Besha Rodell

The number of food talks and events and conferences and night markets and festivals just keeps growing in L.A., and it's hard to know where to spend your time and money and stomach space. But a conference that's new to L.A. and looks especially noteworthy is coming up in a......

From a distance, Shibumi looks a little like the fanciest dive bar in America. The new downtown restaurant is not a dive bar at all — quite the opposite — but the long, shadowy room shares some DNA with a number of Lower East Side establishments from years gone by......

Los Angeles has a reputation as a fairly early-to-bed city. This is largely due to the travesty of our liquor laws, which require bars to be completely cleared of patrons by 2 a.m. Many people people that restaurants shut down early, too. But if you know where to look, there......

The first time I tried to find Shawn Pham's restaurant Simbal, I spent ten minutes staring at the address location on the phone while circling the block and wandering through Japanese Village Plaza trying to figure out where the heck I was going. Eventually I caught glimpse of a sign......

Culinary ambition is a strange beast. The formula used to be relatively simple: work your way up the restaurant chain, feed people well, and eventually get a decently paying job. Perhaps you might eventually open your very own restaurant. These days, a culinary career is so much more complex. Once......

I've never seen such pure delight as the look on the faces of women entering the Silver Lake Gelson's and seeing friends drinking at the new bar just to the left of the store's entrance. It's 4 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, and my friend Madeleine and I have perched......

Is there a street in greater Los Angeles changing more rapidly than Ventura Boulevard? The San Fernando Valley thoroughfare, which Wikipedia claims is "the world's longest avenue of contiguous businesses" (hard to believe, but hey...Valley pride!), is an ever-changing strip of places to eat, drink and shop. In recent years,......

Chef Bryant Ng has brought to Cassia some of the sensibility that made his now-shuttered Spice Table such a favorite, but the context here is slightly different: He's riffing on the interplay between French and Vietnamese cuisines, both the influences that are born of the historical French occupation of Vietnam......

It's a lot of fun to imagine the genesis of the menu items at Trois Familia, that "duuuude, wouldn't it be cool if ..." flash of inspiration that created dishes such as churro French toast and maple-chili glazed bacon. At the Silver Lake French/Mexican brunch restaurant opened by Jon Shook,......