Food & Drink

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• Best Steakhouse

  Jar

  In this era of gastropubs and fusion bistros, it comes as a welcome relief to enter a place that still calls itself a "chophouse," as does Suzanne Tracht's 11-year-old West Hollywood restaurant, Jar. The moniker is a signal to other beautifully atavistic traits: a maitre d' in a suit and tie, white tablecloths, an iceberg wedge on the menu, a… More >>

• Best Restaurant

  Providence

  Michael Cimarusti's seafood palace on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood earlier this summer celebrated its seventh birthday, a suitably biblical number for a fish restaurant with an excellent pastry kitchen. In those seven years, Providence has neither plateaued nor reversed direction: It has gotten better, kind of a stunning achievement for a restaurant that was worth 2 Michelin stars back when… More >>

• Best Free Water

  FOOD

  Back in 2007, when Judy Ornstein first opened her neighborhood café FOOD, she had a recycling brainstorm: Why not install a plastic, serve-yourself, all-you-can-drink dispenser and fill it with filtered H20, ice cubes and whatever fruity odds and ends she found in the kitchen? Sometimes there are hunks of pineapple sweetly infusing the cold water; other times it's a mind-bendingly… More >>

• Best Overpriced Coffee

  Coffee Commissary

  Four dollars for a cup of coffee? Before you spit out your Starbucks, hear us out: There's a revolution going on in the java world that has little to do with the over-barbecued cafe loco you're used to and everything to do with small organic farms in South America that are churning out product with the kind of terroir previously… More >>

• Best San Fernando Valley Pastry Shop

  Sweet Butter

  On a chic strip of shops near a leafy Sherman Oaks neighborhood filled with film-industry types, Sweet Butter is designed to feel as if you've stumbled into a sidewalk pastry shop in Paris. Fleur de sel caramel brownies, butter-rich croissants, bread pudding with brioche (in coconut-lemon and chocolate versions), cinnamon muffins filled with homemade peach or strawberry jam, plum-lemon bars… More >>

• Best Hollywood Glamour Restaurant

  Polo Lounge at Beverly Hills Hotel

  Opened in 1941, the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel continues to be the most glamorous restaurant in the Los Angeles area. Bar none. (Heck, we saw Warren Beatty there just a few months ago.) Of course, glamour is always difficult to define. For us, it has to do with an elegant, understated style and a kind of worldly… More >>

• Best Taiwanese Breakfast

  Four Sea Restaurant

  If you're from Taiwan, stepping into a Four Sea Restaurant will make you feel right at home. They have two locations — one in Hacienda Heights and another in San Gabriel. Rumor has it that they're opening another branch in Irvine. Their success isn't unwarranted. They have one of the largest selections of Taiwanese breakfast items in Los Angeles, and… More >>

• Best Doughnut

  The Donut Man

  Few doughnuts are worth driving some 30-odd miles to taste (if you're coming from central L.A.) but in the case of the Donut Man, gas up. And not just for the doughnuts' undeniable deliciousness but also their sheer girth. If you've heard of the place, likely you've seen photos of the strawberry doughnut, which oozes a filling of whole, ripe… More >>
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  Best Pie

  Cake Monkey

  It's hard to pinpoint what makes pies from Cake Monkey so singularly special, but allow us to ruminate. For one thing, no matter what the spectacular filling is, it's encased in a shatteringly crisp butter crust. It's burnished and bronzed and topped with sanding sugar, which during the course of sampling pies around town we've determined is pretty much the… More >>

• Best Pho

  Pho Filet

  The star of Pho Filet, as you may guess, is its filet mignon, which comes as standard in most of the restaurant's bowls of pho. The filet mignon's immensely popular co-star is the pho bac; it's a distinctly gingered affair, with pronounced hits of cloves in each slurp. It is absolutely delicious, although because it is rather strong, a purist… More >>

• Best Tamales

  Rivera

  At Rivera, you can dial a phone number listed on the menu to hear chef John Sedlar describe some of the dishes. "Most people think of tamales as the embodiment of Mexican cuisine's earthiness," he says in the recording, before launching into an explanation of "Clams Tamalli." The dish is supposed to "join together earth and sea" with its corn… More >>

• Best Place to Fit in Dinner Before a Downtown Show

  'Tina Tacos

  In New York, rushed pre-theater dinner works this way: You hop out of the Times Square subway stop at 7:40 and grab a hot dog or stale sandwich from whatever cart or Café Europa happens to be on your way. In L.A.'s downtown theater district, however, if you don't know where you're going, you might well starve. Sure, there's the… More >>

• Best French Fries

  Church & State

  We've said it before, and we'll say it again: The french fries at Church & State are the tops. Chef Walter Manzke might have stepped away from the stoves, but the bistro's fries, made of frozen, quarter-inch russets and fried in a mixture that includes lard (sorry, vegetarians), carry on his legacy at the corner of Mateo and Industrial streets.… More >>

• Best Handmade Noodles

  Sweethome Grill

  Though the establishment has been open for just a few months, it's the intricacy of the broth at Sweethome Grill that caught our attention. Noodle soups can be cumbersome to eat after a while, especially since they're so heavy in carbs and loaded with spice. But somehow the people over at Sweethome make them just right. The chef, who hails… More >>

