Besha Rodell

See more of Anne Fishbein's photography from Post & Beam. It's Friday night, and Post & Beam is jam-packed. While soul music plays, friends and couples and families eat deviled eggs and scoop up pizza, chattering so loudly that even the giant flat-screen TV over the open kitchen is drowned......

Online reservations, especially ones you can make using your phone, are pretty darn convenient. There are a ton of companies that offer this service, although Open Table pretty much owns the bulk of the market. But yesterday Urbanspoon launched a new service through its Rezbook function, which allows you to......

Cream (the Eric Clapton band, not the dairy product) blasts; two pretty girls in their late teens bop self-consciously and mouth the words as they stand in the pastry line; the wait for a table has just gone from 30 minutes to an hour. From the blond wood bar set......

I've had a ton of great mail since soliciting reader feedback in my first Fork Lift column, including an amazing letter that began "Dear Sir! Thank you for your article in the L.A. Weekly about working as an restaurant critic. I think you have the very right approach, when you......

A young man with a beard slides his stool up to the bar, squeezing in between a flirting couple and an elementary school-aged child. The bearded fellow is dining solo at Black Hogg, his only companion a fat book of Carl Jung. He inquires about beverage options and is informed......

Los Angeles is not a love-at-first-sight kind of place. To an outsider, the wide boulevards and fierce jumble of humanity look arid and disorganized. The city is both overwhelming and confusing. At first the neighborhoods aren't easy to define, either geographically or in terms of personality. It's a distinctly weird......

It would have been stupid to think I could take this job and avoid being compared to Jonathan Gold. I have to admit, though, I did not think the first comparison would have to do with our looks. And yet, that's exactly what happened when Eater L.A. posted a blurry......