Main Dish Recipes

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

Top Chef Masters Recap: Cooking for Billionaires, and Why Curtis Stone Is, in Fact, the Man

Hooray! Top Chef Masters is back! You know, that souped-up version of the old Bravo staple in which we get to watch alreadyfamous chefs duke it out in the kitchen, not for money (as all their winnings go to charity) but for the prestige of being crowned truly the best of the best. Right? That must ... More >>

77: Agedashi Tofu at Izakaya Bincho

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. 77: Agedashi Tofu at Izakaya Bincho. At Izakaya Bincho, a cubbyhole of a restaurant hidden along the boardwalk Redondo Beach Pie, chef Tomo Ueno might have bee ... More >>

Robert Danhi's Easy Thai Cooking A Recipe for Grilled Lemongrass Chicken

Feel like eating Thai food? Then cook it yourself -- which isn't as hard as it sounds, because there's a book to help. It's Easy Thai Cooking, by Robert Danhi (Tuttle: $16.95). Danhi knows the kind of Thai food you like, because he lives here and has eaten his way through Hollywood's Thai Town as w ... More >>

Maison Giraud in the Pacific Palisades Is an Homage to Classic French Cuisine — for Better, and Sometimes for Worse

Your 4th of July Dining Deal Round-Up: Cobbler, Korean BBQ Sliders Beer Pong

Beer Belly's Backyard Boogie: The Filipino grillmasters at the The Park's Finest are joining forces with Beer Belly to host their 2nd annual "Backyard Boogie," an afternoon stocked with plenty of BBQ and beer. From 12 p.m. to 5 p.m., you can enjoy smoky pulled pork, hot links, coconut beef, bibingka ... More >>

89: Live Santa Barbara Spot Prawns at Providence

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. 89: Live Santa Barbara Spot Prawns at Providence. Providence is the sort of place where you expect to be impressed, perhaps even astonished. Michael Cimarusti' ... More >>

6 Great Dim Sum Dishes at Sea Harbour

Sea Harbour Seafood Restaurant in Rosemead is the embodiment of Chinese haute cuisine. The management runs the show, and everyone else from the chefs to the waitstaff is at their call. Walk in during slow hours and you'll probably see a group of men dressed in crisp suits exchanging business cards a ... More >>

Q & A with Shi Peng and Phillip Fu of JTYH: Noodle-Making, Media Fame A Noodle Video

JYTH Restaurant has long been a favorite among seekers of handmade noodles in Los Angeles. They're one of the few restaurants in Los Angeles that makes Shanxi knife-shaved noodles (dao xiao mian 刀削面), and chef Shi Peng does it with a thin metal blade he made himself. The restaurant has been ... More >>

Q & A With Professor Amy Rowat: Food and Science at UCLA, Danish Gastro-physical Societies Experimental Cakes

If you've been attending UCLA's Science & Food lectures, which began in April and continue through next month, you'll know who Professor Amy Rowat is. She's the one who put the series together, whose happy task it was to find sand fleas and an old electric blanket for Rene Redzepi and Lars Williams ... More >>

BBQ Beer: The Spice Table and The Bruery Host an Event

Barbecue and beer. A pretty ordinary combination -- except when the chef adds coconut, or a dash of fish sauce. The Spice Table is partnering with The Bruery to offer a prix-fixe dinner May 23 at $75 per person. The Singapore-inspired restaurant will serve eight dishes, each accompanied by select be ... More >>

Mother's Day Flowchart: Where to Take Your Mom for Brunch

Mother's Day is on Sunday, which, depending on your relationship with dear Mom, is the best day of the year, or just another day to hear, yet again, about all the pain you caused during childbirth and the ensuing 18 years thereafter. In either case, there are many, many restaurants and eateries ce ... More >>

The New Era of (Good) Healthful Cookbooks, Starting With Hero Food And Salad for Dinner

