The 10 Best Dishes of 2010

From entree to cappuccino, short ribs to bacon-wrapped bacon

Comments (0) By Jonathan Gold Thursday, Dec 23 2010

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Have you tasted bloody clams? Because they really are worth eating: chewy, plump things about the size of a half-dollar, oozing dark juices from inside their rough, crenellated shells, tasting something like shellfish fortified with strong beef bouillon. Bloody clams, a specialty of the Guatemalan café La Cevicheria, may be at their very best chopped into a ceviche, moistened with chile and citrus and Worcestershire sauce, a tonic all animal vitality, sweet ocean and life. 3809 W. Pico Blvd., L.A. (323) 732-1253.

TONKOTSU RAMEN

This has been a year that the Los Angeles ramen cult will cherish for decades, a year when half a dozen fine noodle shops opened, when the lowly street noodle finally reached the status of more exalted specialties like sashimi and robata-yaki. Best of all may have been Jinya, whose operation was imported straight from Tokyo — its long, springy noodles soak up just enough broth to become saturated, yet retain a wheaty integrity of their own. And best of all at Jinya is an odd, strong-smelling tonkotsu ramen whose intense pork broth is pumped up with industrial quantities of dashi and dried fish, a broth on steroids, a broth that seemed to be trying to establish a world record for umami concentration. Can tongues pant? After a few bites, you may feel as if yours had just run a half-marathon without bothering to notify the rest of your head. 11239 Ventura Blvd., Studio City. (818) 980-3977, jinya-la.com/ramen.

BACON-WRAPPED BACON

PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

Bloody clam ceviche

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What leads a man to wrap bacon around bacon? Is it a short step to those 93,000-calorie meat bombs that fascinate the interwebs? Yet at Fig, a hotel restaurant otherwise dedicated to the glory of California produce, it almost seems like a good idea, a thick, braised slab of belly fat, sweetly smoke-pungent and soft as a gentle sigh. The second bacon, encasing its brother in a mummy wrap, is crisp and thin, a bacon of texture as opposed to a bacon of substance, likely to shatter at the touch of a fork. If Alain Ducasse spent a few shifts behind the griddle at a Denny's, something like bacon-wrapped bacon would be the result. If you have ever wished that bacon could be liquid and crunchy at the same time, this is the bacon for you. In the Fairmont Miramar Hotel, 101 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica. (310) 319-3111, figsantamonica.com.

VAMPIRO

A lot of Angelenos first tasted this supreme example of Eastside street food ... in Beverly Hills, where blogger Bill Esparza had recruited the stand that may or may not have been called Tacos Guanajuato for the local food festival. And the magnetic pull of those vampiros — crisp tortillas blanketed in molten toasted cheese before they were dressed out as tacos; gooey, salty, spicy and crunchy — was enough to propel even Westsiders to the Boyle Heights Catholic school that let them set up their tables on the grounds. Squid Ink's Robin Brown tells us that the entire stand was stolen, which means no more vampiros for the moment. Ars longa, vampiros brevis, I guess.