Top 10 Dishes of 2007

Cemitas

A cemita looks superficially like a Big Mac — both sandwiches are multilayered concoctions on oversize, sesame-seeded buns — but unlike the fine cooks at Cemitas Poblanas Elvirita #1, McDonald’s rarely offers jellied pig’s feet as an option. After the roll is griddle-toasted to a fine, oily crunchiness, it is then crammed with cheese, slices of avocado ripe enough to constitute a condiment, and a layer of chiles, either pickled jalapeños or smoky chipotle chiles. There is a layer of meat over the chiles — Poblano head cheese, perhaps, or the slippery pickled pigskin called cueritos, or chicken, or Puebla-style carnitas stewed to dense porkiness. Usually, though, it’s a parchment-thin sheet of breaded, fried beef: the familiar pan–Latin American meat milanesa, named after the Milanese way of cooking veal — burnished to a bronzed crispness in a vat of hot, clean oil. Should you get your cemita garnished with big handfuls of the shredded Poblano string cheese called quesillo? It goes without saying. 3010 E. First St., E.L.A., (323) 881-0428.

Jitlada’s heat-seeking mussels (Photos by Anne Fishbein)

Quesillo on your cemita? It goes without saying.

Location Info

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My Taco

6300 York Blvd.
Highland Park, CA 90042

Category: Restaurant > Mexican

Region: Northeast L.A.

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Spago Beverly Hills

176 N. Canon Drive
Beverly Hills, CA 90212

Category: Restaurant > California

Region: Beverly Hills

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More About

• Wolfgang Puck
• Koreatown
• Nicola Mastronardi
• Soup Recipes
• Main Dish Recipes

Salmon Cakes

There are so many things to like about Larkin’s, including the tiny corn muffins, the peppery fried catfish, the pleasant patio, the oozy macaroni and cheese. On a good day, the fried chicken is as fine as you’ll find in a Los Angeles restaurant. But it would be wrong to overlook the salmon cakes, modest but delicious examples of the soul-food breakfast specialty made with decent fresh salmon instead of canned, and spiked with more crunchy vegetables than a Southern, but not a Californian, cook might think proper. 1496 Colorado Blvd., Eagle Rock, (323) 254-0934 or www.larkinsjoint.com.

Tarte Flambée

Los Angeles has been without a decent brasserie for so long that some of us forgot how good they might be, how pleasant it is to eat decent choucroute, drink peasanty Côtes du Rhône by the glass and contemplate the virtues of a Gruyère-clotted onion soup that didn’t happen to be from Hamburger Hamlet. Comme Ça, David Myers’ stylish brasserie in the Melrose Place neighborhood, is a tough reservation at the moment. And one of the reasons is his version of an Alsatian tarte flambée, a brasserie staple of puff-pastry baked with crème fraîche and with cubes of chewy, smoky bacon. There isn’t a wine in France that doesn’t taste better helped down by a slice of the buttery tarte. 8479 Melrose Ave., W. Hlywd., (323) 782-1178 or www.­commecarestaurant.com.

Samgyetang

This chicken-ginseng soup ranks first among Korean hangover tonics: broth, salt, and a tiny hen stuffed with glutinous rice and aromatics. You could consider samgyetang the Korean equivalent of Jewish chicken-in-a-pot, if you could imagine a matzo ball actually stuffed into a chicken. Keumsan, the local outlet of a Seoul-based chain, may be Samgyetang Central in Koreatown, and its signature dish is essential: a crock of mild, ginseng-fragrant broth nestling a tiny chicken stuffed with sticky rice, jujubes, and a gnarled sliver of ginseng root that traces the contour of the chicken’s cavity like some kind of alien internal organ. Don’t you feel better already? 1144 S. Western Ave., Koreatown, (323) 731-9999.