Try the seaweed-tofu beignets, spare arrangements of foraged greens, scallops with nightshade berries or shriveled, butter-soaked carrots that somehow manage to taste better than meat. Read more.
Everyone is here for Attari's sandwiches: lengths of toasted French bread dressed with fresh tomatoes, lettuce and a smattering of spiced, super-tart Iranian pickles. Read more.
Best new restaurant winner 2013. Eat this: braised lamb neck in jus, beef and bone marrow pot pie, house-cured salumi. No reservation? Wait for seats at the bar & chef Colby may serve you personally. Read more.
Try the chefly interpretation of Mexican bar snacks, including seared slices of carnitas terrine with cubes of Coca-Cola gelee and pigskin two ways. Read more.
Blink and you might miss this San Gabriel Valley hole-in-the-wall where diners can watch dumplings being made from behind a clear partition. [Eater 38 Member]
A hip, modern Vietnamese eatery. During lunch drop in for banh mi, vermicelli noodle salads, and even a pho baguette, while dinner brings more serious plates of baby octopus and phocatini. Read more.
Sandwiches come on soft house-baked brioche buns and include fillings like cheddar, honey mustard aioli and a juicy, chile-flecked turkey sausage patty made in-house.
Guy Fieri, host of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, checks out Gloria's Café, an El Salvadoran place making traditional stuffed tortillas and a pork stew called Adobada. Find more tips at FN Local. Read more.
Featured at the First Annual LA Weekly Tacolandia! Look for the truck in the downtown area or flag it down in East LA! Read more.
You can pay a buck & get a little packet of chiles torreados as a side, or you can get them as a taco wrapped in a thick corn tortilla with Guisados’ liquid habanero chile salsa on top -Jonathan Gold
Don't expect to find the standard Vietnamese dishes like pho, banh mi, or bun here. Try the bun mam, an anchovy-based noodle soup with fish, shrimp, pork belly, and eggplant - fantastically funky.
This Tokyo-imported Holy Grail of tempura serves just 2 (!) menu items: Tempura whitefish or fried eel + shrimp, scallops, drippy yolk fried egg, all heaped on sticky rice, covered in sweet soy sauce. Read more.
The South filtered through the not-South: fried chicken skin served with hand-made Tabasco, a hot biscuit with a spoonful of pimento cheese or a steaming bowl of black-eyed peas. Read more.
A Los Angeles burger institution that started out as a food stand in 1939. Fat Cheeseburger (Angus chuck beef patty topped with lettuce, tomato, onion and pickles on a plain or whole wheat bun).
A fusion of complex, ritualized Japanese kaiseki cuisine with modern California small-plates cooking, like the black cod served under smoldering sheets of the Japanese cedar hinoki. Read more.
Probably most satisfying are the savory soy milk and the sweet bean curd. Savory soy milk comes with a lovely array of meaty nibbles and tripe-y bits. Read more.
Best of LA 2012 - Best Culinary Cocktails. Bartenders keep up with chef Michael Voltaggio's penchant for highly conceptual, designer food with a list of designer drinks.Try the Cold Brew, it's badass! Read more.
They send out a whole sea bass rubbed in fresh turmeric and deep-fried to crunchiness, then buried under a blanket of julienned mango and fried garlic. Read more.
Best Korean BBQ - 2012! Cuts of rib-eye are beautifully marbled, the pork belly sliced just so, & dosirak, shaken tableside with a fried egg, is a most entertaining side dish! -Garrett Snyder Read more.
The ultra-spicy, tamarind-soured, fish-sauce-laced house-special version of pad thai here is about as good as it gets, a powerful dish, truly exotic, sweet and squiggly and delicious. Read more.
Everyone has notions about what the best tacos in L.A. might be, but to us, nothing beats the al pastor tacos from this gas station joint on weekend nights. Read more.
"The Chongqing fried chicken was nearly as good as I'd ever had; buried in a fragrant hillock of fried dried peppers and nearly vibrating..." - Jonathan Gold Read more.
Lucques, named for a vivid green variety of French olive, is located in Harold Lloyd's old carriage house. Sunday family dinners are legendary. Prix fixe dinners. Read more.
"...an edgy, grown-up restaurant serving an Asianized, farm-centered, technique-oriented small-plates menu, ... with even more polish: a new sort of cuisine." - Jonathan Gold Read more.
What you will talking about is the bacon cheddar buttermilk biscuits, palm-size creatures that have the gravitational pull of the sun. -Jonathan Gold Read more.
Raul Ortega might personally hand you a taco, ask if you want to try a plate of ceviche or aguachile. His signature tacos dorados de camaron, fried tacos with shrimp, are just too formidable. Read more.
Start out with some fine tempura, like the savory soft boiled egg fried in a light crunchy batter, before the main event: sea urchin cream udon ($15.95).
The DNA upon which the Nobu empire was built, Mats is celebrity chef Nobu Matsuhisa's first restaurant ever, and his best by a margin. Locals who hate on it are lying to themselves. [Eater 38 Member] Read more.
The clam is cloaked in a salty rich miso followed by two types of toro sushi: bluefin and bigeye tuna. Read more.
Night + Market has a menu based on the bar snack. You will find a kind of Thai tapas, a unit of consumption carefully calibrated to the refreshment inherent in a single bottle of Singha ~Jonathan Gold
Order the lamb sandwich and get it “double-dipped” for extra au jus goodness.
