For the third year, Eater's national restaurant critic, Bill Addison, has put out a list of 38 restaurants he considers the most vital right now. This year, the language has changed a little, from “essential” to “best” (which is a big distinction, if you ask me), but the way he's gone about it seems not to have changed much. “Both inclusion and exclusion ultimately always come down to the question of which restaurants feel most relevant right now — even if their relevance comes in the form of a certain timelessness,” Addison says in his introduction.

L.A. has three restaurants on the list, all of them new inclusions, meaning also that all three places that were on the previous list (Guerrilla Tacos, Trois Mec, Night + Market Song) have cycled off. Perhaps most interesting is Addison's inclusion of Szechuan Impression, a place that usually gets overshadowed by a different Szechuan restaurant in the San Gabriel Valley. “In seeking out Sichuan restaurants coast to coast, none have impressed me more than Lynn Liu and Kelly Xiao’s bright corner perch in a San Gabriel Valley strip mall,” Addison writes.

Petit Trois and Sqirl are the other two Los Angeles picks. Addison also named a best restaurant in America this time around: Blue Hills at Stone Barns.

You can read the entire list here.

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