Gjelina is cheerful, boozy & known for both its good-looking customers & Travis Lett's decent organic-fetish Italian food. The scene may be as crunchy as the pizza crust, but relax: It's Abbot Kinney. Read more.
A nice place to drop in for Basque-inspired tapas: crisp, gooey chicken croquettes; lamb meatballs glazed with caramelized tomato sauce; tiny squid stuffed with duck sausage; or Spanish cured meats. Read more.
Specializes in cooking Kerala: saucer-shaped rice-flour saucers called appam; an obscurely flavored fish curry with undernotes of tamarind and garlic; the peppery, buttery cashew-rice dish ven pongal. Read more.
Get the mole sampler and spend the evening comparing Oaxacan black mole with mellower mole Poblano; with the spicy, smoky mancha manteles; or with the signature mole de los dioses. Read more.
Nickel Diner bakes its own bread, prepares elaborate cakes and maple-bacon doughnuts and makes delicious fried catfish with corn cakes. Don’t miss the Lowrider Burger. Read more.
Musso's, if you look at it a certain way, is a living museum of 1920s American cuisine: avocado cocktails, crab Louie, jellied consommé, grilled lamb kidneys and Wednesday sauerbraten. Read more.
Get your Carolina-style slaw dogs, Italian dogs, rippers, cremators, Hatch chile dogs—made with artisanal, natural-skin, small-production franks imported from New Jersey. Read more.
Ludovic Lefebvre is one of the greatest pure chefs ever to cook in Los Angeles. Trois Mec is the first place that has ever been his own, like a private club that happens to serve delicious cuisine. Read more.
There’s some delicious meat and seafood here: Wagyu sashimi, bone marrow flan, thinly sliced veal tongue in salsa verde, and real Kyushu beef. Read more.
You’re here for an astonishing quantity of meat, charcuterie ranging from potted duck with blueberries to the intense house-cured bacon, and a menu of simple, butcher’s food. Read more.
Chef Jordan Kahn keeps it weird and proud with nominally Vietnamese-based cuisine, and the results are often as delicious as they are startling. Read more.
Specialties include pot roast, Kansas City steaks and an iceberg wedge salad frosted with blue cheese. Don’t forget to try the chicken with kaffir lime leaf, either. Read more.
The luxury ingredients and luxury prices seem not to dissuade diners who are happy to face down $175 asparagus dinners, showers of truffles and caviar, and even the standard $125 prix fixe. Read more.
Delivers in every way a seafood house can deliver, with tanks full of spider crabs, exotic reef fish and Santa Barbara spot prawns, and a kitchen prepared to braise sea cucumber and sun-dried abalone. Read more.
Try the Rotgut Mekong whisky, stinky natural Gamays from the Loire, fearsome yet delicious nam prik, or pounded salads from the area around Chiang Mai. Read more.
The house-smoked Hunan ham has the smoky punch of first-rate barbecue, coarsely chopped and sautéed with dried long beans, garlic cloves, chopped chiles. Read more.
The basic impression is of Italian cooking translated into an odd American dialect, in which grilled anchovies are laid so beautifully on the plate that you suspect there's an art director. Read more.
You will eat beef and chawan mushi and other things you may not associate with sushi because this is less a sushi bar than a kind of kaiseki restaurant, exquisitely seasonal, exquisitely Japanese. Read more.
Try the chefly interpretation of Mexican bar snacks, including seared slices of carnitas terrine with cubes of Coca-Cola gelee and pigskin two ways. Read more.
Go straight for the crabs fried with chile and garlic; the crocks of Old Alley Pork, braised into pig candy; the smoked fish; the stone-pot fried rice; or the pan-fried pork buns. Read more.
Park's pretty much has the top end of K-Town barbecue to itself. The quality of the galbi, the pork belly and the spicy galbi soup is superb. Read more.
Some delicious examples: pistachio flavored with nuts hand-carried back from the Sicilian pistachio village Bronte, or rich goat's milk gelato spiked with roasted cacao nibs Read more.
The ultra-spicy, tamarind-soured, fish-sauce-laced house-special version of pad thai here is about as good as it gets, a powerful dish, truly exotic, sweet and squiggly and delicious. Read more.
Chef Sergio Peñuelas is a master of pescado zarandeado, marinated snook cooked by shaking over charcoal until the flesh caramelizes but does not char. Also recommended: the fiery shrimp aguachile. Read more.
Nobu Matsuhisa is one of the one or two most important chefs ever to come out of Los Angeles, combining izakaya cooking and Peruvian flavors into a style that inspired chefs all around the world. Read more.
Specialty: pasta, handmade, whole-wheat rigatoni more or less in the style of cacio e pepe, cooked extremely al dente and tossed with cheese and a punishing handful of black pepper. Read more.
It is occasionally difficult to ascertain whether the most impressive bit of a dish is the chewy slab of Japanese halibut fin or the thimble-sized cucumber garnishing the fish. Read more.
