Erin Lyall

Ten years ago, a list of great happy hours in Koreatown would be strictly Korean: smoke-filled, dark bars full of steaming hot pots of tofu, kimchi pancakes and shots of soju. No longer. Los Angeles' Koreatown now is a hodgepodge of old-school Korean bars, nouveau seafood restaurants, hipster beer parlors......

There's a new kid in Culver City, nestled in snugly on Main Street amid the taverns and restaurants that make up the area's burgeoning food scene. The Wallace was opened over the weekend by husband-and-wife team Michael and Carol Teich: She runs the front of house, he runs the kitchen......

Looking for a special something for your food-oriented family members this time of year? Avoid the crush at Sur La Table, quell the urge to stick a restaurant gift certificate in an envelope -- a whole slew of companies have popped up with food-related gift box subscriptions. It's a gift......

They look like mean, inhospitable creatures, surrounded by spiny quills like some kind of underwater hedgehog. But once cracked open, sea urchins yield one of the great delicacies of the sea, pure ocean essence that is slightly rich on the tongue. You do not, in fact, eat sea urchin meat,......

Did you know the USDA got rid of the food pyramid? Yup, they've replaced it with a "food plate" (how utterly boring). And half of that plate, they advise, is supposed to be full of fruits and vegetables -- about 2 to 3 cups of produce per adult, per day......

What happens when you pair red winemaking techniques with white wine grapes? Orange wine. In colors ranging from light gold to amber pumpkin, it's the perfect way to toast the fall season. Even better, orange wine can pair with anything from beef to pheasant to figs, with the strength of......

In the sepia-toned days of the 1920s, husbands spent too much of their paycheck at the bar, factory workers suffered injuries after tipsy lunches, Wild West saloons were dens of debauchery and murder -- and it all got to be just too much for proper society. Enter Prohibition, a nearly......

A sushi bar is a thing of zen beauty, the ultimate voyeuristic experience. Stacks of crabs and oysters, glassed-in slabs of fish, plastic containers of sea life, vegetables and pickles -- all out there in the open for you to drool over. But the counter can be equally mysterious: What......

Trattoria Neapolis -- an airy, bustling Italian bistro in Pasadena -- is a passion project for owner Perry Vidalakis, who did his research and takes his pizza very seriously. Authenticity is so paramount, he had a 7,000-pound wood-burning oven shipped over from Naples (the floor had to be reinforced to......

There's a thin red line -- or perhaps a fuzzy purple one -- between restaurants with good bar programs, and bars with good food. This is a list of the latter: The following are drinking establishments in which you don't feel guilty pulling up a chair just to have a......