pan of warm corn bread, glossy with harissa butter, is an improbable yet must-order side. I wish we had more fantastic North African-focused restaurants across California. Aziza sets a sterling example.
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Benu
San Francisco Asian $$$$
(Carolyn Fong/For The Times)
When Corey Lee introduced his serene SoMa restaurant 15 years ago, he splintered notions of Western tasting menus. Born in Korea and raised in New Jersey, he felt pulled to fine dining at an early age, working through high temples in London and New York before spending nine years with Thomas Keller, eventually becoming chef de cuisine at the French Laundry. Lee adopted Keller’s playbook and made it his own — taking American clichés like mac and cheese or peas and carrots and reconstructing them using Escoffier techniques and California plenitude — devising an haute third-culture cuisine that ennobles Korean, Chinese and Japanese flavors. At my first Benu meal in 2014, I’ll never forget an opening riff on siu mai, a dumpling of pork belly, diced kimchi and a tiny oyster in a glassy wrapper made from kimchi broth set with hydrocolloids. It shattered against the teeth. It smashed expectations.
In the mid-2020s New York’s fanciest “Korean wave” restaurants help set the tone for the city’s high-end dining scene. Nationally Lee no longer stands alone, but his cooking has matured: less blatant modernism, more emphasis on Korean tradition. Small presentations like a two-bite toast of Pacific anchovy with house-fermented tomato ssamjang lead to a finale of ginseng-poached quail, its skin rendered to amber, served with flawless rice, fragrant with green onion and sides that include salted shrimp salsa. I hear rumblings sometimes that Lee’s technically rigorous food comes off as too subtle on the palate. In my handful of dinners at Benu over the last decade, I’ve never come away from his singular show of intellect and identity feeling anything less than inspired.
In the mid-2020s New York’s fanciest “Korean wave” restaurants help set the tone for the city’s high-end dining scene. Nationally Lee no longer stands alone, but his cooking has matured: less blatant modernism, more emphasis on Korean tradition. Small presentations like a two-bite toast of Pacific anchovy with house-fermented tomato ssamjang lead to a finale of ginseng-poached quail, its skin rendered to amber, served with flawless rice, fragrant with green onion and sides that include salted shrimp salsa. I hear rumblings sometimes that Lee’s technically rigorous food comes off as too subtle on the palate. In my handful of dinners at Benu over the last decade, I’ve never come away from his singular show of intellect and identity feeling anything less than inspired.
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Breadbelly
San Francisco Bakery Coffee $
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Clouds of flour, blocks and blocks of butter, all the micro-seasonal fruit: San Francisco is the best bakery city in the United States. The options can overwhelm, but I’ll send you first to Breadbelly. Katherine Campecino-Wong, James Wong, Clement Hsu and their staff craft many detailed delights, both sweet and savory, at their always-busy six-year-old storefront in Richmond. Most of us come, at least on a first visit, for the famous kaya toast. Coconut jam, squiggled over milk bread, has been infused with pandan, turning the color to avocado-green and imprinting flavors of vanilla and toasted rice. Its fame is earned. Stick around, though, for the omelet-filled biscuit sandwich dripping with American cheese and charred scallion chimichurri; the crazily smart riff on an arancino made with sticky rice and stuffed with Chinese sausage and Fontina; and the almond-scented crumb cake baked with boozy Luxardo-style cherries and sour cherry jam. Arriving later in the afternoon to avoid crowds means a whole lot might be sold out … but there will still be kaya toast.
Extra Helpings: Four more S.F. bakery suggestions: Arsicault for the legendary croissants; b. Patisserie for the equally fabled kouign amann; Holy Nata for the custardy Portuguese pasteis de nata; and Baklavastory for peerless pistachio baklava.
Extra Helpings: Four more S.F. bakery suggestions: Arsicault for the legendary croissants; b. Patisserie for the equally fabled kouign amann; Holy Nata for the custardy Portuguese pasteis de nata; and Baklavastory for peerless pistachio baklava.
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Californios
San Francisco Mexican $$$$
(Carolyn Fong/For The Times)
California has precious few fine-dining temples devoted to Mexican cuisine, which makes Val Cantú’s accomplished tasting-menu restaurant all the more special. The restaurant, named after a term for Californians of colonial Spanish and Mexican descent, has grown remarkably in scope and ambition. It began in 2015 with a clubby first location in the Mission full of tufted banquettes and Art Deco chandeliers, and in 2021 moved to a black-box arena of a SoMa dining room with psychedelic art and balletic service. Heirloom corn masa, much of it from Tierra Vegetables in Santa Rosa, provides the literal base for many dishes and gives the menu shape. A pink Tlaxacaltecan corn varietal called Xocoyul Rosado gave an almost fudgy texture to a summertime sope filled with Dungeness crab, red bean mousse and a frilly crown of machaca made from Ibérico ham. The 10-plus courses, which culminated in a citrus-brightened riff on pescado zarandeado with salsas and fragrant tortillas, satisfied on many levels.
Pastry chef Kelli Huerta stole the evening with a three-act dessert starring a trio of strawberry varieties, each in their own form: Seascapes as a duet of shaved ice and sorbet; Mara des Bois, each tasting like a thousand berries concentrated into a single fruit, rightly paired only with vanilla crema; and Chandlers steeped as a soothing, mint-laced tea. After a year of travels, this is the dessert I replay most in my head.
Pastry chef Kelli Huerta stole the evening with a three-act dessert starring a trio of strawberry varieties, each in their own form: Seascapes as a duet of shaved ice and sorbet; Mara des Bois, each tasting like a thousand berries concentrated into a single fruit, rightly paired only with vanilla crema; and Chandlers steeped as a soothing, mint-laced tea. After a year of travels, this is the dessert I replay most in my head.
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Copra
San Francisco Indian $$
(Carolyn Fong/For The Times)
Kerala, India’s southwestern-most state, has a unique culture — and cuisine — forged by outside influences from its millennia as a center of maritime spice trade. At airy, plant-filled Copra in San Francisco’s Fillmore District, Srijith Gopinathan imagines the dishes of his native Kerala (and bordering state and Tamil Nadu) with reverence and surgical nuance. Take pork belly, paired with a fruit called kudampuli, and sometimes known as Malabar tamarind. As a seasoning it’s first smoked; the flavor, tart and as intense as wafts from a campfire, most commonly infuses fish curries. But Gopinathan marries kudampuli brilliantly with the pork, tempering its edge with garlic, ginger and not-too-fiery green chiles. I could go on similarly about the crab in coconut, the spiced fried chicken, the appam flatbreads made from fermented rice batter and coconut milk, the coiled paratha, the fine-tuning of the chutneys. As someone lucky enough to have visited Kerala, I sit in Copra’s always-buzzing room feeling as though I’m dining in the state’s culinary embassy.
To bring the specificity of the food into the larger world, Andre Sydnor has assembled a global-minded wine list that’s a joy to read, sorting bottles into categories like “elegant and ethereal” and “deep and concentrated.” But, even better, have a conversation with him. We watched the wheels of his mind turn on the pork belly before he returned with an affordable Grenache/Mourvedre blend, juicy with dark-fruit notes, from Sonoma-based Emme Wines.
To bring the specificity of the food into the larger world, Andre Sydnor has assembled a global-minded wine list that’s a joy to read, sorting bottles into categories like “elegant and ethereal” and “deep and concentrated.” But, even better, have a conversation with him. We watched the wheels of his mind turn on the pork belly before he returned with an affordable Grenache/Mourvedre blend, juicy with dark-fruit notes, from Sonoma-based Emme Wines.
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Cotogna
San Francisco Italian $$$
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times )
A perfunctory glance down Cotogna’s menu doesn’t initially distinguish its dishes from the state’s spate of ambitious, rustic-midscale California Italian restaurants: pasta in twirled strands and stuffed squares; seasonal salads and crudo; meats and fishes cooked over open flames. At Cotogna, Michael and Lindsay Tusk perfectly execute the recognizable blueprint. Expect vegetables grown by farmer Peter Martinelli 30 miles away. Strands of tagliolini (often enlaced with Dungeness crab) or wider tagliatelle made under Michael’s direction will ruinously rewire your benchmarks for excellence. A few hallmarks: sformato (savory custard, often infused with puréed carrot) bathed in fonduta; tiny, meat-filled agnolotti del plin; and meticulously ridged ricotta raviolo bleeding egg yolk with every forkful. Order a beautifully charred pizza crowned with ingredients like lamb sausage and gypsy peppers. Lindsay’s vision for the dining room is rustic coziness rendered in bricks and woods, though the tasteful outdoor dining hutches built during the pandemic also would be lovely on a sunny afternoon. Which reminds me: Cotogna is only open for lunch on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, it is one of my favorite places in America for a daytime meal. For a splurge, look no further than next door to the Tusks’ impeccably refined tasting-menu restaurant, Quince, a model of reinvention over its nearly 22 years that remains at peak performance.
Extra Helpings: California Italian is a major food group in San Francisco. Flour + Water and Acquerello are a couple of other longtime favorites.)
Extra Helpings: California Italian is a major food group in San Francisco. Flour + Water and Acquerello are a couple of other longtime favorites.)
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Dalida
San Francisco Mediterranean $$
(Carolyn Fong/For The Times)
Opposite a manicured field of green space, with San Francisco Bay in open view, Laura and Sayat Ozyilmaz’s Eastern Mediterranean restaurant resides in a former mess hall of the Presidio’s iconic red-brick Montgomery Street Barracks built in 1895. Their cooking more than stands up to the dazzling location. The menu dips into the lexicons of Lebanon, Cyprus and Iran, but the dishes most prominently circle Sayat’s Turkish heritage. Start with Istanbul-style mussels stuffed with dill-scented rice and currants, and a stunning dish of grilled octopus sliced into rounds, laid out in circles on a platter and splotched with a pork version of sujuk and olive-caper dressing. Lamb, the region’s essential meat, sees its rightful shine in tiny manti layered in tomato and yogurt sauces and a powerhouse entree of lamb chop sheathed in spiced ground lamb and caul fat over hummus. Gata, an Armenian tea cake, is reconfigured as a tart of almond and mahleb (a spice made from the seeds of sour cherry) and served with whatever sumptuous fruit happens to be in season. Note the restaurant is open for dinner, lunch and weekend brunch. I would never want to separate Dalida from its idyllic roost, or from the Northern California sense of place that informs its intricate flavors, but this food is very much to my personal taste. I wish the restaurant existed in Los Angeles.
Extra Helpings: What we do have in L.A. is Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis’ blockbuster survey of Middle Eastern cuisines at Bavel in the Arts District, and its kebab-and-small-plates sibling Saffy’s in East Hollywood. And for immersion into tradition-minded Turkish dining in the Bay Area, go in on meze and raki at the Meyhouse restaurants in Palo Alto and Sunnyvale.
Extra Helpings: What we do have in L.A. is Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis’ blockbuster survey of Middle Eastern cuisines at Bavel in the Arts District, and its kebab-and-small-plates sibling Saffy’s in East Hollywood. And for immersion into tradition-minded Turkish dining in the Bay Area, go in on meze and raki at the Meyhouse restaurants in Palo Alto and Sunnyvale.
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HK Lounge Bistro
San Francisco Chinese $$
(Carolyn Fong/For The Times)
A few overall thoughts on Bay Area dim sum, which is an ever-evolving case study: The finesse that for so long kept Daly City’s Koi Palace in the top tier was missing during recent meals. I find the execution at Dragon Beaux in San Francisco’s Richmond neighborhood (operated under the growing Koi Palace umbrella of restaurants) far sharper. S.F. stalwart Yank Sing will always have a place in my heart, but the vitality behind the food isn’t quite what it was. Most important: If you love dim sum, you should be eating at HK Lounge Bistro.Four years after Annie Ho’s beloved Hong Kong Lounge II burned down in Richmond, she resurrected the business in a small SoMa space with translucent windows, carpeting and soothing pinkish walls. It looks and feels like a waiting room for the afterlife. The dim sum is among the best I’ve had in California. Gather a group and go for it: textbook shiu mai and har gau, slippery noodle rolls, a nicely unctuous steamed turnip cake in XO sauce, sticky rice in lotus leaf with delicate bits of sausage and other meats. The custard in the dan tat (egg tarts) tasted a little diluted, but that was the only complaint I heard loudly among my table full of hardline Cantonese opinionators, some of whom were put off by the word “bistro” in the new name and had skirted the place. They’ve become converts.
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La Taqueria
San Francisco Mexican $
(Carolyn Fong/For The Times)
It would be such a score to share with you some arcane, down-a-back-alley-every-other-Thursday revelation about the perfect Misson-style burrito in San Francisco. I attempted that feat for the Chronicle back in 2006, when I ate hundreds of burritos over 10 weeks and documented the quest. After all that, I wound up top-ranking La Taqueria, already the most lauded burrito specialist on the West Coast — which is to say, in the whole world. Nearly 20 years later, Miguel Jara’s frontrunner, where lines have been trailing onto the sidewalk since 1973, remains the place to gauge the landscape. The star order: a carne asada “super” burrito, which famously omits the rice typical to a Bay Area burrito, leaving more room for smoky beef, near-liquid cheese, guacamole, sour cream, pinto beans and additions of salsa fresca and hot sauce. Ask for the burrito dorado, an off-menu request; even sealed in silver foil, it will be crisp after searing on the plancha. Some people will tell you the tacos are even better. I don’t agree, but order away. You’re here to add your own opinion to the grand collective.
Extra Helpings: For nearby comparisons, try the ace Mission-style burritos at Taqueria El Farolito, El Metate and late-night favorite Taqueria Cancún.
Extra Helpings: For nearby comparisons, try the ace Mission-style burritos at Taqueria El Farolito, El Metate and late-night favorite Taqueria Cancún.
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Mandalay
San Francisco Burmese $$
(Carolyn Fong/For The Times)
Mandalay’s tea leaf salad, lahpet thoke, is a plate full of ingredients that look readied for a recipe: small piles of chopped peanuts, pale sesame seeds, fried garlic chips, diced tomato, sliced green chile and, set in the center, the mound of fermented tea leaves, forest green and appealingly slick. Servers mix the elements tableside. It all comes together: the several degrees of crunch against the slipperiness, the ways the chile and tomato coax out the tea’s citrus notes and gentle funk. Mandalay, opened in 1984, is the longest-operating Burmese restaurant in San Francisco. It was not the first place I had tea leaf salad; that was Burma Superstar, a name so irresistible that founder Desmond Tan’s marketing savvy spawned a mini-empire and helped popularize Burmese cuisine across the Bay Area. But Mandalay — run by Kevin Chen, whose uncle was one of the founders, and his wife Sherry Dung — makes the tea salad I love the most. Alongside: mohingha (fish soup in lemongrass broth with rice noodles), the pork and pumpkin stew jolted with mango pickle and, for dunking and sopping, flaky-crisp balada.
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Mijoté
San Francisco French $$$
(Carolyn Fong/For The Times)
“Are you going to Mijoté?” responded knowing San Francisco friends when I asked them for recommendations. What put this 3-year-old Mission bistro at the top of their lists? Last summer two of us sat down for dinner and a staffer sidled right up to chat natural wine. While she grabbed a bottle of Arbois from the Jura, we watched Kosuke Tada and his team of chefs line up plates behind the long counter (formerly a sushi bar), dancing around one another with practiced ease as one arranged near-custardy hunks of beef cheek with purple cabbage while another finished garnishing. I got it: the intimacy, the energy and my God, the cooking. There’s a just-so perfectionism to the saucing, seasoning and meticulous contrasts that conjures France, with a freshness and hint of controlled chaos that sing of California. (The restaurant’s name means “simmered” in French but can also be slang for “drunk.”) Tasting-menu skeptics can embrace the brevity: four nightly changing courses, $82 per person. Your only decision is whether you want a pre-dessert cheese supplement and, if they haven’t yet run out for the evening, a slice of pâté to start. Chicken leg confit may loll in sauce moutarde; king salmon may be scented with saffron on a Tuesday and piercing pesto on Wednesday. There will always be lush, crusty slices of sourdough from local master Josey Baker.
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Minnie Bell's Soul Movement
San Francisco Soul Food $
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Rosemary. That’s probably the word that comes to mind when you first crunch into Fernay McPherson’s fried chicken. I remember how the herb gave the bird new woodsy-sweet dimension, without overpowering its essential pleasure, when McPherson debuted Minnie Bell’s as a stand at the Emeryville Public Market in 2018. Its flavors are even more finely calibrated at her restaurant relocated to the Fillmore District, a historic Black neighborhood where her family has lived for generations. The short menu weaves in a couple of specials such as oxtails braised with potatoes and carrots or fried fish on Fridays, but the fried chicken commands most of the attention. Sides of custardy mac and cheese, capped with a Parmesan crust, and long-simmered, nicely bitter greens complete a holy trinity of comforting foods. Along with dinner service, Minnie Bell’s is also blessedly open for lunch on Friday and Saturday, instantly making the restaurant a vital new daytime dining option.
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Mister Jiu's
San Francisco Chinese $$$
(Carolyn Fong/For The Times)
Brandon Jew is only the third tenant to occupy 28 Waverly Place, a building constructed in Chinatown in the 1880s. He can recall inhaling longevity noodles as a kid at Four Seas, the previous occupant and one of the community’s once-thriving banquet halls. Last decade Jew spent three years renovating the interior, creating a Midcentury Modern set piece and accenting the dreamscape view of Commercial Street. No matter where you sit, take a moment to politely slip past tables to stand at the window, gazing past neighborhood stalwarts like Eastern Bakery to pastel buildings and all the way to the Ferry Building clock tower and San Francisco Bay, fog withstanding.
