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: PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

Cacao: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

Jonathan Gold
Why isn't duck carnitas on every Mexican menu in town? If you think about it, the dish is almost inevitable —  duck meat simmered in fat until it nearly collapses, perfumed flesh arranged atop crisply fried sopes, a shotgun marriage of traditional and European cooking techniques of the sort that......
Credit: PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

Drago Centro: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

Jonathan Gold
Celestino Drago's grand restaurant, opened in a banking complex at the depth of the financial crisis, has in the last few years had to reinvent itself a dozen ways in order to stay vital, and it is possible to regard it as a wine bar, a center of the Italian......
Credit: PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

The Gorbals: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

Jonathan Gold
With the Pico Kosher Corridor, bustling Israeli joints and the best delis in the country, Los Angeles is not exactly lacking in Jewish-identified places to eat. But The Gorbals, Ilan Hall's restaurant in the lobby of the old Alexandria Hotel, may be the only Jewish restaurant that has ever served......
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Lazy Ox Canteen: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

Jonathan Gold
Like many of the best restaurants of the moment, Lazy Ox is tinged with aggression, leaping like flames from the open kitchen, in this case served up by Joseph Centeno, a young, Texas-born chef with a sweet smile, a working command of Mediterranean, izakaya Japanese and several Latin American cuisines,......