• Best Taco

  Guisados

  The most difficult thing you will encounter at Guisados is the menu. There are so many guisados — stewed meats and vegetables — and only so much room in your stomach. So, unless you're really set on a particular filling, your best bet is to order the sampler plate, which offers six mini-tacos, each filled with a fantastic meat or… More >>

• Best Dim Sum Restaurant

  Sea Harbour Seafood Restaurant

  You know you've stumbled into a quality dim sum restaurant when the chef is generous with the roe on top of the shu mai — no pathetic sprinkling of orange here. Sea Harbour Seafood Restaurant is one of the few dim sum places that really pays attention to both quality and portions. Although the restaurant has become a mecca of… More >>

• Best Vegan-Friendly Restaurant

  Elf Cafe

  Technically vegetarian, the current menu at Elf Cafe is more than vegan-accessible — with 14 dishes listed as either vegan or adaptable. In a cozy space in Echo Park next to Mohawk Bend (another vegan-friendly spot), chef Scott Zwiezen is serving dishes with mostly Mediterranean flavors. Those who balk at seitan and tempeh will appreciate that Zwiezen uses neither, choosing… More >>

• Best Sushi

  Urasawa

  When discussing Urasawa, it's probably best to address the elephant in the room first. This is unequivocally the most expensive restaurant in the city (too high for alt-weekly expense budgets). It's the kind of commodity, along with courtside Lakers tickets, that most people spend years squirreling away toward. The real question — is it worth it? Chef Hiro Urasawa trained… More >>

• Best Farmers Market

  Santa Monica Certified Farmers Market

  Ranking farmers markets in Los Angeles is like trying to decide between ramen shops in Gardena: You're dealing with a surfeit of wealth. That said, the market that takes over the Santa Monica Promenade on Wednesday mornings is in a category of its own. Decades before markets started popping up in every neighborhood in town, the Santa Monica Certified Farmers… More >>

• Best Martini

  Musso & Frank Grill

  Like silent films, old-school in the martini realm does not mean boring. Nor is there much to be said of the dry martini at Musso & Frank Grill that hasn't been said already. Yes, they know how to make a classic Old Hollywood sipper — even after longtime barman Manny Felix retired after 40 years of infamous red-jacket stirring. And… More >>

• Best Brewery

  Ladyface Ale Companie

  Ladyface Ale Companie is not the most centrally located brewery in Los Angeles, but its superiority in beer, food, service and community events transcends any complaints about traffic on the 101. Nestled at the foot of Ladyface Mountain, the brewery's namesake, the patio is equipped with heat lamps and misters that moderate the mercurial inland temperatures, allowing you to enjoy… More >>

• Best Margarita

  Border Grill

  Long before "mixologist" became part of L.A.'s cocktail lexicon, you could always, and still can, rely on the bartenders at Border Grill to make a great, fresh lime juice–tinged classic margarita in various tequila and orange liqueur forms — the notable exception being happy hour, the one time we've been disappointed by watered-down versions here. It's also the sort of… More >>

• Best Macaroni and Cheese

  Bay Cities Italian Deli

  If you were unimpressed by the mac 'n' cheese you tried at Bay Cities Italian Deli, then you must have tried its other mac 'n' cheese. There are two distinct macs served at the Santa Monica Italian deli: one in the traditional saucy yellow, and the other a sprezzaturic, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink dish. The latter could never disappoint. The macaroni swells with… More >>

• Best Bloody Mary

  Fig

  For that Sunday morning carnal craving, the smoky bacon Bloody Mary (bacon-infused gin, fresh tomato juice, a bacon slice for garnish) at Fig at the Fairmont Hotel definitely has the meat advantage. To our surprise, we even found the fresh tomato and watermelon juice version, which sounded like entirely too "pretty" a cocktail, to be a nice light refresher (even… More >>

• Best Breakfast Spot

  Canele

  The rustic, seasonal brunch menu at Canelé, chef Corina Weibel's homey Atwater Village restaurant, certainly seems innocuous enough. "Thick French toast," for example, or a "side" of "baked pancake with Meyer lemon custard." As it turns out, this "thick French toast" is a trio of inches-high slabs of French toast, ridiculously crispy on the outside, wonderfully custardy on the inside.… More >>

• Best Burrito

  La Azteca Tortilleria

  La Azteca Tortilleria, an old-school tortilleria in East Los Angeles that's been open for 65 years, has a small menu for customers who can't wait to go home to eat their freshly assembled tortillas. Consequently, it makes the best burrito in town: one made with profoundly awesome flour tortillas, obviously, but also embellished by a meringue-battered whole chile relleno, expert… More >>

• Best Pizza

  Sotto

  Sotto's precarious installation of an imported-from-Italy Stefano Ferrara oven, an odyssey that involved a crane and a couple hundred pounds of Vesuvian dirt, was a sight to behold (and a foreshadowing of LACMA's Levitated Mass transport). When the restaurant opened last year, chefs Zach Pollack and Steve Samson were lauded for their rough-and-ready Southern Italian fare, and rightfully so —… More >>

• Best Pizza Slice

  Vito's Pizza

  When the title of best pizza is tossed around, someone inevitably brings up Vito's Pizza, the West Hollywood institution that serves one of the more refined East Coast pizzas in Los Angeles (New Jersey–style, specifically). Best known is the White Pie, slicked with large of amounts of oily pesto and mounds of fresh ricotta. The edges are more substantial and… More >>

• Best Salad

  Dominick's Restaurant

  This charmingly old-school joint — and former Sinatra hang — in the southwest corner of West Hollywood has much to commend it, including the (covered) brick patio, which, if not the most romantic in the city, certainly makes our top 10. But the menu item that keeps drawing us back to Dominick's Restaurant is a very simple, very big salad… More >>

• Best Culinary Cocktails

  ink.

