Main Dish Recipes

Tacos in L.A.: Your Ultimate Guide

If you're living life correctly, every day is National Taco Day. We know that. But hey, why not take another opportunity to celebrate something awesome, and something we do better than anyone else (ha, ha, New York Times, that was a very funny joke). In order to help you celebrate properly, we've ... More >>

Jewish Holiday Cooking Advice from Shiksa in the Kitchen A Chicken Recipe

The Jewish holidays -- well, any holiday really -- require heavy-duty planning, cooking, coordinating and grocery shopping. To ease some Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur (the holiday where Jews starve all day and binge all night) stress, we turn to Tori Avey, also known as the Shiksa in the Kitchen, for ... More >>

Meatless Mondays: Kyle Schutte's Recipe for Jicama Tacos

Jicama tacos were part of the first round of changes Kyle Schutte, executive chef at The Corner Door in Culver City, made on the restaurant's menu when he took over the kitchen this past April. "I wanted to lighten up the menu. When I came onboard, there was a lot of heavy things," Schutte says. "Th ... More >>

3 Great Banh Beo in Los Angeles

Leading up to this year's Best of L.A. issue (due out Oct. 3), we'll be bringing you periodic lists of some of the best things we've found to eat and drink around town. Ice cream sandwiches and bowls of tsukemen, fish tacos and dan dan mien, cups of boba and glasses of booze. Read on. On your last ... More >>

10 Best Fish & Chips in Los Angeles

Los Angeles is having a seafood moment. New-age clam shacks and haute oyster bars are tucking into neighborhood spaces and building out into massive new digs at an unbelievable pace. Even the lobster roll, that sometimes rubbery, thick with mayonnaise or hot with butter lunch snack, is popping up in ... More >>

Valley Ho! Three New Restaurants in the SFV Show Some Weaknesses, a Few Surprising Strengths

Horse Thief BBQ in Grand Central Market Now Open: 15-Hour Brisket New Mac And Cheese

Slow-cooked beef brisket is king at Horse Thief BBQ, which officially opened to the Downtown crowd at Grand Central Market last Tuesday, July 9. It's been the biggest seller, says co-owner Russell Malixi -- so much so that they've already had to adjust how much they prepare in advance to meet demand ... More >>

Meatless Mondays: Daniel Roberts' Recipe for Lollipop Kale Pesto Pasta

When it's time to overhaul the seasonal menu at Cafe del Rey, chef Daniel Roberts has developed a rough template: He runs through what's fresh at both the farmers and fisherman's markets along with flavor profiles he'd like to feature. "I've been executive chef [including restaurants such as Asia de ... More >>

Meatless Mondays: Josiah Citrin's Recipe for Tomato Soup with Braised Cannellini Beans and a Poached Egg

Chef Josiah Citrin may be best known for his two Michelin-starred French restaurant Melisse in Santa Monica. At home, his two teenage kids are more familiar with his Monday dinners, which for about eight months was meatless every week from last October until about June. It started as a way for son A ... More >>

Fantastic Fourth of July Recipes From Around the Web

It's America's birthday! The least you can do is cook something nice for our fair country. Or, at least for your friends who are bringing the beer. On the fourth of July, people are grilling, making pies, trying to keep cool and well-fed. We took a look around the web for the best recipes for all ... More >>

3 Great Cold Sesame Noodle Dishes in West San Gabriel Valley

Cold sesame noodles are often considered more snack than meal in Chinese cuisine -- fast and accessible. At most restaurants in town, there's one general style: noodles, typically thin, with julienned cucumbers and a variation of a sauce heavy on sesame paste, punctuated by splashes of minced garli ... More >>

Edward Lee's Smoke & Pickles Cookbook A Recipe For Adobo Fried Chicken and Waffles

Top Chef alum Edward Lee studied English at NYU. While undergraduate English majors are not necessarily great writers, something about Lee's background as a student of literature infuses his new cookbook Smoke & Pickles: Recipes and Stories From a New Southern Kitchen. It's not just a collection o ... More >>

