Jonathan Gold

Bay Cities Bay Cities makes a decent turkey sandwich, a loud, greasy meatball sandwich, and a very respectable hero with Parma prosciutto, ripe tomatoes and cheese, but the sandwich of choice here is a monster called the Godmother, which includes a slice of every Italian cold cut you've ever heard......

Photo by Anne FishbeinAuthenticity comes in many flavors in Los Angeles, from the goat stew at places that seem plucked straight out of the Guadalajara suburbs to French dip sandwiches assembled the same way since 1903, from the quivering cubes of duck blood on a dim sum cart to chicken......

Photo by Anne Fishbein Here’s what I did last week. SUNDAY: Everybody but me, it appears, adores the crisp-skinned roast chicken at the Cuban restaurant Versailles, loves the soupy black beans, the avocado salad, the mounds of bright-yellow arroz con pollo. And the walls at the restaurant are encrusted with......

Apple Pan My family have been Apple Pan regulars at least since Lew Alcindor played freshman ball. The top and bottom buns of an Apple Pan burger are both crisped and slightly oily, crunchy at the edges, working toward a near-complete softness at the middle; the pickles are resilient dill......

Ashoka the Great Ashoka is where to come for tandoori dishes: skinless chicken legs and fish kebabs and minced-lamb sausages marinated in yogurt and spices, flash-cooked in an ultrahot clay oven and served sizzling in a bed of onions on a heated steel platter. Mediocre tandoori, like bad barbecue, can......

The vast Cantonese banquet halls process thousands of customers a day. Gleaming Hong Kong-style cafés are as numerous as the red beans in a Chinese milk shake. Intimate seafood restaurants steam tankersful of live prawns each week. Still, the basic unit of Cantonese dining in Los Angeles seems to be......

`If you grew up eating hot dogs in the swinging San Fernando Valley '70s, your family probably had allegiances to the Hot Dog Show or Flooky's or the Wiener Factory, which were as inarguable, as inevitable, as the question of Orthodox, Conservative or Reform. My family was big into Flooky's,......

Green Field Churrascaria What to do at the Brazilian steak house Green Field is grab a plate and wander through the long buffet station, picking up fresh hearts of palm, marinated chickpeas, fresh asparagus, nubs of garlic-fried chicken. Then comes the meat, rodizio ("all you can eat") style. Well-done skirt......

Old Town Pasadena may be the most gentrified district in America, a sort of mega-mall sprinkled like fairy dust through hundred-year-old office blocks, polished to a shine. In Old Town - which for some reason has been renamed Old Pasadena - you are never more than a few yards from......

Bahooka This Polynesian restaurant is the kind of place you'd expect to find near a scruffy tropical seaport, all rusted nautical gear, stolen street signs and scarred dark wood. Lifeboats hang out back, and a mysterious board engraved "Joyce Kilmer" is nailed to the rear wall. There are fish in......