The things we love about Los Angeles — the layers of culture, the realness beneath the Hollywood mythology, the possibilities within the enormousness — are the same factors that can make our metropolis overwhelming, especially when it comes to dining out.
Restaurants in L.A. County number somewhere between 25,000 and 28,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s a lot of choices, a lot of commotion, a lot of just-fine among the truly exceptional.
Think of The Times’ annual guide, then, as a call to order. This is two restaurant critics having a meeting of the minds about where to eat right now, and why these places matter.
For months we practically lived in our cars, visiting hundreds of places before whittling the sum to 101. We disagree sometimes. Projects like these exist for debate. And, more important, for inspiration.
This year the guide has 31 new additions. Read on for the brilliant reboot of a modern Mexican groundbreaker in Culver City and exceptional chilaquiles in Pico Rivera. Quick-stop Peruvian-style rotisserie chicken in Pasadena and a Southern revival in West Hollywood that found its way after an early choppy start. Next-level Puerto Rican rellenos de papa in Woodland Hills and deliciously curative Toisanese soups in South El Monte.
A handful of familiar entrants reappear, better than ever, after previously dropping off. Sinaloa-style tacos originally out of Long Beach bounce back into the mix, as does a restaurant that redefined breakfast last decade and in February began serving dinner.
Our two 2026 Hall of Fame inductees are pillars. At one, plates of fried chicken, gilded with macaroni and cheese, greens and yams, sustain the community while expressing the city’s African American history through multigenerational family traditions. The other also upholds family heritage, via provoleta and mixed grill platters, at an Argentine steakhouse celebrating 30 years this fall.
We narrowed our favorite new places to drink down to five hubs where the sense of kinship came through as strong as the martinis or espressos. Among them: a casual wine bar with a great burger in Altadena, an ambitious coffee complex in Glassell Park and L.A.’s most exciting cocktail destination in recent memory.
These are weird, uncertain times. An AI doomsday event may or may not be around the corner. But from our No.1 choice — an electric, concisely formatted fine-dining debut hidden in a subterranean den on West Pico Boulevard — through No. 101 we took extra value in celebrating the beautiful intangibles of humanity: imaginations and hands working together, striving for excellence. We ate exceptionally well at these restaurants, and we felt alive and heartened at their tables too.
The collectible magazine also features our critics’ Hall of Fame and Best Drinks lists.
Showing Place Places
101. Mish Delicatessen
Fairfax Jewish Cuisine $$
(Rebecca Peloquin / For The Times)
A plate of matzo brei that doesn’t taste like wet, eggy cardboard? A knish that doesn’t resemble a potato-laden rock? With each visit to Mish, Eric Greenspan is erasing every bad deli experience of my Jewish childhood. His cooking is equal parts nostalgic and swashbuckling, with a menu that brazenly reimagines foods most Jewish Americans hold near and dear. His matzo brei is like a plate of excellent pancakes torn to bits, punched up with scallions and black pepper. Kreplach are filled with pastrami, fried, tossed in a schmaltzy sauce and covered in “Jewish chili crunch” made from chiles and the seeds and seasonings found in everything bagel spice. He’s making excellent Montreal-ish bagels in a wood-fired pizza oven. Dara Yu is behind a pastry and bread program that boasts brown-butter hamantaschen. And bartender extraordinaire Julian Cox created the cocktails. Mish is the Jewish deli of my wildest dreams.
Read Jenn Harris’ review of Mish Delicatessen.
Read Jenn Harris’ review of Mish Delicatessen.
Wilshire / La Brea Station
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100. Jade Rabbit
Santa Monica Chinese American $
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
What’s “real Chinese food”? For Bryant Ng and his wife, Kim Luu-Ng, it’s orange chicken, the dishes his parents prepared at home and everything in between. At the couple’s counter-service restaurant in Santa Monica, Bryant is embracing Chinese diaspora cuisine in his quest to create his own style of Chinese American food. Beef and broccoli is stir-fried with tomatoes, onions and fried potatoes like lomo saltado. Spicy Sichuan fried chicken, reminiscent of la zi ji, is marinated in fish sauce, buttermilk and white pepper. Fans of the couple’s previous restaurant, Cassia, will recognize the chickpea curry and its creamy coconut base as a meatless reimagining of his family’s traditional Singaporean-Chinese recipe. At Jade Rabbit, you build your own bowl with various proteins and vegetables. Bryant’s greatest triumph may be a golden slice of scallion garlic cheese toast, intended as a nod to Sizzler. It’s ultra buttery and crisp on one side, then pillow-soft on the other. Call it Chinese American, or just plain bonkers delicious.
26th Street / Bergamot Station
99. Loli Farms
Pasadena Peruvian $
(Ronaldo Bolanos / Los Angeles Times)
Owners Sandra Loli and Mauricio Vincenzi transformed this former Pasadena gas station into a temple devoted to pollo a la brasa, or Peruvian-style chicken. The chickens slowly turn in a wood-burning oven, filling the room with the heady, sweet aroma of pecan, apple and almond woods. The bronzed skin is tacky with the bird’s own fat and sugars, and beautifully caramelized along every ridge. The meat hums with a gentle smokiness and a complex, fruity chile flavor that’s warm, rounded and highly addictive. You eat the chicken with an aji verde electric with Peruvian yellow peppers and huacatay, pungent black mint. And with a mild aji amarillo fragrant with oregano and garlic. The restaurant is a joyful celebration of Peruvian culture and cuisine, with a menu that boasts so much more than the excellent chicken. Look for crunchy golden tiles of yucca frita, loaded salchipapas, lomo saltado sandwiches and liters of Inca Kola.
Read Jenn Harris’ review of Loli Farms.
Read Jenn Harris’ review of Loli Farms.
Fillmore Station
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98. Mario’s Butcher Shop
Newport Beach Butcher Shop Sandwich Shop $
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
We should all be lucky enough to have a Mario’s Butcher Shop in our neighborhood. A one-stop shop for all your meat needs, a refrigerated case full of fresh pasta and Bolognese and a kitchen that turns out paper-wrapped hot and cold sandwiches and burgers with beef tallow fries. Owner Mario Llamas opened the Newport Beach shop in 2021 and expanded the physical space and his sandwich lineup last year. He cures and ages deli meat and smokes and steams pastrami. He rolls mortadella into tight spirals and piles them onto crusty rolls. It’s just the sort of thing you want to unwrap on your trip to the beach. The crown jewel of his sandwich board is the Niman Ranch steak sandwich, made with filet mignon or N.Y. strip cooked over charcoal and a little white oak for a slightly sweet and smoky flavor. It’s dressed with chimichurri and Kewpie mayo for maximum lubrication and sandwich elation.
97. Barsha
Hermosa Beach Middle Eastern cuisine $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Eternally in my dreams for Los Angeles: more restaurants serving the intricate, sun-soaked, culturally nuanced cuisines of North Africa. Thankfully we have Lenora Marouani, who has absorbed the flavors of Tunisia from her wine pro husband, Adnen, and his family. The couple operate two wine bar-shop hybrids, in Manhattan Beach and El Segundo, but at their Hermosa Beach restaurant the Cal-Med menu dips most expressively into Tunisian cooking. Taste the play of hot and sweet spices in chicken mosli, a light tomato stew spooned over quinoa. Preserved lemon sparks the broth in which La Goulette mussels bathe, and also teases out the citrusy qualities of Santola Vinho Verde, one of a dozen wines available on draft. Lenora also persuasively dips into the lexicon of the American South, weaving shrimp and fried okra over cheese grits and layering a trifle with lemon cake and berries scented with rose water.
96. Colossus Harbor
San Pedro Bakery $$
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Colossus Harbor is the third spinoff of Kristin Colazas Rodriguez’s Colossus Bread bakery, known for its exceptional breads and pastries. It’s located at the bottom of a luxury apartment complex in San Pedro, with sweeping views of the Main Channel across the street. Executive chef Jeff Paletz expanded the bread program into something that resembles three restaurants in one: a morning pastry and coffee destination with flaky, buttery croissants; a place for lunchtime sandwiches like the mushroom French dip; and a cozy date-night spot with bubbly-crust pizzas the size of truck tires. The dough, made from bread flour, hard red spring wheat and spelt, features an addictive chewy texture and a sharp sourdough tang. It’s the sort of crust you wouldn’t dare leave behind. And to pair with your pizza? There’s a small market area featuring mostly natural wines from the Mediterranean, with crisp, bracingly acidic whites and lusty reds.
Read Jenn Harris’ review of Colossus Harbor.
Read Jenn Harris’ review of Colossus Harbor.
95. Al Baraka Restaurant
Anaheim Palestinian $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
I call the musakhan at Aref and Majeda Shatarah’s Little Arabia restaurant “magic chicken.” Available as a Saturday-only special, Majeda prepares the classic Palestinian dish with roast chicken that slips easily from the bone. It’s served over a flatbread painted with a piquant purple mash. You tear away pieces of bread, equal parts crisp and chewy, and use it to hold strips of chicken and a few toasted almonds. The confluence of textures, with ultra-sweet onions and tart sumac, is pure magic. But I suggest filling the table with Majeda’s full repertoire of Levantine dishes. Kubba with laban features fried, spiced meat and bulgur dumplings gently simmered in a garlicky yogurt sauce. The mansaf is intensely rich and tangy with lamb shanks coated in a dry goat’s milk yogurt called jameed. I crave it all, but I need that magic chicken. I’ll see you there.
94. Lum-Ka-Naad
Northridge Thai $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The dish I longed for all summer wasn’t a bowl of cold noodles, tomato salad or corn-filled pasta. It was the crisp anchovy and apple salad from Ratri Sonbalee’s two-decades-old Northridge restaurant. She tosses matchsticks of tart green apple with chile, lime, cilantro, shallots and heaps of crunchy fried anchovies that pop with umami bursts in each bite. It’s one of nearly two dozen southern and northern Thai specialties on a menu that boasts more than 100 dishes. Sonbalee’s signature southern Thai khua gling kra dook moo thrills with a curry paste supercharged with chiles, makrut lime leaves and lemongrass over pork ribs. Attempt to make room for a few northern specialities too, like larb khua, pungent and peppery with fresh rau ram. And regardless of your tolerance for spice, just know that if something says “spicy” on the menu, it will likely make your eyes water.
93. Borit Gogae
Koreatown Korean Barbecue $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
SeongHee Jeong and her family operate one of Koreatown’s front-runner restaurants of the decade, a counterpart to the community’s myriad barbecue palaces. Borit Gogae serves a $35-per-person set menu organized around a base of boribap (barley rice). It’s a feast of soups, crunchy salads, kimchi and other banchan-style seasoned vegetables (including tea leaf, wild greens, eggplant, oyster mushrooms and stir-fried peppers) and, for dessert, dried persimmon rolls and plum tea. The staff deliver them to the table in a whirl. It’s your task to assemble lunch or dinner to your taste, similarly to bibimbap, adding what appeals to your bowl, mixing flavors and finishing with drizzles of sesame oil and staining flicks of gochujang. The spread is nearly vegetarian, with options for group platters of thoroughly marinated galbi or bulgogi or salt-cured croaker. Large canvases of colorful art by Jeong line the walls, filling an otherwise industrial space with the same wholesome spirit as the food.
Wilshire / Western Station
92. Macheen
Boyle Heights Mexican $
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
If I’m introducing visitors to the glories of L.A. breakfast burritos, I take them to Jonathan Perez’s daytime taqueria in Boyle Heights. So much about the place speaks to our dining era. It’s housed inside Milpa Kitchen as an open-ended daytime residency, as is the coffee program, run by baristas Xuan Carlos Espinoza and Joel Espinoza, called Cafe Cafe Mobile. The sidewalk patio absorbs customers into the neighborhood, set on a tree-lined corner chock-a-block with local businesses. Perez makes modern, individualist breakfast burritos. He scrambles eggs with Swiss cheese; he likes its creaminess and nuttiness. Tater tots receive a dusting of dried chiles. Choose from among five meats and their preordained pairing: birria with chipotle aioli, pork belly with avocado salsa, and Filipino longanisa (a favorite) with salsa macha. Burritos reheat magnificently at home. Tacos? Tacos are a moment. Perez’s menu includes a fish taco smeared with roasted jalapeño tartar sauce and overlaid with frisée slaw. Engineered to be polished off the second they’re in hand, two of them is all you need for a quick, magnificent lunch.
Soto Station
91. Phởholic
Garden Grove Vietnamese $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Lunch at the Phởholic in Westminster is a chaotic affair that starts in the parking lot. People lounge on disintegrating office furniture while they wait for their names to be called. Cars double park, blocking the driveway while customers load their trunks with plastic bags of food. Once you’re seated inside, you have about three seconds before someone comes to take your order, and about two minutes later your table is crammed with steaming bowls of pho. In an area crowded with pho joints, owner Gordon Pham’s broth stands apart, silky and balanced with a savory backbone and the fleeting fragrance of cloves and star anise. I order mine with slivers of ruby-centered beef, boulders of oxtail and a heap of fresh rice noodles. If you’ve bought into the collagen craze, you can add an extra beef bone and use the provided scissors to snip away at bits of tendon to add to your pho.
