Michelle Huneven

It was not love at first sight between the Mustard Seed and me. A reader suggested I visit the small corner café on Hillhurst Avenue in Los Feliz, and, obediently, I did. Readers and friends have suggested many a great restaurant to me — and many a horror. The Mustard......

I always find willing volunteers to go with me to La Serenata de Garibaldi -- especially to the original restaurant in Boyle Heights. Long cited by critics and Mexican-food lovers alike as the best Mexican seafood restaurant, if not the best Mexican restaurant, in Los Angeles, it is a widely......

At the sweetly funky Onyx coffeehouse on Vermont, the art was bad, the tables mismatched, the coffee mediocre, and the customers more often than not scribbling away. Gone now, the Onyx has been replaced, in what seems a sign of the times, by the quietly lavish, sophisticated Figaro. Lovingly furnished......

What, if anything, is wrong with Los Angeles restaurants? To hear Wolfgang Puck tell it, whatever fault there is lies largely with the media — specifically with the Los Angeles Times, which invited him and six other prominent chefs to take part in a roundtable discussion last February. The subject......

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a chef in possession of talent must be in want of his own restaurant. Many a grueling hot hour in an employer‘s kitchen is no doubt spent in contemplation of what a restaurant of his own would look -- and taste -- like......

  When Porta Via opened some years back, it brought an interesting blend of Northern California innovation and authentic Italian ambiance to Cañon Drive in Beverly Hills. Co-owner Sandy Gendel had an impressive culinary pedigree: He‘d worked for Jonathan Waxman at Napa’s Table 29, put in some time at Chez......

Illustration by Christine Haberstock ENVY ME. IT'S A WARM, BRIGHT Tuesday, and I'm driving chocolate maker John Scharffenberger around Los Angeles to sample and discuss some of my favorite chocolate desserts. Scharffenberger is a very tall, slim, youthful man who grew up mostly in Southern California, went to college at......

Photo by Anne FishbeinMy first meal at Angeli on Melrose was in the mid-’80s and consisted largely of culture shock. I was living in the southern Sierra at the time, and had come to Los Angeles to do work for a magazine and visit friends. Early on a summer evening,......

There was a lot of good food last year, but these are the 10 dishes I haven‘t been able to stop thinking about since I ate them. Persimmon Pudding: Desserts have always been excellent at Axe, but the persimmon pudding may be hitting an all-time high. Dense, warmly spiced, not......