Where to Eat Now

Thirty-five new entires to the list

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

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Danube Bulgarian Cuisine Even though the only other Bulgarian restaurant in the country is 2,400 miles away in New York, you may think that you’ve seen a lot of this food before — and you’d probably be right. Bulgaria was under Ottoman rule for nearly 500 years, sits next to Greece, absorbed influences from both Russia and Arab countries. As in Turkey, a Bulgarian meal starts off with a succession of the appetizers called meze — a yogurt dip infused with ground walnuts and cucumber, thin slices of zucchini fried in egg batter, a shopska salad sprinkled with Bulgarian feta cheese, and stuffed grape leaves. Unlike neighboring cuisines, Bulgarian cooking depends on huge amounts of pork — grilled pork, roast pork, sautéed pork, pan-fried pork, ground pork, pork enough that one may understand the use of pig as a primary outlet for Bulgarian cultural expression. Unless you are set on the stuffed peppers, the fried lamb baked in parchment or the drob sarma, the notoriously funky Bulgarian dish of chopped lamb innards baked under a crust of yogurt and eggs, the pork is the way to go. 1303 Westwood Blvd., Wstwd., (310) 473-2414. Open daily 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. & 5–10 p.m. No alcohol. Street parking. AE, MC, V. Dinner for two, food only, $27–$35. Bulgarian.JG$$b

Dino’s Burgers If you are looking for a proper representation of hellfire, the grill at Dino’s Burgers may be as close as you will get, a smoke-belching landscape of fire and ashes, with stacks of chickens ready to be flipped into the blaze like so many unrepentant sinners. A burger stand in the Byzantine-Latino Quarter still owned by founder Demetrios Pantazis, Dino’s is as perpetually crowded as Pink’s after the bars close. The half-chicken plates cost only $4.50 a pop, including fries and tortillas; steak platters with rice, beans and salad run maybe a buck more. There are hamburgers, of course, thin, charred, peppery patties tucked into big, damp buns, cushioned with lettuce and thick tomato slices. The Mexican plate is the kind of Mexican food you would expect to find in a small North Dakota town that doesn’t see many Mexicans, although I am perversely fond of the carne asada. Still, you are going to order the chicken. And the best part of the meal may be the dense stratum of French fries that lies under the chicken like the hot rock beneath the earth’s crust, saturated with the greasy, capsaicin-rich juices of the bird. It may take a week to scrape the residue out from under your fingernails, but it will be worth the crimson shame. 2575 W. Pico Blvd., L.A., (213) 380-3554. Sun. 7 a.m.–11 p.m., Mon.–Thurs. 6 a.m.–11 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 6 a.m.–mid. No alcohol. Takeout. Limited lot parking. Cash only. Dinner for two, food only, $8–$11. JG¢b?

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

Danube: Last Bulgarian food for 2,400 miles

Location Info

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Bin 8945 Wine Bar & Bistro

8945 Santa Monica Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA 90069

Category: Bars/Clubs

Region: West Hollywood

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Dong Ting Chun True Hunanese cooking is rough, peasanty stuff, inflected with feral fragrances and fresh-chile heat, strong pickles and fermented everything, a dozen different intensities of smokiness. Dong Ting Chun may be the most accessible local Hunanese restaurant since Charming Garden closed a few years ago, although it still isn’t quite set up for those of us illiterate in Chinese. Every meal at Dong Ting Chun is an adventure: Will fried mudfish be great or a murky disappointment? (The latter.) Is the sunny-side-up egg with hot pepper really what it sounds like? The egg is pretty much fried over, hard, but the fried hot peppers are for real. (Some of us couldn’t stop eating it.) The famous dish at the Shanghai Dong Ting Chun (which may or may not be related to this one) is a steamed fish head plastered with fresh and fermented chiles, and here you will find fish heads on two tables out of three, enormous things, painted Santa Claus red with a solid quarter-inch layer of chiles. There are a few obvious nuggets of meat at the base of the beast’s skull, but the rest of the meal will probably see you probing the animal with your chopsticks like a surgeon, trying to discover hidden pockets of flesh. At Dong Ting Chun, it always pays to get a head. 140 W. Valley Blvd., No. 206, San Gabriel, (626) 288-5918. Open Open daily 11 a.m.–10 p.m. Beer, wine. Takeout. Lot parking. MC, V. Dinner for two, food only, $16–$25.JG$b[

Ebisu How many new izakaya are there in Los Angeles? How many grains of sand lie upon Zuma Beach? Ebisu, named after the nightlife-intensive Tokyo neighborhood, is the newest restaurant from the people behind the splendid noodle shop Daikokuya, which introduced Little Tokyo to the pork-rich tonkotsu style of ramen. Like Daikokuya, Ebisu, fitted into the space that used to house the local Mandarin Deli, is nostalgically themed — suburban postwar, is my guess, with big fish on the walls, leatherette booths and a scattering of exotica that would look at home on the jacket of a Martin Denny album. For some reason, I kept thinking of late-’60s Marina del Rey, although I’m sure the designer is riffing on some classic Asagaya joint that the regulars could reference in a second. Unlike the rest of the izakaya in town at the moment, Ebisu is both huge and easy to get into on a weekend night, possibly because its menu of traditional Japanese appetizers, noodle soups and teriyaki dinners hews a little too close to the Japanese food you could actually taste in Little Tokyo in the Summer of Love, and possibly because it is too slick to appeal to the fans of Haru Ulala next door. 356 E. Second St., Little Tokyo, (213) 613-1644. Open daily 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m. & 5 p.m.–1 a.m. Beer, wine. Street parking. AE, MC, V. Japanese. JG$$bÂ?