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90. Jacaranda
Hollywood Californian $$$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
To describe Daniel Patterson’s cooking at the 30-seat tasting-menu restaurant he runs with his wife, music industry veteran Sarah Lewitinn, I zoom in on a dish as orange as an egg yolk: a squash blossom stuffed with a shrimp-and-squash dumpling in a circle of sauce made of squash, saffron and turmeric. Dots of oil infused with shrimp heads, dried scallops, ginger and other aromatics pull the brain in the direction of Cantonese flavors, but the overall effect evokes more of a vibe — a broadly Southern Californian, strolling-on-a-cloudless-summer-day kind of feeling — than it does any one cuisine or culture. Moments like these have me rooting for Jacaranda, which opened in May and is evolving quickly and for the better. The couple had originally envisioned their first joint venture as a nightly dinner party, but Patterson’s cuisine is the kind of equation (flawless ingredients plus intellectual heft) suited more to occasion dining than a casual event. As they adjust the tone, other elements are already in place, including ace beverage director Rick Arline and turn-your-head artwork by Lewitinn’s uncle, Abstract Expressionist Landès Lewitin.
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89. Biriyani Kabob House
Koreatown Halal Indian Pakistani $
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The dish most worth singling out at Enam Karim’s 25-seat Koreatown restaurant is Hyderabadi lamb biryani, one of the great rice feasts of Los Angeles. It’s prepared kacchi-style, a method developed during the Mughal Empire that layers raw, yogurt-marinated meat (in this case lamb shank) with rice and an intense masala of ginger, garlic, cardamom and a dozen other seasonings. The ingredients meld over low heat in a sealed pot, until the meat falls away from the bone and the infused flavors dart from floral to earthy to spicy-sweet in one forkful. When ordering from the menu of four dozen Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani dishes, stay focused on this particular biryani and the specials that reflect Karim’s origins in Karachi, Pakistan, including nihari (beef in a thick, gingery gravy), hariyali chicken (simmered in a neon-green sauce bright with mint and cilantro) and haleem, a complexly fragrant beef and lentil porridge so silky it’s nearly savory custard. Most customers ask for carry-out, knowing this food travels exceptionally well.
Wilshire / Vermont Station
88. Saqartvelo
Van Nuys Georgian $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Speaking from the pre-streaming era, sometimes a greatest-hits collection can be a masterpiece of sequencing and narrative, rather than a retread of played-out anthems or a randomly compiled playlist. That’s how it feels to dine at Saqartvelo, run by women who all grew up in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. If you’re new to Georgian cuisine, this Van Nuys cafe is an ideal immersion experience. If you’re familiar with Georgia’s stews, dips, dumplings and justly famous breads, you’ll find heart and intention behind the repertoire. The standard-setter on every table: Adjaruli khachapuri, the canoe-shaped, cheese-filled vessel, finished with an egg yolk and baton of butter for stirring into the molten center. Boiled khinkali — soupy dumplings bundled with oniony pork and beef, their wrappers pleated to resemble sun rays — tend to arrive next. Among brothy stews, the most compelling is called chakapuli. Cubes of diced beef hide among submerged herbs. The first spoonful is a ricochet of tarragon, which grows rampant in Georgia in the springtime and tastes bracingly delicious in this dish year-round in California.
Read Bill Addison’s review of Saqartvelo.
Read Bill Addison’s review of Saqartvelo.
87. Perse
Persian $$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The newest project from Farinaz Pirshirazi and her brother Farbod, who also run the Persian restaurant Toranj in Westwood and Manhattan Beach, has an especially shiny surface: Its open-air space, decorated in light woods and shades of cream, perches on the third floor of Brentwood Plaza Gardens along San Vicente Boulevard. It can take studying the menu, or asking Farinaz for guidance, to find the hidden treasures beyond elaborately plated versions of familiar kebabs and dips. The biggest prizes are regional dishes, rarely seen in Los Angeles, inspired by the coastal Gilan Province in northern Iran. Tahdig presented under a smoke-filled cloche mirrors the flavors of freshly harvested rice traditionally smoked over fruit woods. A sauce of walnuts, barberries and pomegranate molasses adds fragrant tart-sweetness to whole branzino. Same goes for brunch: Order the omelet with smoked dates, the billowy saffron pancake and the kuku sibzamini (potato frittata as flat fritters) to taste flavors that, in their rarity and deliciousness, break from the pack of most local Persian repertoires.
Read Bill Addison’s review of Perse.
Read Bill Addison’s review of Perse.
86. Tainos L.A.
Woodland Hills Puerto Rican $
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
Taínos L.A. owner Odessa Rodriguez and her uncle Edwin Torres wanted to create a cocoon of nostalgia for L.A.’s Puerto Rican community with their Woodland Hills restaurant. A longtime chef in both his hometown of Ponce and in San Juan, Torres’ cooking is distilled through the lens of his specific route to California. He lard-fries the chicharrón for his mofongo, creating prized pops of crunch and salt throughout the mashed green plantains. Rellenos de papa are halos of remarkably light, fluffy mashed potato around deeply savory ground beef. The pernil is cooked low and slow until the rendered fat creates a sweet and sticky crust around meat so tender, it nearly melts. Rodriguez credits Bad Bunny with a recent swell in appreciation for Puerto Rican food and culture. She’s probably right, but I have a hunch that her crowded dining room has more to do with the mofongo coming out of Torres’ kitchen.
Read Jenn Harris’ review of Taínos L.A.
Read Jenn Harris’ review of Taínos L.A.
85. Cosetta
Santa Monica Pizza Italian $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Zach Pollack’s superpower is serious playfulness. Dishes on the Italian American menu at his Santa Monica restaurant can read cheeky — “chicken wings alla Buffalo, NY,” “bloomin’ radicchio lettuce cups,” “Hawaiian Sunrise” pizza — but they arrive tasting of ingenuity, never as parody. This is perhaps truest of his mozzarella sticks, a carryover of his former pizzeria, Cosa Buona, in Echo Park: He nails the breading-to-cheese ratio, and the mozzarella is smoked and slightly more molten than lesser specimens. I swipe them through marinara and the nostalgia pangs quiet as I crunch into them. Longtime fans of Pollack and his now-closed Alimento in Silver Lake should know that though he initially swore off attempting pasta in Cosetta’s tiny kitchen to keep a tight focus on pizza, he has masterminded two baked versions: a freeform lasagna with bone marrow gilding its Bolognese, and shells, their tips handsomely scorched from the heat of the wood-burning oven, bathed in a clever mashup of vodka and arrabbiata sauces. Enjoy them on Cosetta’s large, leafy, softly lighted patio, great for groups.
Expo / Bundy Station
84. Found Oyster
East Hollywood Seafood $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Sitting on the covered patio of Found Oyster with a sweating $10 martini and your fingers covered in Old Bay should be a required experience for any Angeleno or visitor to our fine city. Ari Kolender’s sliver of a seafood restaurant on Fountain Avenue delivers a New England oyster bar experience in the heart of East Hollywood. You piece together dinners from handfuls of peel-and-eat prawns covered in that familiar savory, salty seasoning with a celery kick; a dozen of the day’s fresh oysters; and sweet crab cocktail. There should be at least one scallop tostada, dressed with yuzu kosho, apple and basil on the table. And maybe a tuna aguachile in a broth buzzing with lime and chiles. The restaurant is part of the Last Word Hospitality group behind some of the most popular neighborhood staples in Los Angeles. After seven years, Found Oyster, and its daily catch, feel as fresh as ever.
Vermont / Sunset Station
83. Bao Kee Cafe
South El Monte Cantonese $
(Dylan James Ho / For The Times)
Toisanese is a rustic-leaning regional subgenre of Cantonese cuisine, often punctuated with cured meats and salted fish, from an area of Guangdong about 75 miles west of Macau where the first wave of Chinese emigrants departed for the United States beginning in the 1850s. Kevin Liao opened Bao Kee Cafe in South El Monte with co-owner Bonnie Chen in 2022, earning community loyalists for the specific Toisanese cooking and, in particular, soups with ingredients that mine the precepts of traditional Chinese medicine. “Ranch chicken tonic soup,” a small, potent elixir otherwise translated into English as “chicken essence,” goes down like instant, intravenous nourishment. Also seek Toisan-style cured meats over rice and a homey, textured, sweet-sour dish that translates from Cantonese as “five-willow fried eggs” and is listed on the menu as “deep-fried eggs with pickled vegetables.” Last fall, Liao and Chen debuted a second, larger outpost in Hacienda Heights with a rangier menu that includes Hong Kong-style roast meats and braised goose in clay pot, a Toisan specialty. I’m most fond of the South El Monte original.
Read Bill Addison’s review of Bao Kee Cafe.
Read Bill Addison’s review of Bao Kee Cafe.
82. Delmy’s Pupusas
Atwater Village Salvadoran $
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Who makes the most outstanding pupusas in Los Angeles? Sharing a plate of Ruth Sandoval’s exceptionally light, crisp-edged masa cakes is a great place to start the conversation. Sandoval began selling pupusas at the Hollywood Farmers Market when she was 12 and her mother handled the cooking. For nearly two decades she’s had her own business, named for her mother, currently setting up at weekly markets in Silver Lake, Atwater Village, Echo Park and, continuing the family tradition, Hollywood. My first order is always her pupusa plump with quesillo Salvadoreño and loroco, the cheese molten and trembly and the earthy-bitter minced flower bud, which works with garnishes of vinegary curtido and red salsa to square the richness. In fine L.A. custom, Sandoval also exercises inventiveness. Alongside classic fillings like chopped chicharrón, she’s perfected an unorthodox vegan pupusa, created with beans and produce from the vendors around her. And most weekends, she has the option — absolutely worth trying — to make pupusas using blue corn masa, its flavor a little sweeter and texture more delicate.
81. Barbacoa Ramirez
Arleta Mexican $
(Andrea D’Agosto / For The Times)
Visits to this Arleta barbacoa stand typically take place in the early morning hours, when the light is still soft and the customers still bleary-eyed. As you near the front of the line, you’re handed a warm corn tortilla wrapped around a small pile of barbacoa dripping with its own fat and juices. It’s a tantalizing preview of what’s to come. Gonzalo Ramirez, who tends and butchers lambs in the Central Valley, slow-roasts the meat overnight. It falls apart at the slightest provocation, well marbled, vaguely smoky but tasting more like pure lamb than anything else. To appreciate the totality of Ramirez’s work, I order a taco filled with pancita reddened with chiles, and another that features crumbles of dense, unctuous moronga, blood sausage. The cup of accompanying consommé, half garbanzo beans and half broth, is fortified with barbacoa drippings and deeply restorative. This is the real breakfast of champions.
80. Barra Santos
Cypress Park Portuguese $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Perched on a barstool at Barra Santos in Cypress Park, with a glass of tawny Port and a plate of bacalhau fritters, it’s possible to feel like you’re seated at an impossibly chic wine bar in Lisbon. Here at one of the only Portuguese restaurants in Los Angeles, chef-partner Melissa López’s menu is an amalgamation of recognizable Old World Portuguese comfort foods and newer, smart interpretations. Her peri peri chicken is painted in a bright and tangy marinade with a sharp chile kick that grows ever more addictive with each mouthful. Sop up the sunset-colored sauce with a mountain of crunchy French fries. Or make a meal out of some of the most compelling bar bites in the city, with plates of grilled Portuguese sardines and anchovies draped over marinated peppers with potato chips. Just be sure to leave room for dessert. The pastéis de nata are some of the best in the city.
79. Badmaash Venice
Venice Indian $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The city’s love affair with the Mahendro family’s Indian gastropub started more than a decade ago in downtown Los Angeles, when Pawan and his sons Nakul and Arjun introduced Angelenos to a menu of chicken tikka poutine, lamb burgers and chili-cheese-stuffed naan. More than a decade later, the family has opened a third Badmaash, in Venice Beach. The new location is their most ambitious yet, with a patio overlooking Abbott Kinney Boulevard, a full bar and an expanded menu of Pawan’s exuberant ruminations on traditional Indian cuisine. Steak frites are doused in an au poivre spiked with masala. Tender lamb neck korma is slow-roasted and smothered in creamy brown-butter cashew and hazelnut curry. Market produce is used to make a “fruit chaat” with tamarind, red chaat masala, mint and toasted almonds. It’s the Badmaash you know and love, only more seasonally minded, sexier and with olive-oil-washed vodka martinis.
78. Lorenzo California
Beverly Hills Sandwich Shop $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Renato Araujo and Cynthia Raslan are delivering L.A.’s most sought-after sandwiches in a Beverly Hills space no bigger than my college dorm room. These are monstrous works of art, fashioned from layers of cured meat and cutlets on crackly squares of puffy schiacciata bread. Each one is clamorous with flavors, spread with Parmigiano pâté, topped with house-made giardiniera, slathered with basil almond pesto or white onion agrodolce, or drizzled with chimichurri. Whatever your sandwich persuasion, there’s a Lorenzo sandwich just for you. I’m partial to the Rafaello, with ribbons of mortadella folded over stracciatella cheese, fig jam, crispy onions and pepperoncini. The pops of acid collide with the sweet jam, the crunch of the onions and the velvety, porky cold cuts. What more could you want from a sandwich? Though, depending on the day, the chicken parm has my heart, with vodka sauce, almond pesto and enough melted mozzarella to deliver an epic cheese pull.
