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

The last conversation I had with chef David Myers lingered on a kaiseki restaurant he'd visited in Kyoto, its silence, and the great specialty it had been perfecting since 1292: a plain, perfect soft-cooked egg. So perhaps he understands why, with the evanescent wonders that pour out of his kitchens at Sona, and the finely realized brasserie cooking at Comme Ça around the corner, I find myself drawn most often to the Zen perfection of his cheeseburger. But Comme Ça's lunchtime-only cheeseburger is sui generis: a thick, dripping, loosely packed puck of bloody-rare beef, glazed with a good Cheddar, barely but adequately contained in a soft, shiny-crusted bun. This cheeseburger is from an old tradition in which ingredients are allowed to speak for themselves, an unfussy burger that tastes like good, aged meat. "It's basically my mother's hamburger,'' confesses the chef. Comme Ça, 8479 Melrose Ave., W. Hlywd. (323) 782-1178.

It can be difficult to choose a restaurant in Little India, but it's easy to choose dessert. Because as enamored as one may be with the reborn Standard Sweets or the halvah at Pioneer Boulevard's many chaat shops, the Saffron Spot wins every time. If I were made of sterner stuff, I would be drawn to the house's caramel-y, austerely delicious matka kulfi, a traditional ice cream made from milk slowly boiled until it becomes almost thick enough to resist the fierce Indian sun. But glittery objects tend to undo one. And it is hard to imagine ice cream more blissfully gaudy than the Saffron Silk, saffron-tinted to the brightness of a sari, flavored with a bit of rosewater and studded with pistachios. Saffron Spot, 18744 Pioneer Blvd., Artesia. (562) 809-4554.

PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

Border Grill's green corn tamales

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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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What could be better than french fries? Possibly this Shanghai-style preparation of battered fillets that resembles nothing so much as freshly fried fish doughnuts, a seafood dish so tender, it makes Mrs. Paul's fish sticks seem as tough as raw eel liver: crisp, greaseless and unexpectedly fragile. Giang Nan, 306 N. Garfield Ave., No. A-12, Monterey Park. (626) 573-3421.

A couple of times a month, I have it on good authority, a certain kind of comment card shows up in the stack at Pizzeria Mozza, written out in old-fashioned, auntly Italian script, suggesting that what the restaurant serves is the furthest thing from pizza. And perhaps that is true. But in the wood oven at Pizzeria Mozza, Nancy Silverton has more or less reinvented the very idea of pizza: airy and burnt and risen around the rim, thin and crisp in the center, neither bready in the traditional Neapolitan manner nor wispy the way you find them in Rome. The crust is so good, in fact, that it may be at its best dressed with nothing more than a drizzle of good olive oil and a few grains of sea salt — and it's not sad to eat topped with burrata and vivid squash blossoms, taleggio and house-made sausage, lardo and rosemary or pureed anchovies and fried egg. (The mandatory caveat applies here: Silverton is a family friend.) This isn't your mama's pizza, and it's not the pizza you used to eat back in Jersey, and that, perhaps, is the point. Pizzeria Mozza, 641 N. Highland Ave., L.A. (323) 297-0101.

The name of the dish came into existence, I was once told, as a typo on the menu at Mon Kee, the first serious seafood restaurant in Chinatown, and it has passed from menu to menu ever since. (I will, for the moment, ignore the inconvenient fact that Mon Kee was Cantonese, while pork pump is ur-Shanghainese, and that it was never clear what exactly was misspelled — the specific cut involved comes from nowhere near the rump.) In all the world, nobody braises with quite the intensity of the Shanghainese, who slow-cook the pump in a rich master sauce of soy and stock and rock sugar and rice wine until it becomes sweet and trembling and barely solid enough to hold its shape in a spoon before it collapses into a fragrant, slightly viscous puddle. For a long time, the local standard-bearer was Lake Spring in Monterey Park; at the moment, I might lean toward the place alternately called Wok n' Noodle and Shanghai Xiao Chi, although you will find neither name outside the restaurant, which from the front resembles nothing more than a shuttered print shop. Shanghai Xiao Chi, 828 W. Valley Blvd., Alhambra. (626) 588-2284.

JTYH, a descendant of the late, great Heavy Noodling, specializes in the sorts of noodles a Cantonese chef would disavow at the point of a sword: thick, irregular things, frilled where they taper to an edge, shaved from a log of dough directly into boiling water. They're self-consciously rustic things that taste of themselves whether fried with moo shoo pork and lots of garlic or immersed with tendon in a deep, anise-scented beef broth. The noodles, which are in the style of Shanxi, a northern Chinese province sandwiched somewhere between Beijing and Inner Mongolia, have the good, dense bite of the best Italian pasta, and the heft to be used as bondage implements if that's the way you roll. JTYH Restaurant, 9425 Valley Blvd., Rosemead. (626) 442-8999.