Jonathan Gold's 99 Essential LA Restaurants

NEW STAR

This Year’s Model: Palate Food + Wine

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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Palate is the food world’s favorite new place to eat in Los Angeles this year, above even spots opened by such boldface names as Gordon Ramsay, Laurent Tourondel and Kazunori Nozawa, a conscious omnivore’s dream. The first solo project of Octavio Becerra, it is an opium dream of a restaurant, a relaxed, butter-yellow space in Glendale’s car-dealer district, a dining room sprawling into a cocktail lounge, a wine bar, laboratories for curing meats and aging cheeses, and a well-curated wine shop. Palate, which occupies the ground floor of a huge wine-storage building, is intensely personal, and an evening there can feel a lot like stopping by a friend’s house and having him show you some cool things he just picked up: lamb from the eccentric Sonoma farmer Don Watson; butter churned from scratch; a “porkfolio” plank that might include Iowa prosciutto, a scrap of house-made lardo, or some salame from a secret California source. The menu is tiny and seems even shorter than it looks — most of the text on the slender document is devoted to charcuterie, house-made pickles and cheese — but changes often. Becerra puts up a lot of things in Mason jars, stiff, unctuous pastes of pork or salmon enhanced with house-churned butter or pure lard. Becerra is deft at getting out of the way of great ingredients, and his best dishes — mackerel with dates and pistachios, grits with porcini, vegetables roasted in parchment — are almost deceptively simple, built around an array of precisely seasonal produce. 933 S. Brand Blvd., Glendale, (818) 662-9463 or www.palatefoodwine.com. Mon.-Sat., 5-10 p.m. Full bar. Valet (and plentiful street) parking. AE, MC, V.

Park’s Barbecue

The waiter comes over, rubs the hot grill with a lump of beef suet. He flinches back, as the melted fat explodes into a rush of blue flame. He lays meat on the grill as tenderly as you might put a kitten to bed, which almost makes sense — at more than $30 for an order of sliced Kobe-style beef and near that for short ribs, this is the most expensive Korean barbecue in town. Even wrapped into a lettuce leaf with bean paste, half a raw garlic clove and a bit of coarse salt, if the supremely beefy flavor comes through. Park’s Tokyo-X crossbred pork belly may be the best pig in Koreatown at the moment, slabs of fat striated with meat, creaminess fading into translucency after a couple of minutes on the grill, and then into the sort of juicy pop you might associate with the seared pancetta in a really good plate of spaghetti carbonara. Park’s is a modern place, all steel and glass; the waiters resemble members of a martial-arts team more than they do restaurant workers. And while the quality of the meat, is a least a tick or two higher than at other high-end barbecue places, the restaurant does not hold back on the array of panchan, the little egg pancakes, puréed squash, tiny fish, kimchi, spicy roots, broccoli, and a half-dozen other things that are the measure of a Korean restaurant. 955 S. Vermont Ave., Koreatown, (213) 380-1717. Open daily 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Beer and soju. MC, V. Valet parking. Korean.

Patina

Sustainable? No. Organic? Probably not. Multicultural? Only when strictly necessary. Patina’s exquisitely wrought dining room in Disney Hall is the most important restaurant space in California, and Joachim Splichal is a master of modern global cuisine, finely crafted, vegetable-intensive compositions of Berkshire pork, yellowfin or Santa Barbara spot prawns geared to the sophisticated palate of the international traveler, beautiful to look at, and as carefully branded as a Lexus. The restaurant is known for the offhand complexity of its presentations, exotic spices and seasonal emulsions often sparked by fragrant herbs or bursts of acidity, food that is often as compelling to think about as it is to eat. 141 S. Grand Ave., dwntwn. (213) 972-3331. Lunch Tues.-Fri. 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m., dinner Tues.-Sun. 5-11 p.m. (9:30 p.m. during summer). Full bar. Valet parking. AE, D, DC, MC, V. French and California contemporary.

Pie ‘n Burger

This is the best neighborhood hamburger joint in a neighborhood that includes Caltech, which means the guy next to you may be reading a physics proof over his chili size as if it were the morning paper. When compressed by the act of eating, a Pie ‘N Burger hamburger leaks thick, pink dressing, and the slice of American cheese, if you have ordered a cheeseburger, does not melt into the patty, but stands glossily aloof. And the exquisitely crunchy patty melt is careful without being insipid, oozy in just the right way, and sweetened by its judicious load of grilled onions When the fruit is in season, don’t miss a cut of the epochal fresh-strawberry pie. 913 E. California Blvd., Pasadena. (626) 795-1123. Mon.-Fri. 6 a.m.-10 p.m., Sat. 7 a.m.-10 p.m., Sun. 7 a.m.-9 p.m. Beer and wine. Street parking. Cash only. Entrees $5-$10. American.