Jonathan Gold

article placeholder

Guelaguetza: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

If any restaurant has earned the right to kick its shoes off and chill for a while, it is probably Guelaguetza, which introduced essential Oaxacan cooking to Los Angeles 20 years ago, and is the place where the governor of Oaxaca stops in for dinner when he passes through town......
Credit: PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

Little Dom's: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

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......
article placeholder

Mozza: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

Mozza has been sprawling so relentlessly that some of us have taken to calling it the Mozza Industrial Complex. And every time you poke your head into Nancy Silverton's outpost of the Batali-Bastianich empire, there is new ground to surveil — this year, it has been the magnificent whole-hog dinners......
Credit: PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

Providence: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

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......
article placeholder

Akasha: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

We can all agree that Akasha is a crunchy Westside fever dream of a restaurant, all recycled this and sustainably raised that, dark woods guaranteed not to have even the address of the rainforest on their BlackBerries and a very nice bowl of steamed quinoa with tofu that could make......
Credit: PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

Casa Bianca: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

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;......
Credit: ANNE FISHBEIN

Street: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

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......
Credit: PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

Guisados: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

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,......
article placeholder

Lou: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

"I want you to taste this," says Lou Amdur, handing you a glass of sour, cloudy liquid that smells like yesterday's bread dough. Although you pride yourself on your palate, and you will later have a conversation about an obscure Loire grape that could almost pass a Turing test, at......
article placeholder

Musso & Frank Grill: 99 Essential Restaurants 2011

If you walk into Musso expecting to have the same kind of steak you had last week at Morton's, you probably have the wrong idea. Because before the restaurant became a martini-fueled Hollywood clubhouse, the place where Faulkner blew out his liver and generations of character actors learned to show......