Those low-fat, low-carb, low-trend-whatever cookbooks will likely always have a market. But yet another positive trickle-down effect of the current farmers market and backyard gardening era has been the really great "healthful" cookbooks we've been seeing recently, Hero Food: How Cooking With Delici ... More >>

Ground Organ Meat: The New Farmers Market Burger Essential From Novy Ranches

If you've been wondering where all the "organ burgers" have been hiding among the ground beef, turkey and vegan summer grilling options, you're in luck. Novy Ranches recently began selling ground grass-fed organ meat (kidneys, heart and tongue) at the Sunday Brentwood Farmers Market and on its websi ... More >>

10 Best Vegan-Friendly Restaurants in L.A.: Happy Earth Day

Earth Day is this Sunday, April 22, and regardless of where you stand on the dietary spectrum, consider curbing your carbon footprint with a meal free of animal by-products. Non-profit organization Environmental Working Group found that eating one less burger per week for a year equates to reducing ... More >>

Cookbook Of The Week: The River Cottage Fish Book How To Cook Trout/Recycle The Newspaper At The Same Time

In the cookbook realm, turning out consistently great books has a downside: We expect more of publishers like the River Cottage and Phaidon. The River Cottage's Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, here with co-author Nick Fisher, a seafood journalist and avid fisherman, does not disappoint with the new Ame ... More >>

10 Best Grilled Cheese Sandwiches in Los Angeles

What is a grilled cheese sandwich? It's comfort food. It's warm and retro-yet-now and endlessly customizable. It's something that can be low-brow, high-end and everything in-between. How is it defined? For the purposes of this guide, we're saying a grilled cheese is a vegetarian sandwich that's ser ... More >>

What Has Betty Crocker Been Up To The Past 90 Years? A Big Book of Weeknight Dinners

At a moment in our culinary history when even our everyday weeknight dinner focus -- or fuss, depending on your recipe perspective -- is on (more) sustainable, farmers market-friendly, nose-to-tail cooking, we were curious what we might find among the pages of a modern Betty Crocker cookbook. Slow-c ... More >>

Koi's Rockin' Cucumber Martini A Recipe

Koi's Rockin' Cucumber martini is the perfect spring cocktail. Somewhat reminiscent of a Pimm's Cup, it's made with vodka and sake in place of gin, with lime juice instead of lemonade. It also has a stronger fresh cucumber flavor, as the cucumbers are added before shaking and straining, rather than ... More >>

Gwyneth Paltrow's Quick Recipe for Busy Moms: Quail Egg Pasta with Black Truffles Welcome Our New Guest Food Columnist

Editor's note: As many of you have probably noticed, the Weekly is currently searching for a new food critic. This sort of thing takes time. Sometimes a lot of time, right? So in the interim, we've asked (begged, really) noted cookbook author, television personality, foodist, movie star and local mo ... More >>

L.A.'s 4 Best Bargain Omakase The "Jiro Effect"

If you're planning on seeing David Gelb's brilliant documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi this weekend when it premieres at Santa Monica's Nu-Art Theater you might be well advised to pass on the popcorn and soda. The film clocks in at just under an hour and a half -- a good portion of that is dedicated t ... More >>

What Chefs Feed Their Kids A Recipe for Josiah Citrin's Potato Chip-crusted Chicken Tenders

Sick of hearing "yucky" when you set food in front of your offspring? Then you might need What Chefs Feed Their Kids (Lyons Press, $24.95) by Fanae Aaron, a mom who's been through all that and much more. If you don't have kids, you still could use this book. And if you hate kids, you might want it ... More >>

Top 5 Sustainable Food Sacrifices for Lent

The King cake's been cut. And if there were beads involved, tuck them away. Remember, Fat Tuesday exists only because it is in balanced juxtaposition with the 40 days of Lent -- a time set aside for guilt, contemplation, fasting, sacrifice and service, depending on your flavor of spiritual commitme ... More >>