77. Stir Crazy
Hollywood Wine Bars $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
A recent Monday night was busy as usual at Stir Crazy. Customers filled every seat in its enveloping 500-square-foot dining room and even tinier patio while a modest crowd milled outside on the Melrose Avenue sidewalk during a short wait for their table. No one came off as impatient. We all understood we’d soon have glasses of citrusy Aligoté in hand, and that we’d be whooshing potato chips through scallion dip before bigger plates of tuna tartare with poached fennel and blackberries or poached chicken in green garlic butter arrived. Macklin Casnoff, Mackenzie Hoffman and Harley Wertheimer poured their tastes and hospitality know-how into a small space that radiates bigheartedness. Hoffman’s approachable list of wines — most of which come from producers around the world she’s followed throughout her career — maintains the restaurant’s center of gravity. Regulars know that Stir Crazy closes on weekends, which is about the most civilized choice for a restaurant staff imaginable.
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76. Tacos La Carreta
Long Beach Mexican $
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Since 2020, José Manuel Morales Bernal has been forging a distinct, umami-blaring taco style from his family’s Sinaloan recipes. He operates trucks in Santa Ana and Riverside, and established a taqueria in Whittier in 2024. His renown started with the first truck he parked in north Long Beach, and though you should try his specialties anywhere you can, there is still nothing quite like Tacos La Carreta at its origin point. To manage his expansion, he’s wisely narrowed the menu down to essentials. Chief among them are chorreadas, crisped corn tortillas covered with melted cheese, asiento (a rendered pork paste that’s the secret ingredient), chopped meat (asada, adovada, tripe or a combination), finely minced cabbage, chopped onion and a ladle of warm, thin tomato-based salsa. Smoky, stacked in flavor, singular. Also unmissable: toritos, flour tortillas enfolding a roasted Anaheim chile that’s split to cradle cheese and one of the aforementioned three meats. What’s that porky-buttery-nutty pheromone among the cabbage and salsa? Yes, a little more asiento.
75. Sqirl
East Hollywood New American $$
(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
Jessica Koslow’s Virgil Village cafe was the brunch disruptor behind ricotta toast and sorrel rice bowls. Now open for dinner, Sqirl has a menu that laser-focuses on hyperseasonal ingredients, fermentation and strategic pops of mouthwatering acid. Chicken liver mousse is sheathed in a layer of compound celery butter, its grassy edge slicing through that familiar offal funk. Think of it as the ricotta toast of dinner. Agnolotti are filled with caramelized onions and smoked beets. The cold-smoked pork collar is served with perfect, flaky tortillas. Koslow leads an all-star kitchen team that includes executive chef Guillermo Mendez, chef de cuisine Sandra Felix and beverage director Kayla Garcia, who is the mastermind behind the cocktail program. Her take on a cosmopolitan struck just the right acidity with fresh citrus. It was the cocktail I wish I was sipping in the 2000s. And Sqirl is where I want to be eating dinner in 2026.
Read Jenn Harris’ review of Sqirl.
Read Jenn Harris’ review of Sqirl.
Vermont / Santa Monica Station
74. Mae Malai
Los Feliz Thai $
(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
Malai Data recently doubled the size of the restaurant she opened in a shopping complex at the edge of Thai Town in 2023. The reason for her swift assent in the community? Her remarkable boat noodles, a recipe she learned from her mother-in-law, who’s made the dish professionally in Bangkok for decades. Data’s servings are small and under $10, as is time-honored in Bangkok markets, where people wander from stall to stall, tasting each cook’s distinctive touches. At Mae Malai, the beefy, murky broth races with star anise and white pepper, though a dozen other ingredients that Data is reluctant to reveal blip and glide across the taste buds. Servers have suggestions: thin rice noodles (among the five options); scribbly bits of pork over beef; and “medium” or “spicy” rather than fire-bomb “Thai spicy.” Dabble in pad kee mao, its wide strands smoky from the wok, and share cups of steamed coconut custard for dessert. But to really appreciate what makes the place special, you must order the boat noodles.
Hollywood / Western Station
73. Kuya Lord
East Hollywood Filipino $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
In August I bought tickets to a kamayan — a communal Filipino feast laid out on banana leaves and eaten by hand — that Lord Maynard Llera occasionally announces through social media and stages on the back patio of his tiny Melrose Hill restaurant. Diners assembled along one long, shaded table set with benches. In front of us Llera and his chefs arranged a dozen or so dishes in tidy rows, repeating the setup so people could reach whatever they wanted: vegetable-filled lumpia, soft-shell crabs sauteed in garlic and crab fat, whole branzino, grilled chicken brushed with herb butter, pancit chami (noodles tangling scallops, fish cake and shredded vegetables), grilled Jimmy Nardello peppers. Short rib kare kare was the showstopper, melting blocks of beef in peanut sauce, electric with fermented shrimp paste, pooling around fried long beans and smoked shiitakes. Many of these dishes, or close analogues, appear on Kuya Lord’s menu; ordering a “Kuya tray” with pancit, rice and a choice between five meats or seafood approximates the variety. Llera is our finest steward of modern Filipino cuisine. In takeout containers, on a restaurant tray, as a celebratory banquet: It’s meaningful to savor his food in any setting.
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72. Osteria Mozza
Hancock Park Italian $$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
After nearly 20 years, dinner at Nancy Silverton’s flagship Hancock Park restaurant feels somehow timeless and endlessly relevant. The sunshine-colored yolk spilling from the swollen raviolo into a pool of brown butter will always stun. The spectrum of cheeses adorned with salsa romesco, cruschi peppers or Cantabrian anchovies from behind the mozzarella bar will be forever worthy of celebration. And the all-Italian wine list remains the most revered for those appreciative of a bottle of velvety rich Amarone. In the restaurant’s cozy sage-colored dining room, it could be 2006 or tomorrow. When the world feels unmoored, you can center yourself in a bowl of tagliolini “Da Francescana,” like an adult version of butter-cheese noodles, slick with beurre de baratte and 36-month Vacche Bianche Parmigiano Reggiano made from the milk of white cows. In Los Angeles, excellent restaurants are the local currency, and Osteria Mozza continues to be the city’s dining lodestar.
71. Lugya'h
West Adams Global $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Maydan Market is restaurateur Rose Previte’s incredible 10,000-square-foot project inside a former West Adams factory. Underneath its exposed beams of wood and steel, seven dining options — a spinoff of Previte’s D.C. sit-down restaurant, Maydan L.A., and six counters each with its own visual and culinary identity — orbit a central hearth wrapped in bronze. Among the crush of options, we send you first to Lugya’h. Alfonso “Poncho” Martinez serves the specialty the city affectionately came to know as “Poncho’s tlayudas” during decadelong Friday night pop-ups in his South L.A yard. Over 14-inch corn tortillas, he spreads black bean refritos, lacy quesillo and handfuls of shredded cabbage. Martinez, who is Zapotec, grew up with cooks in Oaxaca’s Central Valleys who folded grilled tlayudas into fan shapes. That’s how he serves them too. Among meaty additions, look for moronga, an exceptional herbed blood sausage, its recipe a wedding gift to Martinez from the father of his wife and business partner, Odilia Romero. Beyond the must-try tlayuda, the complex, coppery-brown turkey leg is also wonderful.
Farmdale Station
70. Petit Trois
Hollywood French $$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Of all the places serving anything that resembles French food in Los Angeles, Ludo Lefebvre’s Highland Avenue restaurant is the only one capable of transporting diners to a chic, cozy bistro somewhere in Paris. Lefebvre’s food is straightforward, unpretentious cooking, with each square of chicken liver mousse toast, plate of vin jaune over tender leeks, and forkful of escargot its own revelation. Over the past decade, the restaurant achieved cult burger status for its over-the-top Big Mec, with two Wagyu patties and caramelized onions drowning in Bordelaise. But it’s still the only place that comes to mind when I want to eat something unapologetically French. These are dishes that haven’t been lightened up or dressed down for an American palate. Is the best omelet in the city being folded around Boursin cheese behind Petit Trois’ marble counter? Is it also home to the most decadent French onion soup this side of the Atlantic? Mais bien sûr.
69. RVR
Venice Japanese American $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Travis Lett’s California izakaya is the pinnacle of a Venice scene every single night, with beautiful people sardined into narrow tables, rounded booths and tightly spaced barstools. Lights are dim. Instrumental jazz on the turntable manages to fill the ear even through the clamor of voices. Amid all its commotion, RVR, in its second year, is also starting to feel like a neighborhood hangout, with regulars and crowd favorites: chicken thigh karaage drizzled with chile honey, shrimp dumplings beautifully rounded in the gold-ingot wonton fold and hand rolls cradling rock cod in tempura and slicked with tartar sauce. Show up to RVR itching to parse the traditionalism of its dishes and you’re probably not going to have a great time. But I trust we can agree on the technical command and the on-their-feet imagination Lett and executive chef-partner Ian Robinson display in the menu’s vegetable section: parsnip tempura in the winter, curry leaf-accented gribiche over asparagus in the spring, tomatoes and peaches and apricots and melons in blasts of herbs and interesting vinegars come warmer weather.
68. Olive & Rose
Long Beach Farm-to-table $$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
One of the best representations of market bounty in recent memory may be the crudités plate at siblings Lauren and Philip Pretty’s Long Beach restaurant. In the center sits a pool of cilantro oil over a silky smooth broccoli hummus. Arranged around the plate are pieces of baby corn, squash, purple potato, cucumber, bok choy, fennel, beets, cauliflower and heirloom tomato. I relish each preparation, the way the hummus accentuates the freshness of every element on the plate. Known for their fine-dining restaurant Heritage, the pair’s Olive & Rose is decidedly more casual, housed in a renovated Midcentury Modern motel. Chef Philip’s ever-changing menu is short, with an option to sample one of everything as a prix-fixe for the table. There might be a tomato tart hidden under a flurry of leek ash. Or a filet of salmon over a rustic sauce Provençale. I’m looking forward to whatever the siblings dream up next.
1st Street Station
67. Rustic Canyon
Santa Monica American $$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
To sample the city’s most of-the-moment cooking, secure a table at this decades-old Santa Monica restaurant. Menus shift with the tides of the Santa Monica Farmers Market, and you’ll find whatever dominates the Wednesday and Saturday stands in executive chef Elijah Deleon’s hands. At the height of summer, there were wedges of Andy’s Orchard nectarines with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkling of salt and fennel pollen. He buried sweet Dwelley Farms corn under a blizzard of queso fresco, registering like an elaborate street cart elote. Deleon, like his predecessor Jeremy Fox, possesses the magic touch when it comes to handling superlative ingredients, knowing when to dial up the heat or acid, and when to leave something untouched. The stone fruit might be long gone, but rest assured that whatever lands on your table will be exactly the right thing to be eating at that moment in time.
17th Street / SMC Station
66. Aunt Yvette’s Kitchen
Eagle Rock Ethiopian $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The menu at Yvette and Russell Platoff’s Ethiopian restaurant in Eagle Rock shares parallelisms with its longstanding counterparts along Fairfax Avenue in Little Ethiopia. Servers will encourage groups to order the vegetarian combo, a color wheel of carrots, yam, cabbage, greens and spice-stained lentils and split peas spread around the circumference of a platter lined with injera. Classic meats — long-simmered doro wat, stir-fried tibs flecked with rosemary and serrano — arrive next, arranged in the tray’s center. But the Platoffs also assert whimsy and inventiveness to create a niche that’s all their own. Tree-trunk tables, emerald-toned tiles and art that once hung in Yvette’s grandmother’s dining room radiate chic supper-club vibes; it’s wise to make reservations at lunch or dinner. Specials like ye beg alicha (lamb stew), featuring an unusually direct thwack of fresh ginger, reveal the kitchen team’s confidence with creative liberties. Their ingenuity culminates in two ice creams they’ve nicknamed fire and ice: One is cardamom, and the other is berbere, the core Ethiopian spice blend that almost sizzles through the frosty sweetness, leaving the meal ringing in your memory and on your palate.
65. Budonoki
East Hollywood Japanese Bar Bites $$
(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
You could classify this East Hollywood restaurant as an L.A.-style izakaya, housed in a room purposefully devoid of natural light, like a beacon of basement-lounge hip. Chef and co-founder Dan Rabilwongse’s short menu highlights snacks and oshizushi, with Japanese-leaning small plates meant to support the mostly sake- and shochu-spiked cocktails. Tables pass around flaky pockets of curry pan bursting with molten mozzarella and Wagyu simmered in Japanese curry. Tiles of fermented pork sausage accompany balls of crispy rice you crumble and eat together with tangy slaw. Pay close attention to the tiny slip of paper advertising daily specials, where Rabilwongse might flex with a bowl of shari crowned with toro, seared Wagyu and ikura for decadent build-your-own handrolls. Libations are playful and well balanced, ranging from a martini dupe sharpened with yuzu and black pepper to the Joshikai, a plum-liqueur-forward concoction served in an über-cute penguin tiki mug (stolen mug fee: $150).