Jew’s aim for the restaurant has always been to reclaim the Cantonese cuisine of his youth, interpreted with deep respect and knowing irreverence. He’s experimented with form over the years, currently landing on a six-course tasting menu. A late-summer dinner included courses like eel clay pot rice lightened with summer squash and an outstanding guinea hen roulade in chicken broth so vivid in its poultry essence that the mind went still between each spoonful. An urging: Preorder a supplemental course of Peking-style roast duck. It’s generous in size, the bird’s skin gleamingly lacquered, and comes with genius sides of peanut butter hoisin and whipped duck liver mousse.
Extra Helpings: Stick around Chinatown for tiny Canto-pop-fueled Four Kings, one of the hottest restaurants in San Francisco; Empress by Boon, another exquisitely furnished tasting-menu jewel with insane views; and takeout dim sum from Good Mong Kok Bakery.
Jew’s aim for the restaurant has always been to reclaim the Cantonese cuisine of his youth, interpreted with deep respect and knowing irreverence. He’s experimented with form over the years, currently landing on a six-course tasting menu. A late-summer dinner included courses like eel clay pot rice lightened with summer squash and an outstanding guinea hen roulade in chicken broth so vivid in its poultry essence that the mind went still between each spoonful. An urging: Preorder a supplemental course of Peking-style roast duck. It’s generous in size, the bird’s skin gleamingly lacquered, and comes with genius sides of peanut butter hoisin and whipped duck liver mousse.
Extra Helpings: Stick around Chinatown for tiny Canto-pop-fueled Four Kings, one of the hottest restaurants in San Francisco; Empress by Boon, another exquisitely furnished tasting-menu jewel with insane views; and takeout dim sum from Good Mong Kok Bakery.
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Reem's California Mission
San Francisco Arabic Bakery $$
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
To eat at Reem Assil’s sun-drenched cafe in the Mission District, a business modeled on the traditions of Arab corner bakeries, is to know the crackle and tang of the flatbreads, crowned perhaps with asparagus in spring or charred corn in the summer, and how the season’s fruits find their way among the typical greens and fried pita in fattoush. Wonderful any time of year: the thin, pliant man’oushe spread with fragrant za’atar, accompanied by soothing, classic sides of labneh, hummus and minted fattoush. If you’ve heard of Assil, you’re likely aware that the Palestinian Syrian chef, a former labor and community organizer, brings far more to her profession than superb baking skills. Beyond converting the restaurant to a worker-owned model in an effort to upend hierarchical industry models, Assil has the courage to be outspoken on many topics, including the intersection of food and social justice. Her cookbook “Arabiyya” is a beautiful extension of her restaurant’s philosophy; after a piece or two of her walnut ba’laawa (or baklava, reclaimed from the Greek kitchen) perfumed with orange blossom for dessert, you will want the recipe.
Extra Helpings: Reem’s is one of the most wonderfully affordable dining options in San Francisco. Two others to recommend: El Mil Amores, also in the Mission, for Mexican breakfast, and cash-only Yamo for bowls of Burmese Chinese noodles under $10.
Extra Helpings: Reem’s is one of the most wonderfully affordable dining options in San Francisco. Two others to recommend: El Mil Amores, also in the Mission, for Mexican breakfast, and cash-only Yamo for bowls of Burmese Chinese noodles under $10.
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Rich Table
San Francisco American $$
(Carolyn Fong/For The Times)
At Evan and Sarah Rich’s 13-year-old Hayes Valley restaurant, I taste a half-century of San Francisco’s evolving definitions around “California casual fine dining” filtering down into one exhilarating menu. I always rely on beignet-like doughnuts, dusted with porcini powder and served with an airy raclette dipping sauce, to jump-start the evening. From there, it’s where the market meets the imagination of the Riches, chef de cuisine Gizela Ho and their kitchen crew. To borrow a fashion term, they’re exceptionally skilled at the statement piece. The acidic pop of chewy sun-dried tomato transforms an otherwise uniformly creamy duo of saag and burrata. The addition of first-of-spring asparagus suddenly anchors evergreen linguine and clams in a time and place. Rhubarb’s astringency among the nuoc cham and lemongrass that flavors grilled pork? The floral-saline qualities of preserved cherry blossoms perfuming miso-marinated cod? Here such cross-pollinations make intuitive, obvious sense. Cocktails mirror the produce-first cooking, and drink names from the “Sex and the City” era of puns (“Basil Instinct,” “For Beet’s Sake”) remind me the team never gets too self-serious. Some restaurants exist to illuminate specific cuisines, or to splice them on a fiber-optic level. Rich Table manages to embody a wider Bay Area ethos. Local food lovers recognize themselves in the place, and visitors are in for a swift, delicious indoctrination.
Extra Helpings: For two more San Francisco restaurants serving innovative, seasonal menus in the “modern Californian” vein, Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski run State Bird Provisions and the Progress on the same block of Fillmore Street.
Extra Helpings: For two more San Francisco restaurants serving innovative, seasonal menus in the “modern Californian” vein, Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski run State Bird Provisions and the Progress on the same block of Fillmore Street.
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Rintaro
San Francisco Japanese $$
(Gabriela Hasbun/For The Times)
The modern concept of izakaya can be defined as an intentionally casual, handsomely scruffy pub serving sake and other beverages, with a lengthy menu of mostly small plates. Rintaro, opened in 2014, stays true to the model while bending gracefully to the creative impulses of chef-owner Sylvan Mishima Brackett. With the help of his father, a carpenter, Kyoto-born Brackett fashioned a dining room that includes booths made from reclaimed redwood wine casks and a cedar counter forged by hand. The aesthetics preserve a sense of serenity when the place is full and bustling — which is most of the time. (For a quieter meal on clear nights, the pandemic-era patio has blossomed into a leafy urban escape.) In the manner of izakaya, order dishes that express a gamut of cooking methods: grilled duck breast over peppery chrysanthemum greens, rolled omelet with the soft oceanic flavor of dashi, smoky-fluffy tsukune and plates of sashimi with sinus-searing wasabi. My longtime Rintaro vice: panko-crusted torikatsu that with every forkful oozes a molten layer of cider-washed cheese from Cowgirl Creamery in Petaluma. The sake list will expand your mind with its possibilities.
Extra Helpings: Also do not miss Brackett’s exceptional hand-rolled udon, served either in broth or tossed in butter and eggy as a playful carbonara. For the finest soba I’ve had in California, head across the Bay Bridge, and then stand in line, for Soba Ichi in Oakland.
Extra Helpings: Also do not miss Brackett’s exceptional hand-rolled udon, served either in broth or tossed in butter and eggy as a playful carbonara. For the finest soba I’ve had in California, head across the Bay Bridge, and then stand in line, for Soba Ichi in Oakland.
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Zuni Café
San Francisco European $$
(Carolyn Fong/For The Times)
“Are you including Zuni?” a young food writer friend sighed at me early in this project. “It seems like the kind of entry where people will just go, ‘Oh, yeah, OK’ and gloss over it.” I did not have a fast zinger retort, and still don’t. I told him simply that Zuni Café, in operation for 46 years now, still holds significance to a lot of people, and they might wonder about its continued value in the community. It is incredibly reassuring to find the place rooted and healthy on its corner of Market Street. Its space feels eternal: the glass windows across triangulated angles, the standing copper bar, the carefully chosen art, the see-and-be-seen staircase that connects to a more secluded second floor. Eating here, particularly on an overcast afternoon, can almost feel haunted, as if the emotions felt by decades of well-fed patrons seeped into the walls and have now begun to slowly bleed back out. Sipping vermouth feels right and civilized.
Judy Rodgers codified the restaurant’s style through the 1990s, marrying impeccable produce and pedigreed meats prepared in styles shaped by Italian and French repertoires. She also distilled her knowledge into a seminar of a cookbook. Rodgers died of cancer in 2013; Anne Alvero, the latest chef to run the kitchen, took over in 2022. At this point it’s impossible for the legendary roast chicken to live up to its reputation. I’m still deeply charmed, though, by the bowl of polenta (I ask for both mascarpone and Parmesan, rather than choosing one, and the kind, aproned servers indulge me), the lunchtime burger on rosemary focaccia and revolving entrees like roasted duck leg with dates and pancetta. Oh, and a silly, life-affirming pyramid of shoestring potatoes on the side, please.
Extra Helpings: I consider the analogue to Zuni Café in Los Angeles and know it to be A.O.C., where Suzanne Goin basically drafted the blueprint for California-Mediterranean small-plate menus, and co-owner Caroline Styne met her with a food-friendly, low-pretense wine program that echoes those growing regions.
Judy Rodgers codified the restaurant’s style through the 1990s, marrying impeccable produce and pedigreed meats prepared in styles shaped by Italian and French repertoires. She also distilled her knowledge into a seminar of a cookbook. Rodgers died of cancer in 2013; Anne Alvero, the latest chef to run the kitchen, took over in 2022. At this point it’s impossible for the legendary roast chicken to live up to its reputation. I’m still deeply charmed, though, by the bowl of polenta (I ask for both mascarpone and Parmesan, rather than choosing one, and the kind, aproned servers indulge me), the lunchtime burger on rosemary focaccia and revolving entrees like roasted duck leg with dates and pancetta. Oh, and a silly, life-affirming pyramid of shoestring potatoes on the side, please.
Extra Helpings: I consider the analogue to Zuni Café in Los Angeles and know it to be A.O.C., where Suzanne Goin basically drafted the blueprint for California-Mediterranean small-plate menus, and co-owner Caroline Styne met her with a food-friendly, low-pretense wine program that echoes those growing regions.
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East Bay
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Bombera
Oakland Mexican Californian $$
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
The carrots look yanked from the earth this very morning. Some seem to have wrestled their way through the soil, growing twisted and knobby; others came out so straight and long they don’t quite fit in the yellow bowl in which they’re served. Nubs of stems remain. Their careful cooking preserves their appearance, but a fork pierces their satisfying soft-crisp consistency. They’re covered with a salsa that chef-owner Dominica Rice-Cisneros named after a town in the Mexican state of Veracruz called Misantla: Slivered almonds poke out of a bonded mixture that crunches like drier salsa macha and lashes out like chile crisp. Underneath, for contrast, are white beans simmered with such precision that they both pop and collapse against the teeth.
Rice-Cisneros — raised in Los Angeles, with career stops in Mexico City and on the line at Chez Panisse — approaches every dish at her Oakland restaurant with equal intention and intensity. I remember her weekly mole specials when she ran Cosecha in Swan’s Market five miles away. At four-year-old Bombera, housed in a former fire station painted stark white, she has the space to craft multiple painstaking versions, among them a smooth, bright, peanut-rich mole verde paired with duck leg and a red chile-sparked pipian that stands against grilled swordfish’s meaty heft. With its come-on-in vibes, savvy list of tequilas and mezcals and dedication to freshness in layered senses of the word, Bombera sets a statewide bar for neighborhood Mexican dining.
Rice-Cisneros — raised in Los Angeles, with career stops in Mexico City and on the line at Chez Panisse — approaches every dish at her Oakland restaurant with equal intention and intensity. I remember her weekly mole specials when she ran Cosecha in Swan’s Market five miles away. At four-year-old Bombera, housed in a former fire station painted stark white, she has the space to craft multiple painstaking versions, among them a smooth, bright, peanut-rich mole verde paired with duck leg and a red chile-sparked pipian that stands against grilled swordfish’s meaty heft. With its come-on-in vibes, savvy list of tequilas and mezcals and dedication to freshness in layered senses of the word, Bombera sets a statewide bar for neighborhood Mexican dining.
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Burdell
Oakland Soul Food $$
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
To the right of the entrance to Geoff Davis’ restaurant is a bar designed in the Technicolor shades of a 1960s-era home kitchen: backsplash of cherry-red teardrop tiles, avocado-green counter, a winking rotary phone in canary yellow on the nearby host stand. Its set-piece charms carry the mood into the sepia-toned dining room. Tables have been readied with vintage glassware, hinting at the swirly-patterned Pyrex plates on which barbecued shrimp, rice grits with Delta asparagus or chicken nuggets paired with caviar will be served.
Nothing about the cooking at Burdell feels like a throwback, though. Davis intended the space to honor where and how he learned Black foodways growing up, while underscoring the ways his ideas are moving the genre forward. Peanut miso soaks into boiled peanuts to double their essence. Dusky berbere spices join smoked ham hocks in the greens. A halved cornmeal waffle becomes a vehicle for scooping silky chicken liver mousse scattered with curls of fried chicken skins. Market vegetables are everywhere on the menu, reclaiming the agrarian roots of American cuisine informed through the centuries by enslaved Africans and their descendants. Genial, quick-witted staffers keep a buoyant pace to the meal; Davis, a devoted oenophile, might slip out from behind the stoves to advise if he hears you debating between bottles of Beaujolais.
Nothing about the cooking at Burdell feels like a throwback, though. Davis intended the space to honor where and how he learned Black foodways growing up, while underscoring the ways his ideas are moving the genre forward. Peanut miso soaks into boiled peanuts to double their essence. Dusky berbere spices join smoked ham hocks in the greens. A halved cornmeal waffle becomes a vehicle for scooping silky chicken liver mousse scattered with curls of fried chicken skins. Market vegetables are everywhere on the menu, reclaiming the agrarian roots of American cuisine informed through the centuries by enslaved Africans and their descendants. Genial, quick-witted staffers keep a buoyant pace to the meal; Davis, a devoted oenophile, might slip out from behind the stoves to advise if he hears you debating between bottles of Beaujolais.
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Commis
Oakland Californian $$$$
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
The dish that never leaves James Syhabout’s tasting menu looks like a quick breakfast of poached egg with a sprinkling of granola along one side of its bowl. One dip of a spoon, though, reveals the “white” to be a soup of onions simmered slowly in butter and puréed. The barely set yolk in the center rests on a hidden jam made from vinegared smoked dates. A pile of minced chives disrupts the smooth textures and sharpens the sweet, warm flavors. Its constant presence anchors the kitchen’s many technical feats presented in poetic forms. I miss the now-closed casual Hawker Fare restaurants Syhabout ran in San Francisco and Oakland that illuminated his Lao Isan heritage; their narrative lives on in a cookbook he wrote with John Birdsall. Commis, wedged into a cozily narrow space where the kitchen team waltzes in full view behind an open counter, affirms Syhabout’s dedication to fine dining. The menus have grown more formal, more daring and more cerebral since he opened the restaurant in 2009; his playful, opulent spins can take the form of caviar-topped daikon and shrimp cake or cumulus almond tofu with candied kumquats and ginger syrup. A bar next door serves a different, shorter menu and stunning cocktails; disappear into the gin-based “Ode to the Farallons,” swirled to resemble weather patterns rendered through radar.
Extra Helpings: Thinking about Syhabout’s cooking through the years makes me hungry for Lao food, which means a trip to long-running Vientien Cafe in Oakland for pork-laced bamboo soup and custardy fish steamed in banana leaves.
Extra Helpings: Thinking about Syhabout’s cooking through the years makes me hungry for Lao food, which means a trip to long-running Vientien Cafe in Oakland for pork-laced bamboo soup and custardy fish steamed in banana leaves.
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Popoca
Oakland Salvadoran $$
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
At the most visionary Salvadoran restaurant in California, Anthony Salguero refashions his culture’s version of the beverage chicha, fermented with corn and pineapple, into a sticky, intricately sour-sweet glaze for grilled and braised chicken. He shaves cured, smoked egg yolk over herbed guacamole as a play on the boiled eggs that often accompany Salvadoran-style guac. He serves a half Dungeness crab with tools to extract the meat and a side of alguashte, an earthy seasoning of toasted pepitas, to accentuate the crab’s sweetness. Nicaraguan chancho con yuca, a slow-cooked pork stew, is the inspiration for a walloping pork chop marinated in achiote, grilled above glowing almond logs and poised at an angle, like a rakishly worn hat, over braised yuca and red cabbage.
Salguero ran Popoca as a pandemic-era pop up in Oakland before finding a more permanent home (brick walls, pale wood floors, shadowed lighting) in the city’s downtown. While he focuses on reimagining the traditions and possibilities of Salvadoran cooking, he doesn’t abandon El Salvador’s national dish: The pupusas are exceptional, made from several versions of masa using corn he buys from Mexico City-based Tamoa. Fillings change with the season: Jimmy Nardello peppers, minced lengua, oyster mushrooms. A dense yet fluffy blue-corn variation spilling chopped shrimp and oozing white cheese particularly wowed. In each case he grills the pupusas so their edges become crisp and fragrant with smoke.
In your glass? More new horizons: Popoca’s team of bartenders pull Salvadoran flavors (coconut, tamarind, chiles, sweet spices, even black beans and plantains) into boozy new contexts.
Salguero ran Popoca as a pandemic-era pop up in Oakland before finding a more permanent home (brick walls, pale wood floors, shadowed lighting) in the city’s downtown. While he focuses on reimagining the traditions and possibilities of Salvadoran cooking, he doesn’t abandon El Salvador’s national dish: The pupusas are exceptional, made from several versions of masa using corn he buys from Mexico City-based Tamoa. Fillings change with the season: Jimmy Nardello peppers, minced lengua, oyster mushrooms. A dense yet fluffy blue-corn variation spilling chopped shrimp and oozing white cheese particularly wowed. In each case he grills the pupusas so their edges become crisp and fragrant with smoke.
