Los Angeles Tops Bon Appetit's 50 Best New Restaurants List

Many of us don't eat at “best new restaurants” too often here in Los Angeles, because normally they're pretty good but also hard to get into and pricey enough to damn us to a subsequent month of beans and rice. Instead, we eat superior beans and rice from our favorite Yucatan restaurants — and bowls of ramen, offal at Korean barbecue joints, and Thai. When we leave the home kitchen, an affordable smorgasbord awaits outside.

But here's Bon Appetit with its annual 50 Best New Restaurant Nominees List, and lo, Los Angeles is well-represented, clocking in with 10% of the total, the equal of New York — if you count Brooklyn's Aska as part of the Big Apple's share.

Hinoki-scented black cod at Hinoki & the Bird; Credit: Anne Fishbein

The lauded? (The restaurants were not ranked, but in alphabetical order.) Allumette, the Echo Park restaurant with what chef Miles Thompson calls a “choose your own adventure-style tasting menu.” Also chef Ari Taymor's downtown restaurant Alma, a destination for what LA Weekly critic Besha Rodell has dubbed “cerebral, nature-driven food.” Bring on the sunchoke soup with smoked dates and egg yolk.

Further down the list, or at least out of the A's: Bar Ama, Josef Centeno's Tex-Mex follow-up to his celebrated first restaurant Bäco Mercat. Chi SPACCA, chef Chad Colby's ode to meat that is the latest door to open into the Mozza complex on Highland and Melrose. And the fifth and final L.A. entry is David Myers's Hinoki & the Bird, the chef's tribute to Japan and cedar trees in Century City. Check out the full list here.

Now for the fun part: Try to get a table.

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