Vermont / Santa Monica Station
64. Two Hommés
Inglewood West African Southern $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The cuisine at Abdoulaye Balde and Marcus Yaw Johnson’s Inglewood bistro is ever-unfolding, growing more specific in its surveys of global flavors with West Africa as its starting coordinate. This year the duo debuted their version of chicken maafe, a peanut-based stew they dissembled, frying the bird separately and setting it over a velvety, slightly tangy peanut gravy. Minced chives and pickled Fresno chiles throw off sparks. It’s a showpiece around which to build a meal, starting with some boss small plates: zucchini buried in fresh herbs over crema, revved with za’atar and shito (smoky Ghanaian hot sauce); white bean dip zinged with Senegal’s mustardy yassa onions; and crab salad over fried plantains. More plantains for dessert, please, in a sticky cake dripping with bourbon toffee sauce. Balde and Johnson flex a playful streak too. At brunch, their handsome dining room turns into a day party, where everyone’s devouring berbere-spiced chicken and waffles and a giant pancake finished with a scoop of ice cream that’s melting and trickling into the pool of cinnamon-maple syrup beneath.
Downtown Inglewood Station
63. Yang’s Kitchen
Alhambra Chinese $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Cold noodles slippery with sesame sauce barely visible under heaps of carrot, cucumber and avocado. Meal sets that channel a traditional Japanese breakfast with yuzu and miso salmon or braised tofu alongside purple rice, miso soup, pickles, a soy egg and grilled seasonal vegetables. Hainan chicken rice rejiggered with dry-aged sea bass over rice slick with chicken fat and a side of ginger scallion sauce you’ll compulsively add to everything else on the table. Yang’s Kitchen is the place for every craving or inkling, where farmers market produce amplifies a menu that celebrates chef-owner Christian Yang’s Chinese heritage and the years he spent mining different cuisines and influences at the now-closed Cassia. Those cold noodles are made with Italian spaghetti. The brunch standout is a lacy-edged blue cornmeal and mochiko rice flour pancake. There may be a lively, elegant Portuguese Baga on offer by the glass. Whatever the occasion, Yang’s is the place.
62. Tacos Los Cholos
Huntington Park Mexican $
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
I’ve yet to find a carne asada taco more intoxicating than the heaps of mesquite-kissed, beautifully marbled meat at Tacos Los Cholos. What started as an Anaheim pop-up in 2019 is now a budding taco empire with locations across Southern California, including a sprawling restaurant in downtown Huntington Park. Here, the Santa Maria-style grill sits near the entrance, with glowing sparks flying off grates teeming with chicken and steak. The menu board encourages a build-your-own taco, baked potato, burrito, quesadilla, torta and even a pizza situation with an array of proteins that ranges from mushroom to sometimes Wagyu. I only have eyes for the prime rib-eye tacos. The smoke-tinged meat is beautifully caramelized, tasting of nothing but salt, the grill and itself. It is hard to improve on perfection, but a couple dabs of salsa tatemada from the salsa bar catapult the meat’s campfire flavors into another taco dimension.
61. Bridgetown Roti
East Hollywood Caribbean $
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
At Rashida Holmes’ bright, casual Caribbean restaurant in East Hollywood, it’s easy to home in on favorite dishes and stick with them. Mine: curry shrimp roti, the spices tingling and the seafood popping against slaw and its yielding wrapper, with sides of griddled macaroni pie and a patty plumped with lacy braised oxtail meat. Recently I brought a writer friend who’s a student of Caribbean foodways. She went straight for the channa and sweet potato roti, sighing over how the flavors reminded her of the best cooking from gas station kitchens across Bridgetown, a cultural staple in Barbados where Holmes has roots. The same friend noted the densely fragrant sauce spread across the cocobread fish cutter (sandwiching fried sea bass) known as “green seasoning.” Shado beni, the Caribbean term for culantro, gives the herby, garlicky mix its distinct pungency. Holmes’ business partner, Malique Smith, is Trinidadian, and I don’t know of fluffier, saucier doubles in Los Angeles. Bridgetown Roti packs up plenty of takeout, but doubles aren’t meant to steam in a box: Scarf them down at a table the moment they arrive to capture their specialness.
Vermont / Santa Monica Station
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60. Wilde's
Los Feliz British $$
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
When chef Natasha Price partnered with childhood friend Tatiana Ettensberger to open Wilde’s a year ago, taking over a snug corner space in Los Feliz, the buzz around the place simmered and concentrated into a single word: “British.” No question, some quintessential British comforts took a spotlight. Cheesy-snacky Welsh rarebit. An elegant rendering of fish and chips. Sticky toffee pudding for dessert. Full English breakfast and sausage rolls rolled out for weekend lunch service. “British,” though, was repeated so often its meanings vacuum-sealed around Wilde’s identity, ultimately squeezing more tightly than would prove helpful, or accurate. The restaurant is a different one than when it launched, and a better one: more expansive as a dining experience, and in its cooking, more specific and far lighter. By all means, crunch into Welsh rarebit to start, but then disappear into seasonal plates of Dungeness crab in saffron sauce, or sea bass with braised plums and fried marjoram, or a brothy tomato bisque with shellfish and cranberry beans. Is it modern British? Cal-Brit? Labels are so tempting, and so reductive.
Read Bill Addison’s review of Wilde’s.
Read Bill Addison’s review of Wilde’s.
59. Mini Kabob
Glendale Armenian $$
(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles)
There is no better place for kebabs than this tiny storefront in Glendale, run by the Martirosyan family for more than three decades. Matriarch Alvard cooks up batches of deeply smoky and jammy eggplant caviar, while her husband, Ovakim, and their son Armen are masterful at the grill, with beef lule kebabs so luscious, the meat barely holds its shape over mounds of basmati rice. The beef is ground fresh and kneaded with pork fat to achieve an unparalleled, tender texture nearly saturated in its own juices. Recently, the restaurant gained a new legion of fans for its breakfast burritos and “Cesar” wraps (not a typo). Armen is scrambling eggs in brown butter and combining them with beef tallow potatoes, a Gouda and Armenian cheese blend, fried sujuk, avocado and fire-roasted tomatillo salsa. And he’s swaddling chicken thigh kebabs and falafel croutons with Caesar salad in a warm tortilla. Just remember to ask for extra spicy garlic sauce.
58. Tsubaki
Echo Park Japanese $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
In February, Courtney Kaplan and Charles Namba’s 32-seat Echo Park izakaya turns 10. I can no longer envision the neighborhood without it or its fantastic next-door sake bar Ototo. Tsubaki’s menu has its pillars: Among them, charcoal-grilled yakitori (soriresu, a.k.a. chicken oysters, forever), chawanmushi threaded with Dungeness crab meat, dragon beans ambered in tempura and dragged through anchovy mayo, market salads sharpened with miso or ginger-soy and a donabe full of clams billowing scents of seaweed and cultured butter. Chef de cuisine Klementine Song ensures a seasonal, playful edge to the mix, cooling palates with gazpacho seasoned with dashi and ponzu in summer and winningly experimenting with Korean-style pancakes zapped with julienned garleek (the trending hybrid of garlic and leek). Whether it’s your first or your 1,001st time drinking sake, Kaplan’s masterfully chosen, soulfully annotated list will steer you toward a delicious and probably mind-opening drinking experience.
57. Taquearte
Pico Rivera Campechano Dine In $
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
There is no hesitation when claiming that Taquearte, a strip mall restaurant in Pico Rivera, serves L.A.’s best chilaquiles. Owners Monica Quinto and Anyelo Farfán are championing a style of chilaquiles specific to their childhoods in Mexico City. The chips are buried under an avalanche of green or red sauce, queso panela, zigzags of crema and diced onion. The sauce crackles with the bright, citrusy charge of tomatillos and serrano chiles. If you order the chilaquiles spicy, the guacachile announces itself in rippling waves of heat. And the chips remain in a magical state of limbo, between crisp and wilted. Before noon, there are molletes, the birotes smeared in refried beans and chorizo and blanketed in a single layer of mottled cheese. After noon, the kitchen turns out tacos campechanos on vast corn tortillas topped with grilled nopales, onions and fried potatoes with your protein of choice. Whatever time you visit, the city’s best chilaquiles will be waiting.
56. Majordomo
Chinatown American $$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
I used to think that the best way to dine at Majordōmo was with as many friends as possible. Enough people to justify the gargantuan short rib, mushroom rice and bing with every spread. But this summer, executive chef James Bailey introduced Dōmokase, a $175, 10-course menu that rolls out the restaurant’s greatest hits in ssam form, with bite-size courses wrapped in greens. Available Tuesday through Thursday at the counter, the meal begins with a series of banchan, then wows with an ice box filled with dry-aged fish, marinated blue Caledonian shrimp and smoked trout roe. There’s a procession of two-bite ssams like the cold fried chicken, then a finale of the restaurant’s signature smoked short rib, grilled and braised chuck, a bowl of ultra-luxurious beef fat rice and an entire board of condiments. The evening concludes with fresh fruit and a cloudlike sugar doughnut. I love my friends, but I think I love Dōmokase even more.
Chinatown Station
55. Lucia
Beverly Grove Caribbean $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
For Cleophus “Ophus” Hethington, celebrating Black foodways is central to the stories he tells on the plates at Lucia, the only fine-dining Afro-Caribbean restaurant in Los Angeles. His pastelón tastes like the sort of thing you make for someone you’re falling in love with, reimagined with sheets of plantain as thin as pasta between interchanging layers of Wagyu sofrito and pecorino béchamel. The beef cheeks that fill the patties are so tender, they’re practically spreadable. And the jerk chicken you might want or expect is replaced by a behemoth lamb shank, marinated in a pantry’s worth of spices like black cardamom and allspice, then braised until wobbly and tender enough to cut with a feather. The Fairfax restaurant also happens to be one of the most striking in the city, with a glowing 18-foot palm sculpture over the bar. And with nightly DJ performances, it’s a setting worthy of a grand night out.
Read Jenn Harris’ review of Lucia.
Read Jenn Harris’ review of Lucia.
54. Bistro Na’s
Temple City Chinese $$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Chef Tian Yong is behind the most sought-after duck in the San Gabriel Valley. Since introducing his Peking duck a few years ago, he’s continued to tweak his technique, fine-tuning the preparation into a six-day process. The results are incomparable, with plump, glossy birds sheathed in crisp skin that shatters like glass. Underneath, the lavish meat drips with juice. The ducks are only available by advanced reservation and in limited quantities, so plan accordingly. If you can’t secure a duck, there’s still plenty to covet. Crispy shrimp are fried and lacquered in a sticky hawthorn glaze. The Qing dynasty jar is a bubbling crock of imperial-style, fortifying chicken soup crowded with abalone, fish maw, quail eggs and dried scallops. And Yong’s ever-changing seasonal menu is full of hyper-regional specialties like a recent sha chong salad, made with wonderfully chewy and briny peanut worms, a seafood delicacy from the southern Chinese coastal region of Chaoshan.
53. A Tí
Echo Park Mexican $$
(Ron DeAngelis / For The Times)
Andrew Ponce’s Echo Park beacon began in September 2024 as a bar serving a short menu in a transitional space. As the menu expanded over two years, Ponce’s style has cohered and become more assured. His L.A.-coded Mexican cooking reads as a love letter to the city written in ever clearer, more confident penmanship. Some dishes rechannel professional experiences. Others are familial, or nod to the region’s culture. His tuna tostada brings it all together, a crackling delight of overlapping fish slices the color of fruit punch, lemony aioli peeking out around the edges and splotched salsa negra among a grove of whole cilantro leaves. Crispy beef tacos land the midcentury hard-shell taco nostalgia, yet its mulchy beef shank filling is a riff on an oxtail braise that Ponce mastered while in Bestia’s kitchen: It has sneaky depths. Alongside seasonal salads and aguachiles and more tacos and duck mole, I feel most often pulled to sip tequila or mezcal from among a tight selection of small-batch distillers.
Read Bill Addison’s review of A Tí.
Read Bill Addison’s review of A Tí.
Chinatown Station
52. Pizzeria Sei
Pico-Robertson Pizza $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Think of the new Pizzeria Sei in Palms as William Joo’s Pokemon evolution. A leveling up of epic proportions, realized in a sleek new dining room. He’s funneling his obsession with dough into three distinct styles of pizza. The first is the Japanese-inspired Neapolitan he’s known for, with swollen, leopard-spotted crusts. To fully appreciate Joo’s imagination, look for the Riviera, adorned with slivers of bluefin tuna conserva over caramelized balsamic onion jam and melted smoked provola. He’s also making a baked and fried montanara, with an impossibly light and crisp texture similar to youtiao. It has become the base for his signature mala-spiked garden pie with lamb. The third style is a thin and crunchy scrocchiarella painted with gochujang romesco. Reservations are still impossible, but now, you’re rewarded with tomato and fior di latte-filled suppli to start, tiramisu to finish, and a little more room to stretch your legs.
