Jonathan Gold's 99 Essential LA Restaurants

Kiriko

Kiriko may still be the great undiscovered sushi bar in Los Angeles, and Ken Namba’s traditional yet creative sashimi surpasses most of what is sold at three times the price. Namba smokes fresh Copper River salmon over smoldering cherry wood, slices it thick and wraps it around spears of ripe mango: The sashimi is soft and luscious, salty and sweet, penetratingly smoky yet delicate — one of the most magnificent mouthfuls of food imaginable. There is Spanish mackerel dressed with grated ginger and ponzu, and mackerel as rich as ripe Brie. The sea bream pulled out of Japan’s Inland Sea is almost gooey in its extreme freshness, dusted with the zest of a tiny yuzu, served with a tiny dish of salt grated to order from a pink, quartzlike stone. One of the gifts of a great sushi chef is nonchalance, and Namba has it to spare, the ability to appear casual, unhurried, processing the food for an entire restaurant while looking as serene and unbothered as Fred Astaire. 11301 Olympic Blvd., No. 102, W.L.A., (310) 478-7769. Lunch Tues.-Fri. noon-2:15 p.m.; dinner Tues.-Sun. 6-10 p.m. Beer and wine. Parking lot. AE, MC, V. Japanese.

Anne Fishbein

A slice of Cut

Anne Fishbein

Cooking sharp, Octavio Becrra

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Asanebo

11941 Ventura Blvd.
Studio City, CA 91604

Category: Restaurant > Japanese

Region: San Fernando Valley

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A-Won

913 1/2 S. Vermont Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90006

Category: Restaurant > Korean

Region: Mid-Wilshire/ Hancock Park

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Kobawoo

Born as a greasy spoon almost two decades ago, Kobawoo has mellowed into a Koreatown institution, a polished, respectable destination restaurant with some of the best food in Koreatown at prices almost unbelievably low. The restaurant has a decent version of samgyetang, a soothing chicken-in-the-pot stuffed with ginseng and sticky rice, and very good pigs’ feet, boiled and pressed into a sort of terrine. The home-style pindaeduk, mung-bean pancakes, are a big draw — the pancakes are ethereal beneath their thin veneer of crunch, melting away almost instantly in the mouth like a sort of intriguingly flavored polenta. But the specialty of Kobawoo is probably bossam, a sort of combo platter of steamed pork belly and ultraspicy turnip kimchi, an elegant preparation that like so many other Korean dishes seems almost custom-designed to accompany a bottle of soju. 698 S. Vermont Ave., (213) 389-7300. Mon.-Sun. 11-10 p.m. Valet, lot parking. Korean.

Krua Thai

Like any respectable Thai joint in this part of Los Angeles, the restaurant features a sign outside boasting of the Best Noodles in Town, but unlike the rest of them, Krua Thai has a pretty fair title to the claim. In a city where great Thai noodle shops are all that keep some of us going some days, when the anguish of a sick cat or a Laker collapse can be eased, at least a little, by the knowledge of a great bowl of boat noodles, Krua Thai’s pad Thai and pad kee mao and rad na and pad see ew may be the very best of all. In its way, Krua Thai could be the Thai equivalent of a delicatessen like Canter’s: cheerful, fast, popular across ethnic lines, and open very, very late. 13130 Sherman Way, North Hollywood, (818) 759-7998. Daily, 11 a.m.-3:30 a.m. No alcohol. Takeout. Lot parking. All major credit cards accepted. Also at 935 S. Glendora Ave., West Covina; (626) 480-0116.

La Casita Mexicana

When you sit down at La Casita, the spiritual home of Mexican cooking in Los Angeles at the moment, you are brought a basket of warm chips drizzled with jet-black mole poblano, a chile-laced red pepian and a green pepian made from crushed pumpkin seeds: the dense, complexly sweet mother sauces that are at the heart of La Casita’s cooking. Chefs Jaime Martin del Campo and Ramiro Arvizu are everywhere if you follow Spanish-language media, demonstrating recipes on the Univision morning show, opening supermarkets, on billboards advertising Mexican avocados. They dominate the food pages of La Opinión, and no local discussion of mole poblano, nopalitos or chilaquiles is complete until they have had their say. The two haunt communal farms, looking for huazontle, hoja santa and nopales as fresh and beautiful as they might be in the Jalisco villages they grew up in. But mostly there is the cooking: a half-dozen different kinds of chilaquiles at breakfast, a beautiful purple-corn pozole, delicious enfrijoladas, and an impeccable version of chiles en nogada, the most famous dish of haute Mexican cuisine. 4030 E. Gage Ave., Bell, (323) 773-1898 or www.casitamex.com. Open daily 9 a.m.-10 p.m. AE, M, V. No alcohol. Street parking.

NEW STAR

There Goes the Neighborhood: La Mill

The past year has seen a lot of fascinating new restaurants open in Los Angeles, but the most interesting of them all may be a coffee shop in the restaurant-starved heart of Silver Lake, a place whose menu is designed by Providence’s Michael Cimarusti and Adrian Vasquez, and whose owners are devoted to the cult of coffee in the same way that a chapel might be dedicated to its saint. Still, the chandeliered coffee shrine is more bourgeois than a lot of Silverlakistas might prefer, and passersby sometimes glare at the Bugaboo-pushing, Pilates-toned, Prius-driving La Mill customers, as if they were personally responsible for the boutiquing of the neighborhood. As you finish off the last bites of a Tasmanian sea-trout carpaccio, eggs en cocotte with fresh Dungeness crabmeat or a $12 ham-and-cheese sandwich, you may concede the point. Even I have trouble wrapping my mind around coffee savant Eton Tsuno’s excitement about what he terms “savory notes” and what you might call coffee that tastes like Campbell’s tomato soup. (A small wine list would be nice.) But the food, molecular-gastronomy-tinged stuff, is easily the most exciting cooking at this price point in Los Angeles, including a hanger steak with an impossibly complicated watercress purée, duck breast sous-vided to within an inch of its life and crisped with honey and vadouvan, and a big, crunchy-skinned hunk of wild Alaskan salmon with mushrooms and soy. Desserts — calamansi floats, liquid-center lollipops, s’mores with lemongrass cremeux — are basically straight out of the Providence playbook. If you needed further incentive to visit La Mill, there are now french fries, cooked with the same attention to detail as its potato chips. 1636 Silver Lake Blvd., Silver Lake, (323) 663-4441. Sun.-Thurs., 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. No alcohol. Takeout. AE, MC, V.