Jonathan Gold

Canary Canary is an Iranian sandwich shop on Westwood‘s Iranian strip, a house of kebabs in the most kebab-intensive neighborhood in California. (As W.C. Fields once said of the garlic-packing town of Gilroy, you could marinate a steak just by hanging it on a clothesline here.) Also notable are Iranian-style......

Antojitos Denise‘s In Los Angeles, good carnitas are common, great carnitas rare. Denise’s is a small, sweet taco stand whose customer base consists largely of people waiting for the MTA at the bus stop right in front. A caricature of Denise is painted on one wall, and if you poke......

Heavy Noodling Heavy Noodling specializes in the sort of strands 100 generations of Chinese chefs have regarded with horror: thick, clumsy noodles that run somewhere between spaetzle and pappardelle, self-consciously rustic things that taste mainly of themselves, whether fried with mixed seafood and lots of garlic or immersed with tendon......

Photo by Anne Fishbein 888 Did I say Chiu Chow? My first meal at 888 — which included a garlicky terrine of beef shank; crunchy, tofu-skin-wrapped dumplings of fresh crabmeat and taro (crab balls); a soft, fragrant lamb stew (seasonal); and sugar snap peas sautéed simply with oil and a......

Ciro’s Some definitions: 1) A flauta is a corn tortilla wrapped around a meat filling and fried crisp. Stylistically, flautas can range from the greasy things your college dorm used to serve, to the giant, tasteless, alto-flute-size roll-ups served by certain upscale Mexican chains. 2) Located just down the street......

Chicken Garden Chicken Garden is a nearly elegant, bare-bones sort of place with soft lights and framed calligraphy. Everybody seems to be nibbling off-the-menu Taiwanese hors d’oeuvres, things like smoked beef strips, or small fried fish with chewy tofu, or fried pork chops with a pepper-salt dip. But really, this......

Cha Cha Chicken Although Cha Cha Chicken seems to operate mostly as a takeout stand, the patio off to the side is a pleasant place on a hot night, dotted with thatched palapas, enhanced by flowers growing out of old tomato-juice cans, ocean breezes, the milder sort of reggae music,......

Photo by Anne Fishbein Chinese banquets are extremely fine things, exquisitely choreographed successions of tastes and textures that are greater than each dish on its own, long-form essays in freshness and style that tend to play themselves out on a larger screen than all but the most elaborate Western meals:......

Agung Agung has all the stuff that would be standard if Indonesian food were as common as Thai: good, clumpy fried rice with scallions and ham; delicious bakmi noodles, a sort of spicy Indonesian chow mein, fried with dark soy, shrimp and plenty of cabbage; the chicken soup soto ayam,......

All India Cafe The conceit here is dishes from each of the regions of India -- tandoori meats from the north and masala dosa from the south, salads and Bombay-style uttapam -- filtered through the soft-focus lens of the All India kitchen and washed with sweet chutneys and herbs. All......