The Best Dishes of 2009

View more photos in Anne Fishbein's "Best Dishes of 2009" photo gallery.

Anne Fishbein

Satoshi Kiyokawa at Kiyokawa restaurant

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The Varnish

118 E. 6th St.
Los Angeles, CA 90013

Category: Bars/Clubs

Region: Downtown

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More About

• Satoshi Kiyokawa
• Laurent Quenioux
• Anne Fishbein
• Foods
• Food and Cooking

The original Shu Feng Garden, jammed into the usual mini-mall storefront in a corner of Rowland Heights, has for years posed a conundrum. Although it has been, practically without question, the best Sichuan restaurant in the county, with exemplary versions of cold pig’s ear, fuqi feipan and spicy fried chicken, its superiority to the best places in the San Gabriel Valley was slight. Unlike the scallion pancakes at Earthen or the hand-pulled noodles at Ma Lan, the mapo doufu rarely seemed profound enough to justify an extra half hour on the freeway. But at the new location in San Gabriel Square, traffic on the Pomona Freeway is no longer an issue. Dan dan mian may be the most meager of dishes in the Sichuan repertory, a simple bowl of noodles with minced pork, pickled mustard greens and chile, the stuff of a million street carts, but Shu Feng Garden’s supple, stretchy noodles and extravagant use of Sichuan peppercorns makes its version pretty special. 140 W. Valley Blvd., San Gabriel. (626) 560-1815.

Are pig’s ears the new pork belly? Because they’ve been everywhere lately, not just on Sichuan menus but dumped over terrines, tangled with squid and piquillo peppers, topped with fried eggs, tossed into salads and folded into tacos. Really, this winter they’ve been easier to find than artichokes. Ground zero for the recent pig’s ear craze is probably Church & State downtown, where the ears, simultaneously crisp and chewy, soft and tasting like the best French roast pork, are piled into a metal julep cup with a little dish of béarnaise sauce on the side, as impossible to stop eating as the onion rings on your girlfriend’s plate. I know Walter Manzke has transformed Church & State into the most accomplished of the city’s bistros, including the stadium-sized newcomer in Beverly Hills, and that we should probably be celebrating his Provencal-style spot prawns, his suave bouillabaisse or his woolly mammoth–size roasted marrow bones instead. But those ears! 1850 Industrial St., L.A. (213) 405-1434.

If you drive the back roads of Umbria on a Saturday afternoon, you will probably run into dozen porchetta wagons parked by the crossroads, vending parcels of temptation at least as potent as anything dreamed up by Robert Johnson: sandwiches carved from the whole roast pigs stretched across the serving counters of the trucks; crisp-skinned and screaming with fennel, rosemary and garlic. At Mozza2Go, the new takeout wing of the Mozza empire, the meat is a bit softer than what you find in Italy, but it is also juicier, practically running down your chin, and the explosive flavor betrays the fact that the restaurant probably spends as much on the fennel pollen as it does on the pork. 6610 Melrose Ave., Hlywd. (323) 297-0100.

An intercoastal restaurant war was launched this fall when Momofuku chef David Chang suggested on a panel that San Francisco cooking was basically figs on a plate. (Chez Panisse chef David Tanis perhaps anticipated this when last year he called his wonderful cookbook Figs on a Platter.) But if the fig is the right fig, it doesn’t need much to showcase its loveliness. And at the Tasting Kitchen, which is almost Maoist in its simplicity, the delicate, smoky sweetness of roasted figs was set like a jewel on a bit of grilled bread smeared with fresh, pure fromage blanc made in the restaurant’s own kitchen. Stunning. 1633 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice. (310) 392-6644.

If you are open-minded about dessert, a beer float can be a mind-blowing way to complete a meal, all cold creaminess and explosive fizz, innocent sweetness and a blast of pungent, hoppy bitterness. As served at Golden State, an ale-intensive Fairfax gastropub, the beer float is practically a sacrament, a scoop of brown-bread ice cream from the cult gelateria Scoops, moistened gently with Old Rasputin Imperial Stout, a marriage of equals. Caramelized intensity plays against caramelized intensity here, brown against brown, rich against richer, and the strong back taste may remind you of the Russian fermented-bread drink kvass. Beer floats are not uncommon in serious beer bars, but Golden State’s version is a step or two beyond. Everybody should try a scoop of Scoops in their beer. 426 N. Fairfax Ave., L.A. (323) 782-8331.

Kiyokawa is the kind of discovery every gastronaut hopes to make at least once in his life, a talented sushi chef, stuck making spicy tuna rolls at an obscure neighborhood restaurant, who has it within himself to prepare the sparkling sashimi plates and first-rate kaiseki dinners, a chef prepared to dazzle adventurous palates with fresh wasabi grated on sharkskin, sake-marinated uni, and live Santa Barbara spot prawns that are stunning in their sweetness. Yet as masterfully as Satoshi Kiyokawa handles raw fish, his most impressive dish may be this simple soup, a strong dashi bathing a single, luscious round of daikon; some carrot; a cube of bean curd; half a taro root with its hairy outside but not its potatolike inner skin removed; and a couple of snow peas. It takes 15 minutes to remove the outer skin of taro, rubbing each tuber with a crumpled piece of aluminum foil instead of swiping it with a knife. Each vegetable must be simmered separately, and combined only at the end, so that the flavors do not muddy one another. It is a dish worthy of a three-star chef. 265 S. Robertson Blvd., Beverly Hills. (310) 358-1900.