Meatless Mondays: Vegan Cooking at Mohawk Bend A Recipe for Mole Pizza

Since he took over the kitchen at Mohawk Bend last December, Erick Simmons has thrown out a few tools from his traditional chef's tool box. "I have no butter in my inventory. I haven't used it here for the last six months. If you told me that before I arrived last year, I would have thought you're c ... More >>

Cherry Season is Almost Over: 5 Great Cherry Recipes To Make The Most of It

Cherry season, that glorious six weeks of early summer when cherries overflow at local farmers markets, is almost done. According to the California Cherry Board, the week around June 20 (next week) is the end of when we'll be seeing local cherries everywhere. By this time in the season, we've usua ... More >>

It's Softshell Crab Season: 5 L.A. Restaurants Serving Softshells

Chomping down on the spindly, arachnid limbs of a softshell crab is one of early summer's great joys. It's this time of year that blue crabs shed their hard shells and can therefore be eaten whole, legs and all. A handful of L.A. restaurants are serving the very seasonal seafood right now -- here ... More >>

Memorial Day Grilling Tips From Chef Govind Armstrong

While chef Govind Armstrong is busy this Memorial Day in the kitchen of his 2 1/2-month-old restaurant Willie Jane on Abbot Kinney in Venice, scores of Angelenos will be firing up the grill. To get ready for the second-biggest BBQ holiday of the year -- July 4 is the biggest -- Armstrong, who also r ... More >>

Meatless Mondays: Maximiliano Chef Andre Guerrero A Recipe for Lemon Rapini Linguine

Andre Guerrero has covered enough mileage at restaurants across Los Angeles that your immediate association of the chef is it's own a litmus test for Angelenos. Millennials will recognize The Oinkster; Gen X-ers might recall Duet or Linq; and Baby Boomers will likely associate him with Café Le Mond ... More >>

Corazon y Miel Review: Craft Cocktails and Creative Cooking Take Up Residence in a Surprising Place

The Bell restaurant's heart is in the right place, our critic finds.

5 Best Places to Eat in the Downtown Arts District

This week's L.A. Weekly profiles the one of the city's hottest neighborhoods: the downtown arts district. Check out the other stories in our series: *Tyler Stonebreaker: Curator of the Downtown Arts District. *6 Developments That Will Change the Downtown Arts District's Future*How the Arts District ... More >>

Meatless Mondays: Susan Feniger A Burmese Gin Thoke Melon Salad Recipe

A three-week trip to an ashram in the Indian town of Ahmednagar in 1981 shifted Susan Feniger's (Street, Top Chef Masters, etc.) aesthetic and approach as a chef. Before then, her professional purview was almost exclusively located within traditional French restaurants on the East coast to the West, ... More >>

The Adobo Road Cookbook: A New Filipino Cookbook A Recipe for Red Wine and Short Ribs Adobo

If you're missing The Manila Machine, a jaunty orange truck that once roamed L.A. dispensing Filipino food, there's good news. You can still have the truck's top sellers, including sticky glazed carabao wings, lumpia, a spicy sizzling pork dish called sisig, and pork belly and pineapple adobo. The ... More >>

DIY Porchetta: How to Make Your Own Porchetta Feast Recipes From Barbrix Chef Don Dickman

Porchetta, as we recently discovered, is having its moment in Los Angeles. Or maybe it's having another moment, as the glorious Italian ode to pig is hardly a recent discovery. The roasted pork dish had been gracing Italian menus, Italian food trucks and rustic Italian kitchens for a long time befor ... More >>

Banadir Somali Restaurant: More Fun With Goat in Inglewood

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 >>

Cookbook Review: The Way to Fry , Southern-Style A Fried Cocktail (!) Recipe

Disclosure: We have a secret crush on Norman King, author of The Way to Fry. The Southern Living editor has that old school, nerd next door charm. Meaning he looks like he has decades of plaid shirt and button down collar experience (a compliment), not merely a fleeting hipster vintage obsession. An ... More >>

Hawkins House of Burgers: 99 Essential Restaurants 2013

Ha Tien Quan: 99 Essential Restaurants 2013

Cookbook of the Week: Sicily, The Postcard Version A Coffee Granita Recipe

The upside of the current trend of hyper-localized cookbooks: You can go to Sicily over the weekend without leaving your kitchen. The latest from Phaidon, Sicily: A Culinary Journey through Sicilian Cuisine, due on stands in about a month, is a compilation of fifty traditional recipes from the edito ... More >>

