Jonathan Gold

Photo by Anne FishbeinCarlito's Gardel The most famous dish here must be the baked-garlic appetizer, a naked halved bulb on a plate, ready to pulp onto the house's quite decent bread. There's also melted provolone cheese, laced with tomatoes and pungent Mexican oregano, for eating with the almost Vermont-style Argentine......

Gook Soo is more than just a noodle Tokyo has its share of noodle shops; so do, one must concede, Taipei, Singapore and Seoul. But Los Angeles may have a bigger variety of Asian noodles than any city in the world, bowls of pho and skeins of soba, hand-pulled mein......

Aladdin Falafel Aladdin's falafel is a small miracle, tastier than its Greenwich Village counterparts, an oblate pingpong ball of ground chickpeas whose thick, tawny crust gives way -- crunch! -- to a dense interior, mildly spiced, barely greasy, tinted green with puréed herbs. Without the benefit of tahini, most falafel......

  Casa Bianca Of all the neighborhood pizza parlors out there, each of them touted as the best in the Southland, one of them actually has to be the best. And I‘m pretty sure that the Casa Bianca Pizza Pie is it. Especially the sausage pizza: speckled with sweetly spiced......

Ba Le Banh mi are more or less Vietnamese hoagies, meat and vegetables daubed with mayonnaise, crammed into a lightly toasted French roll and wrapped in a neatly folded sheet of butcher's tissue. The king of banh mi is the combination sandwich usual- ly referred to as banh mi dac......

  Pork arm. J.Z.Y., the first American satellite of a venerable Beijing teahouse, can seem a little like a Chinese version of the Polo Lounge, a vermillion teahouse frequented by Hong Kong movie stars and women wearing chunks of jade the size of Mike Tyson‘s fists. The menu is a......

All India Café This place is at its best when you bring the fewest preconceptions to the table, when the food least resembles its regional roots. The restaurant's signature dish is probably the "frankie," a Bombay street snack that the Westside Bombay Cafe brought to California and perfected, sort of......

Charming Garden Charming Garden is a clean, bright place, spare of ornament, with fresh tablecloths and formal service. It is also the most serious Hunan-style restaurant in Southern California. At lunchtime, here comes the waitress, slinging a tray with an assortment of cold hors d'oeuvres: tender young bamboo shoots cooked......

Photo by Anne FishbeinFRENCH CHEFS HERE, MOST OF THEM ANYWAY, ARE resigned to nourishing their best customers on custom-ordered egg-white omelets, sauceless chicken and swordfish broiled dry. The Zone Diet has forced the city's Italian chefs to devise carpaccios instead of pastas; New American chefs have had to redefine home......

Art by Dave Shulman La Luz del Día The last place you'd expect to find a real Mexican joint is among the maraca vendors and befuddled German tourists of Olvera Street, but there it is (and has been for decades), La Luz del Día, serving cactus salad to the hordes......