In your glass? More new horizons: Popoca’s team of bartenders pull Salvadoran flavors (coconut, tamarind, chiles, sweet spices, even black beans and plantains) into boozy new contexts.
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Tacos Mamá Cuca
Hayward Mexican $
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Maria Márquez began her Sonoran-style taqueria in 2022 from her home in Oakland, pairing the nearly translucent, lard-glossed flour tortillas she’d been making her whole life with meats grilled open-air over mesquite coals by her husband, Juan Carlos Garcìa. Three years later the business evolved to a food truck parked four days a week in a lot along one of Hayward’s main streets, with a comfortable dining tent set up in the far end. Few things in California life are as rewarding as a taco that hits your senses like the current that turns on the stadium lights. San Francisco Chronicle critic Cesar Hernandez led me to the taco Yaquí, a large tortilla folded around smoky chopped carne asada with refritos (flavored with chorizo and chipotle to double the smokiness) and a grilled Anaheim, its stem a curly tail sticking out from the bundle. Melted cheese had sealed the taco, but I pried it open to splat on smooth avocado sauce and roasted-tomato salsa served in a molcajete. Boom. The menu is short: quesadilla, caramelo, chorreada (made with a crackling corn tortilla drizzled with the rendered, toasted lard called asiento); asada, al pastor, chorizo, tripa. For overkill, the “special burrito” is wrapped in bacon and grilled to crispness. It’s probably something you only need to order once, but it’s there for all the TikTok likes should you choose.
Extra Helpings: On the subject of Sonoran-style taquerias, I must shout out Sonoratown, now with several locations across Los Angeles County, which fills its powdery-butter tortillas with cheese-laced guisados for chivichangas and my favorite burrito in the city with grilled steak or, lately, spiced cabeza.
Extra Helpings: On the subject of Sonoran-style taquerias, I must shout out Sonoratown, now with several locations across Los Angeles County, which fills its powdery-butter tortillas with cheese-laced guisados for chivichangas and my favorite burrito in the city with grilled steak or, lately, spiced cabeza.
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Tacos Oscar
Oakland Tacos $
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
The taqueria that Oscar Michel and Jake Weiss run out of a repurposed shipping container isn’t strictly vegetarian, but they devise the most inspired vegetarian and vegan tacos in California. They’re famed for their broccoli taco: hunky florets (I’m grateful it’s actual broccoli and not twiggy broccolini, which I’m so over), which are charred but not acrid, freckled with peanut and chile arbol salsa, zapped with pickled onions and folded into a plush, just-made tortilla using masa from Oakland’s La Finca Tortilleria. It’s awesome. Other creations might involve fried sweet potatoes and queso fresco, or calabacitas anointed with an herby pepita salsa, and recently I had an open-faced quesadilla special with chanterelles and three other mushrooms, bound with molten jack cheese and scented with epazote’s peppery musk. At weekend brunch, even a seemingly basic bean and cheese taco reveals delicious calculations: Creamy Mayocobas plus melted strands of Tillamook cheddar plus roasted jalapeño salsa equals wow. Yes, meatier brainstorms also impress: A tri-pork situation involving bacon, linguiça and polvo de chicharrón with collard greens and black beans comes to mind. But the taco genius low on the food chain is an example that can and should resonate across the state.
Extra Helpings: In the last year The Times’ Food team named some of our favorite meat-free tacos around Los Angeles. Two of mine: Josef Centeno’s wondrous puffy tacos with soyrizo or mushroom birria at Bar Amá; and the “heaven” vegan tacos, particularly the vegan riff on green chorizo, from Alex and Elvia García at Evil Cooks.
Extra Helpings: In the last year The Times’ Food team named some of our favorite meat-free tacos around Los Angeles. Two of mine: Josef Centeno’s wondrous puffy tacos with soyrizo or mushroom birria at Bar Amá; and the “heaven” vegan tacos, particularly the vegan riff on green chorizo, from Alex and Elvia García at Evil Cooks.
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Tanzie's
Berkeley Thai $$
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Picture a cafe in Berkeley on a Sunday morning in winter, the low February light hitting the leaves of hung ferns and brightening the already sunshine-yellow walls. The menu at Tanzie’s centers on dishes that Krissana Tussanaprasit (who runs the restaurant with her partner, Jezreel Rojas) grew up eating in northern Thailand’s Chiang Mai. I’m already rattling off our order to the server — including nam prik ong (ground pork taut with shrimp paste and chiles) and sai oua (Chiang Mai’s ubiquitous sausage suffused with herbs) when I see another staffer whizzing by with a plate of eggs. “Oh, that’s today’s special, topped with Dungeness crab.” Tussanaprasit and Rojas refer to their style of soft scramble as “lava eggs.” They’re swirled with chopsticks in a pan until they set into a spiral pattern — a composite of Korean and Japanese omelet techniques they gleaned from online videos. Our table began to fill. The pork dishes energized, their flavors intricate and potent. The eggs arrived a little later, as a calming aftermath. Forkfuls were soft clouds, mingled with sweet, lacy crab. I sipped a glass full of freshly squeezed blood orange juice between bites and thought to myself, “This is a perfect breakfast.”
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Silicon Valley and South Bay
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Bad Animal
Santa Cruz Wine Bars $$
(Mariel De La Cruz/For The Times)
Bad Animal, a gathering place on a tree-lined street in downtown Santa Cruz, looks a lot like my dream hybrid retail model — and maybe yours too. First, it is a large, heroically curated used and rare bookshop. Co-founders Jess LoPrete and Andrew Sivak describe the titles in which they specialize as “the excessive, psychedelic, revolutionary, fierce, transgressive, uncanny and uncivilized.” Sold. LoPrete also oversees an on-site natural wine bar, its list designed in price and styles (minerally sparklers, juicy Slovenian reds) to enthrall rather than alienate. I had a rare calm hour last summer reading Tricia Romano’s “The Freaks Came Out to Write” while slowly draining a glass of rosé. Then I stuck around for dinner. Lalita Kaewsawang has been the chef at Bad Animal’s restaurant, Hanloh Thai Food, since 2022. She serves a monthly rotating menu of studied dishes that often includes Monterey Bay cod in herb-fragrant broth and gaeng keow waan, her silky and basil-scented green curry surrounding beef, apple eggplants and bamboo shoots. May such an enterprise grace every community in California.
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Bò Né Phú Yên
San Jose Vietnamese $
(Mariel De La Cruz/For The Times)
San José is home to the largest Vietnamese population in a single city outside Vietnam, and the strip mall enclaves of San José’s Little Saigon rival its Orange County cousin in the variety and specificity of its restaurants. Where to start eating? Wander into the courtyard of Lion Plaza on Tully Road, and look for the “L’amour Dance Studio” sign above the semi-hidden entrance to the complex’s food court. “Bo ne,” says the woman from behind the counter at Bo Ne Phu Yen, less a question and more of a statement. It’s what everyone orders. She hands over a beeper, and when it buzzes you walk up to receive a spitting-hot black-iron plate, with sliced filet mignon, egg, one lightly packed pork meatball and a generous splotch of soft pâté, all hissing and sizzling. I’m so mesmerized by the action, I almost miss that the plate is in the shape of a cow. Use the warm, crackling loaf of French bread to compose ideal bites, interspersed with nibbles of tomato and cucumber. Bo ne is a traditional breakfast, though the stand stays open until mid-afternoon most days.
Extra Helpings: For your next stops in San Jose’s Little Saigon, explore the broader menu — and especially the extra-crisp cha ca la vong — at Thie’n Long, and the spicy noodle soups at Hue Restaurant in the same complex.
Extra Helpings: For your next stops in San Jose’s Little Saigon, explore the broader menu — and especially the extra-crisp cha ca la vong — at Thie’n Long, and the spicy noodle soups at Hue Restaurant in the same complex.
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Saapaaduu
San Jose Indian $$
(Mariel De La Cruz/For The Times)
For quality and quantity of South Asian restaurants, Silicon Valley bests any other corner of the state. In 20 years of seeking regional Indian cuisines in particular through the area, I’ve learned to search online by the country’s states — Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Kerala — to find menus grounded in specific traditions. This habit has never yielded better results than this year, when it led me to an office complex in southeast San José, otherwise emptied at night, where Rukmani Srinivasan and Purnima Arunsankar opened Saapaaduu in early 2024. The word is a phonetic spelling of the word for “meal” in the Tamil language and, sure enough, the name signals the cooking of Tamil Nadu, the South Indian state where coconut is a verb, noun and adjective in the kitchen. Take note as a server hurries through the dining room carrying a vessel filled with food that’s wrapped in a cone of aluminum foil. Unwrap the package and beneath the rush of steam you’ll find kizhi parotta, a lush dish of shredded flatbread mixed with chicken, goat or cubes of paneer and a gingery, cardamom-forward spiced coconut gravy called salna, all bundled in a banana leaf. Start with pidi kozhukkattai — delicate steamed dumplings flecked with vegetables and coconut, served with carefully seasoned coconut and tomato chutneys — and then share the fragrant seeraga samba chicken biryani made with tiny, short-grained Tamil rice.
Extra Helpings: For more South Asian dining across Silicon Valley, dive into the veg and non-veg Maharashtrian dishes at Swaraj India, plates of textured snacks at Delhiwala Chaat and daily-changing thalis, including an excellent mix of Gujarati specialties on Saturdays, at Royal Thaali.
Extra Helpings: For more South Asian dining across Silicon Valley, dive into the veg and non-veg Maharashtrian dishes at Swaraj India, plates of textured snacks at Delhiwala Chaat and daily-changing thalis, including an excellent mix of Gujarati specialties on Saturdays, at Royal Thaali.
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Sushi Yoshizumi
San Mateo Sushi $$$$
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
“Please don’t waste your time and money if you expect [a] very fancy dining experience here,” reads part of the disclaimer on the reservation page for Sushi Yoshizumi. The language warns away the diner who hasn’t been indoctrinated into Edomae-style sushi, a shorthand term in modern contexts for ideals that sidestep showy garnishes and double down on time-honored techniques. Of course, this level of shooing-away is catnip for the omakase-obsessed. The most hypercritical sushi purist I know in Los Angeles urged me to claim one of the eight counter seats in front of Akira Yoshizumi. When I slid in (two minutes late, every other diner already settled) and Yoshizumi began by pushing etched-glass cups of filigreed, pleasantly slimy seaweed called mozuku toward us and then launched right into a couple sashimi courses, I understood her insistence. There’s no caviar, no truffle oil, and none of the cooked appetizers that often precede similar omakases in L.A. In two-dozen presentations, Yoshizumi simply strives to frame the qualities of each variety: marinate silvery kohada, boil prawns, steam amadai with specks of sudachi zest, press roe, pair sardine and green onion in a tight roll. His art relies on what’s swimming in Japanese waters. My meal of micro-seasonal seafood won’t look exactly like yours. But for the true believers willing to pay $325 per person (before sake even begins to flow), this is one of the most extraordinary sushi indulgences in California.
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Central Valley
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Mi Ranchito Cafe
Stockton Mexican $
(Jyotsna Bhamidipati/For The Times)
I asked two L.A.-based food writers, Bill Esparza and my Times colleague Gustavo Arellano, if they had suggestions in California’s vast Central Valley, anywhere between Bakersfield and Sacramento, that might exemplify the region’s Mexican American dining culture. They both independently sent me to Mi Ranchito Cafe in Stockton, which has stood since 1955. Alexandra Reyes’ father bought the restaurant in 1974; she’s been running it since the 1980s. Among combination plates of enchiladas, tacos, chiles rellenos, camarones al mojo de ajo and breakfasts of machaca and eggs in many styles, the dish called “a la chicana” best distills the taste of the place. It’s a local specialty in which strips of beef are sautéed and then simmered with onions and green and red peppers in a light tomato sauce. Polishing off a plate feels good in the soul. To soak up all the sauce, the restaurant makes amazing flour tortillas unlike any I’ve known before: oblong and three times the usual thickness, almost with distinct layers, and marked with griddle patterns like a secret alphabet I’m sure I can decipher if I stare long enough. Dining within the restaurant’s wood-paneled walls and murals of vaqueros on horseback can feel like a time capsule. Locals keep tables and counter seats full, likely realizing the keeper of traditions they have in the place.
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Saizon
Fresno County New American $$$
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
A few days out, the only reservation two of us could score for a Saturday night at Saizon was 5:15 p.m. I had read it was the buzziest restaurant in Fresno. Even early, as we passed from the piercing San Joaquin Valley heat and into the air-conditioned dimness, the 5,300-square-foot dining room was nearly filled. Decibels ricocheted like golf balls off concrete walls. The crowd looked to favor cocktails: margaritas, lychee martinis, frozen blood orange negronis. My eyes and ears adjusted, and I locked into the restaurant’s rhythm. Chef Justin Shannon oversees a modern American menu that flirts with several genres: seafood bar, small plates, steakhouse. The fun came from hopping between them. Dijonnaise and tomatillo vinaigrette intensified the sweetness of cracked Dungeness crab legs, which tasted even more vivid interspersed with bites of well-seasoned guacamole. The guajillo-coriander rub on a flat-iron steak merged with chipotle butter melting over the top to create subtle layers of heat. Stalks of broccoli could hardly be seen through a pummeling of garnishes — crisped prosciutto, bread crumbs, shaved Grana Padano and grilled-lemon vinaigrette among them — but the flavors wound up balancing in all their busyness. Impressive cooking in such a massive restaurant isn’t easy, and neither is personable service, but Saizon pulled off both. I was grateful our server pointed me to the Otherside cafe in the same complex for coffee: An espresso tonic and avocado toast from there was the road-food breakfast I needed the next morning.
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Wool Growers Restaurant
Bakersfield Basque $$
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Perhaps, from a culinary perspective, Bakersfield would like to be considered more broadly than by its history of Basque restaurants — communal spaces with origins tracing back to Spanish sheepherders who immigrated to the San Joaquin Valley in the late 1800s. I won’t be helpful, alas. I pass through the area at least once a year with friends, and we inevitably hop around between a couple of Basque restaurants, asking ourselves which one leads after pacesetting Noriega Hotel closed its original location in May 2020. My answer seesaws, but mostly it’s Wool Growers. The setup of salad, vegetable soup, salsa, marinated tomatoes, beans and bread that precedes the entrees closely mirrors others around town. Here the fried chicken runs a little juicier and more roundly garlicky, though, and the oxtail stew is full of meat tumbling from the bone, and the vinegar that sharpens the sliced pickled tongue twangs like Parker Posey’s North Carolina accent in “The White Lotus.” When I salt the hell out of the fries, they’re great. Plus, the beige floral wallpaper and the plastic table coverings over white tablecloths woozily blur the time-space continuum. I don’t know quite where or when I am, but the friendly, fast-moving staff always seems glad I’m here.
Extra Helpings: Runner-up Basque restaurant: The Pyrenees Cafe, which doubles as a rowdy bar on the weekends. And speaking of bars: The Sinking Ship Room, the subterranean adjunct to Tiki-Ko in downtown Bakersfield, is outlandish, pirate-themed bliss.
Extra Helpings: Runner-up Basque restaurant: The Pyrenees Cafe, which doubles as a rowdy bar on the weekends. And speaking of bars: The Sinking Ship Room, the subterranean adjunct to Tiki-Ko in downtown Bakersfield, is outlandish, pirate-themed bliss.
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Central Coast
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Bell's
Los Alamos French $$$
(Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times)
Daisy Ryan grew up in the Santa Ynez Valley and left for school at the Culinary Institute of America, followed by jobs around the country that included a front-of-house stint at Thomas Keller’s Per Se in Manhattan. But she wanted to focus on cooking, and on her own terms, so she returned to California with her husband, Greg Ryan, to open Bell’s in Los Alamos in 2018. Their aesthetics were photo-spread immaculate — faded checkered floors, pressed-tin ceiling, copper pots hanging in the open kitchen — and Daisy’s food at the beginning leaned French bistro. National food media rushed in with glee. Seven years later, the restaurant remains a focal-point meal for a long weekend getaway but has been equally embraced as a locals’ hangout. Lunch still persuades with Gallic charms: buttery escargots, a rustic terrine, fancy sandwiches and a crêpe du jour. An irresistible Cal-Med influence has snuck into the ever-changing prix fixe dinner. You might be asked to decide between Pacific mackerel (spritzed with tangerine in winter or offset with ripe melon in August) and a crisp-soft panisse (rectangular and arranged with anchovies and saffron aioli, or round and layered with peaches and pistou). If your impulse is to order both, you are not alone.
Extra Helpings: The Ryans additionally co-operate the casual-swank seafood restaurant Bar Le Côte in nearby Los Olivos, which I particularly enjoy for lunch. They also hosted Ashley and Nik Ramirez for their Na Na Thai pop-ups, inspired by the couple’s years of living in Bangkok, before the permanent location opened in Buellton. Try the geng daeng moo sap, with its fragrant blast of red curry paste.
Extra Helpings: The Ryans additionally co-operate the casual-swank seafood restaurant Bar Le Côte in nearby Los Olivos, which I particularly enjoy for lunch. They also hosted Ashley and Nik Ramirez for their Na Na Thai pop-ups, inspired by the couple’s years of living in Bangkok, before the permanent location opened in Buellton. Try the geng daeng moo sap, with its fragrant blast of red curry paste.