Wilshire / La Cienega Station
51. Moo’s Craft Barbecue
Lincoln Heights Barbecue $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
I suspect that nothing could deter the perpetual line outside of Moo’s Craft Barbecue. The pull toward Michelle and Andrew Muñoz’s wobbly smoked meats is that strong. The couple pioneered a new style of barbecue unique to their Eastside Los Angeles home, inspired by Central Texas, with an attitude that’s all Southern California. The pork ribs are meaty and intensely smoky. The brisket is cloaked in a jet-black crust, dripping with juice and generously marbled. The links are coarse-ground masterpieces of pork, fire-roasted poblano and Oaxacan cheese. Much has been said about the burger, fashioned from the brisket trimmings and appropriately named THICC. It is without a doubt one of the best burgers on the planet, but Michelle’s sides often threaten to steal the show. Kimchi fried rice studded with pork belly is its own treasure. And I’d probably wait in line all afternoon for a spoonful of beans crowded with chopped brisket.
Lincoln Heights / Cypress Park Station
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50. Yerord Mas
Glendale Armenian $$
Los Angeles has never seen an Armenian restaurant like Yerord Mas before. Setting up in a former Glendale doughnut shop, Arthur Grigoryan traces his family’s diaspora journey through a tight menu: pistachio-laced hummus inspired by an ancient Egyptian cookbook; meticulous variations on vegetarian and beef kyuftahs; a crisp, generous fattoush made with pastel-colored farmers market produce. Grigoryan’s $38 basturma brisket sandwich, a monument of high-quality ingredients and personal expression, transcended its viral social-media moments, both positive and negative. It’s the image you’ll still see online most associated with Yerord Mas, but Grigoryan, as of press time, swapped its laboriousness for kebabs, including beef and lamb meatballs in cherry sauce, a reinterpretation of the most famous dish from Aleppo, Syria. In other words, Yerord Mas remains in fascinating, real-time evolution.
Read Bill Addison’s review of Yerord Mas.
Read Bill Addison’s review of Yerord Mas.
49. Bar Etoile
East Hollywood French Wine Bars $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
This year Jill Bernheimer closed her 17-year-old wine shop Domaine L.A., a wellspring known for making a sometimes oblique subject more approachable to its customers and introducing an eclectic, global mix of independent vintners. Happily, we have Bar Étoile, the Melrose Hill haven Bernheimer runs with hospitality pro Julian Kurland. Gracefully bridging the definitions of “wine bar” and “restaurant,” its setup accommodates many moods. A solo martini after work, or a glass of something cool (a fizzy German rosé perhaps, or a peachy skin contact from Chile) with a friend before a film? The silvery, 22-seat zinc bar is the place to land. Trust Bernheimer or Kurland to shepherd you through the bottle list, steered by your tastes and budget. And by all means, stay for a full dinner. Travis Hayden’s menu is full of smart, wine-friendly twists. He encases chicken liver mousse and peach-Banyuls jam in a toasty block of milk bread and, alongside roast chicken, braises endive in whey caramel for a soft, sweet-bitter effect. I always order his cheese tart made with nutty Pleasant Ridge Reserve and dusted with chive powder.
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48. Evil Cooks
El Sereno Mexican $$
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
Of the hundreds of dishes I consumed this year, there was one that left me dumbfounded: Alex Garcia’s cheeseburger tartare at the El Sereno restaurant he runs with his wife, Elvia Huerta. The mound of rib-eye was dressed in a vinaigrette that zipped with pickle brine and was topped with a square of American cheese. A brilliant, completely unhinged, high-octane take on classic steak tartare. It was just the sort of thing you’d expect from a heavy metal-themed taqueria, run by chefs who refer to themselves as Pobre Diablo and La Bruja. The two gained a cult following for the inky-black Poseidon octopus tacos they made when Evil Cooks was a pop-up, but there’s so much more to explore at the restaurant: Blue sweet prawns in a tom yum aguachile that will leave your tongue ablaze. Chewy dumplings filled with silky black beans. In a city blissfully replete with Mexican restaurants, Evil Cooks is one of one.
Read Jenn Harris’ review of Evil Cooks.
Read Jenn Harris’ review of Evil Cooks.
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47. Ammatolí
Long Beach Middle Eastern $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
There is no more gracious setting for consummate Levantine cooking in Southern California than the downtown Long Beach restaurant run by Dima Habibeh and her family. Born to a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother and raised in Jordan, Habibeh meaningfully dovetails her origins into a menu of mezze, salads and meaty, shareable main courses. As Ammatoli has been embraced by the community since opening in 2018, more traditional dishes have continued to appear. Lately she’s introduced her version of molokhia, a pureed soup of silky-slippery jute leaves poured over rice and paired with half of a bronzed rotisserie chicken. She makes unusually delicate shishbarak, round dumplings filled with ground lamb and beef set in a pool of yogurt sauce and scattered with pine nuts. These centerpieces might be the midpoint for a meal that begins with gorgeously swirled hummus and sumac-bright fattoush, and finishes with crunchy-cheesy knafeh or date cake baked by Habibeh’s daughter Masah. A stunning corner location, the restaurant’s play of light and its calming, white-and-gold interior feel cheering at lunch, brunch or dinner.
1st Street Station
46. Holy Basil Santa Monica
Santa Monica Thai $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
People tilt their heads in disbelief when I insist that the most inspired, maximalist Thai cooking in Los Angeles can be found in a closet-sized restaurant at the bottom of a luxury development in Santa Monica. Wedchayan “Deau” Arpapornnopparat’s downtown and Atwater locations of Holy Basil seem like respectable warmups to the newest home for his musings on Thai street food, incorporating his Chinese heritage, Bangkok upbringing and years spent in India. You’ll still find signature dishes like lhon, with puri puffs filled with Dungeness crab, uni and coconut cream fragrant with lemongrass. And the yum kao, an addictive mixed bag of crispy rice, peanuts and slivers of red onion. But now, new favorites emerge, like the gra pow reimagined with sliced duck breast in a garlic-forward XO sauce with plenty of funk. It’s garnished with a picture-perfect, crispy-edged fried egg and rounds of bird’s eye chile that detonate like tiny firecrackers.
26th Street / Bergamot Station
45. Fat + Flour
Culver City Bakery $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Nicole Rucker, L.A.’s high priestess of pie, closed her original Grand Central Market outpost of Fat + Flour in May, allowing her and her team to channel their full creative powers into the Culver City bakery and cafe. The menu never stagnates. Summer is always magic time, when Rucker makes her annual journey to the famed Masumoto Family Farm to pick peaches and nectarines. A week later, I’m having a latticed peach and olallieberry pie so quintessential, so honest in its marriage of browned crust and bubbly fruit, I had two wide slices for dinner and nothing else. If I’d been devouring the pie in the cafe for lunch, I’d have started with a chive-flecked pimento cheese and tomato sandwich on toasted challah. Every season brings its gifts if you’re on the lookout. In winter, I always hold out hope that Rucker revives her warming (and laborious) savory hand pies filled with curried greens, paneer and potato. Also, at any time of year, she makes textbook fudgy brownies, and she’ll readily engage in a philosophical debate about the inclusion, or not, of nuts.
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44. Knife Pleat
Costa Mesa French $$$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Do the majority of people walking around the South Coast Plaza know that one of the state’s premiere fine-dining destinations is tucked into a corner of the shopping center called the Penthouse? It’s been seven years since Yassmin Sarmadi and Tony Esnault opened Knife Pleat, and every meal continues to feel like the discovery of a hidden treasure. There are several ways to dine, with tasting menus and prix fixe lunches. Whichever adventure you choose, the preparation of each component — whether meat, fish, vegetable or sauce — is flawless and injected with a bit of whimsy. Perhaps a nod to nearby Little Saigon, a recent amuse bouche featured a spring pea puree with pickled carrot and fresh herbs, invoking the flavors of a banh mi. Head bartender Adrian Saylor is an ace at libations, with a clever take on a Bee’s Knees fashioned with his own nonalcoholic gin. It may be my favorite N/A concoction in Southern California.
43. Le Dräq
Downtown L.A. Eclectic $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Josef Centeno thrives on change to reach his highest creative altitudes. At the turn of the year, he essentially rebranded his downtown Tex-Cal-Mex cantina Bar Amá as Le Dräq, a hybrid project that fuses Amá’s essence with the soul of Bäco Mercat, the restaurant he closed during the pandemic in 2020. His bäco creation — a round of yogurt-leavened flatbread folded around a mound of various global-inspired ingredients like an extra-large taco — is itself a vehicle of constant reinvention. An ideal meal at Le Dräq, then, might look like two or three vegetable-focused small plates (pimento cheese-stuffed squash blossoms, perhaps, or snap peas pinging with Meyer lemon, feta and salsa seca), a fried shrimp or soft-shell crab bäco and the green chile enchiladas that Centeno brought from his hometown San Antonio. The menu is in constant, innovative flux. I’m pretty certain you can count on the tall, gloppy, excellent cheeseburger and, at brunch, a snuggly wrapped egg-and-potato breakfast burrito that arrives in a golden crackling cheese crust.
Pershing Square Station
42. Destroyer
Culver City Breakfast/Lunch $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Cafe culture in Los Angeles is a specific construct that revolves around sunshine, a robust coffee program and things on toast. What Jordan Kahn has created at Destroyer, his decade-old, daytime-only cafe, is a whimsical, brunch-every-day wonderland where your avocado toast is replaced by an avocado confit gilded with über-concentrated slow-cooked tomatoes, smoked prosciutto and puffed rice. Where your sweet potato waffle holds the heart of a plate of soul food, smothered in braised kale with the depth of long-simmered collard greens, a fat slice of jamón serrano and a foamlike Gruyère cheese emulsion over the top. Where the fruit bowl is presented as half of a Weiser Farms sugar cube melon with a coconut yogurt core and a mound of chewy tapioca pearls. This is brunch like nowhere else in the city, and an accessible, sun-flecked way to experience the sort of mind-bending cuisine Kahn is known for at nearby Vespertine.
Culver City Station
41. Darkroom
Santa Ana Eclectic $$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
It’s easy to be captivated by Zach Scherer and Drew Adams’ singular style of cooking, with an approach to hospitality that colors far outside the lines of convention. Their signature dish is a thick slab of zucchini bread that eats like savory French toast, slathered in koji butter, seared until crisp and topped with a ribbon of Spanish ham. From their dimly lit restaurant in a Santa Ana industrial complex, the two are putting out some of the most thrilling, mind-boggling food in Southern California, culling inspiration from Asia, the Mediterranean and Latin America. Who else is filling agnolotti with a surprisingly supple combination of scrambled eggs and breadcrumbs? Or making umami-blasted furikake popcorn for their tomato salad? Or caramelizing onions in bone marrow for a burger they serve split and face-down in a pool of au poivre dashi? It’s all just as wild, fun and excellent as it sounds.
40. Damian
Downtown L.A. Mexican $$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The decade’s reigning upscale Mexican restaurant continually refines its dialogue between Mexico City and Southern California. Like the two cultures on which it draws, Damian’s dishes never stop evolving. A first crunch of the Cesar tostada, covered in a blizzard of Parmesan, is as much about deliciousness as it is about locality. Hollywood’s de facto salad atop a fried tortilla makes perfect sense, and crowning slips of silvery boquerones give the creation a more appropriate potency than the uni the kitchen originally used as a finishing touch when the restaurant opened in 2020. This is how Jesús “Chuy” Cervantes and his team craft the whole menu, taking familiar Mexican foods — ceviches, aguachiles, tamales, huaraches, carnitas, meats cooked al pastor — and rearranging shapes and colors and combinations without ever losing sight of their essential pleasures. A sleek Arts District dining room, with an even more urbane inner-courtyard patio, and a warm, committed service staff reinforce the elegance, as does the beverage menu with sophisticated riffs on margaritas, small-batch sipping mezcals and wines from Mexico’s Valle de Guadalupe.
Pico / Aliso Station
39. Sushi Inaba
Torrance Japanese $$$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Nothing will test your patience quite like sitting at the end of Yasuhiro Hirano’s seven-seat sushi bar, hidden within I-naba Japanese restaurant in Torrance. After the chawanmushi, recently studded with sweet Hokkaido scallops, buried under bits of crab leg suspended in dashi, and the impromptu sea snail tasting (I prefer the creaminess of the black water snail over the water snail), there is the procession of nigiri. Hirano ages seasonal fish to coax out each variety’s depth of flavor, then drapes it over his signature shari, seasoned with two kinds of akazu for a pleasant sharpness. You watch as the eyes of the other diners roll back into their heads with each piece of nigiri. People moan. Then Hirano turns his attention to you and delivers a scored sliver of salt-cured clam, or a piece of nine-day-aged bluefin tuna that’s butterier than actual butter, and it’s finally your turn for sushi nirvana.
