Where to Eat Now

Thirty-five new entires to the list

Comments (0) By Jonathan Gold Tuesday, Feb 6 2007

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Café Toros Brazilian cooking is incredibly diverse, ranging from the jungly cassava-based cooking of Minas Gerais and the spicy tropical seafood dishes of Bahia to the cosmopolitan restaurants in skyscraper-choked São Paulo. Still, if you were to take a survey of Brazilian restaurants in Los Angeles, you would be challenged to find a single restaurant that specialized in something other than sizzling portions of sausage, rib-eye and rump. Café Toros, then, may be the most unassuming Brazilian restaurant in town, a bare storefront in a Westside mini-mall. The kingdom of Jose E.F. Salgado, it is a bastion of Brazilian home cooking, a center of homey stews, garlicky beans and baked pork ribs. Especially good is the moqueca, a Bahian-style fish stew with coconut milk; the house roast chicken, cooked with tomatoes and onions; and a strange, bittersweet roast chicken made with dark Brazilian beer. Café Toros is as far from the grand, carnivorous excesses of Green Field or Fogo de Chao as it is possible to get. But to the young Brazilians who crowd into the place on weekends, Salgado’s place tastes like home. 3300 Overland Ave., W.L.A, (310) 838-8586. Open daily 10 a.m.–6 p.m. No alcohol. Takeout. Lot parking. Cash only. Lunch for two, food only, $12–$20.JG$b

Canelé Dinner at Canelé, a Southern French restaurant in the old Osteria Nonni space in Atwater, can feel a lot like crashing a dinner party, with oddly minimalist décor, people you probably know and friendly but puzzled waitresses who aren’t quite sure why you’ve stumbled into their domain. The chef/owner is Corina Weibel, a Nancy Silverton protégée who also cooked for a while at Lucques, and she works the urban rustic side of new Los Angeles cooking: the caramelized onion tart called pissaladière and an austere green salad with crème fraîche; rare roast lamb with Israeli couscous and beef bourguignon with noodles, workmanlike roast pork loin with polenta and simmered greens, and an honest flan with bitter caramel sauce. If this were your dinner party, and your kitchen guru of choice is Julia rather than Marcella or Madhur, this is the kind of food worthy of the good china. And on your way out, the hostess will hand you a small example of the restaurant’s namesake pastry, a dense, fluted cylinder of crisp-edged pudding traditional in Bordeaux. 3219 Glendale Blvd., Atwater Village, (323) 666-7133. Tues.–Sun. 5:30–10:30 p.m. Beer, wine. Street parking. AE, MC, V. Entrees $16–$22. French.JG$$b[

BLD: A most useful restaurant. (Photos by Anne Fishbein)

Danube: Last Bulgarian food for 2,400 miles

Location Info

Map

Bin 8945 Wine Bar & Bistro

8945 Santa Monica Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA 90069

Category: Bars/Clubs

Region: West Hollywood

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Capperi Restorante When you travel through Italy, it sometimes feels as if there is no town so remote and no decent restaurant so obscure that there isn’t at least one Japanese cook in the kitchen, apron stiffened with boar’s blood and tomato sauce, tending the wood fire. Some people think that Tokyo’s Italian restaurants are among the best in the world, which makes a certain sense: Italian cooking, like Japanese cooking, is based on a frank expression of fresh ingredients inflected by a limited number of seasonings. Little Tokyo’s Capperi, where almost all of the customers are Japanese, may be the most orthodox old-style Italian restaurant in Los Angeles, a living museum of the sights and smells that many of us had assumed became extinct in the 1970s: textbook linguine with seafood; pizzas annealed into ruddy planes; veal scallopine finished with Marsala, and scarcely a dollop of cod roe or a drop of balsamic vinegar in sight, reproduced as faithfully, and occasionally as soullessly, as a wax model of spaghetti marinara. Capperi, 318 E. Second St., Little Tokyo, (213) 613-1003. Open daily 11 a.m.–3 p.m. & 5–11 p.m. Pastas and entrees $10.50–$22. MC, V. Italian. JG$$?

Chop Suey Café From 1935 until it faded away 50-odd years later, the Far East Café was a mainstay of the Little Tokyo neighborhood, with battered wooden booths, tall ceilings and a neon “Chop Suey’’ sign outside as grand as anything out of an Edward Hopper painting — also a reputation for unusually tired Chinese food. Freshly reopened, cobwebs scrubbed away but otherwise looking pretty much as it did in the mid-1980s, the redubbed Chop Suey Café seems to pick up just where the Far East left off: a mixed clientele of hipsters and old-timers eating sweet-and-sour pork flavored with one part vinegar, two parts nostalgia — there are probably dishes here you haven’t tasted since Richard Nixon was in office. As a re-creation of a culinary style that has been discredited for more than 30 years, the menu at Chop Suey Café does present some conundrums. Is the gray, cornstarch-thickened gravy on the cashew chicken a glitch or a feature? Is the steamed rice authentically gummy, or just gummy? But there is some funk in its step — the string beans stir-fried with ginger and garlic were quite good. Happy hour is a specialty. And if you are so inclined, Chop Suey Café is an aromatic, Chandler-esque place to kill an afternoon. 347 E. First St., dwntwn., (213) 617-9990. Tues.–Thurs. 11 a.m.–2 p.m. & 5–10 p.m., Fri. 11 a.m.–2 p.m. & 5–11 p.m., Sat. 11 a.m.–11 p.m., Sun. 11 a.m.–10 p.m. Full bar. Street parking. AE, MC, V. Asian.JG$?