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Bettina
Santa Barbara Italian $$
(Shelby Moore/For The Times)
The Santa Barbarans I know love Bettina and its pizzas, but it’s also the place where plenty of traveling food-obsessed Angelenos head first to dine in the area. Brendan Smith baked bread at famed Roberta’s in Brooklyn (during his stint there he met Rachel Greenspan, his wife and business partner); the crusts of his blistered, puffed-edge pizzas bring the same delight as a hunk of sourdough that’s just cooled enough to eat. Pepperoni-covered evergreens are great, but even better to seek out the most seasonal revelations. A combination like winter’s roasted kabocha squash with goat cheese and garlic oil will segue to springtime asparagus accented with pancetta, shallots and truffled sottocenere. Clever antipasti (cacio e pepe arancini, fluffy meatballs in vodka sauce), upbeat service and an approachable wine list, heavy on Italian and California options, round out the appeal. In warm weather the charms of the industrial-chic dining room spill outside: The filled tables in the mini-mall courtyard suddenly feel like a piazza in the midst of a festival.
Extra Helpings: Any conversation of pizza in Santa Barbara County, or California, should also mention Full of Life Flatbread in Los Alamos, where the crunchy-edged pies truly convey an essence of bread, and the wine list highlights many of the best local producers.
Extra Helpings: Any conversation of pizza in Santa Barbara County, or California, should also mention Full of Life Flatbread in Los Alamos, where the crunchy-edged pies truly convey an essence of bread, and the wine list highlights many of the best local producers.
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Caruso's
Santa Barbara Italian $$$$
(Shelby Moore/For The Times)
I consider the ways, specifically from an Angeleno perspective, that Caruso’s might fly under the fine-dining radar. Its name perhaps conveys a red sauce chain, though instead it refers to Rick Caruso, the real estate developer and would-be mayor of Los Angeles.
The ne-plus-ultra luxury Rosewood Miramar Beach hotel in the Montecito community (hi, Oprah; hi, Meghan and Harry) east of Santa Barbara is part of his portfolio, and its centerpiece restaurant perches beachside with an open-air view of the Pacific. Looking at pictures of the cuisine, one might see plates of micro-vegetables and geometric meats arranged with surgical tools and justifiably worry that the food leans, well, hotel-food sterile.
Exactly the opposite is true, it turns out. Massimo Falsini, chef de cuisine Shibani Mone and his team might accentuate glamour in their presentations, but they also cook with heart. Falsini grew up in Rome but managed to shed any orthodoxy around pasta. He summons the wit of Massimo Bottura for a dish he calls “I Grew Up in Trastevere You Should Try This Carbonara,” rechanneling the holy cheese-egg-pork trinity into silky ravioli that gush at first bite. Diners have three menu options: Three or four courses, with multiple choices for appetizer, pasta, entree and dessert, or a 12-course set tasting menu. Four courses with a tablemate willing to order different dishes and share is my strategy. In spring, burrata with floral Mara de Bois strawberries could transition to sweet pea and Dungeness crab ravioli; black cod and white asparagus in a coconut-tinged turmeric brodo that’s as fragrant as a Goan seafood curry; and a dazzling chocolate construction for dessert, though I will always opt for cheese from a roving cart. Service is expert to the point of clairvoyance, which comes in especially handy when you’re braving a conversation about the tome of a wine list. The somms tend to aim and score. For this and many other reasons, dinner at Caruso’s merits an overnight celebratory stay in Santa Barbara.
The ne-plus-ultra luxury Rosewood Miramar Beach hotel in the Montecito community (hi, Oprah; hi, Meghan and Harry) east of Santa Barbara is part of his portfolio, and its centerpiece restaurant perches beachside with an open-air view of the Pacific. Looking at pictures of the cuisine, one might see plates of micro-vegetables and geometric meats arranged with surgical tools and justifiably worry that the food leans, well, hotel-food sterile.
Exactly the opposite is true, it turns out. Massimo Falsini, chef de cuisine Shibani Mone and his team might accentuate glamour in their presentations, but they also cook with heart. Falsini grew up in Rome but managed to shed any orthodoxy around pasta. He summons the wit of Massimo Bottura for a dish he calls “I Grew Up in Trastevere You Should Try This Carbonara,” rechanneling the holy cheese-egg-pork trinity into silky ravioli that gush at first bite. Diners have three menu options: Three or four courses, with multiple choices for appetizer, pasta, entree and dessert, or a 12-course set tasting menu. Four courses with a tablemate willing to order different dishes and share is my strategy. In spring, burrata with floral Mara de Bois strawberries could transition to sweet pea and Dungeness crab ravioli; black cod and white asparagus in a coconut-tinged turmeric brodo that’s as fragrant as a Goan seafood curry; and a dazzling chocolate construction for dessert, though I will always opt for cheese from a roving cart. Service is expert to the point of clairvoyance, which comes in especially handy when you’re braving a conversation about the tome of a wine list. The somms tend to aim and score. For this and many other reasons, dinner at Caruso’s merits an overnight celebratory stay in Santa Barbara.
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Chez Noir
Carmel European $$$
(Mariel De La Cruz/For The Times)
The word “hamlet” could have been invented to describe Carmel-by-the-Sea, the 18th century mission site-turned-haven of wealth perched below Pebble Beach on a bend of coastline with bucket-list views. Jonny Black and Monique Black, who are married, worked at Quince in San Francisco before opening Chez Noir on one of Carmel’s hillier blocks in 2022. (The French name is literal; the couple live in the apartment above their jewel-toned bistro.) Serving a four-course, $165-per-person prix-fixe meal, the restaurant doesn’t tip into the lavish extremes of California’s loftiest tasting-menu extravagances but certainly swings toward a special occasion. The Blacks and their team have an impeccable grasp on the experience they’re creating. Jonny tethers his California-Gallic cuisine to the farmers markets, and his plates are master classes in the leafy, carefully strewn tableau. There’s punch beneath the prettiness: taut acidity in the passion fruit beurre blanc over striped bass; zigzags of wine and brine among a gorgeous whirl of grilled quail, olives, blackberry jus and bouquet-shaped maitake mushrooms. Every day brings new dishes, but preternaturally tender Monterey abalone, grilled on skewers, always arrives as an opening snack. Monique leads a polished, soulful front-of-house staff intent on your happiness. They are exceptionally knowledgeable about local small-production, women-owned wineries, so you will drink very well.
Extra Helpings: You want the blowout tasting-menu spectacular in the area? That’s Aubergine inside the elegant L’Auberge Carmel hotel. For more casual, full-hearted Italian Californian cooking, book a table at Maligne in nearby Seaside.
Extra Helpings: You want the blowout tasting-menu spectacular in the area? That’s Aubergine inside the elegant L’Auberge Carmel hotel. For more casual, full-hearted Italian Californian cooking, book a table at Maligne in nearby Seaside.
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The Dutchess
Ojai Burmese Bakery $$
(Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times)
You have decelerated through an hour of curving mountain highways to shed the city over a long weekend in Ojai. Where do you begin eating? The all-day approach at the Dutchess — part of the Santa Monica-based Rustic Canyon group helmed by Josh Loeb and Zoe Nathan — makes for an easy, excellent answer. Mornings bring a counter full of croissants, scones, sugar-coated buns and other sweet and savory pastries from pastry chef-partner Kelsey Brito and her team. Swing by at lunchtime for easygoing fixtures: chicken salad or a fried chicken sandwich, a grain bowl, maybe the day’s season riff like grilled asparagus paired with a fried duck egg and set over an intense herb sauce that splits the difference between pesto and chutney.
Dinner flips into … something entirely, wonderfully different. Chef-partner Saw Naing channels his Burmese heritage into the evening menu. In his hands you recognize how flavors of India, China and Thailand (countries that border Myanmar) ripple through Burmese dishes while coalescing into a cuisine uniquely its own. A bowl of wriggly egg noodles covered in spicy ground chicken is the kind into which you lean farther and farther until the last strand has been slurped. Fermented tea leaves, front and center in the signature Burmese salad, might also flavor oil drizzled over halibut crudo arranged with citrus and cherries. No matter how much the lineup changes seasonally, I always anticipate the carefully spiced yogurt-marinated lamb masala served on an oval plate half-covered with freckled naan.
Extra Helpings: A very close second in Ojai? Rory’s Place, for broiled oysters and other dinnertime comforts. For easy family meals, secure a picnic table at Ojai Rôtie and order what owner Lorenzo Nicola calls “French-Lebanese style rotisserie chicken,” slathered with toum and great with sides of hummus and labneh.
Dinner flips into … something entirely, wonderfully different. Chef-partner Saw Naing channels his Burmese heritage into the evening menu. In his hands you recognize how flavors of India, China and Thailand (countries that border Myanmar) ripple through Burmese dishes while coalescing into a cuisine uniquely its own. A bowl of wriggly egg noodles covered in spicy ground chicken is the kind into which you lean farther and farther until the last strand has been slurped. Fermented tea leaves, front and center in the signature Burmese salad, might also flavor oil drizzled over halibut crudo arranged with citrus and cherries. No matter how much the lineup changes seasonally, I always anticipate the carefully spiced yogurt-marinated lamb masala served on an oval plate half-covered with freckled naan.
Extra Helpings: A very close second in Ojai? Rory’s Place, for broiled oysters and other dinnertime comforts. For easy family meals, secure a picnic table at Ojai Rôtie and order what owner Lorenzo Nicola calls “French-Lebanese style rotisserie chicken,” slathered with toum and great with sides of hummus and labneh.
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Industrial Eats
Buellton Eclectic $$
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Waiting in line for lunch at Industrial Eats, there are scores of choices to consider. Reams of butcher paper, full of handwritten menu items, hang behind the counter. They run down a dozen pizza options, salads and hot dishes that can range from beef-ricotta meatballs and stuffed shells to miso cod in dashi with spinach and avocado and a riff on char siu pork over sesame noodles. Then you shuffle along to find more possibilities printed on sheets taped to a deli case or fastened to clipboards: burgers, cheese plates and seasonal specials like seared peaches over toast with burrata and prosciutto. Just when your head begins spinning, like you’re studying an obsessive wall map straight out of a “Homeland” scene, a staffer asks for your order. Remarkably, the kitchen delivers on most everything. The above-mentioned peaches radiated summertime, their freshness magnified alongside a plate of chicken livers sparked with pickled shallots, chiles, guanciale and a jammy-yolked soft egg. Founding chef-owner Jeff Olsson died of cancer in 2023, but his wife Janet Olsson and her team maintain their shared vision of joyful abundance. Industrial Eats is one of the most popular restaurants in the Santa Ynez Valley, for good and lasting reason.
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Jocko's Steakhouse
San Luis Obispo Steakhouse $$
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Jocko’s — which began in 1925 as a saloon run by Ralph “Jocko” Knotts, and has been run by his children and grandchildren in several iterations for nearly 70 years — immortalizes the regional traditions of Santa Maria-style barbecuing, a practice of cooking meat over smoldering local red oak that traces back through centuries of Mexican, Portuguese, Spanish and indigenous vaquero culture. The backdrop is a squat, cinderblock building with few windows and a center bar that divides the space into two wings. In the “Pit Dining Room” to the left, you can watch the pit master shuffle steaks like they’re poker decks on grates over snapping flames.
I recommend the Spencer steak, a tender boneless cut of rib-eye that absorbs sweet smokiness particular to this place. Meals come with sides that are a delightful blend of Central Coast standards and midcentury steakhouse holdovers: tiny pinquito beans, salsa meant to flavor the meat (“It’s not for dipping or we would serve tortilla chips!” the menu language admonishes), packaged crackers and pats of butter, shredded-lettuce salads perfect for blue cheese or ranch dressings and adorned with a single, sheer beet slice. Modern concessions like king crab legs and French dip fill out the options, but keep it closer to home with a link of linguica (a Portuguese vestige that remains the choice of sausage for backyard cookouts in San Luis Obispo County) and an artichoke appealingly singed alongside the steaks.
Extra Helpings: For other forays into dining centered around Santa Maria barbecue, I like a rib-eye with a martini and an artichoke side at Hitching Post 2 in Buellton, and a tri-tip sandwich at Cold Spring Tavern in Santa Barbara.
I recommend the Spencer steak, a tender boneless cut of rib-eye that absorbs sweet smokiness particular to this place. Meals come with sides that are a delightful blend of Central Coast standards and midcentury steakhouse holdovers: tiny pinquito beans, salsa meant to flavor the meat (“It’s not for dipping or we would serve tortilla chips!” the menu language admonishes), packaged crackers and pats of butter, shredded-lettuce salads perfect for blue cheese or ranch dressings and adorned with a single, sheer beet slice. Modern concessions like king crab legs and French dip fill out the options, but keep it closer to home with a link of linguica (a Portuguese vestige that remains the choice of sausage for backyard cookouts in San Luis Obispo County) and an artichoke appealingly singed alongside the steaks.
Extra Helpings: For other forays into dining centered around Santa Maria barbecue, I like a rib-eye with a martini and an artichoke side at Hitching Post 2 in Buellton, and a tri-tip sandwich at Cold Spring Tavern in Santa Barbara.
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Les Petites Canailles
Paso Robles French $$$
(Shelby Moore/For The Times)
Courtney and Julien Asseo’s sun-filled restaurant with the playful French name — it translates as “the little rascals,” in reference to their three children — feels innately connected to this slice of California wine country. Julien was raised on a vineyard in southwest France before the family moved to Paso Robles, where his father Stephan Asseo founded L’Aventure Winery in 1998. Julien synthesizes his backgrounds, and his experience working in the formal Gallic kitchens of Joël Robuchon and Guy Savoy in Las Vegas, into a warm, West Coast iteration of Parisian bistronomie. One dish etched in my vision: leeks cut into uniform cylinders, grilled on a plancha, set upright in a circle, covered in dense herb vinaigrette and dotted with pine nuts. It is appetizer as topiary, and the sharp flavors, with the licorice nip of tarragon, equal the presentation. Wine director Dayton Saunders has many options to match Asseo’s lardon-studded tarte flambée, sculpted springtime pea salad and impeccable steak frites, including rosé and Rhone-style blends from L’Aventure but also a trove of white and red Burgundies.
Extra Helpings: If you’re traveling through the Central Coast wine region, plan to order ahead for pizza at My Friend Mike’s in nearby San Luis Obispo. Mike Radakovich’s pies — bubbly-brown sourdough crust, a combination like bitter greens and roasted onions over chile-spiked cream as satisfying as a plain cheese — usually sell out daily.
Extra Helpings: If you’re traveling through the Central Coast wine region, plan to order ahead for pizza at My Friend Mike’s in nearby San Luis Obispo. Mike Radakovich’s pies — bubbly-brown sourdough crust, a combination like bitter greens and roasted onions over chile-spiked cream as satisfying as a plain cheese — usually sell out daily.
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Sama Sama Kitchen
Santa Barbara Southeast Asian $$
(Shelby Moore/For The Times)
A fillet of black cod smeared with coconut sambal steams in its parcel of banana leaves until collapsing into the texture of savory pudding. Smoky, sweet, bitter and salty flavors overlap in mie goreng, the noodles snarled with hunks of braised pork. A set plate at lunch condenses the menu with its sampling of balanced chicken satay, smashed cucumbers, wings shellacked in fish sauce caramel and a dome of coconut rice. Ryan Simorangkir and Tyler Peek opened Sama Sama Kitchen a dozen years ago, taking cues from Simorangkir’s Indonesian heritage and the business partners’ shared time working together in restaurants throughout Southeast Asia. Santa Barbara’s restaurant scene has mushroomed since they launched, and the pair have branched into other ventures since then, but their State Street flagship is steady in the most welcome sense.
Extra Helpings: Right across the street is Bibi Ji, another Santa Barbara frontrunner that serves keenly tuned versions of saag paneer, butter chicken and spiced lamb kebabs. Winemaker and somm megastar Rajat Parr is a founding partner; the natural-leaning wine list is spectacular.
Extra Helpings: Right across the street is Bibi Ji, another Santa Barbara frontrunner that serves keenly tuned versions of saag paneer, butter chicken and spiced lamb kebabs. Winemaker and somm megastar Rajat Parr is a founding partner; the natural-leaning wine list is spectacular.
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Greater Los Angeles
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Ammatolí
Long Beach Middle Eastern $$
(Ron De Angelis/For The Times)
The calming, sun-drenched corner restaurant in downtown Long Beach, run by chef Dima Habibeh and her family, has grown impressively in dimensions and ambitions since its 2018 opening. Habibeh — born to a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother and raised in Jordan — poignantly evinces her origins in her cooking. 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 at dinner, with perhaps a glass of white wine from Lebanon’s Bekka Valley. 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.
Extra Helpings: Three more defining greats among Long Beach’s booming dining scene: Cambodian lodestar Phnom Penh Noodle Shack, Sinaloa-inspired Tacos La Carreta and gloriously unorthodox panaderia Gusto Bread.
Extra Helpings: Three more defining greats among Long Beach’s booming dining scene: Cambodian lodestar Phnom Penh Noodle Shack, Sinaloa-inspired Tacos La Carreta and gloriously unorthodox panaderia Gusto Bread.
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Anajak Thai
Sherman Oaks Thai $$
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
In 2019 Justin Pichetrungsi made the life-changing decision to leave a thriving career as an art director at Walt Disney Imagineering and take over the Sherman Oaks restaurant his parents founded in 1981. Anajak’s core menu continues to honor Ricky Pichetrungsi, Justin’s father, whose recipes merge his Thai upbringing and Cantonese heritage. The creative individualism that Justin has asserted — specifically his Thai Taco Tuesday phenomenon, when the menu crisscrosses fish tacos lit up by chili crisp and limey nam jim with wok-fragrant drunken noodles and Dungeness crab fried rice, and also building what has become one of L.A.’s great wine lists — catapulted the restaurant into one of the decade’s great dining sensations.
