Jonathan Gold

You should probably be going to Mercado La Paloma anyway, because it's as close to a utopian Los Angeles as you're going to find, a cooperatively run marketplace whose second floor is home to nonprofits and neighborhood tutoring facilities, and its first to a warren of regional, Mexican crafts markets......

You can be forgiven for surmising that something's up at Lukshon, right? Because you are at a Sang Yoon restaurant, nobody has tried to tackle you on the way to your seat, and you are drinking Singapore Slings or an oddball Canary Islands wine called Listan Negra instead of bitter......

John Sedlar is a chef whose résumé could occupy most of a novel; a mind spinning off in a hundred directions at once, leaving trails to follow, as well as a body of work to be admired. There are at least four separate menus at Rivera now, for instance, exploring......

Would you like to go to Animal? I mean right this second? You're probably out of luck, because it's the most popular restaurant in Los Angeles at the moment. The seats are already filled with twice-a-week regulars, chefs in town for a taping, fantastically beautiful women attracted to the testosterone......

 Even after a couple of years, the Tasting Kitchen feels more like an art collective than it does a proper restaurant, a place where the odd discussions you have with your neighbors at the communal table seem as vital to the project as the fig bruschetta, and servers drift in......