Barbara Hansen

Open since September, the newish Mexican restaurant Mercado is in a super-busy spot, adjacent to the Original Farmers Market and a little west of the Grove. But if you drop in for happy hour, you'll feel as relaxed as if you were seaside in Mexico. You'll sit in a large patio room......

Ever eaten Parsi food? Probably not, because you won't find it in L.A. or SoCal, unless you have Parsi friends who invite you to their homes.   But now there is one restaurant where you can taste it: Woodlands in Artesia's Little India.  Annu Dangore, the owner, is Parsi and this year......

Yes, you can cook tandoori chicken in a toaster oven. But you won't find that procedure in Farhana Sahibzada's cookbook, Flavorful Shortcuts to Indian/Pakistani Cooking (Trafford, $25). For six years Sahibzada was chef-owner of Cinnamon STIX, a cappuccino café and Indian snack shop near her home in Woodland Hills. There, she subbed......

Shades of Scheherazade, Kismet and Lawrence of Arabia. If your magic carpet hasn't taken you to such realms, you can still get there via Open Sesame's jallab cocktail.  As you drink, you'll breathe in the alluring scents of rose water, orange blossom water and incense as if you had been transported......

The Northridge Thai restaurant Lum-Ka-Naad plans a second location that will be a tad easier to reach from Los Angeles. The new place will open toward the end of March or in April in a cluster of shops at 17644 Ventura Blvd. in Encino. Already, the site is plastered with "coming soon"......

You may think there's nothing in Koreatown but barbecue. If you've found your comfort zone in the sort of small-plates, New American restaurants everyone's already talking about, you might think that going to unfamiliar Korean restaurants sounds dicey. You assume no one will understand you, that you won't be able......

It has to be the most outrageous Mexican dish in SoCal: Tater Tots smothered with Oaxacan mole, cheesy with panela and prettied up with red onion, cilantro and sour cream. You'll find it at Amor y Tacos, new in Cerritos. But wait, there's more daffy food to make you smile,...

Hollywood folk soon will have a new place to get their espresso fix, along with a dulce de leche croissant or a concha. In other words, La Monarca Bakery opens soon at the corner of Sunset Blvd. and Gower Street. This will be its first branch in the heart of......

The wooden stick that conductor Zubin Mehta worked with yesterday, Nov. 20, wasn't a baton, because Mehta hadn't come here to lead the L.A. Phil. Instead, it was the slim trunk of an Albizia julibrissin, or silk tree, which Mehta planted in Griffith Park to celebrate the 40th anniversary of......

The Thai government is poking into what you eat -- not to report you for ordering too much pad Thai and not enough khao kluk kapi but to suggest places where you'll get a decent version of each. In the Thai Select program, authorized inspectors examine restaurants in an effort......