When you finally score a maddeningly difficult reservation (for a night other than Tuesdays; taco nights are mostly walk-in and often mobbed), you stroll into Anajak to find … a small, sweet-looking neighborhood restaurant, with wine bottles lining every inch of shelf space between tables covered in white cloth. Wine director Ian Krupp will swing by to narrow down a Riesling or red Burgundy. Haw mok, a steamed fish-curry custard, wobbles like a soufflé as you carve out the first spoonful. Galangal, cumin and coriander grip gai yang-style grilled wings in their fragrance. The star of the Justin-era menu is fried chicken sheathed in rice-flour batter and scattered with fried shallots. It’s made in the style of Nakhon Si Thammarat, a city in southern Thailand where Rattikorn Pichetrungsi, Justin’s mother, has family. Rattikorn remains very much involved with the business: In peak season her mango sticky rice rates as one of the city’s most soothing desserts.
Extra Helpings: Two other casual, creatively energized Californian Thai restaurants I love: the Atwater Village location of Holy Basil in Los Angeles, and Nari in San Francisco.
When you finally score a maddeningly difficult reservation (for a night other than Tuesdays; taco nights are mostly walk-in and often mobbed), you stroll into Anajak to find … a small, sweet-looking neighborhood restaurant, with wine bottles lining every inch of shelf space between tables covered in white cloth. Wine director Ian Krupp will swing by to narrow down a Riesling or red Burgundy. Haw mok, a steamed fish-curry custard, wobbles like a soufflé as you carve out the first spoonful. Galangal, cumin and coriander grip gai yang-style grilled wings in their fragrance. The star of the Justin-era menu is fried chicken sheathed in rice-flour batter and scattered with fried shallots. It’s made in the style of Nakhon Si Thammarat, a city in southern Thailand where Rattikorn Pichetrungsi, Justin’s mother, has family. Rattikorn remains very much involved with the business: In peak season her mango sticky rice rates as one of the city’s most soothing desserts.
Extra Helpings: Two other casual, creatively energized Californian Thai restaurants I love: the Atwater Village location of Holy Basil in Los Angeles, and Nari in San Francisco.
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Antico Nuovo
Larchmont Italian $$
(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
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 that Los Angeles has a lot of safe, redundant options for pasta.) His dishes taste of the kind of farm cooking where every cut of an animal has recognized value. After opening Antico in Koreatown six 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 Parmigiano) 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. And let me not forget the ice creams: unusually silky, with honeycomb and pistachio crunch as mainstay flavors but always seasonal fruit options too, and so complex they hit the palate like sophisticated sundaes.
Extra Helpings: Funke in Beverly Hills is a close second for L.A.’s finest Italian restaurant. For a more affordable option, open for lunch and in a different corner of the region, check out the daily-made pastas at Jame in El Segundo.
Extra Helpings: Funke in Beverly Hills is a close second for L.A.’s finest Italian restaurant. For a more affordable option, open for lunch and in a different corner of the region, check out the daily-made pastas at Jame in El Segundo.
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Azizam
Silver Lake Persian $
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
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. In the Los Angeles area, home to the largest Iranian population outside Iran, most Persian restaurant menus are crowd pleasers purposefully designed around fire-singed 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 2024. The leading light among their concise mix of mazeh (cold small plates), sandwiches and entrees is the kofteh Tabrizi, a giant herbed beef-and-rice meatball steeped in a tomato-based broth electric with Persian dried lime. Your spoon soon finds its sweet, secret heart: a filling of mixed dried fruits 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 hoping 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.
Extra Helpings: Two other Persian favorites: tiny Taste of Tehran in L.A.’s Tehrangeles neighborhood in Westwood, and Komaaj in San Francisco for northern Iranian specialties.
Extra Helpings: Two other Persian favorites: tiny Taste of Tehran in L.A.’s Tehrangeles neighborhood in Westwood, and Komaaj in San Francisco for northern Iranian specialties.
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Barbacoa Ramirez
Arleta Mexican $
(Shelby Moore/For The Times)
Lamb barbacoa — when cooked properly for hours to buttery-ropy tenderness — is such a painstaking art that most practitioners in Southern California sell it only on the weekends. In the Los Angeles area, conversations around sublime lamb barbacoa should start up in the north San Fernando Valley, at the stand that Gonzalo Ramirez sets up on Saturday and Sunday mornings 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 barely hinting of garlic; a pancita variation stained with chiles that goes fast; and incredible moronga, a nubbly, herbaceous sausage made with lamb’s blood. Join the line (if it’s long, someone usually hands out samples to encourage patience) and then find a place at the communal outdoor table. Worried that options might run out, I tend to arrive before 9 a.m., an hour when Ramirez’s rare craftsmanship often inspires a mood where people sit quietly, holding their tacos as something sacred.
Extra Helpings: Two other Los Angeles-area weekend standouts must be mentioned: On Lincoln Heights’ Ave. 26, Josefina Garduño and her family serve spicy consomé bobbing with chickpeas and wisps of meat alongside barbacoa tacos. And in frequent Sunday pop-ups in Boyle Heights, Petra Zavaleta of Barbakush unwraps her Pueblan-style barbacoa from a swaddle of maguey leaves.
Extra Helpings: Two other Los Angeles-area weekend standouts must be mentioned: On Lincoln Heights’ Ave. 26, Josefina Garduño and her family serve spicy consomé bobbing with chickpeas and wisps of meat alongside barbacoa tacos. And in frequent Sunday pop-ups in Boyle Heights, Petra Zavaleta of Barbakush unwraps her Pueblan-style barbacoa from a swaddle of maguey leaves.
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Baroo
Downtown L.A. Korean $$$
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Many of Baroo’s longtime fans remember when the project began nearly a decade ago in a Hollywood strip mall, serving grain bowls and pastas with dizzying layers of ingredients that sold for under $20. Kwang Uh, influenced equally by his time in kitchens around the world and his Buddhist studies, had pulled off the rarest achievement: His mind and hands produced things that tasted original.
As a student of fermentation, Uh knows about miracles of transformation in food — and in life. The first iteration of Baroo was untenable as a business. Mina Park, who is married to Uh, deserves no end of credit for refashioning the ephemeral, short-lived legend into a viable enterprise. Baroo returned in 2023 as a comfortable, flatteringly lit dining room in downtown L.A.’s Arts District. Uh’s lyrical cooking has been shaped into a modern Korean tasting menu, priced at $125 per person and reasonably paced to soothe those of us impatient with prix fixe dinners. The emphasis is on vegetables and herbs and seafood; one course features densely delicious short rib or pork collar 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. Garnishes of kimchi, pickles, soybean-based varieties of jang and even buttermilk (paired in one sauce with lemongrass) open doors to unseen worlds of flavor. With 24 hours’ advance notice, you can order a vegetarian or vegan version of the tasting menu. Its many wondrous and detailed components channel Korean temple cuisine, and it is immediately one of the city’s most brilliantly realized feasts, plant-based or otherwise.
As a student of fermentation, Uh knows about miracles of transformation in food — and in life. The first iteration of Baroo was untenable as a business. Mina Park, who is married to Uh, deserves no end of credit for refashioning the ephemeral, short-lived legend into a viable enterprise. Baroo returned in 2023 as a comfortable, flatteringly lit dining room in downtown L.A.’s Arts District. Uh’s lyrical cooking has been shaped into a modern Korean tasting menu, priced at $125 per person and reasonably paced to soothe those of us impatient with prix fixe dinners. The emphasis is on vegetables and herbs and seafood; one course features densely delicious short rib or pork collar 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. Garnishes of kimchi, pickles, soybean-based varieties of jang and even buttermilk (paired in one sauce with lemongrass) open doors to unseen worlds of flavor. With 24 hours’ advance notice, you can order a vegetarian or vegan version of the tasting menu. Its many wondrous and detailed components channel Korean temple cuisine, and it is immediately one of the city’s most brilliantly realized feasts, plant-based or otherwise.
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Borit Gogae
Koreatown Korean Barbecue $$
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
“Set menu with barley rice,” reads the modest description for the centerpiece meal at this nearly 3-year-old breakout star in L.A.’s Koreatown. For $35 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 omnivorous 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.
Extra Helpings: Koreatown is a civic jewel, with hundreds of culinary possibilities. Three more essentials: Soban, for the wondrous banchan and spicy raw crab; Surawon Tofu House for the volcanically bubbling soondubu; and MDK Noodles for the delicate pork and shrimp dumplings.
Extra Helpings: Koreatown is a civic jewel, with hundreds of culinary possibilities. Three more essentials: Soban, for the wondrous banchan and spicy raw crab; Surawon Tofu House for the volcanically bubbling soondubu; and MDK Noodles for the delicate pork and shrimp dumplings.
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Chi Spacca
Hancock Park Italian $$$
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
If we imagine a Los Angeles dining culture without Nancy Silverton — groundbreaking pastry chef of Spago’s early days, co-founder of Campanile and La Brea Bakery, queen of the global Mozza empire — we might as well also picture the city without traffic or sunshine. She is forever a part of our identity.
Silverton’s Osteria Mozza and Pizzeria Mozza rule the southwestern corner of Highland and Melrose, but I recommend Chi Spacca, her third restaurant there, most often. At 12 years old the place still bounces with a wild-child personality that’s less predictable than its older siblings. Silverton’s pastry-god stature manifests most strongly here pre-dessert. I will always order a predictably gorgeous salad and the focaccia di Recco, a crackery, stretchy-cheesy flatbread with Ligurian origins that she obsessed over for years to perfect. Savory pies — chicken pot pie, lamb shepherd’s pie and a hearty marrow-laced variation featuring beef cheek and mushrooms — dip into British traditions, most of them flaunting bronzed, flaky dream crusts. Meat cookery, under executive chef Armen Ayvazyan, remains the menu’s nucleus. Beyond massive, ever-excellent steaks, consider the slightly more manageable pork loin: It’s roasted in milk and covered, as if spring never ends, in a fine dusting of fennel pollen.
Extra Helpings: Polished service and dishes like mozzarella di bufala matched with papery cruschi peppers, not to mention the legendary ravioli with its self-creating sauce of oozing yolk, keep nearly 18-year-old Osteria Mozza relevant in the L.A. hyperdrive dining machine. To eat the squash blossom and burrata pie at Pizzeria Mozza is to know the genesis of the city’s current pizza boom.
Silverton’s Osteria Mozza and Pizzeria Mozza rule the southwestern corner of Highland and Melrose, but I recommend Chi Spacca, her third restaurant there, most often. At 12 years old the place still bounces with a wild-child personality that’s less predictable than its older siblings. Silverton’s pastry-god stature manifests most strongly here pre-dessert. I will always order a predictably gorgeous salad and the focaccia di Recco, a crackery, stretchy-cheesy flatbread with Ligurian origins that she obsessed over for years to perfect. Savory pies — chicken pot pie, lamb shepherd’s pie and a hearty marrow-laced variation featuring beef cheek and mushrooms — dip into British traditions, most of them flaunting bronzed, flaky dream crusts. Meat cookery, under executive chef Armen Ayvazyan, remains the menu’s nucleus. Beyond massive, ever-excellent steaks, consider the slightly more manageable pork loin: It’s roasted in milk and covered, as if spring never ends, in a fine dusting of fennel pollen.
Extra Helpings: Polished service and dishes like mozzarella di bufala matched with papery cruschi peppers, not to mention the legendary ravioli with its self-creating sauce of oozing yolk, keep nearly 18-year-old Osteria Mozza relevant in the L.A. hyperdrive dining machine. To eat the squash blossom and burrata pie at Pizzeria Mozza is to know the genesis of the city’s current pizza boom.
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Dunsmoor
Glassell Park American $$$
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
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 13 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 to the rhythm of California’s calendar, 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 fragrantly nutty Carolina Gold rice into which he sometimes stirs shrimp butter and Parmesan, and other times serves simply with Gulf shrimp and new-crop alliums. Both are superb in their delicate touch. 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, matched to a rumbling Syrah, is itself worth a trip.
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, matched to a rumbling Syrah, is itself worth a trip.
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Earle's on Crenshaw
Leimert Park American $
(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
In the infinite ways to define Los Angeles, “hot dog town” is among them. Generations of Angelenos know brothers Cary and Duane Earle, who began selling hot dogs from a cart in 1984 and opened their first stand-alone restaurant in 1992. Several locations later, settled on an iconic stretch of Crenshaw Boulevard, their storefront is not only bedrock for the local Black community but a citywide favorite — including for vegans, with plant-based versions of Earle’s signature hot dogs, burgers and cheese fries. With nearly 20 options for hot dog toppings, it might take several trips to nail down your go-to order. Make mine a classic chili-cheese dog with raw onions. Also, who is that ray of sunshine radiating from behind the counter? The brothers’ mom, Hildred Earle-Brown, who as neighborhood grandmother seems to never forget a face.
Extra helpings: It is equally hard to imagine Los Angeles without another restaurant name-checking the same street, Dulan’s on Crenshaw. When this transplanted Southerner needs fried chicken, oxtails, mac-and-cheese and collards, I head to Greg Dulan’s restaurant, recently and sharply remodeled.
Extra helpings: It is equally hard to imagine Los Angeles without another restaurant name-checking the same street, Dulan’s on Crenshaw. When this transplanted Southerner needs fried chicken, oxtails, mac-and-cheese and collards, I head to Greg Dulan’s restaurant, recently and sharply remodeled.
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Henry’s Cuisine
Alhambra Chinese Seafood $$
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
The sprawling Cantonese banquet halls that proliferated across L.A.’s San Gabriel Valley in the 1980s may be waning, but smaller, more casual restaurants have appeared to maintain the cuisine’s vital presence. Witness the weekend crowds at Henry’s Cuisine: Henry Tu and Henry Chau created a new social center in Alhambra when they opened it in 2015. Families gather around large tables, calling to one another above the din to pass platters of lobster strewn with crisped garlic, water spinach shiny in silken bean curd sauce and shrimp fried in salted egg yolk batter that’s pleasurably gritty. At lunch or dinner, the kitchen prepares its in-demand showstopper: pig’s feet cured and rendered to the texture of greaseless ham and then draped with near-sizzling squares of crackling skin. For a group, some subtler but equally worthwhile specialties require a day or two of notice to prepare. Among them are two sustaining soups sized for groups: winter melon, as big as a jack-o’-lantern, presented with pageantry in a silver tureen and swirling with fresh and cured pork and black mushrooms, and the warming comfort of chicken and morels bobbing with dried scallops in pure, nearly viscous poultry stock.
Extra Helpings: A few other regional Chinese essentials in the SGV: pace-setting Chengdu Taste and neck-and-neck contender Sichuan Impression for nuanced Sichuan cooking; Zhejiang-style braised meat over rice at Luyixian; and, at Dolan’s Uyghur Cuisine, the “big plate chicken” stir-fried cumin lamb that illuminates the Uyghur culture specific to the autonomous Xinjiang territory in northwest China.
Extra Helpings: A few other regional Chinese essentials in the SGV: pace-setting Chengdu Taste and neck-and-neck contender Sichuan Impression for nuanced Sichuan cooking; Zhejiang-style braised meat over rice at Luyixian; and, at Dolan’s Uyghur Cuisine, the “big plate chicken” stir-fried cumin lamb that illuminates the Uyghur culture specific to the autonomous Xinjiang territory in northwest China.
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Holbox
Historic South-Central Mexican $$
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Most days, a lunchtime line stretches nearly out the door of Mercado La Paloma in L.A.’s Historic South-Central. What are all these people queued up for? 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 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 $130-per-person tasting menus that Cetina serves only on Wednesday and Thursday.
Extra Helpings: Check out Holbox’s sister Mercado stand, Chichén Itzá, for the torta de cochinita pibil, crunchy kibi with pickled onions and other Yucatecan dishes.
Extra Helpings: Check out Holbox’s sister Mercado stand, Chichén Itzá, for the torta de cochinita pibil, crunchy kibi with pickled onions and other Yucatecan dishes.
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Kato
Downtown L.A. Taiwanese $$$$
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Steamed fish fragrant with ginger and scallions. Stir-fried clams with basil. Newport Seafood’s famous peppery lobster. The dishes Jon Yao grew up eating with his Taiwanese family, and savoring in San Gabriel Valley restaurants, are the seeds from which his one-of-a-kind cuisine comes to light. A gorgeous abstraction like his 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. 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.
Kato currently holds the No. 1 position on our ranked list of the 101 best restaurants in Los Angeles. In tandem with Yao’s unparalleled cooking, the beverage program has no equal in the city. Co-owner Ryan Bailey 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, a rare prodigy who is at once a cocktail classicist and modernist, has my vote for the city’s greatest bartender. His non-alcoholic program alone changes the game. A handful of one-hour reservations are available nightly to sit at Kato’s tiny bar for drinks and snacks. It’s a condensed experience of the restaurant, certainly, but its own exciting adventure nonetheless.
Extra Helpings: Around the corner from Kato in the Row DTLA complex is Hayato, where Brandon Hayato Go prepares a lyrical meal with a structure that loosely follows kaiseki. Go is a virtuoso of a chef. His restaurant serves seven people five nights a week, and reservations are nearly unattainable. It’s worth all the calendar alerts and wait lists. And while we’re talking both about kaiseki-inspired tasting menus and culinary expressions of identity at the highest level? Dinner at Niki Nakayama and Carole Iida-Nakayama’s n/naka is a first-class round-trip ticket between Japan and California, rendered in 13 meditative courses.
