Jonathan Gold

getting the check at King Hua; Credit: Anne Fishbein

Navigating a Cantonese Dinner Menu at King Hua

Jonathan Gold
When we non-Chinese visit one of the San Gabriel Valley's handful of grand Cantonese restaurants, such as King Hua in Alhambra, we usually are there for morning dim sum, with its accessible, crowd-pleasing array of dumplings and snacks, or for a friend's banquet, where we enjoy the suckling pig and......
the invisible restaurant critic; Credit: Anne Fishbein

Authentic Tamales, Fit to Serve Mom

Jonathan Gold
Dear Mr. Gold: My mom is coming to my house for Christmas for the first time ever and I volunteered to cook, decorate, the whole nine yards. She is Mexican and is traditional on holidays, which means every year she makes tamales. I never learned or watched, unfortunately; I just......
House-made cheese with preserved cherry; Credit: PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

Jonathan Gold Reviews Le Comptoir

Jonathan Gold
Click here for Anne Fishbein's slideshow. In the demimonde of post-aughts Los Angeles, where the value of a meal out may lie less in the dent it leaves on your Visa card than in the discomfort involved in obtaining a table, there are three levels of almost-restaurants, the phenomenon in......
clam chowder at Neptune's Net; Credit: N. Galuten

Neptune's Net: When You're in a Bad-ass Seafood Mood

Jonathan Gold
When the weather gets cool, the surf gets big and the traffic on PCH dies down, Malibu once again belongs to us, free of the tourist hordes in their rented Aveos. And so we crank down the top, crank up the Suicidal Tendencies and bomb up the coast to Neptune's......
the invisible restaurant critic; Credit: Anne Fishbein

Late Night in Little Tokyo

Jonathan Gold
Dear Mr. Gold: I was wondering if you had any ideas for a place to eat after 10 p.m. in Little Tokyo or downtown. We're meeting a group of people for dinner after a movie, and we wanted to try something outside of the normal sushi/ramen/izakaya stuff. --Victor-Schechter, via Facebook......
Jonagold apples; Credit: F. Friesema

Cooks County: A Perfect First-date Restaurant?

Jonathan Gold
At the end of 2011, the year that the gastropub finally wrestled formal dining into a bathtub to drown, we pretty much know what a good, new restaurant is going to look like. There will be an open kitchen, and noise, and a very decent selection of obscure wines by......
Credit: Anne Fishbein

Waterloo & City: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

Jonathan Gold
It may be a stretch to consider Waterloo & City, a pool-shooting, darts-playing, ale-swilling, Ramones-blasting bar shoehorned into a rundown coffee shop, to be much more than a glorified bar. The place is ostensibly a gastropub, whatever that has come to mean, and there is indeed a Sunday roast; a......
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Campanile: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

Jonathan Gold
The heart of regional cooking lies in the ability of its chefs not only to work within the limitations imposed by the meager ingredients available but also to exalt those limitations as the soul of the cuisine itself. Rich regions eat cheeseburgers every night. Poor regions eke minestrone, socca or......
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El Huarache Azteca: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

Jonathan Gold
Without anyone much noticing the transition, Highland Park has become one of the best neighborhoods in Los Angeles to experience regional Mexican cooking. Even the trucks and taco tables serve food from parts of Mexico barely represented here a decade ago. At the vanguard was El Huarache Azteca, which was......
Credit: ANNE FISHBEIN

Sotto: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

Jonathan Gold
First of all, Sotto is not really a pizzeria. I thought I'd get that out of the way. Because while there is an oven — a 15,000-pound behemoth ballasted with imported Vesuvian soil — and chefs Steve Samson and Zack Pollack come from Ortica, the South Coast Plaza restaurant that......