  It's impossible these days to open a serious eatery without a serious cocktail program, but rarely do the drinks at a restaurant so closely match the kinks and ambitions of the kitchen as at ink. Bartenders Gabriella Mlynarczyk and Brittini Rae Peterson keep pace with chef Michael Voltaggio's penchant for highly conceptual, designer food with a list of highly conceptual,… More >>

• Best Soul Food

  R&R Soul Food

  Located in a strip-mall storefront in Carson, R&R Soul Food announces its intentions to the world via a light-up sign in the window, which reads "Chitterling." This place is not messing around. Inside, turquoise walls are adorned with framed pictures of Afrocentric Christianity — the Black Last Supper, for instance. While many L.A. soul food spots serve from steam trays,… More >>

• Best Burrata

  Osteria Mozza

  Is there a restaurant in this fine city that does not currently have burrata on the menu? The seafood restaurants have it. The Peruvian restaurants have it. If it once topped pizzas and adorned simple Italian salads, it now tussles with sea urchin and gives soothing counsel to chili peppers. We most likely have Nancy Silverton to thank for this,… More >>

• Best Oyster Bar

  L&E Oyster Bar

  There are certainly fancier seafood spots in town than L&E Oyster Bar in Silver Lake. There are places with huge seafood towers, marble bars and impressive displays of ice and shellfish behind glass for your ooohhing and ahhing needs. But after trying all those places, L&E still stands out for one thing in particular: the oysters. L&E's oysters are served… More >>

• Best Upscale Burger

  Rustic Canyon Wine Bar and Seasonal Kitchen

  It is de rigueur these days for upscale restaurants to have a burger on the menu. But with so many delicious and cheap burgers in town, where is it worth it to eat an $18 burger? At Rustic Canyon Wine Bar and Seasonal Kitchen in Santa Monica, that's where. Some combination of the meat (a blend of chuck and brisket),… More >>

• Best Baguette

  Bread Lounge

  Ran Zimon, owner and baker at downtown's newish bakery Bread Lounge, is something of a minimalist. His bakery is designed like the lofts that surround it, and his spare menu is built around his stunning breads, with a small list of pastries and sandwiches and house-made drinks. No Coke. No cupcakes. But his baguettes best exemplify his ideology, which has… More >>

• Best Lowbrow Burger

  The Spice Table

  OK, OK, it's a bit of a stretch to call a burger at an upscale Asian restaurant "lowbrow," especially considering the abundance of fantastic, legitimately proletariat burgers in L.A. But the Spice Table's burger is, in its soul, a fast-food burger — or at least it's modeled on one. Two patties come draped in Kraft American cheese with pickles, lettuce,… More >>

• Best Drinking Chocolate

  Demitasse

  Demitasse in Little Tokyo has a lot going for it — fantastic pour-over coffee, awesome Kyoto iced coffee, good pastries. But it's possible we'd pass all that up for a cup of the café's outrageous drinking chocolate. Made with E. Guittard Cocoa Rouge cocoa powder mixed with Tahitian vanilla, the drink then is imbued with a drop or two of… More >>

• Best Farm Stand in the SFV

  Tapia Bros. Farm Stand

  A trip to the Tapia Bros. Farm Stand is almost a trip back in time. Family-owned since the 1920s, in its current location for more than three decades, Tapia Bros. fits right into today's locavore culture. Smell those ripe strawberries? They were grown across the street, at the corner of Hayvenhurst and Burbank. From March to November, you'll find super… More >>

• Best Pisco Sour

  Picca

  Forget the standbys: the Italian cafés, the French bistros, the Japanese sushi bars. This year, nothing feels so essential in L.A. as Peruvian tapas. We have Ricardo Zarate to thank for that: First he brought the cuisine to our consciousness with his groundbreaking Mo-Chica, and then, last year, he opened Picca, an upscale Pico-Robertson spinoff with a long list of… More >>

• Best Cheese Shop

  The Cheese Store of Beverly Hills

  Long before you could find cheese sommeliers in trendy restaurants and hipster cheesemongers in farmers markets, Norbert Wabnig was building his cheese palace, helpfully named the Cheese Store of Beverly Hills. The Austrian-born, New Orleans–raised cheese master first came to the shop in 1975 — at which point he worked for $1.80 an hour. Now Wabnig owns the store, a… More >>

• Best Fish Taco

  Ricky's Fish Tacos

  A man, a plan, a pan. That's the basic story of how Ricky Piña launched his eponymous Ricky's Fish Tacos, a small stand located in a Sunset Junction parking lot, back in 2009. Unable to find anything in Los Angeles that measured up to the Ensenada-style fish tacos of his youth, Piña, a former florist, outfitted an old filing cabinet… More >>