Kato currently holds the No. 1 position on our ranked list of the 101 best restaurants in Los Angeles. In tandem with Yao’s unparalleled cooking, the beverage program has no equal in the city. Co-owner Ryan Bailey 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, a rare prodigy who is at once a cocktail classicist and modernist, has my vote for the city’s greatest bartender. His non-alcoholic program alone changes the game. A handful of one-hour reservations are available nightly to sit at Kato’s tiny bar for drinks and snacks. It’s a condensed experience of the restaurant, certainly, but its own exciting adventure nonetheless.
Extra Helpings: Around the corner from Kato in the Row DTLA complex is Hayato, where Brandon Hayato Go prepares a lyrical meal with a structure that loosely follows kaiseki. Go is a virtuoso of a chef. His restaurant serves seven people five nights a week, and reservations are nearly unattainable. It’s worth all the calendar alerts and wait lists. And while we’re talking both about kaiseki-inspired tasting menus and culinary expressions of identity at the highest level? Dinner at Niki Nakayama and Carole Iida-Nakayama’s n/naka is a first-class round-trip ticket between Japan and California, rendered in 13 meditative courses.
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Kismet
Los Feliz Californian Mediterranean $$
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
While not serving strictly plant-based meals, Sarah Hymanson and Sara Kramer’s 8-year-old Los Feliz restaurant is the finest place I know in Los Angeles for a vegetable-focused dinner. They have a uniquely elegant way of matching herbs and seasonings from the Levantine canon with bounty gathered by their market manager, Anna Polacek. Some dishes are baselines: Cucumbers flavored with a parsley-seed twist on za’atar and rosewater-scented labneh might be paired with cherries, mandarin segments or sliced persimmon as the seasons fluctuate. The annual and always spectacular heirloom tomato salad could arrive dressed in buttermilk vinaigrette perfumed with basil and bergamot Count on perennial Moroccan-spiced carrots, fried cauliflower with caper yogurt and, for those of us who eat higher on the food chain, the lemony chicken phyllo “pies” dotted with pine nuts. Pass the malawach, which tears into flaky jags when you rip a chunk. “This is the California dinner we dreamed about,” vegetarian friends say when visiting town. Same for this Angeleno. And if you can’t make it to L.A., Hymanson and Kramer’s cookbook was published last year, as colorful and as uplifting as the plates in their calming dining room.
Extra Helpings: We’re overdue in California for brilliance from some daring, produce-driven, vegetarian-focused chefs. In San Francisco, no one has yet to dethrone Greens, in operation since 1979. In Los Angeles, we have vegan, Italian-leaning Crossroads Kitchen, where vegetables are deliciously cast like bronze and steel into kinetic sculptures.
Extra Helpings: We’re overdue in California for brilliance from some daring, produce-driven, vegetarian-focused chefs. In San Francisco, no one has yet to dethrone Greens, in operation since 1979. In Los Angeles, we have vegan, Italian-leaning Crossroads Kitchen, where vegetables are deliciously cast like bronze and steel into kinetic sculptures.
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Komal
Historic South-Central Mexican $
(Shelby Moore/For The Times)
Given that Los Angeles is the largest nexus of Mexican culture in the United States, the city has relatively few outlets for superior masa — the kind, made with corn grown on family-run farms, that smells, feels and tastes supercharged. Which is why food obsessives now flock to the molino and food stall in Mercado La Paloma started last year by Fátima Júarez and her husband, Conrado Rivera. Júarez chose corn as her medium when she began working with Gilberto Cetina just across the market at Holbox in 2017. At Komal, she grinds and nixtamalizes corn daily from heirloom varieties procured by import company Tamoa. Her menu, deceptively spare, is mostly a handful of quesadillas and tacos. Unfold a creased blue corn tortilla, bound by melted quesillo, to admire the spray of squash blossoms inside. These three earthen-sweet elements alone contain the world. Two tlacoyos, filled with creamy ayocote beans and covered in pleasantly astringent cactus salad, shows off the almost fudgy denseness of the masa in a thicker form. Weekends bring freshly imagined specials: lamb barbacoa, fried empanada with shrimp, maybe tres leches crowned with a corn cookie. Komal’s identity as a restaurant continues to take shape, but its presence in the community has been immediately thrilling.
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Langer's Deli
Westlake Jewish Cuisine $$
(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
The No. 19 at Langer’s should be named the official sandwich of Los Angeles. The pastrami — brined, peppered, smoked, steamed and shaved by hand into slices thick as dominoes — bulges between two slices of double-baked rye bread. A cushion of coleslaw, Swiss cheese and Russian dressing hovers over top like an upper bunk. Your senses are keener in the face of such flawlessness. And still, the human desire for tinkering persists: Everyone on The Times’ Food team can name their own preferred pastrami variation. I’ve come to love the already hulking No. 54, a combination of hot pastrami and hot corned beef, dressed in the style of the No. 19. Such is the pull of Norm Langer’s domain, opened by his parents, Al and Jean, across from MacArthur Park in 1947. Steer your car to the designated parking lot at 7th Street and South Westlake Avenue a block from the restaurant. Then settle into a chestnut-brown, tufted booth seat among the happy cadences of silverware against plates and myriad languages ringing through the dining room. In its consistency and timelessness — and incalculable worth to the city as L.A.’s once-vital Jewish deli culture sadly vanishes — Langer’s defines the term “institution.”
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Mae Malai Thai House of Noodles
Los Feliz Thai $
(Shelby Moore/For The Times)
The journey into L.A.’s dense, specialized Thai dining culture begins with a single dish. My bid? Malai Data’s superlative version of boat noodles, a recipe gleaned from her mother-in-law, who’s made the dish professionally in Bangkok for decades. Find her in the shopping complex at Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue, in a room with traffic-cone orange walls and a fleet staff of servers. 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. I ask for thin rice noodles (among six 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.
Extra Helpings: In L.A.’s Thai Town, Sarintip “Jazz” Singsanong’s Jitlada remains indispensable for a fiery descent into southern immolators like jungle curry with crispy pork. Not quite two blocks away is Amphai Northern Thai Food Club, serving the more herb-fragrant curries and lemongrass-packed sai ua from Chiang Rai, Thailand’s northernmost province. And for another single-dish rec, head to Roasted Duck by Pa Ord for its lacquered-skinned namesake fanned over jade noodles.
Extra Helpings: In L.A.’s Thai Town, Sarintip “Jazz” Singsanong’s Jitlada remains indispensable for a fiery descent into southern immolators like jungle curry with crispy pork. Not quite two blocks away is Amphai Northern Thai Food Club, serving the more herb-fragrant curries and lemongrass-packed sai ua from Chiang Rai, Thailand’s northernmost province. And for another single-dish rec, head to Roasted Duck by Pa Ord for its lacquered-skinned namesake fanned over jade noodles.
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Mariscos Jalisco
Boyle Heights Mexican Seafood $
(Ron De Angelis/Ron De Angelis for The Times)
To choose one taqueria in the heart of Los Angeles, a city sustained by tacos, to put forth as an uppermost recommendation is daunting. And yet, I know my answer, confirmed by months of eating last year when The Times’ Food team banded together for a project naming the 101 Best Tacos in Los Angeles. For 23 years, Raul Ortega has been parking his shiny lonchera on Olympic Boulevard, serving what has become one of the city’s canonic dishes. His tacos dorados de camarón ensnare a mixture of spiced, minced shrimp with the elegance of a Venus flytrap. The edges of the tortillas sizzle and crisp in the fryer, while the filling cooks to improbable creaminess. Be careful: The first bite is usually lava-hot, even with the cooling relief of sliced avocado and thin red salsa flooding the surface. Reaching ideal temperature, the range of textures pings among the four cardinal directions. I’ve long believed Ortega’s masterpiece is a worthy first-ever meal in Los Angeles. He operates three additional outposts, including a counter restaurant in Pomona and a lonchera on the Westside. If none of them quite reaches the zeniths of the Boyle Heights truck, it still might be the most incredible seafood taco you’ve ever had, and a fast-track pass into the city’s culinary identity.
Extra Helpings: Tacos Los Güichos on West Slauson Avenue serves the al pastor taco I love most in Los Angeles. For breakfast tacos, Macheen in Boyle Heights sets the standard. For melting carne deshebrada folded into impeccable handmade flour tortillas, head to Asadero Chikali in Inglewood near SoFi Stadium.
Extra Helpings: Tacos Los Güichos on West Slauson Avenue serves the al pastor taco I love most in Los Angeles. For breakfast tacos, Macheen in Boyle Heights sets the standard. For melting carne deshebrada folded into impeccable handmade flour tortillas, head to Asadero Chikali in Inglewood near SoFi Stadium.
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Meals by Genet
Carthay Ethiopian $$
(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
A big, wood-framed mirror hangs behind the bar at Genet Agonafer’s civic treasure of a bistro in L.A.’s Little Ethiopia. It bounces butterscotch lighting, creates an illusion of added depth, and it tilts away from the wall at just the right slant to reflect images of diners crowding around tables covered with white tablecloths, sipping honey wine and tearing off spongy pieces of injera. Agonafer has run her restaurant for a quarter of a century, and after dabbling in semiretirement by offering only takeout during and immediately following the pandemic, she reopened the dining room Fridays through Sundays. It is a gracious gift to the city.
The menu at Meals by Genet has always been concise. Its centerpiece was, and remains, doro wat. Agonafer’s painstaking version of the celebratory chicken stew takes more than three days, cooked until the consistency resembles the smoothest, shiniest mole negro. Intricate spices meld into an indistinguishable whole. Eating it can be like rereading a favorite poem, familiar but forever capable of new meaning. Vegetables hold different but equal importance. Agonafer has been vegan for years now. The colors of her vegetarian combination platter, spread over injera, look like an image of California’s shifting geography taken from space: Forest-green collards segue to earth tones of spiced lentils and split peas and the desert shades of turmeric-stained cabbage.
Extra Helpings: Three more favorite Ethiopian restaurants, where the vegetarian platters particularly excel, across the state: Lalibela, on the same block as Meals by Genet; Enssaro in Oakland; and Walia in San José.
The menu at Meals by Genet has always been concise. Its centerpiece was, and remains, doro wat. Agonafer’s painstaking version of the celebratory chicken stew takes more than three days, cooked until the consistency resembles the smoothest, shiniest mole negro. Intricate spices meld into an indistinguishable whole. Eating it can be like rereading a favorite poem, familiar but forever capable of new meaning. Vegetables hold different but equal importance. Agonafer has been vegan for years now. The colors of her vegetarian combination platter, spread over injera, look like an image of California’s shifting geography taken from space: Forest-green collards segue to earth tones of spiced lentils and split peas and the desert shades of turmeric-stained cabbage.
Extra Helpings: Three more favorite Ethiopian restaurants, where the vegetarian platters particularly excel, across the state: Lalibela, on the same block as Meals by Genet; Enssaro in Oakland; and Walia in San José.
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Mini Kabob
Glendale Armenian $$
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
There’s a world of good kebabs, and then there’s Mini Kabob, a tiny Glendale takeout operation that has become the culinary epicenter for one of the world’s largest Armenian diaspora communities. Chef Alvard Martirosyan, her husband, Ovakim, and their social media-savvy son Armen have been achieving near-perfection with skewered meats for over 30 years. They marinate beef, chicken and lamb so thoroughly the seasonings permeate to a cellular level, and then grill them over flames until they become charred but still juicy. It’s hard to move past lule kebabs, formed into undulating shapes on saber-like skewers, though marvel too at the depths of spice and richness in the pan-fried cutlets. Meats come splayed over a generous bed of rice, with sides of roasted tomato and jalapeño and hummus flecked with Aleppo pepper. The trio’s family tree includes relatives born and raised in Egypt, which is reflected in the care and crunch of their falafel. Don’t skip the off-menu fried potatoes, requested by calling the restaurant rather than ordering through a delivery app. They’re the first thing I eat — in my car, swiped liberally through garlic sauce. One bite leads to another, and meals from Mini Kabob rarely make it home.
Extra Helpings: For other Armenian treasures nearby, swing by Zhengyalov Hatz in Glendale for its namesake dish, griddled flatbread stuffed with more than a dozen greens and herbs, and Tun Lahmajo in Burbank for homey roast-meat dishes and riffs on khachapuri and other cheese-filled breads.
Extra Helpings: For other Armenian treasures nearby, swing by Zhengyalov Hatz in Glendale for its namesake dish, griddled flatbread stuffed with more than a dozen greens and herbs, and Tun Lahmajo in Burbank for homey roast-meat dishes and riffs on khachapuri and other cheese-filled breads.
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Morihiro
Atwater Village Japanese $$$$
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Los Angeles has one of the world’s most fervent sushi cultures, increasingly so on the high end: Omakase restaurants have never been more prominent, nor greater in number or price. Morihiro Onodera’s five-year-old sushi-ya in Atwater Village reigns among them. Onodera arrived in Los Angeles in 1985 after training as a sushi chef in Tokyo, including briefly with Jiro Ono. Beginning in 2000, with the 11-year run of his debut restaurant, Mori Sushi in West L.A., he helped codify the L.A. style of omakase in which small dishes — some of which reflect technique-focused kaiseki traditions (a zensai plate of tiny, seasonal bites) and some of which reflect his wit (big-eye tuna tartare balled into a chunky, unruly orb and heaped with caviar) — precede a parade of nigiri.
A table at Morihiro is a good option, but if you can, indulge by booking a seat at the sushi bar in front of the master himself. His nigiri is spectacular: Onodera gives equal attention to superior seafood and the Japanese rice milled daily in the restaurant for his meticulously seasoned shari. Handsome ceramics, most made by the chef, bring additional aspects of beauty. Staffers pour the most compelling sake pairings of any sushi bar in L.A. Rather than the reverent hush of most top-tier sushi bars, Morihiro brims with exuberance. I commented once on a round of kohada, or gizzard shad. Curing and vinegar had teased out a hanger-steak-of-the-sea meatiness. “It’s my favorite,” Onodera chuckled. “Jiro’s favorite too.”
Extra Helpings: Omakase connoisseurs are an extra-opinionated lot; I think most would agree that Sushi Kaneyoshi in downtown Los Angeles and Sushi Inaba in Torrance are also L.A.-area paragons.
A table at Morihiro is a good option, but if you can, indulge by booking a seat at the sushi bar in front of the master himself. His nigiri is spectacular: Onodera gives equal attention to superior seafood and the Japanese rice milled daily in the restaurant for his meticulously seasoned shari. Handsome ceramics, most made by the chef, bring additional aspects of beauty. Staffers pour the most compelling sake pairings of any sushi bar in L.A. Rather than the reverent hush of most top-tier sushi bars, Morihiro brims with exuberance. I commented once on a round of kohada, or gizzard shad. Curing and vinegar had teased out a hanger-steak-of-the-sea meatiness. “It’s my favorite,” Onodera chuckled. “Jiro’s favorite too.”
Extra Helpings: Omakase connoisseurs are an extra-opinionated lot; I think most would agree that Sushi Kaneyoshi in downtown Los Angeles and Sushi Inaba in Torrance are also L.A.-area paragons.
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Park's BBQ
Koreatown Korean $$$
2020
(Shelby Moore/For The Times)
Literally dozens of barbecue houses line the streets of L.A.’s Koreatown, each staking a place in the ecosystem: a novel cut of beef or two; a themed interior that evokes a period in Korean history; robot servers. Maybe they bring the bling with gold grill covers, or they serve a particularly fluffy steamed egg or other perfected side dish to distinguish the meal. Amid all the possibilities, for overall quality and hospitality, no one has been able to dethrone Jenee Kim’s restaurant, which has set the standard for decades. A staffer whisks your group into the clean-lined dining room, which hums from the sound of the powerful vents drawing smoke from the tabletop grills. A meal goes by in an exhilarating blur of fellowship and meat. The “Taste of Park’s” includes five cuts of beef: Deeply marbled ggot sal, hunks of short rib, tuiles of brisket, squiggles of bulgogi and a forearm-sized slab of galbi hit the tabletop grill in rapid sequence. Staffers sail by, performing the rituals of turning meats, cleaving them with scissors and moving any remaining cooked pieces to the side to make room for the next round. Extras of doenjang jjigae, laden with tofu and vegetables, and stone pot rice riddled with kimchi bring balance to the meal. There is little arguing against Park’s supremacy.
Extra Helpings: Among the newer crop of Korean barbecue restaurants, I’m into Origin, with its intentionally stark room summoning 1960s-era Seoul, and Quarters, where chimichurri and “arrabbiata” dipping sauces spin off in global directions. The most mind-expanding Korean barbecue restaurant in the state is Corey Lee’s San Ho Won in San Francisco. Meats grill in the kitchen over lychee wood charcoal, and everything takes on a California fantasy sort of freshness and brightness. I think something like it could fly in Los Angeles.
Extra Helpings: Among the newer crop of Korean barbecue restaurants, I’m into Origin, with its intentionally stark room summoning 1960s-era Seoul, and Quarters, where chimichurri and “arrabbiata” dipping sauces spin off in global directions. The most mind-expanding Korean barbecue restaurant in the state is Corey Lee’s San Ho Won in San Francisco. Meats grill in the kitchen over lychee wood charcoal, and everything takes on a California fantasy sort of freshness and brightness. I think something like it could fly in Los Angeles.
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Providence
Hollywood Seafood $$$$
(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Michael Cimarusti and Donato Poto’s paragon of sumptuous, celebratory dining reaches its 20th anniversary this month. 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 cosseting sense of hospitality. You’re probably at Providence for a special occasion, and these invested souls do their utmost to exceed expectations.
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. 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.
