* Good Girl Dinette
The Good Girl Dinette blog was the spring’s food-nerd obsession: Diep Tran, who used to work at Blue Hen and whose family owns the Pho 79 chain of Vietnamese noodle shops, chronicled the year she spent opening this restaurant in Highland Park. Even the haterati were rooting for her. Tucked into a storefront below an old Masonic lodge, the local Good Girl Dinette is a clean, airy space, filled with earnest couples and young families, serving bubbly soft drinks they make with farmers market fruit (the Meyer lemon is especially good), preparing a menu of Vietnamese-American comfort food that is friendly to vegans.
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If your obsessions are centered in South El Monte or Little Saigon, this may not be the place for you. The chicken pho will not remind you of your favorite pho ga. The fried imperial rolls are stodgy; the fresh spring rolls are stuffed with tofu instead of grilled pork and shrimp. But the spicy fries are astonishingly good — topped with the mince of cilantro, fresh chiles and garlic you usually see on Vietnamese-Chinese fried crab or squid, an idea good enough to seem almost inevitable; the biscuit-topped curried-chicken potpie is wonderful. And the clove-spiked beef stew is a perfect amalgam of Vietnamese flavors and Depression-era diner cooking, a blend that seems to be exactly what this neighborhood, and these times, demand. 110 N. Avenue 56, Highland Park, (323) 257-8980, goodgirlfoods.com. Lunch Sat.-Sun., 11 a.m.-2 p.m.; dinner Sun., Tues.-Thurs., 6-10 p.m., Fri.-Sat., 6-11 p.m. Closed Mon. No alcohol. Cash only.
Grace
Grace, a chic, perpetually booked restaurant equidistant from El Coyote and Grace’s sister restaurant BLD, is the demesne of Neal Fraser — a rock star of L.A. cuisine, a chef with a wobbly, idiosyncratic style that couldn’t be further from the finish-fetish crowd pleasers. His is a detailed, market-oriented sort of New American cooking, heavy on French technique, strong flavors and intricate presentations. The cooking can still be a little rough around the edges at Grace — Fraser’s style is pretty improvisational — but this is still tremendously ambitious food, most of it locally sourced. If you’re lucky, you’ll run into a Scottish hare served with a tiny, crisp blackberry pie, a giant, unctuous slab of braised rare-breed pork belly on black rice, or Angus beef tartare mounded atop a miniaturized, grilled cheese sandwich saturated with truffles. And there are freshly fried jelly doughnuts for dessert. What more could you want? 7360 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 934-4400. Tues.-Thurs., Sun., 6-10 p.m., Fri.-Sat., 6-11 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking; difficult street parking. AE, MC, V.
The Grill on the Alley
The Grill seems as permanent as the Hollywood Hills, with its dining room washed in a pale, masculine light that seems imported from a century-old restaurant in New Orleans, and the white-jacketed waiters who call you sir, even if you are wearing sneakers. This is, in other words, a serious place to have lunch, the kind of restaurant where the Beverly Hills Rotary might hold its meetings if the Rotary had a chapter for aspiring billionaires. The steaks are good, the Caesar salad is dependable and the steak tartare is sublime. No better corned beef hash exists, and a crisp plate of it — well-done, thanks — is the ideal companion for a clear, cold, gin martini. You will also find this town’s essential rice pudding: touched with cinnamon, drizzled with heavy cream, coaxing the nutty, rounded essence out of every grain of rice. 9560 Dayton Way, Beverly Hills, (310) 276-0615. Mon.-Thurs., 11:30 a.m.-10:30 p.m., Fri.-Sat., 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m., Sun., 5-9 p.m. Full bar. Takeout. Valet parking; free street parking before 6 p.m. AE, DC, D, MC, V.
Guelaguetza
A proper mole negro, the classic sauce of central Mexico, is black as midnight, black as tar, black as Dick Cheney’s heart. There may be 50 Oaxacan restaurants in Los Angeles, each claiming the gooiest memela and the most delicious homemade horchata, but Guelaguetza, the first serious Oaxacan restaurant in town is still the best: the mintiest green mole, the richest mole amarillo and the spiciest goat barbacoa. At the original Koreatown location of Guelaguetza, not far from the biggest concentration of Oaxacan restaurants and bakeries this side of Oaxaca itself, you’ll find grasshoppers fried with chile, tlayudas the size of manhole covers and delicious, mole-drenched tamales. The black, black mole, based on ingredients the restaurant brings up from Oaxaca, is rich with chopped chocolate and burnt grain, toasted chile, and wave upon wave of textured spice — it’s as simple yet as nuanced as a great, old Côte Rôtie. 3337½ W. Eighth St., L.A., (213) 427-0779. Open daily 8 a.m.-10 p.m. No alcohol. Street parking. AE, MC, V.
* Huckleberry
Sunday mornings at Huckleberry, the new bakery/café from Rustic Canyon pastry chef Zoe Nathan, come perilously close to full-contact brunch, a scrum of Lululemon and UCLA sweatshirts. There is a line to get into the line here, and not an orderly one. Customers angle for views of the chalkboard menu, bribe small children to scout the pastry case, and jostle for tables in front of the serene counterstaff, who have obviously done enough yoga to rise above the petty turmoil of the crowd. At Huckleberry, even the governor waits in line. Nathan, the pastry chef, is beginning to get the kind of food-world attention previously reserved for Sherry Yard and Nancy Silverton, and her reputation for homey, carefully constructed desserts may be exceeded only by the buzz about this bakery. And it is worth a certain amount of trouble to get a crack at her prosciutto-stuffed croissants, so buttery that they threaten to spurt like a well-constructed chicken Kiev, or her flaky bacon-maple biscuits; her crumbly rustic tarts stuffed with goat cheese or her ultrarich flatbread. Brisket hash? Sure. Green eggs and ham is reinterpreted as pesto drizzled over sunnyside-up eggs nestled into La Quercia prosciutto on a housemade English muffin, and afternoons see sandwiches and rotisserie chicken — duck on Thursdays! 1014 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 451-2311, huckleberrycafe.com. Open Tues.-Fri. 8 a.m-7 p.m., Sat.-Sun. 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Takeout and retail bakery. Street parking. AE, MC, V.
