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114 S. Central Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Category: Restaurant > Singaporean
Region: Downtown
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3239 Helms Ave.
Culver City, CA 90232
Category: Restaurant > Asian Fusion
Region: Culver City
408 S. Main St.
Los Angeles, CA 90013
Category: Restaurant > Contemporary
Region: Downtown
2057 Sawtelle Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90025
Category: Restaurant > Japanese
Region: West L.A.
8400 Wilshire Blvd.
Beverly Hills, CA 90211
Category: Restaurant > Vietnamese
Region: Beverly Hills
7360 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
Category: Restaurant > Latin American
Region: Melrose/ Beverly/ Fairfax
8050 W. 3rd St.
Los Angeles, CA 90048
Category: Restaurant > Japanese
Region: Melrose/ Beverly/ Fairfax
1142 Manhattan Ave.
Manhattan Beach, CA 90266
Category: Restaurant > New American
Region: South Bay
Roast marrowbones with prawn sambal
In a year when Los Angeles cooking came together with a coherence it probably hasn't seen since the mid-1980s, this dish at Spice Table seemed to express everything important about local cuisine. The roast marrowbone is a touchstone of the nose-to-tail movement. Its garnish of scarlet pickled onions hints at the Yucatán. Chef Bryant Ng, a Singaporean who also cooked at Pizzeria Mozza, roasts his bones in the wood fire that perfumes his downtown restaurant and glazes the marrow with a Southeast Asian paste of fermented shrimp and ground chiles that chars and crisps in the smoky heat. When you spoon the trembling marrow onto a bit of sliced baguette, garnishing it with the rau ram and a sliver of pickled onion, the taste of the leaf is sharp, almost metallic; the funk of the shrimp paste gives way to a low, throbbing chile heat; and the marrow melts on your tongue, meat yet beyond meat; a mellow, liquid bass line that makes the other flavors dance. 114 S. Central Ave., Little Tokyo. (213) 620-1840, thespicetable.com.
Ganjang goreng
If you have eaten extensively in Koreatown, you undoubtedly have run into ganjang gejang, raw marinated crab, as a giveaway in an assortment of banchan. And you probably haven't much enjoyed it: The crabs are too small, they're too gooey or they have been too long from the sea — probably all of the above. At Soban, ganjang gejang, at the princely price of $29.95, is a way of life, even though the dish is properly drinking food and a sign on the wall indicates that alcohol is neither permitted nor condoned. One look at the plate and you will forgive: two neatly bisected blue crabs, not transformed by rice wine, as is the norm, but by what seemed to be a clean, soy-tinged distillation of the animal's own juices, mellow yet crabbier than the crab itself. When you suck at a leg, the flesh pulls cleanly out from the shell, firm but not cooked, briny and sweet, and nearly glazed with big clumps of roe. 4001 W. Olympic Blvd., Koreatown. (323) 936-9106.
Stuffed Monterey squid
At Lukshon, Sang Yoon of Father's Office fame has focused his perfectionism on the street food of Southeast Asia, and the cocoa-dusted foie gras ganache, lamb-belly roti canai and Spanish mackerel with coconut vinegar are almost jewel-like in their precision, if not their fidelity to the dishes on which they are riffing. I've never had anything quite like his tiny bulbs of California squid stuffed with Northern Thai fermented ground-pork sausage, although I've stared at recipes for similar dishes in Vietnamese cookbooks. The sauce, a kind of pesto made with the pungent Vietnamese herb rau ram and Malaysian candlenuts, is from a fantasyland where Liguria meets Kuala Lumpur. Could this be the year of rau ram? 3639 Helms Ave., Culver City. (310) 202-6808, lukshon.com.