Jonathan Gold Reviews Baco Mercat

Cookbook(s) Of The Week: The World In A Skillet & The Lodge Cast Iron Cookbook A Recipe For "Hot & Numbing Rabbit"

amazon​On first read, we didn't believe it ourselves when we decided to include a hybrid cookbook/anthology from an academic publisher, The World in a Skillet, and what boils down to a promotional cookbook from a cast-iron skillet maker, The Lodge Cast Iron Cookbook, in the same post. But give ... More >>

Cafe Bolívar's 10th Anniversary, With Arepas

In December, Bolívar Café and Gallery celebrated two achievements. First, its 10th anniversary as a small, bustling Santa Monica café. Second, the arrival of a custom-made arepa machine, and the reappearance -- after a year hiatus -- of this Venezuelan dish. "On the first day we made over 200," ... More >>

Fried Chicken at Son of a Gun: Sandwich of the Week

[Our 30 Sandwiches in 30 Days series was big -- but not big enough to encompass the multitude of L.A.'s sandwiches. As promised, our weekly sandwich pick extends the odyssey.] Son of a Gun is, for the most part, a seafood restaurant, one where Animal duo Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo give reign to the ... More >>

Jonathan Gold's 10 Best Dishes of 2011

Chichén Itzá's New Cookbook a Recipe for Sopa de Lima

​If you're a fan of the Yucatecan food at Chichén Itzá in the Mercado La Paloma, you can now make your favorite dishes yourself. No kidding. All the recipes from the restaurant, and many more, are in a just-published cookbook by Chichén Itzá's founder, Gilberto Cetina (read the Weekly's Q ... More >>

Cookbook of the Week: Poulet, When All You Want Is An Honest Chicken A One Pot Coconut Chicken Recipe

amazon​Holiday goose, turkey, duck. All great, but in another week or two, and we'll be happy to get back to that tried-and-true weeknight chicken. Good thing in Poulet: More than 50 Remarkable Meals that Exalt the Honest Chicken there is plenty of interesting poultry recipe fodder for anyone ... More >>

5 Paula Deen Holiday Recipes We Don't Want To Try

Paula DeenPeek-a-boo, y'all.​In the spirit of the season, we thought we'd go through 2011 Rose Parade Grand Marshal Paula Deen's rich, buttery collection of online holiday recipes and highlight a few stand-outs. Deen is the author of cookbooks, magazines and hosts "Paula's Best Dishes" on the ... More >>

A Recipe: Joan Nathan's Moroccan Chicken with Olives and Preserved Lemons

Katie StoopsJoan Nathan's Moroccan chicken with olives​If you're planning to head to Joan Nathan's talk at the Central Library this Saturday, you could do worse than spend the days prior to the event cooking. Specifically, cooking one of the dishes from Nathan's book Quiches, Kugels, and Cousc ... More >>

Bäco Mercat: An Exam in Culinary Poststructuralism

F. FriesemaJonagold apples​Some new small-plates restaurants are content to serve you hamburgers and fries. Others bring in influences from Singapore, Copenhagen or Tokyo. But the menu at Bäco Mercat, the new restaurant from Joseph Centeno of Lazy Ox, reads almost like a graduate exam in culi ... More >>

Cookbook Of The Week: The Art of Living According to Joe Beef's Testicle Pizza Theory A Vienna Sausage (!) Martini Recipe

When we first flipped through The Art of Living According to Joe Beef by Frédéric Morin, David McMillan and Meredith Erickson, we thought it was yet another pretty but also pretty lackluster restaurant cookbook (Joe Beef is Montreal's restaurant du jour). There's even the requisite foreword by a w ... More >>

Novy Ranches Grass-fed Beef: Farmers Markets Aren't Just For Apples Anymore A Roasted Cow Head Recipe From Ray Garcia

At the Novy Ranches grass-fed Angus beef stands that have been popping up at various farmers markets the past few months -- Topanga, Woodland Hills, Sherman Oaks and several others) -- you'll find an assortment of steaks, roasts and ground beef, as well as plenty of "off" cuts like oxtail, beef chee ... More >>

