Jonathan Gold’s 99 Essential L.A. Restaurants

Sanuki No Sato
One ramen dive or another is always pulling us down to the Gardena/Torrance area, and we are always happy we made the effort. But when bombing up Western Avenue toward home, we always feel a bit wistful that we hadn’t stopped at Sanuki No Sato instead, the famously unmarked restaurant that is probably the area’s most elegant noodle restaurant. Udon noodles come in all the standard flavors: topped with crisp buttons of tempura batter in a plain soy-enriched broth, or with chewy bits of rice cake, or with exquisitely slimy Japanese mountain yams. Yuki-nabe udon — served in a rustic-looking iron kettle and buried beneath half an inch of grated daikon, a sprinkling of grated wasabi and a ferociously spiced cod-egg sac — is refreshing in spite of its bulk, an exotic bowl you could eat every day. At lunch, come early for the infamous sanuki obento, a multicourse banquet served in a lacquered box, and a testament to Japanese engineering: I have seen buffet tables with less food on them. 18206 S. Western Ave., Gardena, (310) 324-9184. Lunch Mon.-Fri., 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m., Sat.-Sun., 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m.; dinner Mon.-Sun., 5:30-10 p.m. Beer, wine. Lot parking. AE, DC, MC, V.

Sapp Coffee Shop
Sapp may be the best lunchroom in Hollywood, a bright Thai restaurant, unrelentingly yellow inside, sharing a small mini-mall with a video shop and a place to get griddled Thai desserts; crowded at noon, not with revelers but with people who have come to Thai Town to shop and eat spicy, stinky boat noodles, remarkable grilled chicken and bright-green “jade” noodles tossed with Chinese barbecue. Sapp is the Thai equivalent of Pie ’N Burger, a lunchroom where the virtues of homeliness become extraordinary when put in context with the shiny, glittery surfaces against which it might compete. 5183 Hollywood Blvd., Hlywd., (323) 665-1035. 7 a.m.-8:30 p.m. Closed Wed. No alcohol. Takeout. Lot parking. Cash only.

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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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Sona
David Myers’ breakthrough restaurant is an exquisite L.A. space, a serene bubble of luxury and refinement with an endless, nuanced, ever-changing tasting menu, which often tends toward the Japanese: cubes of sansho-pepper-scented tuna married to sautéed sweetbreads, passion-fruit cannoli stuffed with peekytoe crab, tiny Nantucket scallops flavored with dates and poppy seeds, or rare duck with red wine and pumpkin seeds toasted to resemble the exact crunch of its skin. Sona is the furthest thing imaginable from the Rabelaisian assault of a brasserie. What we know as California cuisine may be dedicated to revealing produce at its best, but Myers goes after nature with blowtorches and microtomes and dynamite, determined to bend the old woman to her will. The morning after nine courses at Sona (this is one restaurant where only the tasting menu will do), it will already seem like a half-forgotten dream. 401 N. La Cienega Blvd., W. Hlywd., (310) 659-7708. Tues.-Fri., 6-10 p.m., Sat., 5:30-11 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, D, DC, MC, V.

Spago
The original Spago on Sunset was to New American Cooking what the Armory Show was to modern painting or Meet the Beatles was to rock & roll: the one that changed the rules. Designer pizza got its start in that Sunset Strip dining room, as did fusion cooking, the notion of the celebrity chef, and the idea that fine dining could be fun. In Wolfgang Puck’s glamorous Beverly Hills space, bolstered by imaginative executive chef Lee Hefter and pastry chef Sherry Yard, he’s redefined our idea of what Spago might be — and the roasted-beet cake with goat cheese, the turbot with Chino Ranch vegetables and the 10-spice roast squab are good enough to make you forget the duck-sausage pizza and the chopped vegetable salad that originally made Spago famous. If a tasting menu is within your budget, it’s probably the best way to experience what the restaurant can do. 176 N. Cañon Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 385-0880. Lunch Mon.-Fri., 11:30 a.m.-2:15 p.m., Sat., noon-2:30 p.m.; dinner Mon.-Thurs., Sun., 5:30-10:30 p.m., Fri.-Sat., 5:30-11 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, D, MC, V.

Square One
When you have finished the sports section over coffee at Square One, and the stack of Weeklys has not yet been delivered, you could probably spend a good 15 minutes perusing the chalkboard, a roster of the vast and interconnected network of the restaurant’s organic suppliers. It is hard to go wrong with bacon, but Square One, a cheerful, brightly painted breakfast place in the L. Ron Hubbard district of East Hollywood, may have the city’s best: Nueske’s bacon, the well-regarded artisanal product from northern Wisconsin, sliced thick, laid on a rack and slow-roasted until it becomes crisp but pliable, sweet and deeply smoky, exploding under your teeth into gushers of fragrant juice. Still, even without the bacon, Square One is a pretty good place — epochal breakfasts, big salads for lunch made with roasted beets or house-cured salmon, pressed ham-and-cheese sandwiches, organic grits, fragile chocolate chip cookies as big around as dinner plates. The chefs shop the same way you do, or at least the way you would like to think that you would if your life were devoted to cooking breakfast rather than to such unimportant concerns as work, television and sex. 4854 Fountain Ave., Hlywd., (323) 661-1109, squareonedining.com. Tues.-Sun., 8 a.m.-4 p.m. No alcohol. Street parking. AE, MC, V.