Jonathan Gold’s 99 Essential L.A. Restaurants

Renu Nakorn
This was the first home of regional Thai cooking in Los Angeles, a fortress of minced-shrimp larb and sour Isaan rice sausage launched at a time when most local Thai menus were all angel wings and spicy broccoli beef. This was where many of us first tried crispy rice salad and real koi soi, beef-intestine soup and seua rong hai. Newly remodeled, Renu Nakorn is modern and spacious, and filled with Breck girls from the local Bible college as well as Thai folk happy to be reacquainted with the restaurant’s Isaan specialties. If you ever went to the original Renu Nakorn (or to the fabulous Lotus of Siam in Las Vegas, which is run by the family that ran the restaurant in the 1990s), you probably know the tripartite nature of the menu, the usual Thai specialties supplemented by the barbecue and spicy grilled-meat salads of the Isaan region, and an almost-hidden list of specialties from the Chiang Mai area, which may be the kitchen’s real strength: pounded roast-chile dips to scoop up with freshly fried pork rinds, sweet pork curries influenced by Burma and coconut-enhanced khao soi noodles. After dinner, wander next door to the last working dairy in the area and pick up a quart of the excellent chocolate milk. 13019 E. Rosecrans Ave., Suite 105, Norwalk, (562) 921-2124. Mon.-Sat., 11 a.m.-9:30 p.m., Sun., noon-8 p.m.

* Riva
Riva is a big, good-looking room in the tradition of the L.A. restaurant, with a long bar at one side, where the bartenders hope to tempt cocktalians with Riviera-inspired Aperol cucumber fizzes and concoctions of grappa and apricot instead of the inevitable Grey Goose and soda. Riva is open every night until midnight, which is no small thing in this early-closing corner of town. Although it started life as more or less a pizza-oriented bistro, chef Jason Travi, who is also at Frâiche, tweaked it into a stuzzichini bar, influenced by the cafés specializing in crostini, cured meats and little raw seafood dishes compatible with cheap wine or expensive vodka that are currently dominating piazzas all over Italy. And the cooking — a bit of this, a bit of that — has come together: a spicy mound of tomatoes and octopus fra diavolo to spoon onto slices of toasted baguette; slabs of fried tripe arranged around an arugula salad, slices of San Daniele prosciutto; slabby petalo pasta with a dense Bolognese sauce flavored with fresh mint; even Travi’s famous tuna tonnato. If you want a shot at the fig and gorgonzola pizza, you’ll have to come back at lunch. 312 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 451-7482, rivarestaurantla.com. Open daily 11:30 a.m.-mid. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, D, MC, V.

Robert Rodriguez

Anne Fishbein

Riva

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Angeli Caffe

7274 Melrose Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90046

Category: Restaurant > Italian

Region: Hollywood

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Angelini Osteria

7313 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Category: Restaurant > Italian

Region: Melrose/ Beverly/ Fairfax

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Rivera
It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that among a certain strain of hungry Angelenos, John Sedlar’s reappearance at Rivera, an elegant new restaurant a block or two from Staples Center, is a big deal, the first restaurant in 15 years from a chef whose blend of French haute cuisine and Southwest-flavors inspired an entire school of cuisine. And past the open kitchen, past the bar, past a casual-dining area, where you can stop for a tapa or three after a Lakers game or a concert at Nokia, is Sedlar’s new inner sanctum, a hushed, intimate dining room lined with glowing tequila bottles and populated with a healthy cross section of the local Latino power structure. Sedlar has apparently been up to a lot since we saw him last, and his cooking, mostly small plates, vibrates with Spanish as well as Latin-American flavors, with a slug of influence from the molecular-gastronomy guys. And unlike every other chef working the Latin-fusion riff, when Sedlar prepares something like a banana-leaf tamale with short ribs and exotic mushrooms, he understands that the most important thing is that the tamale itself be good. This is a restaurant Los Angeles has needed for a very long time. 1050 S. Flower St., dwntwn., (213)749-1460, riverarestaurant.com. Lunch Mon.-Fri., 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m.; dinner Mon.-Sat., 5:30-10:30 p.m., Sun., 5:30-10 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted.

Rustic Canyon
If you spent the morning browsing through the Santa Monica farmers market, you have a pretty good idea of what you’re going to see on the menu at Rustic Canyon that night. Like so many other restaurants on the Westside, the food at this wine bar owes less to the standard bistro playbook than it does to the kind of cooking French guys don’t consider cooking at all: basically a sackful of glamorous produce collated with artisanal cheeses, sustainable meats and lovingly handcrafted pastas. As cynics might say, that’s not cooking, that’s shopping. On the other hand, it is also more or less the strategy followed by places like Lucques and Chez Panisse. And when executed by a chef as skilled as Rustic Canyon’s Evan Funke, whose goat cheese tortellone with fresh mint, duck breast with peaches, and sliced sunchokes sautéed with garlic are so fine, it seems like the only possible way to eat — the ratatouille is the essence of summer, and his roasted root vegetable shepherd’s pie couldn’t have been better if it were made with hare in place of the roasted turnips. The rustic pastries of Zoe Nathan, who also runs Huckleberry across the street, have won a national reputation, and when you taste her fresh corn cake with corn ice cream or her hot, cinnamon-scented doughnut spheres with stone-ground hot chocolate, you will understand why. 1119 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 393-7050, rusticcanyonwinebar.com. Sun.-Thurs., 5:30-10:30 p.m., Fri.-Sat., 5:30-11:30 p.m. Beer, wine. Valet parking.