Jonathan Gold

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Jitlada: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

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......
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Mayura: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

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;......
Credit: ANNE FISHBEIN

Red Medicine: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

 Red Medicine, whose co-owner unmasked and ejected the L.A. Times restaurant critic in his establishment's earliest weeks, is still more discussed in gossip columns than it is in food circles, and a lot of people who couldn't pick Wolfgang Puck out of a police lineup have strongly held opinions about......
Credit: Anne Fishbein

Vincenti: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

Valentino may be grander than Vincenti, and Giorgio Baldi may draw a more famous clientele, but Vincenti is the spiritual center of fine Italian cooking in Los Angeles, its hearth. And befitting a hearth, much of Nicola Mastronardi's food comes from the big, hardwood-burning ovens, flavored with the presence of......
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Ciro's: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

You can astral-project to Rajasthan if you like; I'll take the iron-barred, low-ceilinged dining room at this East L.A. institution, the funk of frying meat, a plate of old-school chile verde and the tiny dish of fresh, juicy avocado salsa that the house brings out for free. Ciro's makes the......
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Gjelina: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

Want to make a grown woman blush? Suggest that the reason she wants to go to this serene patio restaurant on Abbot Kinney is because she wants to gaze deeply into a scruffy waiter's eyes. She will object, of course, claiming that what she wants is the Cavaillon melon with......
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Kiriko: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

Kiriko may still be the great, undiscovered sushi bar in Los Angeles, and Ken Namba's traditional yet creative sashimi surpasses most of what is sold at three times the price. Namba smokes fresh Copper River salmon over smoldering cherry wood, slices it thick and wraps it around spears of ripe......
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Meals by Genet: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

Among all the kitsch and incense of Fairfax Avenue's Little Ethiopia, Meals by Genet stands out as an Ethiopian bistro, which is to say a homey, soft-lit dining room that looks at least as French as it does African. The menu is short: crisp-skinned fried trout, half a dozen stews......
Credit: PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

101 Noodle Express: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

Nine-coil large intestine and millet porridge being what they are, Shandong cooking may be a bit less accessible to the average Angeleno than Chongqing fried chicken or beef noodle soup. Chinese gourmets consider Shandong to be one of the four essential cuisines, but the specialty dish at 101 Noodle Express,......
Credit: PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

Bludso's: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

If you were looking for an excuse to drive down to Compton on a Saturday afternoon, you could do worse than to head to Bludso's, a puffing barbecue pit whose dining room doubles as a church on Sunday mornings, although its takeout line is a pretty good cross-section of that......