Jonathan Gold's 99 Essential LA Restaurants

Neal Fraser, best known for his restaurant Grace, has long been a bwana7450 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 930-9744. Open daily 8 a.m.-11 p.m. (bar food till mid.) Full bar. Valet parking. AE, MC, V. American. of complexity in fourth-stage Los Angeles restaurants, mixing so many national idioms on a plate that his customers are never quite sure whether they are reading a menu or looking at a departures board at LAX. But at his diner BLD, freed of the formal requirements of the destination-restaurant menu, he turns out to be a brilliant short-order cook, churning out exemplary, drippy hamburgers made with Wagyu beef and even juicier burgers made with Berkshire pork, moistening sandwiches with aïoli, using smoky house-made ketchup where he can and Heinz 57 where he must, and dropping coleslaw bombs like a 40-year fry cook with canola oil in his veins. BLD is a useful restaurant, open for quick breakfasts of croissants and cappuccino; for sybaritic brunches of fluffy ricotta pancakes and eggs Benedict; for salady lunches and meaty feasts, for serious date-night dinners and after-movie snacks. At its best, BLD’s menu of braised pork shanks and crab burgers is the kind of cheap-ingredient food that cooks make for each other when they think nobody else is paying attention.

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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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Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger are perhaps the unlikeliest great Mexican chefs in what is the second-biggest city in all Aztlan, neither Mexican by heritage nor serving a primarily Mexican clientele — I suspect that most of their customers revere the place mostly for the potent artisanal-tequila margaritas, the deafening buzz and the baskets of warm chips. But while the chefs may not claim to redefine Mexican food, they do prepare it exceedingly well, using impeccable technique and first-rate ingredients to transform the taco, the tostada and the homely chile relleno into creatures almost unrecognizable if you’re used to their Cal-Mex equivalents, as well as constructing scholarly takes on elaborate traditional foods like jet-black huitlacoche sauces or sweet chiles en nogada. The long, black dining room, an artifact of the late 1980s whose crazily skewed ceiling is still painted with rocket ships and batmen, looks even better now than it did when the place first opened. Border Grill is the rare mainstream Mexican restaurant whose tacos don’t make you yearn for a truck parked by an auto-parts junkyard somewhere in East L.A. 1445 Fourth St., Santa Monica, (310) 451-1655. Sun.-Thurs. 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m., Fri.-Sat. till 11 p.m. Full bar open till mid. Takeout. Street and valet parking. AE, D, MC, V. Modern Mexican.

Bulgarini Gelato

Leo Bulgarini is the wrong guy to mouth off to the day after his beloved AS Roma squad drops a game to Genoa or Inter Milan. His gelati are labeled only in Italian, and his standards are so famously strict that he has been known to pull his delicious sorbetti from the menus of restaurants and the freezer cases of retailers that in one way or another fail to come up to his standards. A big photograph on the wall of his Altadena shop shows him making an obscene Italian gesture to a giant Sicilian ice cream plant. But the gelateria, the love child of Roman expat Bulgarini and his Altadena-raised wife, Elizabeth Foldi, is a singular, perfect blossom in a world of international sweets conglomerates and by-the-book mixes: fragrant Sicilian pistachio gelato, vivid blood orange sorbetto, subtle cinnamon cream and dark, smoky chocolate gelati flavored with orange peel, with fresh hazelnuts or with rum. And Leo probably pulls the best espresso shot in the San Gabriel Valley when he’s in the mood, a thick, syrupy thimbleful made with an antique Italian machine. If you don’t believe me, ask him yourself. 749 E. Altadena Dr. Altadena, (626) 441-2319. Wed.-Thurs., Sun. noon-8 p.m., Fri.-Sat. noon-9 p.m. Takeout. Gelateria. 

Campanile

Monday is family-dinner night, when you can dine on big platters of fried chicken, porchetta or mussels at a reasonable price, and Thursday is still grilled-cheese night. If you missed the prix-fixe WGA Soup Kitchen dinners the first time around, they’re back in an anniversary edition, maybe in anticipation of a SAG strike; chef Mark Peel prepares an elaborate degustation menu the third Wednesday of the month, and giant wine dinners show up on Mondays too sometimes, although Peel’s new obsession (apart from the farmers market one, which continues unabated) seems to be 19th-century cocktails. To keep up with the place, sometimes it seems as if you need an annotated timetable, like the kind that are issued by Amtrak. But as the restaurant approaches its 20th anniversary, and the chefs Peel launched from his kitchen head some of the best restaurants around the country, Campanile still showcases every imaginable shade of fire and heat, from the cigar-box fragrance of that cedar-plank salmon to the leg of lamb flavored with the smoke from smoldering herbs, to the thin, broad sheets of veal that pick up the heady fragrance of burning oak logs. 624 S. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 938-1447. Lunch Mon.-Fri. 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m.; dinner Mon.-Wed. 6-10 p.m., Thurs.-Sat. 5:30-11 p.m.; brunch Sunday 9:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, CB, DC, MC, V. California/Mediterranean.