Michelle Huneven

Illustration by Dana Collins THERE'S SOMETHING SO PLEASING ABOUT A MEATBALL. ROUNDNESS, for one. Self-containment. Wholeness. Children are naturally drawn to them. Meatballs are like sausages without their casings, hamburgers without their buns, meat loaf in bite-size form. They're a little-mentioned comfort food whose heyday was probably in the '50s......

Photo by Anne Fishbein DOWN IN THE GARMENT DISTRICT, RIGHT WHERE SPRING AND MAIN streets converge, there's a two-story café with a mansard roof and a brick patio. The balcony's white wrought iron is entwined with vines. This is Angélique Café, which is both a fixture and a bit of......

After two years at the fashionably hip Linq, chef Andre Guerrero has paired up with Saddle Peak Lodge’s former general manager, Michael Lamb, to open Max Restaurant in the Valley. Max is just west of Fulton on Ventura, at the same address where JoeJoe‘s used to be. JoeJoe’s was Cal-French,......

I am standing at the cheese case of Nicole‘s Gourmet Imports and cradling a wedge of hard aged chevre when a man behind me says, ”This is a very dangerous shop.“ He’s right. I came in for lunch, but while waiting for my sandwich, I‘ve been shopping. Well, it started......

Cora’s used to be the tiniest cafe, a favorite hang of surfers, pier fishermen and idlers. Lunch and breakfast only. Closed by 3 p.m. Nice piece of real estate, though, right there on Ocean Boulevard, where all the big new hotels were going up. Cora‘s days were numbered, anybody could......

What makes a restaurant fun? An excellent place to explore this question is Wolfgang Puck’s brasserie, Vert, in the new Hollywood & Highland mall. But the answer isn‘t simple; rather, it’s synthetical, a case in which the parts amount to more than the whole. Taken apart, piece by piece, Vert......

Photo by Anne Fishbein oachim Splichal sure knows how to make a restaurant. He and his Patina Group now have five in downtown Los Angeles alone, as well as numerous others, including Patina and the Pinots in Hollywood, Studio City and Costa Mesa. But Zucca . . . Zucca ......

Thirty-year-old Alex Scrimgeour, the chef/“proprietor” of the new, eponymous Alex on Melrose, has taken a famous, seminal restaurant space — Michel Richard’s Citrus — and remade it in his own image, thus writing another chapter in the ongoing story of Los Angeles restaurants: The inventive, groundbreaking older chef gives way......

Photo by Anne Fishbein 672 SOUTH LA BREA AVENUE hasn't been a very auspicious address for several restaurants. Robert Gadsby's eponymous restaurant didn't survive, and a fusion fiasco called One also went under. Now the space is in the hands of veteran restaurateur Philip Chiang and his partner, Kim Nguyen,......