Cookbook Review: The Flavors of Belize May Not Be Perfect, But It's Hard Not to Love a Fried Breadfruit (!) Recipe

A good cookbook collection does not look like it came straight out of a food stylist's studio. Sure, it will include several near-perfect volumes, those monumental titles that still capture your attention. But some cookbooks, like Flavors of Belize, will sport a few flaws. You might keep them beca ... More >>

10 Best Eats in Little Tokyo: Neighborhood Grub Crawl

L.A.'s Little Tokyo is home to at least 100 eateries -- Japanese and non-Japanese, old and new, traditional and innovative. And it is just about 0.13 square miles in size -- dense, compact, and easily explored on foot. (Roughly bounded between 4th, Alameda, Temple, and Los Angeles streets.) That mea ... More >>

The Lazy Ox Chef Cycle: Josef Centeno to Travis Chase

The Lazy Ox Canteen is known for many things: The New American menu peppered with global influences. A soundtrack booming with The Animals and Soft Cell. The compact dining room outfitted with naked light bulbs and a pair of ox horns. Its unassuming setting -- a calm Little Tokyo street near Skid Ro ... More >>

Cookbook of the Week: Every Grain of Rice A Quick Spicy Sesame Noodle Recipe (Happy Chinese New Year!)

If you are a Fuchsia Dunlop fan (you are, we hope), you probably already have a copy of her new cookbook, Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking, and are halfway through a lunch of braised chicken with chestnuts, peas with dried shrimp, and sour-and-hot mushroom soup. Or, should you be try ... More >>

Ching-He Huang: A Blueprint for Your Chinese New Year's Eve Feast

The Chinese New Year's Eve feast Ching-He Huang planned for her upcoming Cooking Channel special is less a menu than what she calls a blueprint. It's a sensible approach to the task of transcribing a storied tradition like a Chinese N.Y.E. dinner. After all, Huang faced a range of possible interpret ... More >>

10 Best Halal Dishes in Los Angeles

Los Angeles can, yet again, boast about having the most variety, if not depth, of something. Home to the most diverse Muslim population in the United States, Los Angeles County is full of halal restaurants. Halal means permitted or lawful according to Sharia (Islamic) laws. In the realm of dining ou ... More >>

Product Review: The Pizza Baking Steel, A Thin Crust Game Changer?

On our quest for the perfect pizza crust, we've broken pizza stones (more than one), tried all of the mock pizza oven tricks (Bricks!) and talked with chefs like Jeff Mahin over at Stella Rosa about our unfulfilled crust expectations. And now, the Baking Steel. Baking pizza on steel is an idea Mah ... More >>

Betty [Crocker] Goes Vegan! The Cookbook "Her" Recipe For Vegan Bisquick

What happens when Betty Goes Vegan? Pull out the Aqua Net and your best pair of Silver Lake stilettos. Brooklyn-based authors Annie and Dan Shannon are serving up vegan bacon cheeseburger hash, Greek sliders (with vegan ground beef), "faux cassoulet" (beans, vegan beef broth, Tofurky sausages), spin ... More >>

Top 4 DIY Super Bowl Snacks

On Super Bowl Sunday of our senior year of college, a friend's French girlfriend made crêpes. Okay, she wasn't French, but she had lived in Paris long enough to feel like she could affect an accent when speaking English and feign ignorance of the occasion's conventions. She made crêpes and every ... More >>

Cookbook of the Week: The Lebanese Kitchen An Easy Eggplant-Pomegranate Salad Recipe

Among the glories of January: leisurely flipping through a fall cookbook release that deserves dedicated attention, like The Lebanese Kitchen, without a single holiday to-do list. The latest in Phaidon's series of international home cooking bibles dedicated to regional cuisines clocks in at over 500 ... More >>

Pujols Kitchen: Charity Cookware Albert Pujols' Favorite "Home Run" Pollo Guisado Recipe