Ahn-Joo: Debbie Lee's Korean Pub Food Restaurant, Her Cookbook a Recipe for Chicken Meatballs

Amazon​Ahn-joo is the Korean word for pub food. It's what Debbie Lee serves at her newly opened Ahn-Joo, a Korean snack bar in the Americana mall in Glendale. No liquor there, but Lee frequents Koreantown pubs so she knows the dishes well. And she adds her own spin to come up with a modern tak ... More >>

Cookbook Of The Week: Holiday Dinners With Bradley Ogden

Holiday Dinners with Bradley Ogden is not our chosen cookbook this week for the obvious holiday reasons, though that green bean and persimmon salad (with basil) in the first "Thanksgiving Fest" section actually did cause us to reconsider Thursday's family appetizer for a moment. But these holiday ... More >>

New Cookbook: Easy Chinese Recipes, Including Some from L.A., a Recipe for Pork Dumpling Soup

Courtesy of Tuttle Publishing."Easy Chinese Recipes" (left) & shrimp & yellow chive dumplings (right).​You'll find a couple of local dishes in Bee Yinn Low's Easy Chinese Recipes (Tuttle Publishing, $24.95). This is because Low lives in Irvine and eats Chinese food all over California as well ... More >>

Beer Belly: From Death By Duck to Lucky Charms Pancakes

​We are in Koreatown. The customers are Korean. The chef won this year's Korean BBQ cookoff, with a dish of kimchi-brined pork loin with Cismontane Double IPA ssam-jang. But we are not eating Korean food -- we are eating something called Death by Duck, which is to say fries crisped in duck fat ... More >>

Gourmet Product Awards Winners Announced

Courtesy of Malibu Pies.​Chipotle chile peanut butter, blueberry licorice and coconut hibiscus tea were among the winners at the first Gourmet Product Awards. The competition honors the best new gourmet products in 43 finely divided categories including condiments, confections, dairy, oils, ba ... More >>

The Dead Celebrity Cookbook: Frank DeCaro Goes from The Daily Show to Peter Falk's Pork Chops A Recipe

​Sure, there are plenty of cookbooks out there written by chefs or celebrity chefs or home cooks or people who somehow cook things for a living. But who needs kitchen experience to write a cookbook when you've been the movie critic on The Daily Show. Which is what Frank DeCaro, author of The D ... More >>

Tandoori Masala: The Rub King of the Spice Jungle A Recipe

Sudha Koul Tandoori masala​In India, people always go out for Tandoori; now hardly anyone owns a tandoor, the North Indian clay oven after which the cuisine is named. Even when they did back in the day, it was more for baking quotidian nans and other mouthwatering breads, than for roasting the ... More >>

Jonathan Gold Recommends Ink.

Jonathan Gold Reviews Mozza's Whole Hog Dinners

Is The Mozza Cookbook All Hype? Or Really That Good?

amazon.com​In our past cookbook reviews, when we have found a cookbook particularly compelling, we tend use words like "noteworthy," "fantastic" and yes, "compelling." But when Nancy Silverton's The Mozza Cookbook (with sous chef Matt Molina and writer Carolynn Carreño), which hits shelves t ... More >>

Faux Shark Fin Soup: A Recipe From the Monterey Bay Aquarium

Courtesy of the Monterey Bay AquariumFaux shark fin soup.​Now that the California Shark Protection Act, a bill that would prohibit the sale, consumption and trade of shark's fin -- and with it shark fin soup -- sits on Governor Jerry Brown's desk, waiting for his approval (probably), here's a ... More >>

Q & A With Nancy Silverton: The Mozza Cookbook, The Problem of Gelato Doing One Thing at a Time Very, Very Well

A. ScattergoodNancy Silverton and her new cookbook at Mozza​ Nancy Silverton, who is an over-achiever in much the same way as is, say, Malcolm Gladwell, has had a productive summer even by her standards. Mozzas in Newport Beach and Singapore recently opened; Amy Pressman's burger project, Shor ... More >>