Main Dish Recipes

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

The 5 Things You Need To Know About In-Chan

In-Chan Thai Cuisine is the subject of this week's restaurant review. Here's a taste of what you can find in the review, as well as a few extra tidbits: Food: Make sure to ask for the special Northern Thai menu, which isn't given out to most patrons unless specifically asked for. Order of it and yo ... More >>

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 >>

Martha Stewart's Cooking School: Episode 4, Stocks

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 See also: Martha Stewart's Cooking School: Episode 2, Sauces See also: Martha Stewart's Cooking School ... More >>

The End of Cookbooks? Consider The Epicurious Cookbook A Do-Ahead Thanksgiving Recipe For Sweet Potato Salad

In the online recipe empire, Epicurious is the culinary equivalent of Alexander the Great, an online conqueror of our weeknight stockpots in unprecedented proportions. A press release for the just-released The Epicurious Cookbook even dubs the entity a "digital food brand," not merely a website, wi ... More >>

Cookbook Of The Week: Naomi Duguid's Burma, Rivers of Flavor Is Here A Recipe For Fried Banana-Sesame Seed Fritters!

"Finally here!" are words we hear all too often with every 30-minute meal-type cookbook these days, but with the release of Naomi Duguid's latest cookbook, Burma: Rivers of Flavor, it couldn't be more accurate. If you don't know Duguid, she is the sort of author who works on her cookbooks -- cultu ... More >>

Cookbook of the Week: Andrew Weil's True Food His Phoenix Via L.A. Umami Sauce Recipe

Full disclosure: we didn't expect to do much more than a quick flip through of Andrew Weil's just-released True Food: Seasonal, Sustainable, Simple, Pure cookbook. Something about those eponymous vitamin packs and the "Spontaneous Happiness" (for a fee) plugs on his website had taken their sales pi ... More >>

Top Chef Masters Recap: "Do You Want to be Comforted, or do You Want to be Thrilled?"

It was a battle of the coasts in last night's Top Chef Masters finale, pitting New York's Kerry Heffernan against San Francisco's golden boy Chris Cosentino. But it wasn't just that. It was also a battle of culinary ideologies, considering these two chefs' approach to food couldn't be more differen ... More >>

Cookbook Of The Week: Japanese Farm Food Is Even Better Than Sushi Rice A Recipe For Sesame-Miso Dressing

What happens when a California girl goes to Japan on a post-college, year-long sushi sabbatical? If you're Nancy Singleton Hachisu, author of the gorgeous new cookbook Japanese Farm Food, you meet an organic egg farmer, fall in love, and move to an incredible property in northern Saitama Prefecture. ... More >>

AltaMed's In Their Own Words II A Recipe for Pescado a la Veracruzana

What's your favorite Mexican restaurant? It just might be one of the 17 in AltaMed's new book, In Their Own Words II, by Sergio C. Muñoz. Rather than a restaurant guide, the book tells how Mexican cuisine flourished in and around Los Angeles in the words of the restaurant owners who made it happe ... More >>

A Recipe From the Chef: Paul Hancock's Cioppino From Catalina Island's Avalon Grille

If you haven't been to Catalina Island -- 22 miles out into the Pacific from the second most populous city in America and a mere 70-minute boat ride away -- lately, you might consider it, particularly now that we're having another run of triple digit temperatures. Snorkeling. Parasailing. A night-ti ... More >>

A Sichuan Cold Table Primer: What's in All Those Stainless Steel Tubs?

If you've been in a Sichuan restaurant, an authentic Sichuan restaurant that is, no doubt you've noticed the most prominent feature, the cold table. Ranging from small, rolling units to permanent counters, the tables are front and center of any true Sichuan place. If you haven't ordered from the co ... More >>

67: Son of a Gun's Uni and Burrata

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. 67: Son of a Gun's Uni and Burrata. There are quite a few contenders for favorites on Son of a Gun's menu, dishes that made this restaurant a destination in th ... More >>

Five Chiuchow Restaurants In Los Angeles

Located in the Guangdong Province of China, Chaozhou, also known as Teochew or Chiuchow, has a cuisine that is reminiscent of the offerings at local Cantonese and Vietnamese restaurants. Most Chiuchow restaurants in Los Angeles are noodle-heavy and, at first glance, the rice noodles taste and look o ... More >>

Home Pizza Oven Tips From Stella Rossa Chef Jeff Mahin

Get more from our 2012 Restaurant Issue, celebrating everything pizza in L.A. Before Stella Rossa opened its doors, chef Jeff Mahin was testing his dough recipes -- and holding out hope he'd be able to use fresh mozzarella on the restaurant's pizzas -- not in the restaurant's high-powered pizza ove ... More >>

Top Chef Masters Recap: Take the Cake, Please

It was not chef Art Smith's best day, to say the least. What, you ask, could have happened to cause him such shame -- worthy of a melting forehead slap? Last night on Top Chef Masters, it was a case of letting his mouth write a check his baking skills couldn't cash, so to speak. More on that in a mo ... More >>

Cookbook Of The Week: Susan Feniger's Street Food, Now In Hardcover Form Her Spicy Yuzu Mayonnaise Recipe

The subtitle to Susan Feniger's Street Food -- Irresistibly Crispy, Creamy, Crunchy, Spicy, Sticky, Sweet Recipes -- could just as well be a Wikipedia entry on the woman who, as we are reminded on the book jacket flap, is behind Street, co-founder of Border Grill, one of the original Food Network pe ... More >>

At Mezze, Chef Micah Wexler Nails a Menu of Creative, Middle Eastern-Inspired Dishes