Extra Helpings: When people say Los Angeles “doesn’t have fine dining,” they’re referring to Euro-centric haute cuisine, which is true enough. Cimarusti is a rare talent for L.A. in that vein, as is Dave Beran. An alum of the fine-dining laboratory Next in Chicago, Beran has two splurge-worthy restaurants in Santa Monica, the revisionist bistro Pasjoli and a new tasting-menu extravagance, Seline.
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. 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.
Extra Helpings: When people say Los Angeles “doesn’t have fine dining,” they’re referring to Euro-centric haute cuisine, which is true enough. Cimarusti is a rare talent for L.A. in that vein, as is Dave Beran. An alum of the fine-dining laboratory Next in Chicago, Beran has two splurge-worthy restaurants in Santa Monica, the revisionist bistro Pasjoli and a new tasting-menu extravagance, Seline.
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Quarter Sheets
Echo Park Pizza Bakery $$
(Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times)
The origin story of my favorite pizzeria-that’s-more-than-a-pizzeria in California began when Aaron Lindell and Hannah Ziskin met while working at Cotogna in San Francisco. They moved to Los Angeles in 2018 and soon after Ziskin became the pastry chef at Melissa Perello’s M. Georgina, a short-lived casualty of the pandemic. The couple regrouped with a pop-up called Quarter Sheets: Lindell, raised in Michigan, baked crackly-edged rectangular pizzas in a Detroit-ish style, while Ziskin tapped into an almost freakish genius for layer cakes stacked with custards, fruits and complex buttercreams. The project’s success led them to take over a tiny space in Echo Park; their aesthetic is early-’80s rec room, complete with charmingly wonky art (parrots are a theme) and both record and cassette players. Both chefs thrive on unstoppable creativity. On Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Sundays Lindell throws round, thin, charry-edged bar pizzas into the mix. Ziskin continues to serve her now-famous spin on princess cake, but she also makes excellent fruit pies and is returning to the plated desserts of her days in upscale restaurants. Mission fig semifreddo scented with sherry and fig leaf and garnished with candied walnuts? A big holy yes. One never knows what’s next from them; it’s safe to expect greatness.
Extra Helpings: We are living in L.A.’s golden era of pizza. Others setting a new standard: Pizzeria Sei for brilliantly re-engineered Neapolitan pies; Secret Pizza for thin, nostalgic “East Coast-style” pizzas; and Apollonia’s Pizzeria for their awesome square pies, particularly with spicy vodka sauce.
Extra Helpings: We are living in L.A.’s golden era of pizza. Others setting a new standard: Pizzeria Sei for brilliantly re-engineered Neapolitan pies; Secret Pizza for thin, nostalgic “East Coast-style” pizzas; and Apollonia’s Pizzeria for their awesome square pies, particularly with spicy vodka sauce.
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République
Hancock Park American $$$
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
“Where should I go for amazing pastries?” “Who has a lunch menu that will make people with very different tastes happy but is also really, really good?” “Where can I take out-of-town friends for a special-occasion dinner that also feels super L.A.?” Walter and Margarita Manzke’s all-day modern California restaurant in Hancock Park is the answer to many of the questions people ask about restaurants in Los Angeles. The married chefs are equally adept talents who gave themselves the format — a bakery plus an all-day restaurant in a spectacularly rococo building — to succeed at what each of them does best. Every morning Margarita and her team fill the front counter with sweet and savory pies, cakes, canelés, fruit-filled tarts and croissants in several eye-catching geometries. At night the space transitions elegantly to formal dinner service. Walter uses meticulous technique, grounded in French tradition yet informed by a vast network of Golden State farmers, to both comfort and startle.
It had been a few years since I’d braved the always-mobbed Sunday brunch. Last month an amorphous line stretched down the block around noon, the same as ever, but also sped along. My partner, friend and I ordered a spread: coconut-rich chia pudding covered in fruit, a wobbling block of French toast, textbook Croque Madame, a frittata baked with both green and white asparagus, the day’s last slice of salted caramel chocolate cake we had to cut into thirds to keep from fighting over it. Each of us had our favorites. We looked around and noticed the crowd was the most racially diverse mix of people we could remember seeing in a Los Angeles restaurant. Many, many of us pass through République. It is a cornerstone of our dining lives, a part of our village.
It had been a few years since I’d braved the always-mobbed Sunday brunch. Last month an amorphous line stretched down the block around noon, the same as ever, but also sped along. My partner, friend and I ordered a spread: coconut-rich chia pudding covered in fruit, a wobbling block of French toast, textbook Croque Madame, a frittata baked with both green and white asparagus, the day’s last slice of salted caramel chocolate cake we had to cut into thirds to keep from fighting over it. Each of us had our favorites. We looked around and noticed the crowd was the most racially diverse mix of people we could remember seeing in a Los Angeles restaurant. Many, many of us pass through République. It is a cornerstone of our dining lives, a part of our village.
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RVR
Venice Japanese American $$
(Shelby Moore/For The Times)
At his Venice restaurant Gjelina and its nearby hybrid food-hall Gjusta, Travis Lett inked the playbook on a specific type of California-lifestyle dining: vegetables as status symbols, pizzas as sex objects. Gjelina’s menu listed dishes in a blocky, all-cap font, the lines set so close the words could jumble together: “Charred okra, Gaeta olive, tomato, pine nuts, mint.” “Smoked mozzarella, tomato confit, jalapeño, arugula, lemon, bottarga.” “Grilled duck sausage, braised rapini, fig mostarda.” He and his chefs delivered on those comma-fueled descriptions, and in both places the kitchens cranked out quality in ferocious volumes. In 2019 Lett was two years into the run of MTN (pronounced “Mountain”), his vision for an izakaya, when he separated from his business partners, and it closed soon after. Gjelina and Gjusta carried on in the model he created, forever the places your East Coast friends want to eat as soon as they emerge from LAX.
Five years later, a surprise: Lett miraculously revived his izakaya with different investors in the same Venice space. MTN walked so RVR could run. (You guessed right: The name is pronounced “River.”) He’s kept the signature crammed text, though now it’s lowercase and spells out things like “sugar snap peas, sweet and sour ume plum, shiso and sesame” and “mixed rice with duck confit, rosalba [a blushing strain of radicchio], mandarin kusho and mint.” Choices are many. Duck tsukune zapped with hot mustard, gingery grilled Monterey Bay squid and variations on ramen with startlingly light-handed broths more than hold their own. The vegetable plates, though. As essays on micro-seasonal, Californian-Japanese flavors, they endlessly seize the spotlight. Smartly themed cocktails, sake and French wine flow alongside. There is warm carrot cake with miso caramel for dessert; our group of four ordered a second one on a recent night. RVR buzzes nightly, a feel-good, full-circle return for Lett and for L.A.’s delight.
Extra Helpings: To continue eating across L.A.’s Westside, Rustic Canyon and Birdie G’s, both under the guidance of Jeremy Fox, are Santa Monica essentials. Si! Mon in Venice serves Panamanian chef José Olmedo Carles Rojas’s reimagined Central American flavors in a finer-dining setting. And Nicole Rucker, once Lett’s baker, rose to claim the crown of L.A.’s pie queen: Find her fruit-filled splendors at her Culver City cafe Fat + Flour.
Five years later, a surprise: Lett miraculously revived his izakaya with different investors in the same Venice space. MTN walked so RVR could run. (You guessed right: The name is pronounced “River.”) He’s kept the signature crammed text, though now it’s lowercase and spells out things like “sugar snap peas, sweet and sour ume plum, shiso and sesame” and “mixed rice with duck confit, rosalba [a blushing strain of radicchio], mandarin kusho and mint.” Choices are many. Duck tsukune zapped with hot mustard, gingery grilled Monterey Bay squid and variations on ramen with startlingly light-handed broths more than hold their own. The vegetable plates, though. As essays on micro-seasonal, Californian-Japanese flavors, they endlessly seize the spotlight. Smartly themed cocktails, sake and French wine flow alongside. There is warm carrot cake with miso caramel for dessert; our group of four ordered a second one on a recent night. RVR buzzes nightly, a feel-good, full-circle return for Lett and for L.A.’s delight.
Extra Helpings: To continue eating across L.A.’s Westside, Rustic Canyon and Birdie G’s, both under the guidance of Jeremy Fox, are Santa Monica essentials. Si! Mon in Venice serves Panamanian chef José Olmedo Carles Rojas’s reimagined Central American flavors in a finer-dining setting. And Nicole Rucker, once Lett’s baker, rose to claim the crown of L.A.’s pie queen: Find her fruit-filled splendors at her Culver City cafe Fat + Flour.
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Sushi Gen
Downtown L.A. Japanese $$$
(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
Los Angeles has cultivated one of the world’s most fervent sushi cultures. Amid the decade’s glut of spendy omakase sanctuaries, affordable options remain imperative to the city’s soul. Sushi Gen, Little Tokyo’s best-known sushi bar, opened in 1980 and has remained honorably democratic through the years. The restaurant doesn’t take reservations, despite constant midday crowds, though the prime-time wait rarely exceeds 20 minutes. Many customers ask for a table — and for the popular, photogenic sashimi deluxe platter. Sitting at Gen’s counter, to me, makes for a far superior and immersive experience. Chefs provide a list of seafood options in English and gladly interact, making nigiri two or three pieces at a time; if they aren’t buried in a lunch rush, they’ll direct you beyond the tuna-yellowtail-salmon standards to rich, sweet varieties of sea bream and sayori, a delicate, pearly fleshed fish listed as “halfbeak.”
Extra Helpings: Hama Sushi in Little Tokyo is equally affordable, and even more no-nonsense. In the mid-range price category, make a reservation for the bar at Sushi Kisen in Arcadia. The chef will take you to nigiri heaven for under $100.
Extra Helpings: Hama Sushi in Little Tokyo is equally affordable, and even more no-nonsense. In the mid-range price category, make a reservation for the bar at Sushi Kisen in Arcadia. The chef will take you to nigiri heaven for under $100.
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Tsubaki
Echo Park Japanese $$
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
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 their dynamic new Japanese-French bistro Camélia in downtown Los Angeles, chef de cuisine Klementine Song has seamlessly steered the kitchen of their flagship. A meal at Tsubaki is as fulfilling as ever.
Extra Helpings: I’m nearly as keen on Ototo, the couple’s sake and snack bar next door. It’s a showcase especially for Kaplan, who has spent decades understanding the complexities and varieties of sake and building relationships with brewers in Japan.
Extra Helpings: I’m nearly as keen on Ototo, the couple’s sake and snack bar next door. It’s a showcase especially for Kaplan, who has spent decades understanding the complexities and varieties of sake and building relationships with brewers in Japan.
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Two Hommés
Inglewood West African Southern $$
(Ron De Angelis/For The Times)
At their Inglewood bistro, Abdoulaye “AB” Balde and Marcus “Mando” Yaw Johnson take a global perspective on comfort foods, particularly with an eye for incorporating the defining flavors of several African countries. Senegalese dibi, the smoked lamb mustardy from its marinade, plumps corn tortillas for tacos kindled by mint salsa and pikliz (Haitian pickled slaw). A showpiece platter of lightly curried Ghanaian-style jollof, coupled with a bowl of creamy black beans, arrives with a choice of meats and seafoods, including shrimp glowing with Ethiopian berbere spice, supple fried catfish or short ribs braised in root beer. This is dining by which to melt the day’s stress — or, over shrimp and grits and chicken over brown sugar waffles at brunch, to rally for the week ahead. The restaurant’s first era of decor centered around a wall collage of 1970s to 1990s R&B albums. I loved it, mainly because it echoed my tastes in music, but last year Balde and Johnson wisely brought in Los Angeles designer and “AfriCali” cookbook author Kiano Moju to help reenvision the space. Lighter paints, pillow-lined banquettes, basket-shaped light fixtures imported from Ghana and framed vintage concert posters give the room a fresh sophistication that more precisely sets the mood for the cooking.
Extra Helpings: On the subject of weekend meals of shrimp and grits or chicken and waffles, brunch is my favorite meal at Keith Corbin and Daniel Patterson’s Alta Adams in L.A.’s West Adams neighborhood. Throw in an order of cornmeal pancakes with brown butter-caramel syrup.
Extra Helpings: On the subject of weekend meals of shrimp and grits or chicken and waffles, brunch is my favorite meal at Keith Corbin and Daniel Patterson’s Alta Adams in L.A.’s West Adams neighborhood. Throw in an order of cornmeal pancakes with brown butter-caramel syrup.
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Orange County
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Al Baraka Restaurant
Anaheim Palestinian $$
(Ron De Angelis/For The Times)
Crisp falafel, stained spring-green inside with parsley and cilantro; mezze spreads of cool dips and hot, lemony chicken wings; za’atar-scented flatbread and crackling, cheesy-stretchy knafeh; kibbeh in a dozen raw and cooked geometries: These dishes only skim the dining possibilities in Little Arabia, a district in West Anaheim granted an official designation by the city council in 2022.
Since 2021, among the strip malls of wide South Brookhurst Street, chef Magida Shatarah and her husband, Aref Shatarah, have distinguished Al Baraka 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), pan-shaped beef kufta in tahini sauce with fries — be sure to scan the list of daily specials. Saturdays, for example, mean an enduring favorite: msakhan, 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 exacting cooking enshrines such traditions.
Extra Helpings: Some excellent next stops in Little Arabia: Forn Al Hara for baked-to-order Lebanese mana’eesh in some three dozen savory variations; skewered meats and silky, tartare-like kibbeh nayyeh at Kababji Grill; and Yemeni lamb feasts at House of Mandi.
Since 2021, among the strip malls of wide South Brookhurst Street, chef Magida Shatarah and her husband, Aref Shatarah, have distinguished Al Baraka 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), pan-shaped beef kufta in tahini sauce with fries — be sure to scan the list of daily specials. Saturdays, for example, mean an enduring favorite: msakhan, 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 exacting cooking enshrines such traditions.
Extra Helpings: Some excellent next stops in Little Arabia: Forn Al Hara for baked-to-order Lebanese mana’eesh in some three dozen savory variations; skewered meats and silky, tartare-like kibbeh nayyeh at Kababji Grill; and Yemeni lamb feasts at House of Mandi.
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Brodard Restaurant
Fountain Valley Vietnamese $$
(Shelby Moore/For The Times)
Californians know what treasure troves can hide behind the characterless façades of strip malls. That’s especially true in Orange County’s Little Saigon, a district that unofficially spans portions of Westminster, Garden Grove, Fountain Valley and Santa Ana. The 1970s proliferation of mini-malls across Southern California coincided with waves of Vietnamese immigrants that began arriving in the area following the fall of Saigon in 1975. In the 50 years since then, Little Saigon spans more than three square miles, housing not only the largest Vietnamese population in the global diaspora but hundreds of restaurants that bond the community’s past, present and future.
For diners the choices can be exhilarating and overwhelming. I recommend starting at Brodard, one of Little Saigon’s most rightly famous restaurants. Diane Dang and her daughters opened the original in 1996, moving this iteration (among spinoffs that include the more upscale Brodard Chateau) into its current Fountain Valley location in 2017. For almost 30 years, conversations about the restaurant have revolved around its nem nuong cuon, a rice-paper roll filled with vegetables, a sliver of deep-fried egg-roll skin and a grilled, springy, carrot-orange patty made of ground pork. The kitchen staff turns out thousands of them daily; most of us would need drafting tools to approximate such precision and consistency. Salads, stews, soups, porridges, noodle stir-fries and broken-rice dishes fill out Brodard’s broad survey of a menu. I gravitate here to comforts like bun chao tom, a brothy version of vermicelli noodles with fish cake, pork hock and bouncy-chewy seafood balls.
Extra Helpings: In the same complex, look for Quán Mii, the area’s best-known specialist for lacy-crisp bánh xèo, and Ngu Binh, where Mai Tran and her family present dishes from Vietnam’s Thua Thien Hue province; try the 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.
For diners the choices can be exhilarating and overwhelming. I recommend starting at Brodard, one of Little Saigon’s most rightly famous restaurants. Diane Dang and her daughters opened the original in 1996, moving this iteration (among spinoffs that include the more upscale Brodard Chateau) into its current Fountain Valley location in 2017. For almost 30 years, conversations about the restaurant have revolved around its nem nuong cuon, a rice-paper roll filled with vegetables, a sliver of deep-fried egg-roll skin and a grilled, springy, carrot-orange patty made of ground pork. The kitchen staff turns out thousands of them daily; most of us would need drafting tools to approximate such precision and consistency. Salads, stews, soups, porridges, noodle stir-fries and broken-rice dishes fill out Brodard’s broad survey of a menu. I gravitate here to comforts like bun chao tom, a brothy version of vermicelli noodles with fish cake, pork hock and bouncy-chewy seafood balls.
Extra Helpings: In the same complex, look for Quán Mii, the area’s best-known specialist for lacy-crisp bánh xèo, and Ngu Binh, where Mai Tran and her family present dishes from Vietnam’s Thua Thien Hue province; try the 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.