• Best Place to Eat Alone

  Pizzeria Mozza

  Certain restaurants are a lot more fun to dine alone in than others. Trendy lounges and burger joints: no. Upscale restaurants where you can eat at the bar: yes. And then there's Pizzeria Mozza, which falls into none of those categories yet remains the single best place to eat solo in this town. You can eat at either of the… More >>

• Best Korean BBQ

  Kang Ho dong Baekjeong

  Few things are more glorious in Los Angeles than the scent of grilled meat wafting outward from Koreatown's epicenter. At twilight you might even be able to make out a smoky haze on the skyline, like a meat-fueled version of the elusive green flash. Korean barbecue fanatics always have a hard time pinning down an across-the-board favorite — Moo Dae… More >>

• Best Torta

  Cook's Tortas

  Before the blistering chile toreado tacos at Guisados, before the vibrant shrimp aguachiles at Dorados Ceviche Bar, there was Cook's Tortas, the original jewel in the East L.A. empire that chef Ricardo Diaz helped forge over the years. Inside Cook's, your attention is immediately diverted to a wall scrawled with chalk, listing a dozen or so hefty tortas, all served… More >>

• Best Old-School Food Truck

  Mariscos Jalisco

  Has the Mariscos Jalisco truck really been shelling out its crunchy shrimp tacos for more than a decade, parked in the same industrial stretch a few blocks east of the L.A. River? It seems like just yesterday that we encountered our first bite of tacos dorados de camaron, a shell of fried tortilla stuffed with plump shrimp, drowned in spicy… More >>
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  Best Carrots

  Weiser Family Farms

  More than any other vegetable, the humble carrot has been elevated the most by modernist cooking techniques. At Copenhagen's Noma, a restaurant voted the best in the world last year, one of the signature dishes consists of a purple carrot that spent an entire year in the dirt, roasted for hours until it becomes unbelievably rich and buttery. At Tehachapi's… More >>
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  Best Stone Fruit

  Tenerelli Orchards

  When the high heat of summer beats down on the rooftops and dogs sprawl out on the front porch with lolling tongues, few things can match up with the pleasure of a soft, ripe peach. Luckily for us, Tenerelli Orchards — which specializes in peaches, nectarines, apricots, cherries and plums — rebounded to full strength after a poor harvest in… More >>

• Best Bibimbap

  Oo-Kook Korean BBQ

  At Oo-Kook Korean BBQ, the rather ritzy Korean BBQ specializing in high-quality cuts of cow (it's in the logo and name, after all), the best-known cut might be the rib-eye, but it's the yukhwe — Korean beef tartare, essentially — that should pique your interest. Your reaction to this deconstructed bibimbap made with raw steak probably hinges on your feelings… More >>

• Best Beer List

  Beer Belly

  With a strictly curated tap list of 12 hyper-local brews rotating on a near-daily basis, Koreatown's Beer Belly has become one of the craft beer bars of choice for drinkers looking to bump their beer knowledge into the next echelon. Can't order your usual hefeweizen? Try Eagle Rock's Manifesto witbier. No Guinness? Try Bootlegger's chipotle-coffee porter. By eliminating "the usual"… More >>

• Best Tapas

  Ración

  When you spy Joachim Splichal — the acclaimed chef who opened Patina in 1989 and has mentored half the toques in town — happily sauntering out of a cozy Pasadena restaurant, smelling vaguely of sangria and cured Spanish ham, moments before your 8 o'clock reservation, you should take it as a good sign. In a world where "tapas" might be… More >>

• Best New-School Food Truck

  Jogasaki Sushi Burrito

  The sushi burrito is undoubtedly one of the better food-truck creations dreamed up in the past couple of years. It's an exercise in practicality, really, the best of both worlds — a burrito bound in delicate soy paper, stuffed with all the flavors of a lowbrow sushi roll, and blessed with the one-handed portability of a wrap. The samurai-sombrero'd Jogasaki… More >>

• Best Boat Noodles

  Pa-Ord Noodle

  As much as we love the version at Sapp Coffee Shop, the boat noodles at Pa-Ord Noodle are graduate-level stuff — the Bitches Brew of Bangkok cuisine. You're headed to a specialist of extra-murky boat noodles, or kuay tiew rua, one of Thailand's most beloved street foods. The broth is dark, wildly intense and funky as a Parliament track. Thickened… More >>

• Best Pasta

  Angelini Osteria

  Walk through the doors of Angelini Osteria on Beverly Boulevard and you'll feel transported. We mean that literally, rather than as some stupid Travel + Leisure cliché. Because there is a real person sitting just inside the door, with a real reservations book. Because there are tables filled not with young women blogging their lunch instead of eating it but… More >>

• Best Omakase Deal

  Kiriko Sushi

  Few itamae balance the stylings of modern and classic sushi with the flair of Kiriko Sushi's Ken Namba. Some days there will be plump tomato geleé or squares of bright orange king salmon that Namba smokes himself in the back kitchen. Other times it's pale lozenges of skipjack topped with yuzu rind and shaved pink sea salt. He might even… More >>

• Best Ramen

  Tsujita L.A.

