Jonathan Gold's 99 Essential LA Restaurants

Casa Bianca

The first time I stepped into Casa Bianca, neon sign glowing “Pizza Pie” in nursery pink and blue, I knew it was the pizza parlor I had always hoped to find in California: perfumed with a whomp of garlic, alive with the roar of customers who had been clustering around the checkered tablecloths for decades. The pizzas were burnt, bubbling majestic things, crunchy and thin in the style of Chicago bar pizza, dusted with gritty cornmeal on the bottom and sliced in a way that defied standard geometry. I got mine with sausage and strips of fried eggplant. In the 20-odd years since then, I have seen little need to change my order. Casa Bianca, the fiefdom of the Martorana family since 1955, serves the best neighborhood-pizzeria pizza in L.A. The sausage is homemade, but the mushrooms on the pizza are canned, old-school style, if that sort of thing bothers you. And there’s freshly filled cannoli for dessert. 1650 Colorado Blvd., Eagle Rock, (323) 256-9617. Tues.-Thurs. 4 p.m.-mid., Fri.-Sat. 4 p.m.-1 a.m. Beer and wine. Takeout. Street parking. Cash only. Italian.

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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Chameau

An argan-honey dip? Do you know where that argan seed has been? If your idea of a Moroccan meal involves belly-dancing, silk pillows and the sensuous wail of the oud, the chic Fairfax-district restaurant Chameau may not be for you. But while Chef Adel Chagar’s flavors may be modern, his techniques tend to come from the traditional Moroccan kitchen: b’stilla made with the time-consuming pastry leaves called warka, house-made couscous light as perfumed air, a lamb shoulder tagine cooked until the meat almost dissolves into a kind of lamb-scented cloud. Chameau may describe itself as French-Moroccan, but the food is quite different from both the plain cooking you’ll find at Paris’ fashionable couscous cafés and the new-style Mediterranean menus that happen to feature a tagine or two. 339 N. Fairfax Ave., L.A., (323) 951-0039. Tues.-Sat. 6-10 p.m. Beer and wine. Takeout. Street parking. AE, D, DC, MC, V. French-Moroccan.

Chang’s Garden

An elegant Hangzhou-­influenced restaurant headed by chef Henry Chang, whose restrained, earthy style became known to the local Chinese community at the old Juon Yuan in San Gabriel Square, Chang’s Garden is well known both for its version of dong po pork, a dish favored by Chinese poets, and for the cooking’s congeniality to wine. Novelist Nicole Mones has practically made a cottage industry out of Chang: She wrote about him in Gourmet, and his dish of pork ribs steamed in lotus leaves figures so prominently in her novel The Last Chinese Chef that it is practically a character of its own. And if you get a shot at the crisp rolled beef pancakes and candied lotus root stuffed with sticky rice, eel with yellow chives and whitefish fried into seaweed-enhanced beignets, you may become inspired too. There is a very nice simmered beef and tripe in chile oil, and splendid fresh Chinese bacon with garlic and chile. Vegetable dishes tend to be pretty good too. Try the pudding-like slabs of Japanese eggplant cooked down with garlic. 627 W. Duarte Road, Arcadia, (626) 445-0606. Open daily, 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m. MC, V. Beer and wine. Lot parking. Chinese.

Chichén Itzá

From its sleekly rustic dining room, Chichén Itzá is devoted to the cooking of the Yucatán, the citrusy, fragrant, sometimes searing-hot cuisine of the Mayas. It’s probably the most genteel restaurant in the Westlake district, favored by politicians and gourmands from the nearby Mexican Consulate, and one of the best places in town to taste regional Mexican cooking — for Yucatecan snacks like panuchos, vaporcitos and the Lebanese-Yucatecan kibi, as well as for the cuisine’s most famous dish, cochinito pibil, which is rubbed with spice, wrapped in banana leaves and cooked until it practically collapses under its own weight. Tikin-xic, seared sole fillets coated with a reddish achiote paste, is also worth seeking out. I liked the restaurant’s original location, the still-wonderful stand in the Mercado La Paloma complex near USC, so much that I actually booked an air ticket to Mérida after my first couple of meals there. The newer, more elegant restaurant is even better. 2501 W. Sixth St., L.A., (213) 380-0051. Sun.-Thurs. 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m., Fri.-Sat., 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m. Beer and wine. Takeout. Validated parking. AE, MC, V. Also in Mercado La Paloma, 3655 S. Grand Ave., dwntwn., (213) 741-1075. Open daily 8 a.m.-6:30 p.m. MC, V. Yucatecan. 

Chung King

On what must have been my thirtieth or fortieth visit to Chung King, the redoubt of ma po doufu, smoked chicken leg and house-smoked Chinese bacon stir-fried with fresh chiles, I was introduced to a new dish, beef in small pot. Or rather, the dish wasn’t new — it had been on the menu since the restaurant opened at its original location in Monterey Park several years ago — but in the rush to eat as much water-boiled fish, bean curd sheet with pickle and salt-and-pepper pork chop as humanly possible, I had merely overlooked the thing, a dense, oily concoction of beef, garlic, and an ungodly quantity of heat-bearing plants, an alluring mess of purest umami. Chung King is still the best place in the San Gabriel Valley to taste Sichuan cooking: sizzling with four or five different kinds of chiles, vibrating with the flavors of extreme fermentation and smacked with the cooling, numbing sensation of Sichuan peppercorns, lies halfway between dentist’s-chair Novocain and the last time you could afford a lot of blow, food that leaves you exhausted, narcotized and happy, drenched in foul, garlic-laced sweat. The deli case filled with chile-marinated pigs’ ears and blisteringly hot tripe is worth a drive alone. If Chuck Jones had ever decided to draw something spicy for the coyote to injure himself with, it probably would have looked a lot like Chung King’s fried chicken with hot peppers, a knoll of crunchy dark-meat cubes subsumed under a blizzard of dried chiles that are the red of silk pajamas, the red of firecrackers, the red of the Chinese flag. 1000 S. San Gabriel Blvd., San Gabriel, (626) 286-0298. Open daily 11 a.m.-9:30 p.m. Beer. Takeout. Lot parking. Cash only. Chinese/Sichuan.