38. Chi Spacca
Hancock Park Italian $$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
I have been lucky enough to witness, and taste, multiple iterations of Nancy Silverton’s meat palace on Melrose Avenue. As different people helmed the kitchen, I watched for the subtle changes in style and seasonality. Under executive chef Alisa Vannah, the tiny, fire-fueled kitchen is running on all cylinders, sparking new appreciation for the 13-year-old restaurant. Silverton’s focaccia di recco still stuns with its cheese-filled, bubbly, cracker-like layers. The savory pies are still fit to satisfy a fur-wrapped medieval king. The 50-ounce bistecca Fiorentina remains the bone-in porterhouse of your wildest, meatiest dreams. Then you make room for something new, like the harissa shrimp skewers, and you can’t help but lick the hot, smoky paste from your fingers. If you spot creamed corn on the menu, order it. Each kernel bursts with the milky sweetness of its natural sugars, adding a little late summer sunshine to whatever hunk of meat is inevitably on the table.
37. Kismet
Los Feliz Californian Mediterranean $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson’s Los Feliz oasis reaches its 10th anniversary in January, and it’s hard to overstate the restaurant’s national sphere of influence — particularly around vegetables as palette and pleasure. “What if?” questions have always peppered their most seasonal dishes. What if, for example, the pair begins with a sliced, just-ripened apricot over a bed of soft feta? What seasonings from the expansive California-Mediterranean cache might complement these ingredients? Their pitch-perfect answers: an herb sauce highlighting peppery, celery-adjacent flavors of lovage to accent the savory, and a trickle of cardamom-infused honey (along with chunky, melting flakes of salt) to round out the sweetness. These free-verse inventions leap out amid the menu’s stabilizing anchors, including a braised chicken leg stained with turmeric and the legendary crispy rice concealing a runny egg yolk. Pastry chef Meadow Ramsey brings the Kismet ethos home with joys like sour-cream cheesecake matched with hibiscus-roasted strawberries, or a ruffle-edged tart shell overflowing with warm caramelized peach compote.
Vermont / Sunset Station
36. Camélia
Downtown L.A. French Japanese $$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Restaurant critics keep dining-room-hopping schedules that don’t exactly allow them to become regulars at any one establishment. In an alternate life, Camélia is a place I frequent as often as possible. Courtney Kaplan and Charles Namba, the couple who founded Echo Park havens Tsubaki and next-door sake bar Ototo, pour their entwined professional passions into their third venture, a Japanese-French bistro in downtown’s Arts District. Namba continually refines his grafting of two cuisines: Dishes like roasted chicken in seaweed cream or an intense, easily shared croque madame built on shokupan and ham katsu have become staples, while a pork chop, crusted in hot mustard and honey and arranged with peaches, captures the menu’s seasonal cadences. As for Kaplan? She’s a civic treasure. She taught Los Angeles how to love sake, and here she continues our education while also flexing her French wine chops. Service-wise, this year Camélia hired an ace of spades among restaurant pros: Patric Kuh, former restaurant critic for L.A. Magazine. He’s the one in a bow tie, charming every soul he meets.
Pico / Aliso Station
35. Pasjoli
Santa Monica French $$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
If you experienced Dave Beran’s Santa Monica restaurant in its earlier years, you might remember an upscale French restaurant. One where he pressed a whole duck in what is surely the most showstopping table-side presentation the city has ever seen. You can still preorder the pressed duck, but after a 2025 glow-up Pasjoli is a mostly casual, playful affair. Maybe start with tots “style animaux,” an homage to In-N-Out in the form of a potato cake covered in jammy onions and a zigzag of cheese. Or chicken cordon bleu wings filled with ham and cheese and served with a buffalo beurre blanc. There are mini martinis (mar-tinys) and seasonal libations worthy of a dedicated trip to the bar. And that perfect burger slicked with bone marrow aioli and the famous grilled cheese? The one that I once declared the best in the universe? You can order both for lunch on the weekends. Plan your indulgences accordingly.
34. Bavel
Downtown L.A. Middle Eastern $$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Meals at Bavel feel like you’re experiencing something larger than just dinner. Like you’re part of a collective, boisterous movement fueled by bowls of silky hummus and gargantuan lamb neck shawarmas in a cavernous warehouse crowded with enough plants to fill a greenhouse. Could the epicenter of the Arts District actually be the raging fire in Bavel’s open kitchen? Maybe. Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis’ 8-year-old restaurant continues to evolve. That lamb neck shawarma is as luscious and wobbly as ever. You won’t find smoother hummus elsewhere. But attempt to make a little room for the kitchen’s newer experiments. Tuna kibbeh nayyeh is a loose interpretation of the staple Levantine mezze, featuring raw tuna seasoned with finger limes and turmeric oil over burnt toum, or garlic sauce. The lamb manti resemble the viral TikTok tortilla skewers, with repeating squares of both laffa and lamb belly sausage on a stick. And just like that, new favorites emerge from the fire.
Pico / Aliso Station
33. Sonoratown
Mid-Wilshire Sonoran $
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
There are certain cravings that only Sonoratown can satisfy. A yearning for the distinct char and scent of mesquite-grilled beef, and the handmade, lard-laden tortillas that somehow possess the same elasticity as Mister Fantastic. When Jennifer Feltham and Teodoro Diaz-Rodriguez Jr. introduced their decade-old, original taqueria in downtown’s Fashion District, they opened the floodgates to a citywide love affair with Norteño-style tacos. The restaurant is a tribute to Diaz-Rodriguez’s hometown of San Luis Río Colorado in Sonora, Mexico. Now, the two have three locations, including a Mid-City restaurant with a bar for beers on tap or a michelada with your tacos. If you’re somehow new to the restaurant, I encourage creating a feast of sorts to fully appreciate the mesquite grill and the flour tortillas: a grilled steak taco or two; at least one caramelo with chorizo and a smoky, grilled poblano chile; plus a tightly wrapped chivichanga filled with stewed chicken.
Wilshire / Fairfax Station
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32. Saffy’s
East Hollywood Middle Eastern $$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis’ East Hollywood kebab house roared into existence as a dinnertime blockbuster in 2022. Deliberately and winningly, Saffy’s has evolved into an all-day restaurant. Mornings mean eggs baked in spiced yogurt just until set, a brioche French toast that needs little adornment and pastries like glazed fritters with pockets of diced fruit or short, crumbly biscuits layered with ham, cheese and mustard. Fattoush, warm hummus and a saucy, spectacular beef and lamb brisket pita sandwich give the lunch menu its own heft while also previewing dinner possibilities. Nights still bring on the fireworks: small plates that veer from supremely smooth hummus scattered with pine nuts to grilled lobster varnished in green harissa, smoky-singed shawarma with a whirl of condiments, kebabs with abstractionist spices (a mixture of pork and veal, say, caked with baharat, poppy seeds, parsley, lime and serrano) and, for dessert, soft serve in rotating flavors like lemon custard or raspberry buttermilk. Crowds still descend, but what was once an explosive scene now feels like a community bedrock.
Vermont / Sunset Station
31. République
Hancock Park American $$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Over the last 13 years, Walter and Margarita Manzke have woven République deep into the fabric of the city’s culinary landscape. It’s the place you go to meet friends for French omelets gooey with Gruyère or cast-iron buttermilk pancakes dripping with honey maple butter syrup for brunch. While in line to order, you ogle a glass case filled with Margarita’s sweet and savory tarts, cookies, cakes and every imaginable form of golden laminated dough. If you miss the couple’s Filipino rice-bowl concept, Sari Sari Store at Grand Central Market, you’ll find an adobo fried rice bowl loaded with tiles of pork belly and a perfect fried egg. It’s also the place you go for special occasions, to celebrate with Walter’s superb vision of California bistro fare, like quail with chanterelle mushroom strudel or a showstopping, table-side Dover sole à la meunière. Whatever the occasion, République is the place.
Wilshire / La Brea Station
30. Electric Bleu
Mar Vista French Californian $$
(Yasara Gunawardena / For The Times)
Craig Hopson and Mai Sakai’s Mar Vista restaurant is an ambitious French bistro caressed with California seasonality and the occasional pop of Aussie nostalgia. There’s pâté en croûte with golden pastry surrounding a Port- and brandy-marinated filling splendacious with fat and the nearly metallic tang of offal. Steak au poivre in a Cognac-and-veal stock hot with peppercorns. Crispy fries dusted in an “electric” salt that pays tribute to one of Hopson’s childhood favorite foods in Australia. The restaurant is also home to one of the best, most accessible tasting menus in the city. The five-course menu is priced at less than $100 and does not require the participation of your entire party. Pro tip: Order one or two tasting menus for the table, and the rest a la carte. A couple slabs of steak au poivre. A little Gruyère fondue ravioli. A seasonal stone fruit salad. Velvety chocolate mousse for dessert. Everybody wins.
Read Jenn Harris’ review of Electric Bleu.
Read Jenn Harris’ review of Electric Bleu.
29. Little Fish Melrose Hill
Seafood $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The Filet-o-Fish-transcending sandwich that chefs Anna Sonenshein and Niki Vahle popularized through an Echo Park takeout window is now the gateway lure (though served only at lunch) to the couple’s first full-service project. Little Fish Melrose Hill qualifies as a seafood restaurant, but its owners sidestep a template that calls for shellfish towers and fried calamari. Dishes — from a tiny mussel sandwich crunching with potato chips to silky crudos and seafood-pork sausage with the right smooth bounce — meander through and between cuisines, landing as an effective union of Sonenshein and Vahle’s culinary gifts. That extends to desserts: Creations like bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream drizzled with Cabernet reduction rate instantly among the city’s most sophisticated sweets. Kae Whalen, one of L.A.’s great wine minds and hospitality freethinkers, leads the front of house and helps define the smart way Little Fish positions itself along the borderlines of casual and fancy, quirky and elegant. The room plays its part too, situated on a prime corner where L.A.’s singular light shifts, gilds and dims as daytime segues to dinner hours.
Read Bill Addison’s review of Little Fish Melrose Hill.
Read Bill Addison’s review of Little Fish Melrose Hill.
28. Baby Bistro
Chinatown Eclectic $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Every world-class food city needs a few heretics among its chefs — the ones who can’t cook any way but their way, defying common sense and easy appeal, introducing dishes that beguile without descending too far into weirdness. In Los Angeles, Miles Thompson is our star rebel. Inside a tiny 1890s-era Victorian cottage, he and his team serve an ever-fluctuating menu of six or so items, priced individually but designed to be ordered as a family-style prix fixe. A meal this summer began with batons of onion bread crowned with quenelles of pimento cheese and pâté-like mushroom sofrito; then veered into courses of mussels in lemony dressing with pickled grapes and dehydrated black olives, followed by squid stuffed with swordfish sausage among melty cranberry beans. We finished with tapioca pudding, scented with rose geranium and lemon verbena, dotted with pistachio brittle and concealing a layer of strawberry jam. Seasonality and experimentalism are the two cardinal points on Thompson’s compass, and Baby Bistro, in its second year, feels far surer in its direction. If you’re ever gripped by the dining blahs, this is the reservation and the remedy.
Chinatown Station
27. Sora Craft Kitchen
Downtown L.A. Turkish $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
After the print version of this guide went to press, Okay Inak announced he would be closing his restaurant in a tiny space at the edge of downtown’s Fashion District in late October. He was a one-man tour de force: canning, prepping, cooking and serving regional Turkish dishes you won’t find anywhere else in Los Angeles. He assembled plates of dips, dumplings, kebabs and stews into exacting geometries, and occasionally gochujang or yuzu kosho rippled among the pomegranate molasses, thick yogurt and jammy tomato. Honestly, one person shouldn’t — and ultimately couldn’t — pulling off what he did. He’s actively in search of a new location. His talents deserve a bigger space … and a staff.
San Pedro Street Station
26. Darling
West Hollywood Wood fired $$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Terrific news: Sean Brock got the memo. One of the nation’s defining Southern chefs, Brock arrived last year in a cavernous West Hollywood space (with an incredible high-fidelity sound system in the front lounge) and presented a menu serving … his take on California cuisine. It was off the mark. So Brock rightly course-corrected. Kerchiefs of country ham over summer melon, crackling-custardy cornbread with smoked tomato jam, grilled chicken mopped with a sophisticated barbecue sauce, lady pea succotash and other beautiful vegetable sides, a peanut tart with sorghum for dessert: The South is now in the house, where it should have been all along. Brunch means biscuits, fish over butter grits and Brock’s deboned, delightfully unhinged riff on not-too-fiery Nashville-style hot chicken, fried in a combination of smoked butter, country ham trimmings, schmaltz, lard and bacon fat. My one non-Southern recommendation: Dry-aged steak burgers are having a moment in L.A., and Darling is arguably making the best among them.
Read Bill Addison’s review of Darling.
Read Bill Addison’s review of Darling.
25. Vespertine
Culver City American $$$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Dinner at Jordan Kahn’s modernist fine-dining experiment often begins with a dish called “Wild Scallop,” an edible, all-white floral arrangement that involves the silken bivalves among frozen mousse and petunia petals, their sweetness teased out in varying degrees by passion fruit, aji amarillo and horseradish. As with most of the 12 courses over a swift three hours, it’s sculptural and curious and, importantly, delicious. That’s the thing, at the high-flying price of $425 per person, that feels most urgent to convey about Vespertine, which sparked so much polarizing debate when it opened last decade: More than ever, the experience is a culinary pleasure. Kahn still desires to push food to the far limits of abstraction, but on the palate the ingredients register as familiar (or at least familiar enough to appreciate), and the staff balances the formality of presentation with some moments of genuine connection. It’s easier now to relax and marvel at the setting inside Eric Owen Moss’ aptly named Culver City building “Waffle,” and at the Los Angeles horizons behind its curving, gridded windows.