  Since opening last August, Little Osaka's Tsujita L.A. has quickly become the most serious purveyor of Hakata tonkotsu in town, a fact validated by the noodle-loving crowds waiting outside the building around opening time. Though it serves its ramen only during an abbreviated lunch hour — out of concern that the dish's popularity would overshadow the dinnertime kaiseki menu —… More >>

• Best Falafel

  Joe's Falafel

  As the restaurant's name might suggest, owner Joe Mattar fries up a mean falafel at Joe's Falafel. Lightly spiced with bits of parsley, jagged and crunchy on the outside, moist and airy inside — you'd be hard-pressed to find a superior version in Los Angeles. But the kicker is the made-to-order laffa, which Mattar artfully flips, twists and turns with… More >>

• Best Shawarma

  Ta-eem Grill

  At Ta-eem Grill, a late-night Israeli joint on Melrose, where a dripping shawarma spit turns seductively in the window, you choose a style of bread and build your sandwich by choosing toppings à la Subway: a dab of baba ghanoush and crushed garlic-chile sauce, a bit of Israeli salad or a handful of green olives. Once you've assembled the perfect… More >>

• Best Okonomiyaki

  Gottsui

  What'll you find at Gottsui is about as close to the Platonic ideal of the Osaka okonomiyaki as you could hope for: a savory Japanese pancake made from a minced potato–and-cabbage batter, griddled crisp like an overstuffed latke. On top goes a latticework of Kewpie mayo, a sweet, thickened Worcestershire sauce and a wave of quivering bonito, microthin shavings of… More >>

• Best Butcher

  McCall's Meat and Fish

  For chefs Karen Yoo and Nathan McCall, the husband-and-wife team behind McCall's Meat and Fish in Los Feliz, it's not only important that customers have access to the same dry-aged beef and sushi-grade fish they used while working at some of the top restaurants in the country (including stints at Sona and Daniel NYC). It's also paramount that the average… More >>

• Best Japanese Curry

  Fat Spoon - CLOSED

  Japanese curry — a peppery, brown gravy with only a passing resemblance to its Thai and Indian cousins — is a stellar version of comfort food, no matter where you call home. Fat Spoon co-owner Michael Cardenas (Lazy Ox, Aburiya Toranoko) and chef Hiroyuki Fujita serve the spiced gravy ladled over panko-crusted tonkatsu pork loin and hunks of braised short… More >>

• Best Fried Chicken

  Jim Dandy

  A great plate of fried chicken can be high art these days — Farmshop, Bouchon and Cube Marketplace all serve spectacular, if pricey, versions. Deep down, though, you know that a few crunchy wings and thighs shouldn't come with valet parking. That's why there is Jim Dandy in South Central, one of two remaining outposts of a fried chicken chain… More >>

• Best Place to Feel the Heat

  Night + Market

  There might be no better place to set your taste buds alight than at West Hollywood's temple to Northern Thai street food, Night + Market. Chef Kris Yenbamroong's cooking is distinctive — funky fish sauce, pungent herbs and, perhaps most notably, searing chile heat. The papaya salad, cool and lime-tart at first, packs a lingering burn. The umami-rich shrimp-paste fried… More >>

• Best Crispy Dumpling

  Beijing Pie House

  At Beijing Pie House, a colorfully decorated diner in Monterey Park, the specialty is a crisp, oversized dumpling stuffed with minced lamb and a ladleful of scalding-hot, pressurized broth. You can attempt to nibble and tease at the outer skin, soft and pliable but lightly browned outside. Inevitably, though, you will take too eager a bite, sending the luscious, gamey… More >>

• Best Filipino Pastry Shop

  Goldilocks Bakeshop

  The several Goldilocks Bakeshop locations across the Southland are basically portals to Manila, to be used in the event of a sweet-tooth emergency. Expat Filipinos come here for polvoron milk-powder, shortbread-like treats and tiny purple ube puto cakes, and pan de sal, or "salted bread," dinner roll–shaped buns actually eaten for breakfast. They come here for modest hopia, a hockey… More >>

• Best Natural Wine List

  Salt's Cure

  There's a heady note of philosophy served in the wineglass at Salt's Cure. Along with the restaurant's organically farmed ingredients and nose-to-tail menu is a wine list that reflects the chefs' commitment to organic and local: a wine list composed of almost entirely California-made, natural wine. Except for one French Champagne, the wines are made from grapes grown without pesticides,… More >>

• Best Sake List

  Katana

  Katana's formula for success — mixing partying, dining and fine sake — rests on its winning menu of Japanese robatayaki-style dishes married with a heavy dose of sushi, a primo bar program, knowledgeable servers and a patio overlooking the Sunset Strip. Anchoring the perennial social hot spot is Katana's carefully culled menu, which changes twice a year, of more than… More >>

• Best Deli

  Brent's Delicatessen & Restaurant

  There are many pretenders to the title of L.A.'s best deli, but Brent's Delicatessen & Restaurant rules over them all. The pros: a mega-menu of traditional New York deli favorites; the freshness of ingredients; and terrific customer service (no NYC attitude accompanies the blintzes). Does the house-made chicken soup with a baseball-sized matzo ball cure the common cold? There are… More >>