Din Tai Fung really does have good soup dumplings, tender and swollen with hot broth, zapped with fresh ginger, perfectly elastic and almost engineered. Read more.
The menu includes both spinach-leaf lasagna and bacon-wrapped bacon, a salad of beets and oranges and a plate of tongue with tomatillo. Read more.
The South filtered through the not-South: fried chicken skin served with hand-made Tabasco, a hot biscuit with a spoonful of pimento cheese or a steaming bowl of black-eyed peas. Read more.
Have you ever found transcendence in a plate of chilaquiles? This is a good place to try. Read more.
The most popular dish? Definitely the fried chicken sandwich, with coleslaw and what must be the only aioli on the planet spiked with Rooster hot sauce. Read more.
Some people arrange their weekly schedules around Angelini's specials: kidney stew on Tuesdays; braised oxtails on Wednesdays, liver alla Veneziana on Thursdays. Read more.
Try the seaweed-tofu beignets, spare arrangements of foraged greens, scallops with nightshade berries or shriveled, butter-soaked carrots that somehow manage to taste better than meat. Read more.
Under new chef Jeremy Fox, Rustic Canyon has jolted the superb produce into something resembling a cuisine; try the asparagus with fried pheasant egg and ultra-dense bone-marrow gravy. Read more.
Pan-Asian perfected in a hundred little ways, including the precise acidity of the sticky Chinese pork ribs, the aromatics in the reinvented Singapore Sling and the deconstructed shrimp toast. Read more.
Most famous for its version of bossam: boiled pork belly you wrap up into leaves with raw garlic, sliced chiles and a salty condiment made from tiny fermented fish. Read more.
Even strong men are defeated by the parade of sautéed pea shoots with garlic, crunchy salt-and-pepper squid and the gargantuan house-special lobster, fried with chile, black pepper and scallion. Read more.
Go for the beef roll: that brawny, steroidal composition of crisp, flaky Chinese pancakes with cilantro and sweet, house-made bean sauce rolled around fistfuls of long-braised beef. Read more.
Mantee brings a different kind of edge to Lebanese-Armenian cuisine. Try the platter of beef dumplings sizzling in a bath of garlicky yogurt. Read more.
Everyone is here for Attari's sandwiches: lengths of toasted French bread dressed with fresh tomatoes, lettuce and a smattering of spiced, super-tart Iranian pickles. Read more.
Jonathan Gold says: I will never forget my first taste of Quintarelli Amarone here, which is as close as I had gotten to a sweet, musky taste of heaven. Read more.
L.A.’s essential rice pudding: touched with cinnamon, drizzled with heavy cream, coaxing the nutty, rounded essence out of every grain of rice. Read more.
Don’t miss the ganjang gaejang, raw blue crabs marinated in an elixir of what seems to be a distillation of the animal's sweet juices. Read more.
Chef Ricardo Zarate is filtering Peruvian cooking through the aesthetics of the izakaya--meals you've been used to eating in L.A. Peruvian restaurants become plates meant to be shared. Read more.
You're probably there for a crack at the impossibly rich bacon cheddar biscuits, and we can't say that we blame you. Read more.
His signature dish is a perfectly fried egg with greens, and fried doughnuts for dessert. Read more.
Tar & Roses, which also has a terrific, mostly Italian, wine list, may also mark the first time in our nation's history when cauliflower became more delicious than prime steak. Read more.
The kitchen gets the food out fast, which is why the restaurant can feed 800 on a weekend night. Who wouldn't gawk at the sight of so many people eating so much food, trying to shout above the fray? Read more.
To get the full effect of 85C's salted latte, it's important to sip directly from the cup, not the straw. They also have have Mochi-filled coffee bread and squid-ink garlic cheese buns . Read more.
Comme Ça is more or less a classic brasserie, with plateaux of chilled seafood, escargots persillade & sautéed skate Grenoblois, except that you can also get a nicely turned Aviation No. 1. Read more.
To find Basement Tavern, you'll have to enter in back, pass by the wafting stench of trash bins, navigate through a loading dock and then descend a flight of stairs, and that's just to get inside. Read more.
Border Grill is the rare mainstream restaurant whose tacos don't make you yearn for a truck parked by an auto-parts junkyard somewhere in East L.A. Read more.
This massive warehouse should be considered a treasurehunt rather than a curated experience. Don’t miss their outdoor $1 sale on Sundays, especially if you like digging through heaps of vintage!
The incredible vintage shoe selection incluses not just the Chanel but flawless Christian Louboutines and Pradas in this packed-to-theceiling resale shop.
This shop is filled with pristine contemporary castoffs. Expect Stella McCartney jackets, Mayle dresses, Chloé blouses, new Hermès bags, and Prada shoes from a few seasons ago.
Sielian’s stocks flawless, iconic pieces from bigname designers in a slick, colorful space.
Owner Joey Grana has such an exacting eye that his selection could easily read as one designer's collection. It has the best vintage selection in a non-exclusively vintage store.
This West Hollywood landmark has incredibly beautiful clothes, by brands like Balmain and Rick Owens.