Culver City Station
24. Orsa & Winston
Downtown L.A. Italian $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
It’s confounding that people continue to sleep on Josef Centeno’s 13-year-old Arts District restaurant. With all the fine-dining places spurring a frenzy around reservations, this is the one to book. Centeno is seamlessly coalescing Italian and Japanese traditions into an ever-shifting five-course menu. Dinner might begin with silky chawanmushi cloaked in summer cypress seeds, smoked trout caviar and baby Japanese sardines. Squid ink pappardelle lounge in a lobster cream sauce charged with the sweetness of Momotaro tomatoes. One constant is the satsuki rice seafood porridge, now a supplemental course. Imagine the most opulent seafood tower and textbook-perfect risotto together in a Parmesan emulsion, gilded with geoduck, sturgeon roe, Hokkaido uni and scallops, prawns and flakes of skipjack tuna. Each component vies for attention with its specific level of marine sweetness. To sip, sommelier Romain Racary has a tokubetsu junmai sake, lively Gamay or a special bottle of Giuseppe Mascarello e Figlio Monprivato Barolo to pair with any riches that emerge from the kitchen.
Pershing Square Station
23. Azizam
Silver Lake Persian $
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Cody Ma and Misha Sesar’s snug Silver Lake cafe has settled in as one of the great casual restaurants to open in Los Angeles this decade. Order at the counter and seek out a table on the cave-like covered patio. The staff delivers Iranian dishes that uncommonly spotlight the homier aspects of the cuisine. Rather than kebabs, there are small dishes of olives sparked with pomegranate molasses and mint oil, and an exceptional version of the herbed grain and bean soup called ash-e-jo, as well as the universal comfort of a turmeric-braised chicken leg over rice that’s even better splotched with wild-shallot yogurt. Follow Azizam on Instagram to keep tabs on Ma and Sesar’s occasional, crowning-achievement specials: variations on a khoresht (seasonal stew) that veer from late-spring sour plums paired with long-simmered lamb or fresh beans that gently snap against lacy-soft lobes of beef cheek.
22. Mélisse
Santa Monica American $$$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Josiah Citrin launched Mélisse in July 1999 (imagine the Backstreet Boys’ summer hit “I Want It That Way” playing on the radio during the drive over) as a fresh contender within L.A.’s pocket of haute-cuisine institutions. While his then-contemporaries disappeared over the decades, Citrin has kept Mélisse relevant through his uncanny knack for reinvention, a sharp eye for up-and-coming talent and a driving curiosity for the latest culinary techniques and global ingredients. His is a dynasty of grand L.A.dining. These days the kingdom operates within a luxuriously quiet, 14-seat theater of a dining room where chef-partner Ken Takayama presides over the open kitchen, and where dinner begins at $399 per person. An elaborate tasting menu unfolds over two hours, the courses arriving seamlessly while Grace Jones or Sade or Mick Jagger play over the sick McIntosh audio system. Tiny tarts double-pop with caviar and finger limes. Steady hands pour tomato soup into bowls filled with strawberry sorbet in the summertime. The finest quail and lamb; the choicest produce from nearby Santa Monica Farmers Market. For a special occasion, Mélisse remains thrilling.
17th Street / SMC Station
21. Sushi Kaneyoshi
Downtown L.A. Japanese $$$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Los Angeles has become a hotbed of omakase, with sushi chefs vying for diners’ attention with increasingly elaborate presentations and luxury ingredients. Often, the otsumami, or the collection of small plates served at the beginning of the meal, is a place to flex before a procession of nigiri. At Yoshiyuki Inoue’s Little Tokyo sushi den, every course propels Kaneyoshi above the rest, with no need for caviar or flakes of gold. His ankimo is singularly spectacular, with a velvet-soft texture that melts on the tongue, and a flavor like concentrated sea butter. He might break up courses of torched barracuda or chutoro nigiri with a crackling slab of green-eye fish tempura cradled in seaweed alongside his perfectly seasoned shari. If you’re lucky, there will be kohada. Inoue’s curing process heightens the silver-skinned fish’s natural umami-rich oils into something irresistibly supple. For the true sushi obsessives in this town, there is only Kaneyoshi.
Little Tokyo / Arts District Station
20. Komal
Historic South-Central Mexican $
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
On the one hand, ordering at the food stall in Mercado La Paloma run by Fátima Juárez and her husband, Conrado Rivera, means deciding between tacos served open-faced and spread with strips of beef and chorizo, or the dazzling quesadilla filled with quesillo and decorated with squash blossoms splayed like a crown, or flautas stuffed with cheese-enriched mashed potatoes. As the mottled golden tiles lining its walls suggest, corn is the meaning behind Komal. Juárez grinds and nixtamalizes at least three varieties of masa derived from heirloom corn varieties grown by Mexican farmers. Each is specific in texture and flavor. A nutty, dark-blue strain becomes tapered tlacoyos, filled with creamy ayocote beans and covered in cactus salad. The shape shows off the masa’s fudgy denseness. Fluffy, strawberry-pink masa forms chuchitos, roundish Guatemalan-style tamales steamed inside dried corn husks; braised pork, sour cream and pickled vegetables offset the subtle sweetness. Weekend specials roll with Juárez’s memories and imaginations: carnitas tacos, chilaquiles verdes, maybe pan de aguacate y cacao dolloped with avocado leaf-infused cream for dessert.
Jefferson / USC Station
19. Quarter Sheets
Echo Park Pizza Bakery $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
It’s accurate enough to think of Aaron Lindell and Hannah Ziskin’s tiny Echo Park phenomenon as the “pizza and cake restaurant.” Tackle Lindell’s shape-shifting pizza creations — his main Detroitish-style, a midweight Sicilian variation and a crackly thin bar pie available for dine-in only Mondays through Thursdays — plus a slice of Ziskin’s pastel, featherlight princess cake, and dinner will be complete and excellent. But Quarter Sheets is also a place of layered realities. The couple have had wide-ranging culinary careers, and the longer they settle in here the more they reassert their expansive identities. A recent hot-weather special, for example: Lindell paired plump, smoky Sheboygan-style brats with frying peppers and pickled Jimmy Nardellos, which Ziskin matched with tri-textured chocolate-cherry-pistachio spumoni. The garnishes for braised gigante beans, a menu staple, constantly evolve in bright, brothy, cheese-dotted ways. Ziskin and pastry chef Krista Hernandez continually swap out soul-soothing fruit pies and elaborate sundaes for dessert. Takeout options are pared down, so plan a couple of weeks ahead for a reservation to discover what these sly geniuses are up to next.
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18. Broken Spanish Comedor
Culver City Mexican $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Broken Spanish, Ray Garcia’s modern Mexican groundbreaker, closed in 2020 but has been reborn. What was once a downtown nerve center for Garcia’s ambitions has been transformed into something closer to a mid-scale neighborhood restaurant. In his new digs, a steep-roofed Culver City building where previous tenants included Roy Choi’s A-Frame, Garcia tacked “Comedor” onto the name, a word meaning “diner” or “cafeteria.” Whether you’re reacquainting yourself with his style or experiencing it for the first time, jump in with an order of refried lentils cooked with fistfuls of epazote and creamy with quesillo. Some signatures remain intact, including the chicharrón reimagined into a crisp-soft pinwheel of pork belly and duck albondigas permeated with smokiness from chipotle and bacon. Both dishes call out for mezcal alongside, and the restaurant obliges with an astounding selection of agave spirits. All in all, an informal room and scaled-back menu don’t diminish Garcia’s original intentions with Broken Spanish. They make them easier to appreciate.
Read Bill Addison’s review of Broken Spanish.
Read Bill Addison’s review of Broken Spanish.
17. Perilla L.A.
Chinatown Korean $
(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)
When I need to feel nourished, I head to Jihee Kim’s banchan shop and order the dosirak (lunch box) containing two modest-sized filets of grilled black cod over rice. The fish has been marinated in doenjang (fermented soybean paste), coaxing out sweetness that complements its smoky char. Alongside are a few forkfuls of four types of banchan: kimchi made with cabbage or collards or yu choy, depending on the time of year; perhaps sesame greens slicked in garlic confit puree, or a chile-flecked duo of fermented cucumber and Korean melon; and, always, one circle of paper-thin omelet rolled in a hypnotic spiral. Occasionally I ask for the dosirak with grilled chicken, or squiggly sliced beef in gochujang sauce that saturates the rice underneath. Even if I stick around to eat my meal at an umbrella-covered table in the surrounding courtyard, I never forget to bring home banchan to mix and match for lunch the next few days. As many of us have learned over Perilla L.A.’s three years in business, Kim’s food makes for superb daily sustenance.
Chinatown Station
16. Antico Nuovo
Larchmont Italian $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The best introduction to Chad Colby’s Larchmont restaurant is the focaccia — tall, steaming cliffs of bread slick with olive oil. You tear away big chunks to swipe through silky duck liver pâté or top with anchovies and spoonfuls of bagna verde. The former Chi Spacca chef applies his signature meaty erudition to rustic ragùs, glossing foglie d’ulivo (olive leaf pasta) in a sauce rich with fire-roasted squab. Or fortifying his Bolognese with beef cheek and veal tongue. Then there are, of course, the grilled meats, pork ribs, for example, tinged with smoke and licorice from a dusting of fennel pollen. But interspersed between all the fire and protein are bursts of freshness. Seasonal stone fruit is tossed simply with marsala and basil. And the most compelling presentation of produce may be in the restaurant’s ice creams, with ripe peach, melon and strawberry on offer at the height of summer. At Antico, you always save room for dessert.
15. Henrietta
Echo Park Californian Italian $$
(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
Henrietta is easily my favorite new opening of the last year. Owner Max Lesser and chef Alexis Brown have succeeded in creating a destination-worthy neighborhood restaurant that feels familiar, even on your first visit. While the sun is shining, there are excellent deli sandwiches and salads. Think an Italian sub filled with spicy capicola and, instead of fries, a mountain of crisp and creamy smashed potatoes smothered in garlic aioli buried under a snowstorm of Parmesan cheese. In the evening, a concise menu of familiar dishes — beef tartare, tuna crudo, half-chicken, rigatoni — only in Brown’s hands, they’re even more satisfying. The chicken is served as a deconstructed Caesar salad, with fuchsia chicories, warm croutons and an addictive dressing sharp with vinegar. Bluefin crudo is dressed in a nearly electric calamansi and blood orange vinaigrette. Wine pro Katie Vonderheide put together a small, eclectic, accessible list of things to drink.
Read Jenn Harris’ review of Henrietta.
Read Jenn Harris’ review of Henrietta.
Grand Ave Arts / Bunker Hill Station
14. Funke
Beverly Hills Italian $$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Evan Funke is the undisputed master of pasta in Los Angeles, fueled by an earnest appreciation for preserving Italian traditions. From the pasta laboratory at his Beverly Hills restaurant, Funke and his team hand-shape winding strands of busiate and concave discs of orecchiette. The cooking stays loyal to Italy, though occasional peak-season ingredients sneak their way onto the menu. The corn agnolotti, only available during the briefest window, is a celebration of both beautifully constructed pasta and the season’s sweetest bounty. And there’s so much more to explore, including the pizzas. The Amalfitana delivers a lightning bolt of citrus on a delicate, crisp crust. And pastry chef Shannon Swindle makes a sweet finish nonnegotiable. A strawberry and hibiscus meringata at the height of summer, layered with a bracingly fresh granita, delicate meringue and juicy squares of pâte de fruit over a tangy crème fraîche panna cotta may be the best dessert I’ve had all year.
13. Seline
Santa Monica Californian $$$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
In June, Dave Beran brought home the James Beard Foundation title of best chef in California for his 38-seat black box theater in Santa Monica, a restaurant that triumphantly culminates his years in the trenches of modernist fine dining. He previously led the kitchen at Next in Chicago, where heady, doggedly researched themes (“The Hunt,” “Bocuse d’Or,” “Kyoto Kaiseki”) change three times a year. The responsibility imbued him with a scholarly approach to tasting menus. Last decade I described the cooking at Dialogue, Beran’s now-closed predecessor to Seline, as “surrealism meets seasonality,” and that’s the métier he has perfected. The plating doubles as a class in art history: naturalism, abstractionism, an O’Keeffe-esque moment involving antlers looming over a bowl of ribboned celery root. Combinations like caviar and coffee, or sausage-stuffed squash blossoms swathed in Béarnaise sauce, can sound outlandish. But logic and pleasure ultimately prevail. Beran, his chefs and his dining room staff swirl around tables, delivering courses and charm. Just as he has mastered distinctions between the intellectual, the sensory and the adventurous in his cooking, he also has learned how deeply diners want to feel welcomed.
