Jonathan Gold

Everybody knows Church & State. It's that loud bistro decorated with strings of Christmas lights year-round. Walter Manzke used to cook there. It rules its street of luxury lofts, and it is nearly as hard as ever to get a table on a Friday night, even when the tables spill......

Were Angelenos amused when Sang Yoon published a scholarly dissertation on ketchup in the local paper this year? They were. Yoon's reputation was largely built upon his refusal to allow the sticky condiment into Father's Office, which was an unusual position for the owner of a beer bar specializing in......

I am reasonably sure that when Jackie Chan dines at Sea Harbour, he is whisked to a private room, plied with Bordeaux and fed the supreme luxuries of the Hong Kong billionaire's table: that one, live fish in the tank your waiter will never tell you the price of; sun-dried......

Thai Town's boat-noodle wars show no signs of abating, and there may be no end of Thai cafés in the neighborhood claiming to serve the best, the most authentic version, but the homely virtues of Sapp become more apparent by the year. Sapp's boat noodles are magnificent: murky, organ-rich beef......

If you haven't been to the Oinkster in a while, what you probably should know is that Andre Guerrero has finally figured out the pastrami, which was a little rubbery and underseasoned for the first several months of the restaurant's life but now is creeping up on the standard of......

In a neighborhood better known for its Vietnamese noodle shops, across street from a Serbian Orthodox church, Babita isn't quite where you would expect a great Mexican restaurant to be, and you could drive by a hundred times without noticing it was there. It is neither a taco shop nor......

Why is Tacos Baja Ensenada still on this list? Isn't it time to switch allegiances to Ricky's, or Taco Nazo, to the Best Fish Taco in Ensenada, or to any of the hundred other places that have learned how to make this glorious dish? I don't know — maybe next......

We know a woman who has made it her life's project to work through the typewritten addendum at the back of Jitlada's menu, 208 Southern Thai dishes almost mythical in their obscurity and their fierce chile heat. We wish her well: We can think of nothing more pleasant than revisiting......

Restaurants specializing in the cooking of Kerala are not thick on the ground. And even if you are familiar with Southern Indian cooking, a lot of the food here may be new to you: saucer-shaped rice-flour pancakes called appam; a complexly spiced fish curry with undernotes of tamarind and garlic;......