Michelle Huneven

“It‘s so French,” said a friend on first stepping into Melisse, Josiah Citrin’s ambitious, classical French restaurant in Santa Monica. Indeed, my recent meals there kept bringing to mind my first fancy French restaurant meal in France. I‘d rented a house in the south of France -- not in the......

Photo by Anne Fishbein IT'S MID-SEPTEMBER AND TEMPTING TO BELIEVE THE HEAT IS OVER. Mornings are cool; the air has a delicious snap. We dig out a sweater -- remember sweaters? Every year, we fall for this illusion. Every September, there's a day or so when it actually gets cold......

Photo by Anne Fishbein I'VE BEEN WATCHING DISH FOR FIVE MONTHS NOW, TO SEE IF IT WAS TAKING hold in a transient location where a number of restaurants (mostly boozy dinner houses) have come and gone. My accountant spent an evening at the restaurant located there some 20 years ago,......

Photo by Anne Fishbein LA BUCA IS A TINY NEW ITALIAN CAFÉ ON MELROSE, JUST EAST OF the studios. And I mean tiny. It is, as named, a box -- about as high as it is wide. The walls are crowded with poster-size movie stills from Italian comedies and dramas:......

Photo by Anne Fishbein TWO FRIENDS WERE BICKERING AT DINNER ONE NIGHT, WHILE THE rest of us were listening. The topic of debate? Which of the two new steak houses in Beverly Hills was better: Mastro's or Porterhouse Bistro. "Porterhouse is so much prettier -- spare and filled with light......

Photo by Anne Fishbein MADRE'S, JENNIFER LOPEZ'S NEW RESTAURANT IN PASADENA, IS probably not what you'd expect. Unless you're expecting a grandmother's parlor. Or, rather, a fairy godmother's parlor. Madre'sis old-fashioned and charming, pedigreed Shabby Chic. Indeed, Shabby Chic guru Rachel Ashwell herself put the place together in a record......

Koi, the lavish new restaurant on La Cienega in the former Drai space, doesn‘t miss a Japanese design motif. Bonsai. Buddhas. Bamboo. Smooth round pebbles. Wide plank floors. Fire by water. Koi. Why, for a hot spot, it’s downright Zen. On my first visit, we sit at the sushi bar......

On Hollywood Boulevard, between Hillhurst and Vermont, sits The Hillmont, the new communal dining hall--cum--steak house. It belongs to Steve Arroyo, who gave us Boxer, and more recently created the lively, fun tapas restaurant Cobras & Matadors. With this new venture, he proves once more that ”hip and charming“ is......

PICNICS ARE TINY HOLIDAYS, A WEEK IN THE country condensed into hours. Even the simplest picnic can lift us out of our daily life, plop us down under some splendid shade tree, stir our senses, and send us home renewed. But they are something of a lost art. On a......