Jonathan Gold

All India CafeThe 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. However, All......

As an agricultural center, Yemen produced the world's first coffee. As a center of music, it produced Ofra Haza, once known as the Yemenite Madonna. But in Tel Aviv, where much of the huge and ancient Yemenite-Jewish community has gathered in the last hundred years, Yemenite culture may be most......

Al-Watan If you have a taste for meaty northern Indian cooking, Pakistani cooking is probably everything you like and more so, spicier than Punjabi and meatier, more deeply inflected by the flavors of ginger, cardamom and wood smoke. First among Pakistani stews is haleem, beef braised with something like shredded......

Brooklyn Bagel Bakery The bagels are fresh here in the a.m., sometimes still hot from the oven, fragrantly sweet, soft without being bready, ready to ripen into the moist, day-old chewiness most people associate with their morning bagel. You can stop by, watch the women from the secretarial school down......

Indian cooking is, of course, some of the most varied and delightful on earth, the repository of a hundred spices, a thousand marvels and 10,000 recipes for lentils. From the sort of curried Country Captain chicken George Washington enjoyed 200 years ago to today's tandoori-chicken pizza, each generation of Americans......

Dodger Stadium Children growing up in Los Angeles found the spicy funk of grilling dogs as much a part of the Dodger Stadium experience as the first green flash of outfield, the buzz of Jerry Doggett from 10,000 radios, the crunch of peanut shells in the aisles, and the cool,......

Dim sum can be grand. Northern breakfast breads are delicious. But congee - porridge - may be as close as there is to a universal Chinese breakfast dish, rice boiled with large amounts of broth until it becomes a nutritious, loosely textured gruel, spiked with a handful of boiled peanuts......

If you grew up in West Los Angeles, you probably have primal yearnings for Lawry's roast beef that you don't fully understand. If like me you hail from the south side, you may long for Poor Richard's, a '60s wonderland of Shirley Temples and chugging model trains up on Slauson......

The San Pedro Fish Market and Restaurant may be the most raucous place in Los Angeles on a Saturday afternoon - a crumbling wharf in the Ports O' Call complex of San Pedro swarming with children, besieged by gulls, vibrating with the sound of mariachis whose trumpets compete with spurts......

Empress Pavilion-- A recent meal at Empress Pavilion included shiitake mushrooms braised with snow-pea leaves - a musky combination that somehow breathed summer - and Chinese water spinach sauteed with blindingly pungent fermented soy. You will also find Cantonese classics here, most of them done extremely well: steamed rock cod......