• Best Potpie

  Good Girl Dinette

  Chef Diep Tran describes her Good Girl Dinette as "American diner meets Vietnamese comfort food," and her potpie perfectly illustrates this fusion. The pie is a twist on Vietnamese chicken curry, a stewlike dish that's commonly served with rice, noodles or a crusty chunk of baguette. Tran grew up eating the meal with her family — they run the Pho… More >>

• Best Peruvian Food

  Mo-Chica

  Mo-Chica, a hip, vibrant restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, which serves some of L.A.'s best Peruvian cuisine, began life as a small counter in Mercado la Paloma, a warehouse-turned-marketplace near USC. The menu — traditional dishes with modern touches and quality ingredients — garnered critical acclaim for chef Ricardo Zarate, a Lima native. Zarate went on to open Picca in… More >>

• Best Arepas

  Bolívar Cafe & Gallery

  Bolívar Cafe & Gallery — named for Venezuelan hero Simón Bolívar, who liberated much of South America from Spain in the 18th century — might seem like a typical neighborhood café, serving up coffee, sandwiches, free Wi-Fi and a cozy vibe. But one item makes the restaurant distinct: the Venezuelan arepas. The arepas — cornmeal patties split lengthwise and filled,… More >>

• Best Yakitori

  Kokekokko

  "We do not serve sushi," a server says on your first visit to the downtown Japanese restaurant Kokekokko. In fact, there is no fish on the menu. Only chicken. Breast, thigh and wings. Gizzard, heart and skin. Meatballs and quail eggs. All served on skewers that have been grilled over charcoal in traditional yakitori style. (Side dishes include chicken dumplings,… More >>

• Best Hot Dogs

  Fab Hot Dogs

  Nestled in the San Fernando Valley in Reseda is Fab Hot Dogs, a joint with a menu as big as the U.S. map that hangs in your third-grade classroom. Indeed, you can get your own geography lesson just by scanning Fab's menu: There are the self-explanatory Philly Cheese Steak and Carolina Slaw dogs, a Boston dog with BBQ baked beans… More >>

• Best Macarons

  EuroPane

  Macarons, those glorious little cookies that look like an OCD pastry chef's re-envisioning of the hamburger as tiny French patisserie experiment, have become trendy. And unlike the rise of the cupcake, the macaron is something we greeted with great happiness and a kind of relief. Macarons are one of those pastries that, even if you're the kind of person who… More >>

• Best Coffee Roaster

  Handsome Coffee Roasters

  Before 2010 World Barista Champion Michael Phillips, Tyler Wells and Chris Owens — all former Intelligentsia employees — launched Handsome Coffee Roasters, they made an offer: Rather than throwing away the perfectly good coffee they produced as they experimented with their roasts, beta tasters could ante up a nominal amount and receive shipments of these initial batches. As it turned… More >>

• Best Funnel Coffee

  Balconi Coffee

  There is local art on the walls at the serene coffee shop Balconi Coffee, but it can be hard to take your eyes off the counter. There, siphon pots that would not look out of place on either Jules Verne's desk or in Walter White's laboratory are lined neatly in a row. Upon your order, water is poured into the… More >>

• Best Bánh Mì

  Bánh Mì My Tho

  Bánh mì shops are to the San Gabriel Valley as ramen joints are to the South Bay: You can barely go a block without driving past at least one. That said, the one worth driving several blocks down Valley Boulevard for is Bánh Mì My Tho, a small shop with barely enough space for a counter, a few refrigerated cases… More >>

• Best Hot Dog Time Warp

  Cupid's Hot Dogs

  Hot dog stands have a great history in the San Fernando Valley, and nowhere is that more evident than at the Winnetka location of Cupid's Hot Dogs. While there are other franchised Cupid's, those stands just don't have the same retro feel of those now run by a third generation of the chain-founding Walsh family. Beyond the original building, what… More >>

• Best Place for 4 a.m. Thai Crispy Pork

  Crispy Pork Gang & Grill

  When it comes to late-night Thai food, Hollywood has an embarrassment of riches. Should you be craving Thai-style crispy pork at 4 a.m., there's a place for it. In a plaza full of Thai restaurants, one place announces its raison d'être on a lighted sign sporting a cheerfully smiling cartoon pig — the aptly named Crispy Pork Gang & Grill.… More >>

• Best Place to Dine Like a Beijinger

  Beijing Restaurant

  The San Gabriel Valley is a Chinese food wonderland, with a broad range of regional, even municipal, cuisines spotlighted. Located across from a lavish Shanghainese eatery on the upstairs level of a spacious plaza, Beijing Restaurant features a menu loaded with specialties from China's capital city. The awkwardly translated menu can make it a challenge to deciphering entries such as… More >>

• Best Shaved Snow

  Class 302

  Angelenos have the opportunity to sample many global variations of shaved ice — but shaved ice is just so 2010. Nowadays it's all about shaved snow. Taking the concept of shaved ice a step further in its logical evolution, condensed milk — sometimes with a flavor added — is frozen into blocks of ice and then shaved, resulting in a… More >>

