99 Things to Eat in L.A. Before You Die

Forget the paradigm shift, the social-media buzz, the legions of imitators, the rock star–chef thing and the lines that stretch halfway to Rosemead. We know that Kogi is a new kind of restaurant, an art-directed take on Korean street food previously unimaginable in both California and Seoul, truck food that makes you feel plugged into Los Angeles. What's relevant here is that a Kogi kalbi taco is really freaking good, Korean-style short ribs tucked into a decent-quality tortilla with shredded cabbage, a bit of chile and a proto-Korean relish of scallions, soy, sesame seeds and citrus, difference neatly split between a Mexican taco and a Korean ssäm. Kogi, twitter.com/kogibbq.

Overshadowed by the magnificent Iranian stews, elegant rice dishes and complex soups, Iranian sandwiches are perhaps undervalued, though not by the expats who crowd into Tehrangeles cafés around noon. But there it is, even better than at its rival Attari, juicy, gently flavored grilled lamb's tongue tucked into a hollowed-out length of toasted French bread, and dressed in a way that may seem familiar to hot-dog cognoscenti, like something you might hope to find in a cross-cultural dive restaurant somewhere in Tehran itself. If you insist, they will make the sandwich for you with an actual Hebrew National frank instead of the tongue. Canary, 1942 Westwood Blvd., Wstwd. (310) 470-1312.

PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

Philippe's French dip: one part history, one part nostril-searing mustard

PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

The strawberry doughnut from Donut Man: knife and fork required

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Casa Bianca Pizza Pie

1650 Colorado Blvd.
Eagle Rock, CA 90041

Category: Restaurant > Italian

Region: Northeast L.A.

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• NL West
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• Los Angeles Dodgers
• Bread
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Actually, you should be eating this after midnight somewhere out on Whittier Boulevard, cooked on a cheap device crudely welded to a stolen shopping cart by a guy who knows that sheriff's deputies are required to demolish the rig on sight. Street dogs always taste better that way: wrapped in bacon, squirted with mayonnaise and ketchup, and piled with grilled onions, peppers and grilled chiles. Similar to what is known as a Sonora dog elsewhere in the country, the street dog is bad to the bone, chips of which you can probably find in the meat. But sometimes you want all of the flavor and none of the salmonella. At such times, there is always Reseda. Fab Dogs, 6747 Tampa Ave., Reseda. (818) 344-4336.

Italian-Americans in South Philly have spaghetti and meatballs, a dish that never existed in the motherland, served in portions that make Fellini movies seem like documentaries. Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles have the Hollenbeck, a.k.a. Manuel's Special, which is more or less an old-line Mexican restaurant's entire menu wrapped into a bedsheet of a tortilla the size of a pillowcase. The streets are paved with gold, the burrito seems to imply. The rivers flow with Coca-Cola, and the burritos are too heavy to lift. The burrito is crude, you say? Why do you hate America? El Tepeyac Café, 812 N. Evergreen Ave., City Terrace. (323) 268-1960.

Aged in buried clay amphorae? Vinified to taste like Hefeweizen? Smelling a bit, quite intentionally, of old socks? Lou Amdur's ideas about wine are more evolved than yours or mine, grounded firmly in the land of meta, so that sound winemaking is dull; intellectual fraudulence can be a sign of integrity; and the fact that you like a wine means that there's probably something wrong with it. That dude from Sideways? He wouldn't last a minute here, at least when the conversation turned from overextracted Santa Ynez pinot noir to superior wines made with braucol, mtsvane or timorasso. Lou, 724 Vine St., Hlywd. (323) 962-6369.

I have tasted way more than my share of these, both in Los Angeles and in systematic paths through the bakeries of Paris, but it was not until I tasted Alain Giraud's compact beauties that I finally realized the crisply intense breakfast pastry's ultimate purpose: not as a mere accompaniment to a café au lait and not just to showcase the chocolate, but as the ultimate expression of the gamy, slightly tart roundness of cultured butter. At such times is one's soul exposed to God. Anisette Brasserie, 225 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica. (310) 395-3200.

Josef Centeno is often grouped with the postmodernist chefs, partly because his cuisine leans toward cross-cultural idioms, and partly because his career path, which has pinged from grand restaurants to bars and diners, is unconventional. But at bottom, I think, he cooks like a slightly hip French grandmother, classic cuisine bourgeois inflected with Los Angeles flavors, and the best food at all of his restaurants tends to be his long-braised meats. Don't miss his spoonably soft paleron, the thick cut of beef shoulder that is known as flatiron when it's cut into steaks instead of braised in red wine, nestled with bittersweet slices of kumquat into a gently salted bed of Cream of Wheat. The dish sounds kind of avant-garde, but is closer to a perfected version of Aunt Fanny's Sunday pot roast. Lazy Ox Canteen, 241 S. San Pedro St., dwntwn. (213) 626-5299.

Los Angeles, we are often told, is a city that refuses to recognize its past — as if, as in Sunset Boulevard, it weren't the most obsessively memorialized city in the world. And there is no restaurant anywhere, not Keens Steakhouse, Simpsons-in-the-Strand or Bofinger, as immersed in its past as Musso & Frank Grill, which is almost a museum of the American lunchroom menu of 1918: avocado cocktail, finnan haddie, chicken potpie, lamb kidneys Turbigo and diplomat pudding. Not least among these nursery-food classics is the Welsh rarebit, a concoction of cheese melted with ale, dusted with paprika and poured over toast. Think of it as ballast for your second martini. Musso & Frank Grill, 6667 Hollywood Blvd., Hlywd. (323) 467-7788.