Jonathan Gold

Dark wood, deep booths and Sinatra; Manhattans and "dago red"; spaghetti and meatballs — your instincts tell you South Jersey, but chef Brandon Boudet grew up in New Orleans, and Little Dom's seems patterned after the neighborhood joints in that city, grown-up places where the local preferences for anise, artichokes......

At this point in his career, Michael Cimarusti has the chef thing down cold, poised when he addresses environmental forums and genial on TV, the first chef in town to embrace the new cocktailian movement and an advocate for the coherence of Los Angeles cuisine. If you've recently come into......

Sam Martorana, who was behind the ovens at Casa Bianca for more than 50 years, was such a presence at the red-checked-tablecloth pizzeria that it was hard to imagine it continuing after he passed away. His pizza was idiosyncratic to an extreme: thin when the fashion was for puffy crusts;......

If you were to poll foodistas about L.A. kitchens of the 1980s, you would be likely to come up with a lot of affection for City Restaurant, where Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken explored the idea of L.A. multiculturalism better than any restaurant has before or since, strands of......

In Mexico City, tacos de guisado are the essential units of street-food consumption, thick tortillas splashed with stew from a heated cazuela, strewn with a bit of onion, and thrust at you even before you remember how to pronounce calabacita. Tacos made with carne asada or carnitas are action tacos,......

See also Anne Fishbein's slideshow and our Google map. What is an essential Los Angeles restaurant? I was thinking about that over lunch at Providence a couple of months ago, contemplating a dish of Santa Barbara sea urchin cosseted with gently scrambled egg, wondering whether the uni might go better......