• Best Thai Grocery

  Bangkok Market

  From jars of fermented shrimp paste and yellow bean sauce, to soft cakes of palm sugar and plastic-wrapped trays of frozen kaffir lime leaves, the fragrance and funk of authentic Thai food is on exhaustive display at Bangkok Market. Devoid of decor, cute displays and free samples, this grocery store is unburdened by any semblance of a shopping "atmosphere." There… More >>

• Best Juicy Dumplings

  Luscious Dumplings

  If you're among the few remaining Angelenos who haven't made their way to the San Gabriel Valley, you're sorely missing out. Luscious Dumplings is one of the few restaurants that lives up to its name. With no more than nine tables, it's family-owned and -operated. The handmade pot stickers sport comfortably crispy underbellies, while the boiled versions are plump with… More >>

• Best Hot Pot

  Boiling Point

  The traditional hot-pot eatery gets a 21st-century twist at the Taiwanese restaurant Boiling Point. The expanding chain has thrown out the massive, family-style pots in favor of miniature, personal pots. Each customer has his pick of 10 broth flavors with complementary ingredients. But no matter which one you end up selecting, each broth is equally packed with intensity, creating a… More >>

• Best Bargain Oaxacan Cuisine

  Expresion Oaxaqueña

  This charming restaurant's authentic, brawny street food tastes just as fine savored in the comfort of one's home. The squash blossom empanada — a slightly sweet, cheese-engorged half-moon expanse of corn — flops nearly over the edge of its Styrofoam to-go container. Fried grasshoppers come accented with lemon and chile. Fresh cheese and black beans soak into a tray of… More >>

• Best Soufflé

  Maison Giraud

  The soufflé is a dying art. While many restaurants have held onto classics like creme brulee, the soufflé is all but gone from dessert menus. Why? Because it's difficult. It's also delicious when done right. At Maison Giraud, the Pacific Palisades French bistro, chef-owner Alain Giraud makes a great case for the revival of the soufflé. There are occasional, fabulous… More >>

• Prettiest Restaurant

  Eva Restaurant - CLOSED

  Back when 7458 Beverly Blvd. housed the previous incarnation of Hatfield's, it was one of the prettiest restaurants in Los Angeles. But since Mark Gold took over the space to open Eva Restaurant in September 2009, it has become hands-down the most gorgeous place to eat in this town — so much so that it's a better value than a… More >>

• Best Sommelier

  Christopher Miller, Spago

  There are fewer than 200 Master Sommeliers in the United States. Of these, fewer than a half-dozen live and work in Los Angeles, and only one, Spago's Christopher Miller, is currently working on a restaurant floor. Miller, one of six recent conferees, has been instantly vaulted to the front of a very distinguished pack. Miller studied for the M.S. exam… More >>

• Best Wine Program

  Terroni

  Max Stefanelli's wine program at Italian restaurant Terroni isn't entirely Italian: There's Champagne, some Slovenian wines and a few outliers from Hungary that he couldn't resist. And it's hardly the deepest Italian list — that sort of distinction falls to a Valentino or an Osteria Mozza. Yet the Terroni wine program celebrates Italy as do few other wine programs in… More >>

• Best Wines by the Glass

  Lukshon

  When Eduardo Porto Carreiro left Los Angeles for New York City last May, he neglected to tell Sang Yoon, his boss at Lukshon. OK, that's not exactly true — with the help of Marisa Brown, Carreiro's still overseeing the wine list from afar, flying in about every other month to train the staff and keep his hand on the reins… More >>

• Best Non-Fast Food Drive-Thru

  Sunny Grill

  People go to drive-thrus for the same reasons that they read Harry Potter books — because it's easy, and because they can. And we get it. Picking up lunch without having to get out of your car is pretty damn convenient. But wouldn't it be nice if there were a place that handed out something other than processed, saturated-fat sandwiches… More >>

• Best Prepared Mole

  Rivas Food Company's Mole Rojo Teloloapan

  Think you know your way around the traditional Mexican sauce mole? Not so, if you haven't tasted Teloloapan red mole. To fill you in, Teloloapan is a city in the state of Guerrero, which is best known for flashy resorts such as Ixtapa, Zihuatanejo and Acapulco. If you've eaten mole in any of those places, it may have come from… More >>

• Best Hung-lay Curry

  Spicy BBQ

  Don't expect to walk into your neighborhood Thai restaurant and find hung-lay curry — unless, that is, your neighborhood includes the northwest corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Normandie. This is the location of Spicy BBQ, which specializes in Northern Thai dishes such as hung-lay curry. Unlike the familiar red and green Thai curries, this one contains no coconut milk;… More >>

• Best Foodie Toy

  La Tiendita's Chef Key Rings

  If you like what you eat at La Casita Mexicana in Bell, why not take the chefs home? Well, not in the flesh but as cute, smiling figures in chef's garb attached to key rings. There's one for Jaime Martín del Campo and another for Ramiro Arvizu, the chefs who run the restaurant. You can tell them (the chefs and… More >>

• Best New Restaurant

  Bäco Mercat

  When Josef Centeno opened Bäco Mercat a little less than a year ago, the stunning menu — calibrated to suit both California produce and myriad Spanish sauces — and happy atmosphere were less a surprise than the fact that it was actually Centeno's first restaurant. The Texas-born chef was a veteran of many wonderful kitchens (Manresa, Meson G, Opus, Lazy… More >>

