Michelle Huneven

Photo by Anne Fishbein BLISS LOOKS LIKE A PLACE THE DEVIL MIGHT LIKE. But it's not easy to find — there's no sign on the building and no visible address. It would seem that if you don't know where Bliss is, the chances of your finding it are slim indeed......

Anne Fishbein THE FIRST TIME I SAW THE NEWLY WHITEWASHED WALLS OF SONA, I took it for a postproduction house, perhaps one having to do with sound. Sonar, I thought, sonance, sonal, sonata. As it turns out, I wasn't all that far off. Husband-wife team David and Michelle Myers, founders......

A LONG, LONG TIME AGO — 30 YEARS NOW — MY first brother-in-law introduced me to a different way of eating. I remember it clearly: He and I were sitting at the island in my parents' kitchen — the island had a grill top on it — and periodically he......

Photo by Anne Fishbein SOME YEARS AGO — SIX OR SEVEN — I WROTE A FEATURE STORY ABOUT a small, informal cooking competition: Xiomara Ardolina, owner of Xiomara in Pasadena, was having a cook-off wherein she pitted herself against the restaurant's then-chef, Patrick Healy. Healy was cooking Nuevo Latino dishes......

When I moved from Atwater Village over a year ago, things suddenly began picking up there. What can I say? There had long been rumors that Atwater would be the next best place, the next Mount Washington or Silver Lake, the next residential bastion of cool. When I moved there......

It’s rare that a new restaurant -- especially a smart, urbane, sophisticated, upscale new restaurant -- is actually designed to be calm, restful, and a possible refuge from L.A.‘s traffic and noise and chronic, insoluble busyness. But without any sacrifice of chic or style, Opaline, on Beverly Boulevard, is exactly......

A bastide is a traditional walled-in country house in the South of France. Here in L.A., at what was formerly (and now unimaginably) the Manhattan Wonton Company, architect and designer Andree Putman has re-created that Cote Sud elegant rusticity in a walled patio with pebbled masonry and olive trees, and......

Photo by Anne Fishbein WAS EVER A GENERATION MORE NOSTALGIC THAN OURS FOR THE LOOK and accouterments of the not-so-distant past? Housed in an old firehouse and named for the district of Los Angeles' first movie studios, Silver Lake's new Edendale Grill is a bit of set-dressed history, a restaurant......

1. Few pastas are simpler or sexier than the ribbony, slightly chewy house-made papardelle at Alto Palato, which is tossed with slippery, mouth-filling porcini mushrooms. A little olive oil, a little sea salt, some good cheese, and there it is -- the best pasta I had all year. 2. How......