12. Anajak Thai
Sherman Oaks Thai $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Time)
It would be romantic to think of Anajak as a heritage site: Justin Pichetrungsi continues to both honor and reimagine the Sherman Oaks restaurant, now in its 45th year, founded by his parents, Ricky and Rattikorn. Justin uses Ricky’s recipes, merging his Thai upbringing and Cantonese heritage, as an outline, resketching sauces for Dungeness crabs and Peruvian scallops and barbecued pork collars to his own definitions. But really, Anajak is more of an embassy. It’s the welcome party, in a setting fresh from a renovation last year, where we take visiting friends to present one great working thesis for dining in Los Angeles. It’s where Justin is always hosting collaboration dinners with the best chefs, local and otherwise. It’s also the place to drink canon Rieslings and Champagnes and Burgundies that pair brilliantly with Thai flavors. I’m convinced wine director Ian Krupp makes the script of his bottle list unreadably microscopic so people rely instead on conversation with him. His enthusiasm, like the restaurant as a whole, is impossible to resist.
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11. Restaurant Ki
Downtown L.A. Korean $$$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
What does modern Korean dining in Los Angeles look like in 2026? Consider the dozen courses at Ki Kim’s wildly ambitious 10-seat restaurant in Little Tokyo, where he builds a narrative of Korean homecooking, framed by the exacting precision of fine dining. Tiny mandu burst with ’nduja in a bone marrow broth dotted with brown butter and soy vinaigrette. Springy noodles are dressed with an intensely grassy pressed perilla oil. Gejang is reimagined as luscious soy-marinated blue crab folded into crispy quinoa and rice slick with crab fat crowded with bits of ice plant and tarragon. Dry-aged duck is accompanied by a bite-size corn dumpling, duck liver with habanero powder and chayote wrapped in radish skin like three tiny banchan. Each course unfolds like a layered memory, rendering the label “modern Korean” too simple for an experience so singular and deeply personal. Restaurant Ki, and Kim, are in a league of their own.
Little Tokyo / Arts District Station
10. Alta Adams
West Adams California / Los Angeles $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
With Alta Adams, Keith Corbin established himself as an arbiter of his own brand of California soul cooking, mining the cuisines of Japan, Latin America, the American South and the Levant. After closing his West Adams restaurant earlier this year to recalibrate, he reopened in the summer with a menu that leans deeper into what it means to be cooking in Los Angeles at this exact moment. The Southern soul food bent hasn’t disappeared; instead, it’s seamlessly intertwined like a much-loved prequel to each dish on the menu. Start with the creamy black-eyed peas crowded with bits of crispy ham hock. Then onto the fire-roasted cabbage with wilted leaves painted in a jammy harissa miso glaze over a fluffy, nutty puree of tahini and labneh. Or the confit duck accompanied by a silky mole demi-glace tangy and sweet with black garlic. With the new Alta Adams, Corbin has distilled the restaurant’s California soul identity into something that feels unmistakably like the soul of Los Angeles.
Read Jenn Harris’ review of Alta Adams.
Read Jenn Harris’ review of Alta Adams.
Expo / La Brea / Ethel Bradley Station
9. Morihiro
Atwater Village Japanese $$$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Morihiro Onodera, who arrived in Los Angeles from Japan in 1985, is the spiritual figurehead of our booming sushi culture — the cool-uncle honcho at the top of an itamae family tree, having mentored many of the other sushi greats running their own places across the city. Onodera has been peripatetic during his long career: His most recent move was relocating his 6-year-old sushi-ya to a sedate space in the Elysian building in Echo Park last October. Wherever he plants himself, he brings ceramics he crafts as well as his devotion to rice, the grains (grown near his hometown in Japan) milled daily and seasoned exactingly to complement each seafood with which they’re paired. In the new digs, enjoying his mastery comes with options. One can dine at the long counter in front of star bartender Han Suk Cho, ordering a la carte sushi and small dishes like freshly made tofu dotted with ikura, tempura and smoky grilled fish collar. Walk-ins can also choose a short-form $200 omakase. A handful of diners can reserve ahead for the nightly blowout event: Onodera presiding over a $450-per-person omakase, opening with courses that dip into technique-focused kaiseki traditions.
8. Providence
Hollywood Seafood $$$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Time)
When my partner and I first settled into our chairs for dinner, a dozen or so servers, food runners and sommeliers glided by our table, dropping off small first tastes and glasses of wine. The staffers we struck up a bit of rapport with? We began to see them more often and others subtly less so. I saw it wasn’t a coincidence —the opposite, in fact — when I noticed it happening with other groups. Providence is the seat of white-tablecloth extravagance in L.A. dining, justly famous for chef and co-owner Michael Cimarusti’s luxury coddling of seafood, including local catches through a sustainable fishing program he helped found. If you so desire, there will be showers of white truffles over lingotti with box crab and uni; there can be a parade of wine pairings that cost as much as the tasting menu (which is $250 per person). Fanciness without human connection feels empty, though, maybe now more than ever, and the warm, alert individuality that Providence’s front-of-house team bring to their jobs is as much the key to the restaurant’s longevity as the brilliant cooking.
7. Hayato
Downtown L.A. Japanese $$$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Brandon Hayato Go’s Arts District restaurant remains the most elusive reservation in town. A holy grail for those eager to join what has essentially become a private club. Yet, I will encourage you to believe a reservation is possible anyway. (Put yourself on the first-time guest notify list and stay flexible.) What Go and his minuscule team manage to execute is an experience unlike any other: nearly 20 courses that highlight both kaiseki and kappo dining. Depending on the time of year, there may be a mound of rich, almost custardy hairy crab, or a single piece of subtly sweet kochi, both flown in from Japan that morning. Or enduring favorites like crystal clear dashi and charcoal-grilled kinki with onions cooked low and slow over glowing embers. His obsession with sake means a list that boasts bottles you’re unlikely to find outside of their origin prefectures. And through it all, Go is the consummate host, ensuring each diner feels like a cherished visitor. Believe!
Little Tokyo / Arts District Station
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6. n/naka
Palms Japanese $$$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Each of the dozen kaiseki-inspired courses prepared by Niki Nakayama and Carole Iida-Nakayama at their Palms sanctuary has a specific beauty. Some are elaborate, as in a platter of one- or two-bite appetizers (including perhaps baby corn tempura and a tiny tangle of somen stained pink from plums) clustered on miniature plates of many shapes and colors. Some are minimalist, as when a black bowl arrives full of clear dashi with a pale sculpture-garnish for stark contrast — recently slices of vermilion rockfish crowned with sudachi, one of the citruses that the chefs, who are married, grow in their home garden. Given all this splendor, every dinner I’ve had at n/naka includes one novel dish that blazes and lingers longest in my brain. This year it arrived in a turquoise vessel that contained sunset-orange tomato dashi. The soup pooled around a crab and shrimp mochi dumpling, overlaid with a fried basil leaf that shattered its flavor everywhere. It tasted of summer, of Japan, of California. It was pure n/naka, which is celebrating its 15th anniversary and is currently, at $395 per person, at the height of its culinary powers.
Palms Station
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5. Baroo
Downtown L.A. Korean $$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
As a bastion of traditional and casual Korean cooking, Los Angeles has only a handful of exceptional higher-end modern Korean restaurants. The most brilliant of them is Baroo. Kwang Uh builds the dishes of his tasting menu — priced at $140 per person and paced to soothe Angelenos’ intolerance of longer, multicourse dinners — by matching local produce, seafood and meats with his endless forays into fermentation. Kimchi, pickles, soybean-based jangs (resulting in wild, wonderful combinations like smoky-fruity raspberry gochujang) and combinations like fermented black beans with rice wine in beurre blanc underneath black cod: One can never predict in exactly how many directions the flavors will ping and swoop. His food simply tastes right. An exquisite vegetarian alternative, requiring 24 hours’ notice, doubles down on the interplay between fresh and preserved ingredients, emphasizing knowledge he gleaned studying with temple cooking master Jeong Kwan Seunim. Mina Park, Uh’s wife, oversees a staff that’s ever-more convivial and skillful with beverage pairings, be it a glass of Champagne, locally made makgeolli or rose kombucha tinged with beet juice, doenjang and burdock tea.
Little Tokyo / Arts District Station
4. Dunsmoor
Glassell Park American $$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
When I ask strangers and friends about their favorite restaurant in L.A., or where they had their last memorable meal around town, the answer I hear more than any other right now is Dunsmoor. Yes. We love the place for its marriage of Southern flavors and small-farm California agriculture, its dining room’s honeyed ambience and the feeling of care emanating from the staff. The cooking, led by Brian Dunsmoor and chef de cuisine Manuel Mendoza, is both catchy and profound, like a superbly crafted pop song. It draws you in with small, appetite-prodding plates (pickled mussels, for example, or oysters whetted with ramp vinegar); hooks you with the lush chords of Carolina Gold rice glossed in shrimp butter, fish strummed with cured pork and all manner of peak-season vegetables; and sends you off humming with sticky date pudding. Dunsmoor’s latest signature dish is an unapologetically salty brick of braised bacon blasted with pepper vinegar and set among fresh black-eyed peas. Shout-out to new wine directors Zoë Brock and Simone Josephs, who have been highlighting vanguard California producers. Speaking of which: If you can’t land a reservation, swing by the adjacent bar for hanger steak with duck-fat fries alongside a plummy, leathery red blend from Lodi.
3. Holbox
Historic South-Central Mexican $$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Gilberto Cetina Jr. is a chef who possesses a superhuman command of the delicacies of the sea. One bite of his smoked kanpachi taco, the griddled tortilla brimming with applewood-smoked fish and queso Chihuahua, and you’ll see there’s no mystery enshrouding the Holbox mania. His ceviches, aguachiles and tostadas are revolutionary in their freshness, their jolts of citrus and their ability to captivate you in a single bite. Offered twice a week, Cetina’s tasting-menu reservations are the hottest ticket in town. Each of the 10 courses comes with a powerfully visceral epiphany. A seafood and masa tamal is veiled in an exquisite abalone liver and plantain mole. The Dungeness crab and smoked yellowtail taco is dressed in a crab butter salsa macha resplendent with crab fat. Holbox is a vital, sublime destination that should have the entire city beaming with pride.
Jefferson / USC Station
2. Kato
Downtown L.A. Taiwanese $$$$
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
I’ve been lucky enough to taste the decadelong trajectory of Jon Yao’s cuisine. To witness his quest to capture the breadth and vitality of the entire San Gabriel Valley in a handful of courses. Recently, he resurrected the mala craze of the mid-2000s with a slab of Mt. Lassen trout in sour vegetable broth. His reimagining of Peking duck stunned with a crackly skinned breast over a pool of duck jus humming with Taiwanese maqaw seeds. The confit legs were tucked into a sesame-crusted mochi bun while sweet plum encased an orb of duck liver mousse. The all-star team keeps stride, with managing partner Nikki Reginaldo’s warm hospitality; bar director Austin Hennelly’s layered, wonderfully well-balanced cocktails; and co-owner and wine director Ryan Bailey’s efforts to present the most eclectic, comprehensive wine book in the city. And the recent additions of pastry chef Erika Chan (I’m still dreaming of a peach and sticky rice summer tart) will have you floating out of the dining room.
San Pedro Street Station
1. Lielle
Pico-Robertson California-Nordic $$$$
(Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)
A newcomer, less than a year old, has soared all the way to the guide’s highest slot? Yes. Swedish chef Marcus Jernmark stunned us both with his finer-dining debut in a glamorous subterranean lair on West Pico Boulevard. “Finer,” meaning: four substantial set courses, which change every six or so weeks, for a reasonable $150 per person in our era of $400 tasting menus. The restaurant, packed nightly, doubles as a master class on how to conduct an effective introduction to Los Angeles. This isn’t someone trying to demonstrate what “California cuisine” should be; it’s someone keeping us rapt with his own story. Jernmark’s genius — pairing his Scandinavian instincts with the riches of our local harvests — doesn’t jump out through a perfunctory scroll of Lielle’s dishes on social media. Everything is meticulously plated, but you have to taste the flashbulb-bright acidity among hills of snipped vegetables and luxe seafood, and how he pairs meats and fruits for maximum dramatic tension. And the bread! Two loaves bookend dinner: Crusty-plush sourdough to be smeared with cultured butter that’s nearly cheese, and golden cardamom buns soaked in a Jernmark concoction riffing on boozy spiced Swedish punsch.
Lielle is astonishing from the outset, a rarity heightened by the front-of-house staff’s united, enlightened mode of hospitality; the surroundings, designed to evoke a sumptuous wine cave; and a spectacular, diverse wine list worthy of the atmosphere. Is it the great higher-end debut of the decade? Quite possibly, and there’s a bonus: Jernmark and his team just opened Marée, a bistro upstairs from Lielle, with fun brainstorms like mussels “gratin” and the city’s next must-have burger.
Read Bill Addison’s review of Lielle.
Lielle is astonishing from the outset, a rarity heightened by the front-of-house staff’s united, enlightened mode of hospitality; the surroundings, designed to evoke a sumptuous wine cave; and a spectacular, diverse wine list worthy of the atmosphere. Is it the great higher-end debut of the decade? Quite possibly, and there’s a bonus: Jernmark and his team just opened Marée, a bistro upstairs from Lielle, with fun brainstorms like mussels “gratin” and the city’s next must-have burger.
Read Bill Addison’s review of Lielle.
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