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Chaak Kitchen
Tustin Mexican $$
2020
(Jennelle Fong/For The Times)
At her second Orange County restaurant, Gabbi Patrick narrows the focus from her first venture, Gabbi’s Mexican Kitchen in Old Towne Orange, to survey and interpret the culinary terrain of the Yucatán Peninsula. Chaak Kitchen’s cochinita pibil, perhaps the region’s most famous dish, is exceptional — pork stained with achiote, smoked over cherrywood, pulled into hunky strands and stacked into a tower domed with pickled onions. It is the kind of dish you can’t leave alone, even if you’re already full from mixed-seafood ceviche, grilled chayote teamed with English peas and dressed in a clever recado negro vinaigrette, or a fantastic bowl of clams in emerald-colored broth with green chorizo. The cuisine is part of Patrick’s family heritage, but tradition doesn’t hem in her cooking: A bone-in New York strip with fried potatoes is a universalist statement of pleasure, and I admire how she occasionally references the Lebanese immigrant influence on Yucatecan culture, as in lemony labneh she glosses over a huarache with chunks of merguez. Her bartenders stand ready for some deep conversation on agave spirits. The restaurant is also open for Friday and Saturday lunch and Sunday brunch, hours of service that make primo use of the building’s retractable roof. A push of a button and boom: instant outdoor dining.
Extra Helpings: For more casual Mexican dining in Orange County, start with extra-meaty tacos at the original Tacos Los Cholos in Anaheim and Tijuana-style tacos at Bandito Taqueria in Santa Ana. Also in Santa Ana, on a tough day lift your spirits with green chile “eggchiladas” and micheladas at Alta Baja Market.
Extra Helpings: For more casual Mexican dining in Orange County, start with extra-meaty tacos at the original Tacos Los Cholos in Anaheim and Tijuana-style tacos at Bandito Taqueria in Santa Ana. Also in Santa Ana, on a tough day lift your spirits with green chile “eggchiladas” and micheladas at Alta Baja Market.
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Heritage Barbecue
San Juan Capistrano Barbecue $$
(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
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 using tallow rendered from brisket trimmings. They glaze pork belly in the manner of char siu, sometimes slipped 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. On that note, there may be banana pudding with fuchsia swirls of ube custard for dessert.
Extra Helpings: Andrew and Michelle Muñoz’s Moo’s Craft Barbecue in Los Angeles also sets the bar for translating central Texas’ beefy traditions into a Southern California context. Also, the smoked burger is fantastic. Also, forged from Kevin Bludso’s Texas roots and with three locations across L.A. County, it’s impossible to consider barbecue in Los Angeles without discussing Bludso’s BBQ.
Extra Helpings: Andrew and Michelle Muñoz’s Moo’s Craft Barbecue in Los Angeles also sets the bar for translating central Texas’ beefy traditions into a Southern California context. Also, the smoked burger is fantastic. Also, forged from Kevin Bludso’s Texas roots and with three locations across L.A. County, it’s impossible to consider barbecue in Los Angeles without discussing Bludso’s BBQ.
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Knife Pleat
Costa Mesa French $$$$
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Chef Tony Esnault and front-of-house whiz Yassmin Sarmadi, who are married, closed their Los Angeles restaurants Spring and Church & State in 2018 and 2019, respectively, to move into the high-fashion wing of Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza. The location fits their aims. Esnault orchestrates a scrupulous form of fine dining that’s vanishing in America. The cooking is high craftsmanship and the plating is art. You stare, as in a gallery, considering the season’s vegetables carved into identical geometries, and the deliberate white space between ovals of duck breast and pools of orange-perfumed reductions. Vitally, within the elaborate presentations, the ingredients taste of themselves. At its essence the food is a joy, making for a worthy special-occasion splurge, and the doting staff thaws some of the formalism. Lunch and afternoon tea options are equally punctilious and accordingly spendy. Arguably the most elegant, uplifting annual holiday meal in Orange County, I can share from years of experience, is the spring dinner at Knife Pleat celebrating Nowruz, the Persian New Year.
Extra Helpings: Looking for more local top-flight dining? Marché Moderne at the edge of Newport Beach pulls off a rococo, many-whirling-ingredients style of French cooking with panache, and Hana re in Costa Mesa is O.C.’s most thrilling formal omakase restaurant.
Extra Helpings: Looking for more local top-flight dining? Marché Moderne at the edge of Newport Beach pulls off a rococo, many-whirling-ingredients style of French cooking with panache, and Hana re in Costa Mesa is O.C.’s most thrilling formal omakase restaurant.
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Phởholic
Garden Grove Vietnamese $$
(Shelby Moore/For The Times)
Food obsessives love to fight over pho, and Little Saigon gives us plenty of ammunition. My first place goes to Phoholic, Gordon Pham’s venture that began in 2015. Pham adapted the restaurant’s broth recipe from the pho shops his family ran in Vietnam, and it models harmony: beefy yet bright, the sweet spices a rippling presence without overpowering other flavors. Fans like to point out the rare (and sporadically available) addition of citrusy-musky ngò ôm among the usual herb garnishes. I come with someone willing to share and order two bowls: the No. 8, with two cuts of flank steak (I sometimes ask for meatballs for more texture), and the blowout No. 16 with deliciously Jurassic hunks of beef shank and oxtail.
Extra Helpings: For further local pho adventures, head to standard-bearer Pho 79 and, for chicken pho, Pho Dakao, which also has an outpost in L.A.’s San Gabriel Valley.
Extra Helpings: For further local pho adventures, head to standard-bearer Pho 79 and, for chicken pho, Pho Dakao, which also has an outpost in L.A.’s San Gabriel Valley.
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Desert Cities
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Alice B.
Palm Springs Californian Mediterranean $$
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
L.A. legends Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken put their culinary muscle behind Alice B., a restaurant in a Palm Springs apartment community geared toward 55-and-older LGBTQ+ residents called Living Out. Its menu circles back to Feniger and Milliken’s initial wide-world approach to cooking honed at City Restaurant, which eventually became their famous, Mexican-flavors-focused Border Grill. In the desert, the menu bridges retro Continental cuisine and Mediterranean influences with an emphasis on the California seasons. California-grown asparagus, in its fleeting moment, dressed with goat cheese, nutty-sweet romesco sauce and salty Marcona almonds. A classic steak Diane, minus the tableside flambé. Excellent cornmeal-cheddar drop biscuits, served warm and crisp-soft with cardamom-infused honey, have been so in demand that customers now can buy them frozen.
Portraits of restaurant namesake Alice B. Toklas and her paramour Gertrude Stein hang front and center of the dining room — offsetting, along with some mod globe-shaped lighting fixtures, a space with fundamentally generic hotel-lobby vibes. It’s the crowd who bring the spark of individuality to the atmosphere. No one demographic defines the mix of people on any given evening, but the patrons certainly skew older and gay, and the welcoming space — for all of us — feels very intentional.
Extra Helpings: For a one-day Palm Springs dining itinerary, among many options, start with a sticky-crisp kouign amann or butterscotch-pecan twist from Peninsula Pastries for breakfast; then burgers (and maybe a gin martini) at the HeyDay, and dinner at Alice B. or, if it’s midweek, check out the amazing Hoja Blanca pop-up hosted at Truss & Twine bar.
Portraits of restaurant namesake Alice B. Toklas and her paramour Gertrude Stein hang front and center of the dining room — offsetting, along with some mod globe-shaped lighting fixtures, a space with fundamentally generic hotel-lobby vibes. It’s the crowd who bring the spark of individuality to the atmosphere. No one demographic defines the mix of people on any given evening, but the patrons certainly skew older and gay, and the welcoming space — for all of us — feels very intentional.
Extra Helpings: For a one-day Palm Springs dining itinerary, among many options, start with a sticky-crisp kouign amann or butterscotch-pecan twist from Peninsula Pastries for breakfast; then burgers (and maybe a gin martini) at the HeyDay, and dinner at Alice B. or, if it’s midweek, check out the amazing Hoja Blanca pop-up hosted at Truss & Twine bar.
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La Copine
Yucca Valley New American $$
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
In 2015, not long after Nikki Hill and Claire Wadsworth married, they visited the Integratron in Landers. On that trip they learned about a long-vacant restaurant space six miles from the sound-bath dome. They bought the squat building, moved nearby … and a decade later their daytime diner rarely has an empty table. In our commodified, risk-averse world, the culinary beacon in the middle of nowhere has all but faded. La Copine is the uncanny unicorn. In Hill’s cooking you can practically taste the self-determination: the joy of someone devising dishes and leading her own crew after years of working for others. The menu of salads, sandwiches, vegetable plates and several entrees doesn’t read as radical or idiosyncratic. But the combinations are so intentional, and the plucking of global ideas so thoughtful, that the results come off as personal. In the dining room, Wadsworth’s star-wattage ebullience sets the tone for the fleet front-of-house staff clad in great T-shirts and flowing desert-chic fashion. This group stays amazingly upbeat in the face of constant busyness.
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San Diego
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Addison
San Diego New American $$$$
(Deanna Sandoval/For The Times)
The Fairmont Grand Del Mar hotel opened Addison — named for Addison Mizner, an American architect known for the Mediterranean Revival style around which the property was designed — in 2006, hiring William Bradley to lead the kitchen. Bradley, who grew up in Chula Vista, has raised its reputation into the most nationally lauded tasting-menu restaurant in Southern California. With chef de cuisine Jonathan Brambila and his team, they weave flavors from our region’s key cultural influences (most prominently, the cuisines of Mexico, Japan and China) tailored into edible finery. Sometimes in fine dining such canvassing of flavors comes off as forced homage. Here, the precision and exclamation-point deliciousness help the approach feel grounded. A summer meal might present chawanmushi gilded with Hokkaido uni and, cleverly, broccoli buds, or a fragrant, soulful lamb broth served with lengua and fava beans. Expect caviar over koshihikari rice with smoked sabayon, a Bradley signature, and a play on fish and chips with burnt onion dip and incredible sourdough bread with two types of butter. The meal is an investment: It costs $385 per person, with options for wine pairings starting around the same price. Given the meal’s extravagance, the dining room is grand but also suspended in the beigeness of another era. A renovation planned to coincide with the restaurant’s 20th anniversary will hopefully align the atmosphere with the celestial, leading-edge cooking.
Extra Helpings: Auburn, Eric Bost’s short-lived restaurant in Los Angeles, delightfully toyed with fine dining structures but closed early in the pandemic. I remain a fan of Bost, who relocated to Carlsbad, where his budding mini-empire includes Jeune et Jolie, serving a California-French tasting menu priced at $120 per person, and the more casual, family-friendly Campfire.
Extra Helpings: Auburn, Eric Bost’s short-lived restaurant in Los Angeles, delightfully toyed with fine dining structures but closed early in the pandemic. I remain a fan of Bost, who relocated to Carlsbad, where his budding mini-empire includes Jeune et Jolie, serving a California-French tasting menu priced at $120 per person, and the more casual, family-friendly Campfire.
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Animae
San Diego Asian Steakhouse $$$
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Chef-restaurateur Brian Malarkey and business partner Christopher Puffer opened their broadly defined “pan-Asian steakhouse” in San Diego’s Marina District months before the pandemic bore down. Its enormous dining room, grandly appointed in golds and mossy greens, was from the start a comfortable place for conversation at reasonable volumes. But it wasn’t until the spring of 2021, when the owners promoted Tara Monsod to executive chef, that the direction of the menu cemented and excelled. Scan for the dishes she shapes and defines with Filipino flavors. Start with fastidiously rendered pig’s ear, thin and shattering, taut and a little sweet with tamarind glaze. Short rib kare kare nearly melts among green beans and eggplant, and pancit palabok, a seafood-and-noodle childhood favorite of Monsod’s, transforms into brothy bucatini looped around meaty lumps of lobster and sprinkled with ground chicharrón. Pork tomahawk, the showstopper, is grilled with precise crosshatches and glows electric red from beet glaze — a holiday ham from another, brighter dimension. Vinegary mango dipping sauce on the side is crucial, as is crab fried rice topped with roe winkingly seasoned with Old Bay. For a light ending, pastry chef Laura Warren fashions a stunning, cooling version of buko pandan — a snowy drift of young coconut mousse surrounded by pandan Anglaise and bouncy cubes of pandan gelée.
Extra Helpings: California is home to over 4 million Filipino Americans. Seek out these stellar Filipino restaurants across the state: tiny, meat-mighty Kuya Lord in Los Angeles; FOB Kitchen in Oakland for great pork or vegetarian adobo; breakfast or dinner at creative Restaurant Abacá in San Francisco; and, in the desert, takeout-focused Meng’s Filipino Cuisine.
Extra Helpings: California is home to over 4 million Filipino Americans. Seek out these stellar Filipino restaurants across the state: tiny, meat-mighty Kuya Lord in Los Angeles; FOB Kitchen in Oakland for great pork or vegetarian adobo; breakfast or dinner at creative Restaurant Abacá in San Francisco; and, in the desert, takeout-focused Meng’s Filipino Cuisine.
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Atelier Manna
Encinitas Eclectic $$
(Deanna Sandoval/For The Times)
The French toast, saturated with custard and often crowned with strawberries or raspberries, stands as tall as a mesa rising out of a valley. The variation on Turkish eggs is a study of soft textures: trembly poached eggs, yogurt, feathery herbs, a drizzle of chile-garlic butter. Scallops sink into grits scattered with a very Californian take on succotash with heirloom beans and grilled corn. The plate beams sunshine. Atelier Manna is a brilliant brunch restaurant, and if that sounds oxymoronic then you have yet to know chef-owner Andrew Bachelier’s cooking. He keeps daytime hours in the Encinitas community of Leucadia, serving improbably poetic dishes on a covered patio alongside a residential stretch of Pacific Coast Highway. The restaurant keeps busy; if he’d opened in Los Angeles, I can imagine fistfights over tables. Bachelier also has impeccable taste in beverages, serving coffee from Steady State Roasting up the road and a white tea with scents of stone fruit from the wonderful London-based Rare Tea Co. He also hired bar ace Nick Sinutko to create “vitality tonics.” With combinations that play on the prominent notes in bourbon, say, combining cherry, vanilla, citrus and ginger, the tonics score among the best nonalcoholic cocktails in Southern California.
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Kingfisher
Central San Diego Vietnamese $$
(Deanna Sandoval/For The Times)
Kim Phan, Ky Phan and Quan Le, owners of the three Viet-Cajun cuisine Crab Hut restaurants in San Diego, opened one of the city’s modern beacons of style in 2022. A dramatic black-and-gold bar anchors the dining room, its walls covered with a sweeping lotus print in shades of green and pink. Brainy cocktails such as “Water Buffalo” — in which gin, coconut and lime counterpoise the umami of reduced and clarified pho stock — set the culinary mood. Executive chef David Sim revels in the possibilities of Southeast Asian flavors melded with freewheeling imagination. Green papaya, banana blossoms and pickled lotus stems work like a photo editing app on crisped pig’s ear: brightening, contrasting, saturating. Striped sea bass caught in Baja waters takes on the sweet funk of caramelized fish sauce, offset with Meyer lemon, fried shallot rings and the simple rightness of buttered rice. Congee with morels, English peas and garlicky mushrooms is a springtime balm. Come early with a group to devour the smoked dry-aged duck platter, and then save room for flan doused in coffee syrup with salty-sweet miso cream.
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Las Cuatro Milpas
San Diego Mexican $
(Deanna Sandoval/For The Times)
Why the constant line zigzagging out the door of this 92-year-old daytime restaurant in San Diego’s vital Barrio Logan neighborhood? Corn tortillas, rolled with pork or chicken and then fried to order in pork lard. Chorizo con huevo, the contents of its bowl covered in soupy beans and tomato-tinged Spanish rice so dense with flavor your taste buds hardly know how to parse the molecules. Alongside the eggs are folded flour tortillas, casually ethereal in their nexus of powdery, stretchy, dense-light textures. I look around the room to see if everyone is as full of wonder as I am. To locals, it’s just Tuesday at Las Cuatro Milpas. These few dishes have been enough to sustain the institution that Petra and Natividad Estudillo began in 1933. While waiting to place your order, glance down the block at Chicano Park, where highway junctions merge overhead, and imagine how the streetscape would have looked to the Estudillos for their first 30 years in business, before the construction of the I-5 and Coronado Bridge carved through the barrio in the 1960s. Two of their grandchildren, all sisters, continue to run the restaurant. May it never change. They expect you to know your order, taken in front of the open kitchen, to keep the queue moving. Bring cash.
Extra Helpings: Now that you’ve had breakfast, stick around Barrio Logan for far more recently opened dining options, including a lunchtime cheeseburger at Hayes Burger or wittily crafted seafood tacos at Fish Guts.
Extra Helpings: Now that you’ve had breakfast, stick around Barrio Logan for far more recently opened dining options, including a lunchtime cheeseburger at Hayes Burger or wittily crafted seafood tacos at Fish Guts.
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Mal Al Sham
San Diego County Mediterranean $
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
I’d seen shots of mansaf — flatbread, rice and lamb in spiced yogurt sauce heaped on a platter in earthen layers — while researching Mal Al Sham online, but it wasn’t listed on the restaurant’s Syrian menu. “Yes, we have it,” the server said casually, and she soon returned carrying the dish. Mansaf is often called the national dish of Jordan, although its appeal has endured across the Eastern Mediterranean region for centuries. This one ranks among the best versions I’ve had in restaurants in the United States. Its silken sauce has the crucial ingredient: jameed, dried and reconstituted yogurt that adds a distinct, delicious sharpness. Six-year-old Mal Al Sham resides on the main road through El Cajon, a city with one of the country’s largest Iraqi immigrant and refugee communities. The restaurant honors the population with a weekend special of quzi, another lamb-and-rice dish more peppered with sweet, bright spices (but no yogurt sauce). For a feast, surround these dishes with other regional staples: silky hummus, fattoush tangy with pomegranate molasses, beefy kibbeh in fried or grilled variations and extra-crunchy falafel. For seekers of outstanding Levantine cooking, El Cajon is a worthwhile 20-minute drive from downtown San Diego.
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