Jonathan Gold

Poised between Reseda’s Persian commercial strip to the south and a smallish Chinese community to the north, Afghan House lies in what amounts to an Afghan mini-mall tucked behind a busy Burger King drive-thru. To one side of the restaurant is a framing shop that also features a line of......

Photo by Anne Fishbein Those of us who crave great Chinese dumplings on weekend mornings long ago learned to bow to the tyranny of the masses, joining the throngs milling around Empress Pavilion or the foyer of Yung Ho, edging out Mercedes sedans in the parking lots of 888 and......

Above a sleek Thai supermarket and behind a soaring Buddhist shrine, concert strobes flashing, vibrating with the sounds of 12-piece rock bands on the huge stage, the L.A. Food Court at Thailand Plaza was the single greatest monument to Thai cooking in North America when it opened, eight separate Thai......

It is possible, at ruinous expense, to find sushi in Los Angeles whose construction rises well above the Tokyo norm. The pizza at Alto Palato compares very nicely with much of the pizza you find in Rome. Koreatown is home to any number of restaurants that would fit right in......

Sasha Carrillo Hot Dog on a Stick In a fine restaurant, service can be almost a mystical thing: glasses refilled, silver adjusted, tablecloths crumbed so subtly that it is easy to forget there is a third party involved, vague yearnings for red wine and meat instantly translated into spit-roasted wood......

A proper Indian biryani is one of the finest rice dishes of the world, a vast, smoking mound of seasoned basmati rice cooked with meat or vegetables. Pakistani cooks sometimes make great biryanis, superheated and fragrant with spice, although the versions in Los Angeles restaurants are definitely starches to race......

Photo by Anne Fishbein If you have lived in Los Angeles more than a couple of years, you may remember the sort of Los Angeles stories that used to be a staple of national (and British) magazines, the colorful journals of writers parachuting into the Westside, setting up housekeeping at......

For a long time, everybody I knew went to Dos Arbolitos, a tiny converted hamburger stand in a supermarket parking lot on the San Fernando Valley’s northern plain that was the source of some of the most directly delicious Mexican cooking in Los Angeles. Friends drove hours roundtrip for the......

Photo by Anne Fishbein Hainan is by all accounts China’s answer to Hawaii, a warm, lush island with beaches of fine, white sand, a tropical wonderland famous for the succulence of its mangoes, abundant pineapples, and the delicate flavor of its native red coconuts. The southern coast of Hainan is......