If you drive by the new Hollywood Pies dine-in location, which officially soft opened this past weekend in West Los Angeles, you just might miss it. Taking up a humble 26-seat residence that fittingly used to house former pizza dive Pizza Mania, the location now sports a modest square sign of their ... More >>
It's also a great place to get a drink in Hollywood
At first glance, Banadir Somali Restaurant looks more like Somalian community center than a restaurant. White bars cover the shaded and tinted windows. The main entrance leads to a long hallway with a kitchen off to the left. You have to look around a bit before noticing a door that leads to the din ... More >>
Still dreaming of those idyllic high school days of talent shows, math problems and after-school slices of pie? Yeah, we're not either, but this Thursday night at Machine Project, you can have your strawberry rhubarb pie and eat it too -- at the first-ever American Pi-dol talent show and pie-eating ... More >>
Recipes for delicate cakes of minced and bound seafood are as old as, well, maritime cooking. The crab version we mostly eat today -- crab, mayonnaise, breadcrumbs, eggs, seasoning and some onion, gathered up and pan-fried or broiled -- is a colonial American recipe that hasn't changed much since it ... More >>
Three years ago, Nicole Anderson started making Elemental Superfood Seedbars out of necessity. The mother of a child with autism, Anderson noticed dramatic shifts in her daughter's behavior when she ate wheat, dairy and sugar, the cornerstone ingredients for almost all conventional snack foods. So A ... More >>
A new 800 Degrees Neapolitan Pizzeria will set up its wood-burning oven in Santa Monica this fall, just a little over a year after the first one opened its doors in Westwood Village. Slated for a 5,000-square-feet space at 120 Wilshire Boulevard, the latest outpost will feature a take-out area and a ... More >>
It's easy to start nodding off when people drag out the old "New York vs. Los Angeles" debate; it's a tired one, and largely a comparison of Big Apples to orange groves, anyway. But after Bon Appetit listed its 20 most important restaurants in America and New York outshone L.A. by a factor of six, i ... More >>
Across the Atlantic, the horse meat scandal continues to rock Europe -- and now it appears that IKEA's Swedish Köttbullar meatballs are the latest ready-made product found to contain horse meat. The Czech State Veterinary Administration alerted the public to traces of horse DNA found in meatballs p ... More >>
Some say that L.A. is having it's pizza moment. Big Al's Halal Pizzeria entered the pizza fray on Saturday, Feb. 2 with a grand opening block party. Although, you might ask,"What exactly is halal pizza?" The second question you may ask is "Why halal pizza and in Maywood of all places?"
Let me preface all of this by saying that I've never been to a Yoshinoya Beef Bowl, and I'm willing to bet that you haven't either. In fact, I don't know anyone who has dined at a Yoshinoya Beef Bowl, and my contacts folder reads like a who's-who of questionable eaters. Yet, inexplicably, those oran ... More >>
Trader Joe's is known for traveling the globe to find a wide and ever-changing variety of foods. They recently went next door to bring back Organic Stone-Ground Mexican-Style Dark Chocolate, which has the shape, taste and paper packaging of traditional south-of-the-border chocolates. There are two ... More >>
Chocolate and wine. Could there be a more classic Valentine Day's pairing? There's one small problem: "The flavors of [dark] chocolate and wine aren't always that compatible," as a Food and Wine article summarized. Sure, there's that tannins on tannins thing, a double hit of bitter acidity in the c ... More >>
Where would you show off an elite variety of beef? Not in some flashy high-end dining spot but in the most beef-centric part of Los Angeles -- Koreatown. There, it's hard to find a place that doesn't serve bulgogi and galbi, and the buzz words are grass-fed, Wagyu, Kobe and Black Angus. That is, un ... More >>
Damages from this past week's arctic push haven't been fully assessed yet, but you can be certain that tender greens like spinach and lettuces (already showing higher prices) and the ever-present artichoke harvests are first among the lost. One wild crop that does do well during the occasionally ... More >>
Austrian chef Bernhard Mairinger has brilliantly old-school technique
The pastrami sandwich at Langer's Delicatessen is legendary. So delicious that it made our "100 Favorite Dishes" list. So distinctive that Nora Ephron deemed it "the finest hot pastrami sandwich in the world." So beloved that Angelenos regularly queue up for a taste -- and out-of-towners bemoan thei ... More >>
