Jonathan Gold And Michelle Huneven

Ciudad. Cuchifritos at happy hour. Fatally strong ­mojitos. Peruvian-style ceviches and Bolivian-style tamales, Caribbean paella and a classic pescado Veracruzana, Bahia-style moqueqas and a fritanga that would knock them silly in Managua. Ciudad, the Pan-Latin downtown outpost of Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, may be all things to all......

The Counter. The “Build Your Own Burger” idea behind the Counter, a fashionable new dive in Ocean Park, makes it a universe of possibilities centering around the hamburger and its matrix of 40-odd fixings, a restaurant where a thick, rare, organic-beef hamburger with herbed goat cheese, dried cranberries and roasted......

Alegria. The best food here revolves around the ­extraordinary mole sauce: sharp, thick, sweetly complex, with top notes of smoke, clove and citrus, lashed with dried-chile heat, black enough to darken the brightest Pepsodent smile. (It takes two days to make, a million steps, and has something like 20 ingredients.)......

Asanebo. It is a pleasure to pull up a stool to the bar, to ­utter the magic word omakase — “Feed me until I burst!” — and to sit back and wait for the food to arrive. Soft, oily salmon, mounded in a bowl, is garnished with caviar; fillets of......

Enoteca Drago. In New York City, Italian wine bars are multiplying like the ebola virus, spreading house-cured head cheese and wines like Romitorio and Cannonau through neighborhoods that had barely seen a jug of Gallo just a year or two before. In Los Angeles, the first serious Italian wine bar......