• Best Empanada

  The Empanada Factory

  Some say you can judge a restaurant by its roast chicken. You should apply the same logic to an Argentine empanada shop's classic Mendoza-style pie. At the Empanada Factory, this pie is done to perfection. The four-bite pastry is filled with the requisite seasoned ground beef, olives and hard-boiled egg. The pastry is baked to a soft, luminous golden hue,… More >>

• Best Trader Joe's Parking Lot

  Fairfax Trader Joe's

  It's entirely possible that the grocery chain Trader Joe's — named after its founder, Joe Coulombe, and not some random guy named Joe — would rather you walk to its stores than drive to them in the first place. It's certainly difficult enough to drive — with crazy-making parking lots that never seem to have enough spots, with bad flow… More >>

• Best Raw-Food Restaurant

  Café Gratitude

  Café Gratitude — a beautiful, bright spot with a large outdoor patio in Larchmont — serves totally vegan food that is as impeccably and locally sourced as any self-respecting restaurant can offer. Everything is organic, and comes in fantastically large portions that can be shared. We've never tried anything that wasn't creative, healthy and filling — and the slightly chewy,… More >>

• Best Poutine

  Animal

  Poutine is a fairly standard French-Canadian dish of fries and oddly springy cheese curds topped with brown gravy. It's a pile of salt, crunch and more salt with a hit of umami — perfect for soaking up that one-beer-too-many. Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo's hipper-than-thou restaurant Animal took the Quebeçois standard and upped the oomph factor by not a small… More >>

• Best Bakery

  Milo & Olive

  It's some feat for a pastry chef to actually out-bake herself, as Zoe Nathan has possibly done at Milo & Olive. More so as she did it not by upping the chocolate ganache ante — as one might expect from the seasoned pastry chef — but by fully embracing the bread baker's domain. Sure, Nathan turned out a handful of… More >>
• 

  Best Kimchi

  Granny Choe's Kimchee Co.

  Any kimchi jar that bears amusing warnings like "pungent contents under pressure — open with extreme common sense" begs to be opened quickly and a little chaotically, maybe even shaken first. With the kimchi from Granny Choe's Kimchi Co., such irreverence is rewarded with an oxygen-fueled condiment variety show. The vinegary red chili sauce and Napa cabbage begin audibly bubbling… More >>

• Best Pastry Shop

  Joan's On Third

  In the nearly 17 years since she opened Joan's on Third, Joan McNamara has baked through every layer-cake trend, cupcake craze and pie fixation. These days, the pastry shop and café is a hotbed of early-morning egg sandwich and lunch-hour Chinese chicken salad activity, but even the best chicken salad is merely an excuse to choose from McNamara's beautifully understated… More >>

• Best Way to Drink Wine While Traveling 60 mph

  Amtrak's Coast Starlight

  Travel Amtrak's Coast Starlight as it meanders for some 35 hours from L.A. to Seattle, and you'll discover a laid-back way to get from here to there. If you book sleeping-car accommodations (pricey, but the nicest way to ride the rails) you get an extra perk — an invitation to the afternoon wine tasting. (First-class passengers also have all meals… More >>

• Best Late-Night Eats

  Du-Par's

  The trick to preserving any culinary landmark is to remain relevant (steel-cut oatmeal) while staying true to your past (corned beef hash). It's a balance that Du-Par's has managed exceptionally well (French toast) at its original Farmers Market location, where regulars still can order a short stack at 2 a.m. and finish off with a slice of cherry pie. Or,… More >>

• Best Garlic

  Windrose Farm

  Barbara Spencer of Windrose Farm grows far too many varieties of garlic to remember all of the seedling specifics. But she's always quick to clarify what she and her husband, Bill, don't grow on their Central Coast farm. "No California whites," she says, referring to the dominant grocery store Gilroy cultivars, California Early and California Late. The couple support a… More >>

• Best Korean Restaurant for Partying

  Gaam Restaurant and Lounge

  Enter a twinkling town square off Sixth Street, squeeze up a stockroom stairwell lined with crates of sake and enter into something of a grand ballroom, which is possibly an old church or a cavernous bank. This is Gaam Restaurant and Lounge's bright nighttime world. Here, overlooking Koreatown traffic, with a stream of soju and a steady rotation of K-pop… More >>

• Best Organic Greengrocer

  Cookbook

  If you live on the Eastside, the tiny neighborhood greengrocer Cookbook is where you go if you're craving responsibly grown bell peppers or a slab of grass-fed, hormone-free, pasture-raised beef. Owned and run by master gardener Marta Teegen, Cookbook sells simple, elegant food that harkens back to a time before giant corporations took over food production. There are seasonal, organic… More >>

• Best Cooking Class

  The Gourmandise School of Sweets and Savories

  We're sure you've seen those colorful macarons popping up all over town. You can learn to make your own — from an authentic French chef, no less — at Santa Monica's Gourmandise School of Sweets and Savories. Co-owned by teachers Clemence Gossett and Hadley Hughes, this hands-on school offers all levels of instruction, with a focus on classic techniques and… More >>