This week and next, we'll be featuring the holiday food traditions of L.A. chefs. Today, Sotto's Zach Pollack tells us about his relationship with brisket. "Growing up a reformed Jew in West Los Angeles, I developed a relationship with brisket around the same time that I developed a relationship wi ... More >>
Over the past few months, you've watched us catalog our 100 Favorite Dishes. Catalog being a lovely term meaning eating our way across this town, well, even more than usual. And because we thought you might want a better way to access these, we've collected all one hundred into one piece, a menu if ... More >>
Lately I've been thinking a lot about an online trailer for an upcoming documentary by Erik Anjou called Deli Man, which chronicles the culture of the American delicatessen through interviews with such L.A. authorities as Norm Langer, Jackie and Marc Canter and, of course, Larry King. (If you can sp ... More >>
Take a look at the calendar. It's time to do some major baking. Hanukkah beings Saturday; after next weekend, you'll be down to the Christmas shipping wire. And for those of us who simply use the season as a joyful excuse to eat more cookies, we'll be more than happy to take some of those Röckenwag ... More >>
At first inspection, the recently opened Float in Pasadena might appear to be simple and cozy new-wave coffeeshop -- one that serves locally roasted Handsome Coffee and tea from LA Mill. In this part of Pasadena, wedged into an alley of the South Lake Avenue shopping district which looks like it cou ... More >>
When I was growing up, there was a little mom-and-pop supermarket in my town called Rainbow Market (over Thanksgiving I learned it had been recently replaced by a Wal-Mart, so it goes). As the main grocery in a small suburban town, it was the hub of most food shopping, and before any dedicated sandw ... More >>
For some of us, baking bread is something that we do without much thought, whenever it's cold enough to crank the oven, for giving to friends, when our kids demand it, or as a coping mechanism (see: the recent election, long distance relationships, Steve Nash). The smell of bread baking is a fundame ... More >>
You've probably heard of The Magnificent Seven, but what about The Salty Six? The saltiest foods might not be the ones you expect (French fries? Pretzels? Flamin Hot Cheetos?), according to the American Heart Assn. The group has singled out the "Salty Six" -- common foods that may be loaded with ex ... More >>
Have you ever tried a vegan Reuben before? It's the kind of sandwich that might encourage a scoff or smirk from the hardened carnivore, but for the past three years it's been one of the most popular items at Locali, the city's first "conscious convenience store" in Los Feliz, which carries a bevy of ... More >>
For people who track the vicissitudes of bread in this town, Abby Franke's bakery in Agoura Hills has always been on the radar. For many years, the German-born baker ran Stoneground Bakery, a tiny shop in a strip mall off the 101 that provided terrific hand-formed challah and old world breads made f ... More >>
While many comics get their material from headlines, L.A. comedian Seth Front draws his inspiration from another source: deli menus. For the past two years, Front has crisscrossed the country giving talks on the culinary history of American Jews of Eastern European descent, using delicatessen foods ... More >>
CSI: Squid Ink is on the scene, out to solve some cold (and hot) kitchen cases. These are problems that have perplexed us for some time. From egg shells that can't be removed, to sunflower seeds that turn cookies green, we figured there had to be scientific explanations for these culinary conundrums ... More >>
Mozza's Scuolo di Pizza dazzles thanks to chef Chad Colby -- and his salumi bar
Squid Ink is going back to basics with Martha Stewart's Cooking School, airing every weekend through the end of the year on PBS. Join us. See also: Martha Stewart's Cooking School: Episode 1, Eggs Martha Stewart believes in studying the classics, she says, as images of Einstein, Shakespeare and Ab ... More >>
This week we're launching a new series called Food of the Moment which devotes itself to an ingredient or dish currently experiencing an boom at local eateries. We'll then eat it, dissect it, discuss it -- and tell you where you can get some. In a Slate piece back in September, Rachel Levin chronic ... More >>
To a 9-year-old, $10 is a lot of money. It's 5 weeks' worth of allowance (if all your chores are done). It's the kind of sum you only come across in one fell swoop occasionally, perhaps tumbling out of a birthday card from great-grandparents, or given as spending money at some Disney resort shop. ... More >>
