Jonathan Gold And Michelle Huneven

Downtown Los Angeles/Highland Park  LA99  Ciudad Cuchifritos at happy hour. Fatally strong mojitos. Peruvian-style ceviches and Bolivian-style tamales, Caribbean paella and a classic pescado Veracruzana. Ciudad, the downtown outpost of Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, may be all things to all people, but especially to all people whose pleasures......

Soy — the staple of vegetarians and lactose-intolerants the world over. Here’s a list of everything from tofu meatballs to soy-dusted cream puffs...Beverly Soontofu. At Beverly Soontofu, you get a simple water kimchi of white radish, and a spicy-red kimchi of white radish. The tofu casserole, soontofu, comes bubbling and......

Bistro K. To put it plainly, Bistro K is a restaurant out of a daydream, with a kitchen that may rank among the few dozen best in town, run by gifted and accomplished French chef Laurent Quenioux, with a bring-your-own-wine policy and no corkage charge; a place where a fine,......

Sophia Loren once said, “Everything you see, I owe to spaghetti.” If that’s not endorsement I don’t know what is. The following features places where you can get your pasta on . . . Angeli Caffé. Twenty years ago, Evan Kleiman’s caffé crystallized the affinity of Angelenos for casual Italian cooking —......

Donut Hole. La Puente may not be on the way to anything in particular, but it is home to the renowned Donut Hole, a drive-thru doughnut shop anchored by a giant hemi-doughnut at either end, a 1947 architectural triumph. From a couple of blocks away, the place looks like the......

Ham makes everything appealing — remember what it did for green eggs?   Dish. With lots of light, lots of room and smart, friendly servers, Dish, located in the small foothill village of La Cañada, is a prime example of the new American coffee shop. Its look is scrubbed-California-farmhouse, the......

This list, for those who crave organ meat as much as Hannibal Lecter did, is filled with dishes so good it’s a shame to call them offal . . . Asanebo. For a while, Asanebo was famous as the No-Sushi Bar, an establishment that served only sashimi and tiny portions of proto-Japanese cooked......

{mosimage}Aroma Café. Pljeskavica is a thin, Balkan hamburger, as big and round as a phonograph record, flavored with salt and onions and peppers and briefly cooked over a hot charcoal fire, a chewy meat patty that still has all its juice. In Los Angeles, pljeskavica is served more or less......

Al-Watan. If you have a taste for meaty northern Indian cooking, Pakistani cooking is probably everything you like and more so, spicier than Punjabi and meatier, more deeply inflected by the flavors of ginger, cardamom and wood smoke. Nahri is a beef curry strongly flavored with fresh ginger; magaz nahri......

Alcazar. This could be coastal Lebanon, really it could, a shaded terrace of music, grilled mullet, and waiters who transfer bright coals to brass hookahs. Enormous kebab plates are rushed to tables — and the shish tawok, grilled kebabs of extravagantly marinated chicken breast, is as good as a kebab......