Jonathan Gold's 99 Essential LA Restaurants
Local culinary classics, plus some new stars on the scene
Tirupathi Bhimas
Atop a newish mini-mall in Artesia’s Little India, Tirupathi Bhimas is a glowing flying saucer of a restaurant, a circular second-story dining room ringed by windows — sari emporia and jewelry stores and sweet shops outside as far as the eye can see. The idea of an Indian restaurant as club-kid hangout is nothing new, and crossover joints certainly play up the sultriness of the Indian kitchen, but what is drawing the crowds at Tirupathi Bhimas is fairly orthodox Andhra Pradesh–style vegetarian cuisine, the heavy Southern Indian stuff, without a Bombay mojito or a chakratini in sight. Tamil is spoken and dishes are assumed to be searingly spicy unless specified otherwise. The standard order at Tirupathi Bhimas is the thali, the traditional combination plate of nine or so stews, soups and grain dishes, spooned into tiny bowls and arranged around the perimeter of a gleaming stainless-steel platter, garnished with a thin pappadum cracker, a pliable round of chapati bread, and perhaps a wad of spiced potatoes rolled into a spliff-size dosa. Will you know what is in the bowls? Probably not, and nobody will bother to explain them to you. Suffice it to say that the spicy Andhra thali will be spicy and the nonspicy thali will be pretty spicy too. After dinner, make sure to drop by the Saffron Spot downstairs for a dish of Indian ice cream. 8792 Pioneer Blvd., Artesia, (562) 809-3806; www.tirupathibhimas.com. Open Tues.-Thurs., 11:30 a.m.-2:15 p.m. & 6-9:15 p.m.; Fri., 11 a.m.-2:15 p.m. & 6-9:45 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 11:30 a.m.-9:45 p.m. No alcohol. Lot parking. Catering. MC, V. Indian.
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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
Urasawa
This tiny, luxurious sushi bar is famously the most expensive restaurant in California, and most nights it is also the best, with fish unseen anywhere else in the country. Other sushi restaurants display fish triple-wrapped behind glass in a refrigerated case; at Urasawa, the fish is out in the open, lighted as carefully as the tomatoes in a Carl’s Jr. ad, all glistening pinks and glowing translucence. If a particular leaf or species of clam is in its Japanese two-week season, it will certainly be on your plate. Waitresses refill your glass with sake, replace hot towels and remove plates so efficiently that you are barely aware of them at all. And Urasawa’s artistry with a fillet is surpassed in the United States only by that of his mentor, Masa Takayama — there is, one senses, an enormous effort to keep the customers in a bubble of serenity, an uninterrupted flow of bliss. 218 N. Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 247-8939. Mon.-Sun. 6-8:30 p.m. Full bar. Valet. AE, MC, V. Japanese.
Vincenti
Valentino may be grander than Vincenti, La Terza flashier and Giorgio Baldi may draw a more famous clientele, but Vincenti feels like the spiritual center of fine Italian cooking in Los Angeles, its hearth. And befitting a hearth, much of Nicola Mastronardi’s food comes from the big, hardwood-burning ovens, flavored with the presence of smoke, forests, stone chimneys and chilly afternoons — a scallop, say, sprinkled with bread crumbs and baked in its shell until it sizzles; a magnificent veal chop; soft curls of cuttlefish tucked into an herb salad; a whole, truffle-laced squab. The adjacent rotisserie turns out the best restaurant version of porchetta I have ever tasted in California — loin and belly are wrapped into a spiral, seasoned with fennel and spit-roasted to a crackling, licorice-y succulence. It is certainly possible to eat several mediocre Italian meals elsewhere in this neighborhood for the price of a single superb one here. At these times, it is good to remember that on Monday nights, pizza also comes out of these ovens. 11930 San Vicente Blvd., Brentwood, (310) 207-0127. Mon.-Sat. 6-10 p.m., Friday for lunch noon-2 p.m. Full bar. Takeout. Valet parking. AE, MC, V. Italian.
NEW STAR
The Steak Pit: Wolfgang’s Steakhouse by Wolfgang Zwiener
Dinner at Peter Luger, a smelly, 120-year-old, investment-banker-ridden dump in Williamsburg, often considered the best steakhouse in New York, tends to be a very specific routine, no menus necessary. You order steak for two, steak for three or steak for four from a man who looks like your shifty Uncle Joe. There is the mandatory tomato-and-onion salad, dressed at table with a glug from a bottle of steak sauce, and possibly a slice or two of bacon cut thick enough to repel rocket-propelled grenades. There is a cursory browse through the wine list, which is basically a roster of the cabernets you’d find on a supermarket shelf priced like fine Bordeaux. You will order creamed spinach and you will order cottage fries, although you will touch neither of them, and when Uncle Joe comes back with the meat, sliding an upside-down saucer under the superheated platter so that the scorched butter and the juices from the steak collect in a little reservoir at the bottom, you slump your shoulders in frustration, because the presliced porterhouse looks as if it’s going to be as disappointing as the rest of the meal. Then you take your first bite, and you start to chew a little, and the meat gods take over, and you’re in that small, blissful corner of the cosmos that can only be reached by way of the best prime, well-aged American beef. If the bodhisvatta had only eaten cow, you might think, he could have saved a lot of time. Wolfgang’s Steakhouse, famous mostly for the completely justifiable infringement lawsuit filed by Wolfgang Puck — whose Spago is right across the street — endeavors to be identical to Luger, from the battered china and the lousy onion rolls in the bread basket to the proprietary brand of steak sauce on the tables. (Zwiener was headwaiter at Luger for decades.) The wine list is not just bad but unbelievably bad, at least if you’re not making an above-the-line salary, and the steaks are priced within spitting distance of what you probably paid for your first car. The karma is bad: It occupies the space of a former tofu-specialty restaurant. The waiters try to get you in and out in about half an hour, and if it weren’t for the full quart of whipped cream they pour on a slice of Junior’s cheesecake, they’d probably succeed. But then the sputtering porterhouse comes, and the little saucer is slid under the plate, and the waiter starts to spoon the darkening juices onto the slices of meat that are going right to you, and that old black pit opens up again, right on schedule. 445 N Canon Dr., Beverly Hills, (310) 385-0640, www.wolfgangssteakhouse.com. Lunch Mon.-Sat., 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m; dinner Sun.-Wed., 5-10:30 p.m., Fri.-Sat., 5-11:30 p.m. All major CC. Full bar. City lot parking in building.
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