Jonathan Gold

The hottest Thai curry in Los Angeles? It's hard to say. The fieriest Mexican dish? I couldn't tell you, although a dish of grilled shrimp with sauteed habanero peppers I had at a defunct Whittier restaurant a few years ago was intense enough to coax my body into something closely......

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 the one. Especially the sausage pizza: speckled with sweetly spiced......

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 the one. Especially the sausage pizza, speckled with sweetly spiced......

Little Joe's If you grew up in the Southland, you've probably known the taste of Little Joe's ravioli - soft meat puffs in red marinara sauce - since you were small. If you grew up almost anywhere else, you've tasted something like Little Joe's ravioli, and the spaghetti and the......

The first cold night of fall, I went to the Living Fish Center, a small, superbly named Koreatown restaurant in whose window a brilliant neon trout burns in permanent midleap. Inside, a school of scarlet fish stare dumbly out from their dim tank, and a bubbling glass raceway teeming with......

Bahooka In the '70s and '80s, countless Kelbo's and Don the Beachcombers closed, the Torches was razed for condos, and the Luau on Rodeo Drive, where three generations of Beverly Hills High School students purchased their first illicit drink, was replaced by the world's most expensive mini-mall. Take heart, though......

Baldomero There may be more than birria and weekend menudo here, but it would be hard to tell by looking at the plates on the tables around you, at the signboards above the steam table or at the menu (which doesn't exist). And where some restaurants serve birria in plates......

Cole's P.E. Buffet When you trip down out of the bright sunlight into the dim warren of Cole's, you stumble into another era, with real Tiffany lamps, sawdust on the floors, and a couple of pickle-nosed guys at the bar who look like they haven't budged from their stools since......

If you're looking for the latest combination of diced papaya and unpronounceable Big Island fish, you might visit the Maui Beach Cafe. If you want to see what kind of Chinese dishes Japanese chefs might cook up for Californians in a restaurant owned by an Austrian famous for his French......