Jonathan Gold's 99 Essential LA Restaurants

Lou

Lou Amdur, who can probably talk more profoundly about biodynamic wines than anyone who hasn’t actually buried a dung-filled animal horn at midnight during a full moon, is the proprietor of this tiny, wonderful wine bar on the south end of Vine, home to both his list of organic country wines and the salady cuisine of his chef DJ Olsen, as well as a pretty decent range of artisanal cheeses, the garlic-laced salamis of Seattle’s Armandino Batali, and house-made rillettes. Lou has a minor specialty in both long-braised meats and tasty vegetarian soups, and the elaborate Monday-night wine dinners revolving around, say, choucroute or the season’s first Alaskan halibut should not be missed. Still, on cool nights there may be nothing better than a plateful of the pig candy made with Lou’s house-smoked bacon, a bowlful of olives and a glass of organic Côtes du Luberon. 724 N. Vine St., Hlywd., (323) 962-6369 or www.louonvine.com. Mon.-Sat. 6 p.m.-mid. Wine. Lot parking. MC, V. California Contemporary.

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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Lucques

The California-Mediterranean cooking of Suzanne Goin, which is feminine in all the best ways, is profoundly beautiful in its simplicity, and there is satori to be found in every bite of grilled fish, every herb salad, every roasted vegetable. When she’s on, Goin teases out the flavor from a tomato with the precision of a sushi master, making textural contrasts dance and playing with bursts of acidity and the resinous flavors of fresh herbs. Lucques, named for a vivid green variety of French olive, is located in Harold Lloyd’s old carriage house; it boasts an ultrasleek Barbara Barry design and one of the nicest patios in West Hollywood, but on loud weekend nights the restaurant can sometimes seem as if it is about 90 percent bar. Sunday family dinners are legendary. 8474 Melrose Ave., W. Hlywd., (323) 655-6277. Sunday nights feature three-course prix fixe dinners. Lunch Tues.-Sat. noon-2:30 p.m.; dinner Mon.-Tues. 6-10 p.m., Wed.-Sat. 6-11 p.m., Sun. 5-10 p.m. Full bar (limited bar menu available 10 p.m.-mid.). Valet ­parking. AE, MC, V. California-French.

M Café de Chaya

If you’ve ever wondered if people actually wear the $400 jeans you see advertised in Vogue, an hour at M Café can be instructive, a merry parade of the snuggest styles and the most avant-garde finishes, worn by some of the most beautiful people on Earth. This is the place that made macrobiotic cuisine fashionable, partly because almost anything tastes great when it is made with vegetables bought at a decent growers market, but also because the kitchen lets kale taste like kale but has the sense to let tempeh-based club sandwiches taste like something you’d pick up at the Daily Grill. Owned by the people who run Chaya Venice and Chaya Brasserie, M Café food may be based on strict macrobiotic principles — the vegetable sushi here is made not just with brown rice, but with organic, artisanally produced heirloom brown rice — but when the tomatoes are ripe, the pesto is pungent and the house-baked bread is crisp, even a sybarite can overlook the fact that the “mozzarella” started its life as a plant. 7119 Melrose Ave., L.A., (323) 525-0588 and 9343 Culver Blvd., Culver City, (310) 838-4300. www.mcafedechaya.com. Open daily, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. AE, MC, V. Beer and wine. Limited lot parking. Takeout and delivery. Contemporary macrobiotic.

Marouch

Marouch has been a Hollywood Lebanese-Armenian mainstay for so long that it is sometimes possible to forget just how good it can be, how succulent the grilled quail, how zataar-fragrant the toasted-bread salad fattoush, how reliable the kebabs, which sing with spice and juice and char. I can’t count the times I’ve crushed out on some Middle Eastern dish I’d tasted in Glendale or Michigan only to find out that Marouch chef Sosy Brady had it on her menu all the time, whether fried fish with tahini, the pungent aged-cheese salad shanklish, the walnut-pomegranate dip muhammara, or the Lebanese melted-cheese dessert knafeh. If you wanted to imagine you were in Beirut, you could stop by this place a few times a day — midmornings for a piece of baklava and a thimbleful of Armenian coffee, lunch for a plate of makanek sausages and a bottle of Lebanese beer, late afternoons for the felafel, house-made from scratch, and a bowl of dense lentil soup, and dinner for one of the homestyle daily specials. Year after year, Marouch becomes nothing but better. 4905 Santa Monica Blvd., L.A., (323) 662-9325. Tues.-Sun. 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Beer and wine. Lot parking. All major credit cards. Middle Eastern/Lebanese/Armenian.

Max

André Guerrero, who despite his youth was peddling his brand of pan-Asian cuisine when most local chefs were still living on Spam spaghetti, never quite caught the wave of fashionable fusion coursing through local velvet-rope restaurants, never fashioned tuna tartare for Paris and Britney to pick at, never glazed his ribs with the sticky sauces that bring Beverly Hills dentists joy. But with the recent remodel of his Encino flagship Max, which shed its air of a plastic-surgeon’s waiting room for sort of a wooden-ship tropical vibe Guerrero, who is Filipino-American, has nudged his cooking into a more adventurous direction, supplementing his legendary ahi towers with steamed pork-belly buns perhaps inspired by those David Chang is doing at Momofuku in New York, throwing a pickle-tasting onto the blackboard menu as a conceit, making lamb “tacos’’ that are actually a lot closer to a new-wave Lebanese ground-meat kibbe stuffed into wedges of pita bread and drizzled with tahini. For dessert, Guerrero’s updated version of the traditional Filipino parfait halo halo, layered with ice cream, palm jelly and coconut milk, is essential. 13355 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, (818) 784-2915. Mon.-Thurs. 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m. Beer and wine. Valet. Fusion.