Jonathan Gold

Everybody likes mint-leaf chicken. In some parts of town, pad Thai noodles are more popular than hot dogs. But to people not actually raised in Bangkok, Thai desserts may be as specialized a taste as oboe recitals or light bondage, gelatinous masses slicked with bland fresh coconut cream and lashed......

Sushi on Tap is a stylish sushi bar in a Studio City mini-mall, a tap-dance-themed place with bright posters on the walls, tap documentaries flickering silently on the video screens that dot the room, and saccharine versions of jazz standards floating out of the speakers overhead. The three sushi chefs,......

Canary Canary is an Iranian sandwich shop on Westwood's Iranian strip, a house of kebabs in the most kebab-intensive neighborhood in California. (As W.C. Fields once said of the garlic-packing town of Gilroy, you could marinate a steak just by hanging it on a clothesline here.) Kebab plates come with......

The Brazilian restaurant Zabumba is as soccer-mad as any three British pubs, with a welter of video screens tuned to the games, World Cup schedules handed out with the check, and at least one waitress who wears a uniform consisting of short-shorts and a Brazilian-flag halter top, which may be......

While the contributions of South America to world culture may include the magical realist novel, Che's groovy beret and Lambada: The Forbidden Dance, the continent's role in world cuisine has gone largely unremarked. Without South America, there would be no potatoes or tomatoes; Thai food would still be seasoned with......

New York has pushcart dogs and the garlic knobelwurst at Katz's deli. Chicago has Vienna franks. Rochester has its white-hots, Cincinnati its chili-sluiced coneys. Sheboygan is famous for grilled brats. Santa Monica . . . Santa Monica is the birthplace of Hot Dog on a Stick. Frankly, as regional hot......

The concept of the single-item restaurant is well known in Los Angeles: Lawry's for prime rib, Tommy's for hamburgers, Philippe's for French dip. If you want crab, you might head to the Crab Cooker; if tofu, to Tofu Cabin. There is precedent for this: The first Paris establishment to call......

The first West African cooks to land in the Caribbean more than 400 years ago did not precisely apply for their jobs. But since then African flavors have been as dominant in American cooking as African-derived rhythms in jazz. From the Carolina rice kitchen to New Orleans gumbos, from Texas......

Behold Sushi Bar Golf, at the historic intersection of Third and Vermont, a Japanese restaurant at the heart of a neighborhood that can't decide whether it is Filipino, Salvadoran or Korean. Although Sushi Bar Golf is in plain view, it seems a little like a secret restaurant, with its valet......

Vim must have been one of the first dozen Thai restaurants in Los Angeles, a bright, fragrant storefront on a strip of South Vermont that anchored one of the city's original Thai neighborhoods. Composer Carl Stone named one of his earliest MIDI opuses after the restaurant, known for its particularly......