A Movable Beast: L.A. Weekly's 99 Essential Restaurants

Angeli Caffe
Angeli's Evan Kleiman is one of the busiest people in Los Angeles food, hosting the Good Food show on KCRW, writing books, emceeing half the city's culinary events and popping up everywhere food policy is being discussed. Scarcely a week goes by at the restaurant when she isn't doing a Slow Food event, turning her kitchen over to a gifted Brazilian cook for Street Food Monday, or curating a many-course regional Italian dinner. Yet Angeli is very much what it was when it opened decades ago, the Los Angeles version of an Italian caffe — not the grand and complicated restaurants you read about in guidebooks, but a place to get a plate of roast chicken, a simple pizza or spaghetti dressed with nothing but a bit of cheese, a few stalks of fresh asparagus or a handful of clams. Angeli crystallized the affinity of Angelenos for this kind of casual Italian cooking. Sometimes there is no place you would rather be than behind a table at Angeli, contemplating a glass of Sangiovese and starting in on some gnocchi in tomato sauce or ravioli with melted butter and sage. 7274 Melrose Ave., L.A. (323) 936-9086, angelicaffe.com. Lunch Tues.-Fri., 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m.; dinner Tues.-Thurs. & Sun., 5-10 p.m., Fri.-Sat., 5-11 p.m. Beer and wine. Takeout and delivery. Valet parking. AE, D, MC, V. Location map here.

Angelini Osteria
Charles Rosen's study of music's Classical era includes sections called "Haydn," "Mozart" and "Haydn After the Death of Mozart." If you were writing about the last decade in Los Angeles restaurants, you could probably title chapters "Angelini Osteria," "La Terza" and "Angelini Osteria After the Death of La Terza." Because where osterie in Italy find purpose in the repetition of classic dishes, in menus that may not change for decades, Gino Angelini is by nature a creative chef who likes to mark dishes as his own — he was a star chef in Italy long before he came to California — and when he was creating his signature cuisine at the fancier La Terza, the simpler Osteria food seemed less rustic than unfinished, as if the cooks couldn't be bothered to perform the couple of steps that would take, say, the stewed tripe from passable to spectacular. But the kitchen seems to be on a tear these days — the oxtails, the Saturday porchetta, the pasta e fagioli are first-rate. And the Osteria seems to have become fun for the chef, a place where he can fuel a happy lunch crowd with pasta al limone with basil, and pizza with burrata, serve veal kidneys on Tuesday nights, dish out respectable versions of Roman trattoria classics like spaghetti carbonara and chicken alla diavola. 7313 Beverly Blvd., L.A. (323) 297-0070, angeliniosteria.com. Lunch Tues.-Fri., noon-2:30 p.m.; dinner Tues.-Sun., 5:30-10:30 p.m. Beer and wine. Takeout. Valet parking. All major CC. Location map here.

PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

Chung King: fried chicken cubes with hot pot

PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

El Parian's goat rib on corn tortilla

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Zelo Gourmet Pizzeria

328 E. Foothill Blvd.
Arcadia, CA 91006

Category: Restaurant > Italian

Region: Foothill Cities

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Ammo
There may be no restaurant in Hollywood as easy to take for granted as Ammo, which has held down its patch of the postproduction district for years. Everyone even tangentially involved in the industry has dashed through Ammo lunches more times than they remember, and while the restaurant was noted for its commitment to local farms, its wine dinners and its seasonal menus, the cooking itself was often overlooked. But this year, with Daniel Mattern as the chef, a local dude who spent time at Portland's Clarklewis, there is actual excitement at Ammo in the kitchen as well as the pantry: a highly mutable menu of pastas, wild salmon and beautiful pork cooked with whatever you saw in the farmers market that morning (a maven probably could guess the exact week of the year by the look of the spigarello, Mission figs and Fuyu persimmons on her plate). Pastry chef Roxana Julliapat is a master of fruit desserts. 1155 N. Highland Ave., Hlywd. (323) 871-2666, ammocafe.com. Lunch Mon.-Fri., 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m.; dinner Mon.-Thurs., 6-10 p.m., Fri.-Sat., 5:30-11 p.m., Sun. 5-9 p.m.; Sunday brunch 10 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Full bar. Valet. All major CC. Location map here.

Animal
In its short, happy existence, Animal has become the most influential restaurant in Los Angeles, the one where visiting chefs go when they have time for only one dinner in town, and at the center of the local fixations on pig's belly, pig's ear, pig's heads and pig's tails; monstrously caloric dishes like loco moco and poutine; and above all devotion to bacon, which appears everywhere on the short, seasonal menu, up to and including the chocolate dessert. Chefs Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo, perpetually red-eyed and rarely seen outside each other's company, consider a dish incomplete without a sliver of pancetta, a bit of pork belly or a slab of the bacon they smoke themselves in the kitchen. It's what Time columnist Josh Ozersky calls lardcore.

Animal is probably the first restaurant to raise Boy Food to the level of a genuine cuisine — a farmers market–powered version of Boy Food, but Boy Food nonetheless: fried quail with grits, chicken hearts with lima beans, fried rabbit legs with tomatoes. Chefs have been serving seared foie gras with syrups and compotes for centuries; Animal's version of that is to put it on a sweetened version of the truck stop–standard biscuits and sausage gravy. Animal is small and loud and powered by seasonal organic produce; has a nice list of manly wines available by the bottle, the glass and the half-bottle carafe; and, although it is populated with people who like meat, it is unafraid to serve an unadorned bowl of fruit for dessert ... if only at those times when even bacon isn't enough. 435 N. Fairfax Ave., L.A. (323) 782-9225, animalrestaurant.com. Sun.-Thurs., 6-11 p.m., Fri.-Sat., 6 p.m.-2 a.m. Beer and wine. Street parking. All major CC. Location map here.