Celebrating this year's Best of L.A. issue -- now out in print and online -- we're counting down, in no particular order, 100 of our favorite dishes. 35: "Sandwich" at Roma Italian Deli: If locating the best golden Sicilian olive oil, some buttery Prosciutto di Parma, or rounds of garlic-flecked m ... More >>
Last year's Feria de los Moles (or Mole Fair) at L.A.'s Olvera St. drew 30,000 people -- and with good reason. The annual event, now in its fifth year and happening this Sunday, Oct. 7 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., celebrates this classic Mexican dish with food, music, dance, workshops, and even a friendl ... More >>
As you may have noticed, this year's Best Of issue dropped on your doorstep, metaphorically if not actually, yesterday. There are hundreds (yes, hundreds) of listings, of spas and hikes and cocktails and grottos (yes, grottos), so many that you might get lost -- so many that we thought we'd pull ou ... More >>
We don't normally take what arrives in the mail as a sign to buy Dodgers tickets. But a beer, snack and great sandwich book from different publishers, all on the same day? Two are cookbooks, Salty Snacks and Emeril's Kicked-Up Sandwiches, the third is The World Atlas of Beer, a coffee table-sized be ... More >>
Does food writing matter? It's a question that food writers ask themselves in moments of self-doubt, and it's a question Monica Bhide asked on her blog back in August. When there's so much going on in the world, does what we eat and cook warrant our time and attention as writers? Since Bhide posed ... More >>
It used to be, a dozen years ago or so, that there weren't that many spots in town where you could find a decent seafood taco, much less a great one. Fast forward to 2012, and fish and shrimp tacos have gone through something of an evolution. There are plenty of fish in the sea now; you can barely ... More >>
Leading up to this year's Best of L.A. issue (due out Oct. 4), we'll be counting down, in no particular order, 100 of our favorite dishes. 53: The Sycamore Kitchen's BLT Sandwich. Quinn and Karen Hatfield's newish casual place on La Brea, The Sycamore Kitchen, is an exercise in incommensurateness, ... More >>
There's an old Louis Black stand-up rant where he theorizes that all the candy corn that was ever made was created in 1911 -- and it simply gets recycled by the candy corn companies year after year, like the Halloween version of the eternally forwarded Christmas fruitcake. Yes, candy corn sucks. Es ... More >>
People who purchase organic food because they think it is more nutritious just got handed their heads of lettuce on a platter by Stanford University scientists. In a recent study, the researchers found that not only is organic food not better for you, it is not even any less prone to bacterial conta ... More >>
Consuming just one chocolate bar a week could lower men's stroke risk by almost 20%, according to a new Swedish study. Researchers at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute followed more than 37,000 men between the ages of 45 and 79 for about a decade, CNN reports. Men who ate the most chocolate over th ... More >>
Is Ricardo Zarate's Mo-Chica deserving of the hype?
The past few years have been good to Los Angeles burger lovers. Led by chains like Umami, Stout and The Counter, the city has experienced what can only be described as a full-fledged burger renaissance. A confluence of factors -- the increasing casualness of dining out, the rising popularity of comf ... More >>
Hang out long enough with David West, a.k.a. "the mushroom man" of Clearwater Farms, and eventually a farmers market customer is bound to ask the "Big O" question. "Well, shiitakes are grown on oak blocks, so until someone decides to make certified organic oak trees, no, these are not organic," says ... More >>
Leading up to this year's Best of L.A. issue (due out Oct. 4), we'll be counting down, in no particular order, 100 of our favorite dishes. 66: Pastrami Reuben at Art's Delicatessan. The motto at Art's Deli in Studio City is "Every sandwich is a work of art." The deli, which has changed little sinc ... More >>
The newish burger joint meets certain needs, but it's no must-try
On paper, meringues look like the easiest thing to create, basically just egg whites and sugar. But looks can be deceptive. While the goal is a melt-in-your-mouth crispy texture, often the disappointing result is a sticky puddle of goo. Determined to find out what we're doing wrong, we turned to re ... More >>
On paper, meringues look like the easiest thing to create, basically just egg whites and sugar. But looks can be deceptive. While the goal is a melt-in-your-mouth crispy texture, often the disappointing result is a sticky puddle of goo. Determined to find out what we're doing wrong, we turned to re ... More >>
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