While Anaheim Angels first baseman Albert Pujols was hitting his 450th home run last year, his wife, Deidre Pujols, was knee-deep in calderos, the Dutch oven of Latin American cooking. The price tag comes with a good cause: Proceeds from her new cookware line, Pujols Kitchen Cookware, benefit povert ... More >>

Cookbook of the Year: Gran Cocina Latina A Spicy Bolivian Peanut Sauce Recipe

What happens you combine a culinary pedigree that includes a Latin American/Spanish market and pastry shop (Ultramarinos) and two restaurants (Zafra & Cucharamama in New Jersey) with a doctorate in medieval history? Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America, a 900-page homage to Latin American c ... More >>

Better Food for Dogs, A Doggie Diet Resolution A Peanut Butter Dog Treat Recipe

And so the month of dieting, and best-selling diet books, begins. Judging by the stacks on our desk, this year's back cover theme is the anti-diet, with books like The Parisian Diet: How to Reach Your Right Weight and Stay There promising a "sensible and holistic approach ... not a flash-in-the-pan ... More >>

Chefs Cook At Home, The Holiday Edition: Sotto's Steve Samson A Recipe For Tortellini

This week and next, we'll be featuring the holiday food traditions of L.A. chefs. Today, Sotto's Steve Samson tells us about his family's Christmas tortellini. "My mom is from Bologna so practically every special occasion meal, especially Christmas Day and Easter Sunday, is centered around tortelli ... More >>

100 Favorite Dishes: The Whole Menu

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 >>

Cookbook Of The Week: Jerusalem: A Cookbook Yotam Ottolenghi's Baharat Recipe

If you're a Yotam Ottolenghi fan, you probably already have a copy of Jerusalem: A Cookbook by the London-based chef and his longtime friend, business partner and chef Sami Tamimi, who helms the kitchen of Ottolenghi's namesake restaurant. Lucky you. It's the ideal time of year to flip through the 3 ... More >>

The 200 Best Canned Fish & Seafood Recipes? Just Add Good Olive Oil -- Really

When a cookbook titled 200 Best Canned Fish & Seafood Recipes lands on your desk, there's really only one reaction: That's a lot of canned tuna. But if you look closely at the recipes from author Susan Sampson, former food editor of the Toronto Star, many are really quite clever. (Did we really ju ... More >>

10 Best Nachos in Los Angeles

Nachos are party food, sporting event food, late-night soak-up-the-booze food or -- conversely -- kid food. Nachos are not aspirational food. At its most basic, this is a platter of chips covered with a neon foodstuff called cheese. Even when elevated, it isn't pretending to be much more. But it do ... More >>

Fred Thompson's Southern Sides: Your Quick Fix For Thanksgiving Side Dish Monotony His Sweet Potato "Guacamole" (!) Recipe

If you're feeling uninspired by the same Thanksgiving sides, you've still got time to order a copy of Fred Thompson's Southern Sides for express delivery before the turkey oven timer goes off. Sure, California is miles from the South, at least last we checked the election results. And the topic of ... More >>

Martha Stewart's Cooking School: Episode 6, Rice

See also: The Martha Stewart Cooking School archives. Rice can be an unsung hero at times -- taken for granted, treated as merely a bed on which to lay more interesting food, or as filler, say, in a burrito. It's an everyday item, thus we often forget to appreciate the many roles it can play in our ... More >>

Cookbook Of The Week: New Classic Family Dinners Campanile's Clams Casino Recipe

Cooking is often about remembering -- actively, looking forward and without regret. You might be inspired by a family member, an incredible vacation, a certain farmer's produce or a neighborhood restaurant dish that you loved. A dish, perhaps, in New Classic Family Dinners by Mark Peel. This isn't ... More >>

In-Chan's Little Secret

This family restaurant in Van Nuys delights with northern Thai dishes — as long as you ask for the special menu

Dinner Tonight: Grab A Jar Of San Angel For A Quick Día de los Muertos Fix

The beauty of this time of year: we get to move straight from a candy hangover to spicy mole. Happy Día de los Muertos. If the idea of spending several hours making a batch of the traditional Mexican sauce isn't tops on your recovery agenda today, you can pick up a jar of locally made San Angel Mol ... More >>