Bäco
The bäco, Joseph Centeno's elusive creation, was for years the focus of a Where's Waldo of L.A. food — a kind of flatbread sandwich, vaguely resembling either a pita wrap or a steroidal taco, that Centeno has flirted with at most of the restaurants he has cooked at since he was at Opus in the mid-aughts, but never officially put on a menu because he was afraid he would never be able to serve anything else. (Bäcos are awfully good.) Now, at his new tavern/small-plates joint Bäco Mercat, it's all bäcos, all the time. A bäco may taste a little like a falafel, or a crisp shrimp bánh mì, or a chicken salad sandwich by way of Algeria. But it is mostly a gooey thing with the Catalan pepper-almond sauce salbitxada; bits of pork belly; crunchy, porous cubes of what Centeno calls beef carnitas; scallions; and a kind of smoky olive oil thing that binds, flavors and oozes into your lap. 408 S. Main St., dwntwn. (213) 687-8808, bacomercat.com.
Tsukemen
A year ago, Los Angeles had barely heard of tsukemen, pronounced skeh-men, a Tokyo-born dish of bare, cooled noodles served with a dipping sauce of superconcentrated pork broth flavored with dried fish. Now tsukemen has gone viral — I half-expect to see it pop up at Jack-in-the-Box. The local grail of tsukemen may be found lunchtimes only at Tsujita, a branch of one of the best-regarded ramen shops in Tokyo. The thick, burly, slippery noodles are pure chew, with the tensile strength of suspension-bridge cables, served with a sauce of long-boiled Kurobuta bones, the syrup-dense essence of pig. You are instructed to eat one-third of the noodles with the dipping broth, the second third with a shake of powdered chiles and the final portion with a squeeze of lime. When you are finished, the waitress takes your thickened sauce and tops it up with hot water. It has become soup. 2057 Sawtelle Blvd., W.L.A. (310) 231-7373, tsujita-la.com.
Rice porridge
There is, perhaps, no dish homelier than congee, a loose, bland porridge made with last night's rice, occasionally enriched with a splash of broth. Yet in the right hands, the soothing blandness can serve as a canvas on which intriguing, even violently clashing flavors may be splashed. At Red Medicine, Jordan Kahn spikes his congee, made from "heritage" rice, with ginseng, toasted hazelnuts, raw egg yolk and fresh sea urchin gonads, whose various levels of nuttiness circle one another like sharks in a clear sea. 8400 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. (323) 651-5500, redmedicinela.com.
Restaurants often specialize in certain types of food or present a certain unifying, and often entertaining, theme. For example, there are seafood restaurants, vegetarian restaurants or ethnic restaurants. Generally speaking, restaurants selling food characteristic of the local culture are simply called restaurants, while restaurants selling food of foreign cultural origin are called ethnic restaurants.
I agree of some of the food on this list but porridge at Red Medicine is completely off. I can clearly say Red Medicine food was the worst food experience I had in last 5 years. Really bad... and the porridge was only tolerable out of all the dishes.
Jonathan Gold is the laughingstock of Koreatown. Not sure why he insists he knows anything substantial about Korean food because it's obvious from all his writings that he doesn't even know the basics about it.
No wonder all the great old places are going or gone. We need at least some appreciation of good food, much less emphasis on being there, LA Weekly style. I have spoken.
Came looking for "funky" and found "mephitic"--oh, for a reason to visit the left coast!!
if you are going to write about food, you should probably get the names correct. what is "ganjang goreng". if this Jonathan Gold idiot has spent anytime in KoreaTown, he would know it is Ganjang Gejang. Dont you have proofreaders or fact checkers?
The people who are idiots are the ones who think Jonathan Gold actually knows anything about Korean cuisine. He's the laughingstock of everyone in Koreatown. We don't get swayed like his fellow ignoramuses just because he won a Pulitizer Prize. We know our food. Every article he writes about it has at last one glaring error that reveals how much of a know-nothing he is. Stick to what you know. Don't pretend you know anything about our food because we will just laugh our asses out.
Before you start calling people idiots, you might want to take a good look in the mirror. Or at least try reading the article itself before you post next time. If you had done so, you would've noticed that Mr. Gold used the correct name of the dish in the article. It's only the heading that's wrong -- most likely put there by someone on the LA Weekly staff, not Mr. Gold. So remember: read before you post :)
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