"[Pho Filet] has a delicious pho bac, highlighted by a slab of filet mignon that looks as if it came off on the losing side of a knife fight, in a broth crazy-sharp with cloves." - Jonathan Gold
Chef Ricardo Zarate has paved the way for Peruvian dining in Los Angeles, and here at Picca he serves a modern interpretation of the cuisine. [Eater 38 Member]
Come to this Peruvian island in Koreatown to buy half a delicious flame-licked bird lashed with green ají sauce, a mound of rice, beans and a chicha morada for a bit more than $10. Read more.
If LA has a temple of molecular gastronomy, this is it. Bring your wallet and a refined a palate as you can muster. [Eater 38 Member] Read more.
Walter Maznke's ambitious bakery/cafe/restaurant in the former Campanile space in La Brea. Don't miss any of the house-made breads and seasonal specials.
A big chain in its native Japan, Santouka in the Misuwa Marketplace offers some of the freshest, most delicious traditional-style ramen in LA. [Eater 38 Member] Read more.
French and Californian cuisines inflect chef Shunji Nakao's contemporary Japanese cooking. For the full experience, order the omakase. Read more.
Soban is a slightly odd institution, nice in a way that's probably closer to the way your mom's best friend's kitchen is nice. The most famous dish here is probably the spicy galbi jjim.-Jonathan Gold
"Brandade, a creamy mash of salt cod with potatoes and a barely poached egg, is a small essay on the virtues of soft food." Read the entire Jonathan Gold review by clicking 'More Info' Read more.
Be sure to check out the daily special & eat at the counter, as its open kitchen is a delight to observe. Menu favorites include Hanin Chicken over garlic rice, Thai sausage and Thai BBQ chicken.
An iconic L.A. sushi restaurant, this small spot in Little Tokyo is constantly filled to the brim, with a unbelievable lunch sashimi special packing the crowds in.
High quality sushi capatalizing on that whole umami taste bud thriller thing, slightly more experimental than other hard core sushi spots. All together now, We'll have the omakase. [Eater 38 Member]
The fish and tofu tacos are both great, but the shrimp and scallop tacos are even better! The seafood/tofu is all fried, but the batter is super light--think tempura, but lighter!
Ludovic Lefebvre is one of the greatest pure chefs ever to cook in Los Angeles. Trois Mec is the first place that has ever been his own, like a private club that happens to serve delicious cuisine. Read more.
"Tsukemen is hip in all the usual ways, including obscurity, a stylized consumption ritual and flavor of an intensity that can be overwhelming the first few times out" -Jonathan Gold Read more.
Chef Hiro Urasawa trained under Masa Takayama, a man who is unanimously agreed upon to be the best sushi chef in the country. Kobe-beef sashimi, Kagoshima beef shabu-shabu...read more. —Garrett Snyder Read more.
This super-secretive sushi bar in Palms is serving up some of the most exciting sushi and kaiseki in the city at the moment. The fish is pristine and the service impeccable.
A restaurant that makes beef-heart tartare seem not only possible but desirable; that makes a craveable specialty of pork boiled with cabbage. Read more.
The menu changes daily, but you will usually find a porchetta, one of the best versions in town, of crunchy rolled pork belly flavored sharply with fennel pollen; and a dish of duck served two ways... Read more.
The braised short ribs is a table-pleaser, along with the strong pot bibimbap. The spicy-braised mackerel is the show stopper, with layers of rich flavor that go perfectly when spooned over rice. Read more.
Yakitori grilled over traditional white charcoal (flown in from Japan) -- chicken livers, heart, thigh, skin and, if you go early, ask about the off-the-menu stuff like the sublime “chicken butt.”
A fresh take on African American dishes: smoked baby backs, roast salmon, buttermilk fried chicken and greens cooked down with ham hocks with an understated chefly flair. Plus hand-stretched pizza. Read more.
Dedicated to Northern Thai cuisine consumed in a colorful 50-seat space. The chef has earned enough of a reputation for his flavor-packed plates to attract Angelenos from across the city. Read more.
The oxtail agnolotti at this new Downtown eatery gets a little surprise with every third bite or so: a nob of bone marrow. Don't fear though, a tangerine salsa tempers the richness a bit. Read more.
The omakase here yields bluefin toro, uni, and yellowtail. Chef Ike-san carefully crafts nigiri and other dishes right before diners, leading to a better than expected experience in this part of town.
"Delicate tongue tacos with green salsa are especially good, as are the tacos of chicken tesmole, an herb-intensive Oaxacan preparation thickened with corn." Read more.
We recommend the astonishing "Hamembert" plate with Mangalitsa ham, oozing wedges of Camembert cheese, and an artfully charred length of baguette. Read more.
Named Best Restaurant Near the Beach Los Angeles 2014 in our Best of LA 2014 issue! Read more.
Chef Sergio Peñuelas is a master of pescado zarandeado, marinated snook cooked by shaking over charcoal until the flesh caramelizes but does not char. Also recommended: the fiery shrimp aguachile. Read more.
A project by Dustin Lancaster and Matt Kaner of Bar Covell, the cozy, hip oyster bar offers a limited menu of seafood plus a well-curated selection of boutique wines and craft beer. [Eater 38 Member]
Named Best New Sichuan Restaurant Los Angeles 2014 in our 2014 Best of LA issue! Read more.
Their menu is a living, habanero-intensive thesaurus of the panuchos and codzitos, sopa de lima and papadzules, banana-leaf tamales and shark casseroles that make up one of Mexico's spiciest cuisines. Read more.
You'll probably start with a cold appetizer...You will get an order of the thick, handmade noodles...But we know why we're here. And as promised, xian bing are hot when you pick them up ~Jonathan Gold
Try the Spanish fried chicken with cumin, pappardelle with nettles and asparagus with lemongrass, and don’t forget the glass of Sancerre. Read more.
