Jonathan Gold

China Islamic Restaurant Almost as soon as you walk into the restaurant, you’ll be asked if you want sesame bread (you do), a thick disk of flatbread made to order, the size of a Chicago-style pizza, crust baked to a shattering crispness that encloses a dozen layers of steamy, scallion-flecked......

Alameda Swap Meet The big food stall under the awning closest to the main building here is a full-on Mexican restaurant without the walls, featuring grilled chicken, carne asada and steam-table dishes: chile verde, chicken mole and a really good, spicy goat-meat stew that‘s the color of fresh blood. The......

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.)......

Agung has all the stuff that would be standard if Indonesian food were as common as Thai: 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, thick with......

Let Kansas City have its fried chicken, San Francisco its cioppino. Los Angeles is a world center of kimchi, the odiferous fermented vegetables that make up so much of the Korean table: briny bits of turnip, chile-sluiced cabbages, bittersweet daikon, stringy masses of seaweed and water spinach, and shoots of......

Cafe Brasil Mostly, you‘ll find grilled animals at Cafe Brasil: pork chops, lamb chops, steak, shrimp and fish, all profoundly salty and resonant with garlic, charred at the edges, fragrant with citrus and a little overcooked. With all this protein comes what seems like a truckload of rice glistening with......

Little Malaysia Little Malaysia seems to concentrate on the Nonya cooking of Pinang, an island off Malaysia’s west coast: hot and spicy, liberal with such root spices as ginger and turmeric, tending more toward clean sweet-and-sour flavors than toward the coconut-milk richness of much Malaysian and Indonesian food. But it‘s......

Photo by Anne Fishbein Bambi Bakery This may be the loudest place in Hollywood on Saturday mornings, with taped marimba music bouncing off the walls, sticky toddlers caroming off glass bakery cases, counterpeople barking orders into microphones, and waves of Central American locals sloshing, smushing and spilling food and drink......

Photo by Anne Fishbein Boca del Rio This place may lack the elaborate chilpacholes, the exotic jungly stews, the strange licoricelike herbs you’ll find in Veracruz, but mostly it delivers the goods: fluffy, garlicky rice; pungent fresh salsa; grilled lobster; stuffed crab; and just the best shrimp al mojo de......

Photo by Anne Fishbein BRUDDAH’S The Spam-fueled Hawaiian aesthetic of Pacific Rim cuisine contrasts fairly radically with Wolfgang Puck’s, especially at the old-line Gardena café Bruddah’s. And the breakfast dish known as loco moco could be entered into evidence as Exhibit A: a Close Encounter tableau of rice topped with......