Jonathan Gold

Credit: Anne Fishbein

Waterloo & City: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

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

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

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

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......
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Le Comptoir: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

Le Comptoir is every chef's dream restaurant: a few counter seats, a single menu each night, and the intimacy of a sushi bar — although it is a pop-up, huddled around the open kitchen of the sprawling restaurant Tiara. An armful of fresh herbs pokes from containers on the service......
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Mother Dough: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

Are you the type of person who is offended when a pizzeria closes on the rare days when its dough refuses to behave? Then Mother Dough probably isn't for you. Bez Compani nurtures his fire-spitting oven with the ferocity of Hogwarts gamekeeper Hagrid nurturing a dragon child, and when it......
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Pollos a la Brasa: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

This Peruvian chicken shack is the kind of place you may have thought was zoned out of existence, a kind of glassed-in shed set down on a traffic island and nearly hidden by high drifts of cordwood. The first thing you notice about it is the wood smoke, great billowing......
Credit: PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

A-Frame: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

If restaurants were Jeopardy! categories, A-Frame's menu could be "Things Locals Eat on the Beach in Hawaii.'' Because aside from the great beach-eats imperative, there may not be much else connecting beer-can chicken and kettle corn dusted with the crunchy seaweed condiment called furikake, Koreanized buffalo wings and hoisin-glazed baby......
Credit: Anne Fishbein

Terroni: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

 Isn't this the place with the foosball? If I were associated with Terroni, I'd probably be getting angry about now. Because while the Italian restaurant may refuse to put herbs in its olive oil, to allow Parmesan to be sprinkled on its linguine alle vongole, or to cut its pizza......
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El Parian: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

At this point in my life, I could no more change my allegiance to El Parian than I could my blind devotion to the Lakers. Because I've been coming here since the early days of Showtime, long enough to remember when the waitresses asked not if you would like to......