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101 answers to a delicious, impossible question
WELCOME TO THE 10th annual L.A. Times guide that attempts to answer a delicious, impossible question: What are the 101 restaurants that best embody excellence and convey the essence of our food culture?

101 Hall of Fame
IN OUR REGION’S sweeping pluralism, there are restaurants so enmeshed in the culture of Los Angeles — so defining of what it means to eat and live in Southern California — that they surpass the notion of annual lists.

1 Hayato
I CONSIDER THE REASONS against naming Brandon Hayato Go’s tiny tasting-menu restaurant No. 1 on this list. The cost is $350 per person, without taking into account the deep, persuasive list of sakes and Champagnes.

2 Anajak Thai
IN 2019, JUSTIN PICHETRUNGSI made the life-changing decision to leave a successful career as an art director at Walt Disney Imagineering and take over the Sherman Oaks restaurant his parents founded in 1981.

3 Kato
THE AMBITIONS OF Jon Yao, his skeleton crew and their tasting menu built around the flavors of Taiwan never quite fit in the restaurant’s tiny, curiously angled West L.A. space.

4 République
WHAT MAKES République an unassailable cornerstone of Los Angeles dining? Margarita and Walter Manzke are equally exceptional talents who gave themselves the format — a bakery plus a restaurant serving three meals daily in a spectacularly baroque Hancock Park building — to succeed at what each of them does best.

5 n/naka
AT A LATE-SUMMER dinner at n/naka, the first plate to arrive — in custom with the ritualized, multicourse form of kaiseki — was sakizuke, a course composed of elements meant to reference the immediate past and future seasons.

6 Taco María
BEEF TARTARE tostada, the first of five courses one recent evening on Carlos Salgado’s mercurial tasting menu, rumbled with tastes and textures. Smoky chile morita saturated the chopped dry-aged meat and charred avocado cooled the palate.

7 Moo’s Craft Barbecue
“TEXAS STYLE BARBECUE,” read the window signs by the entrance to Andrew and Michelle Muñoz’s Lincoln Heights restaurant. Those three words only tell the beginning of the story.

8 Morihiro
MOST OF THE top-flight sushi bars in Los Angeles follow a school of omakase involving ornate small dishes that precede the parade of nigiri.

9 Bavel
AT THE TOP OF my wish list for Los Angeles restaurants: more chefs articulating the spice-fragrant, sun-soaked flavors of North Africa and western Asia (a.k.a. the Middle East, a term many friends and peers from the area increasingly reject).

10 Providence
PROVIDENCE IS A local and national benchmark of whitetablecloth extravagance, rightly famed for Michael Cimarusti’s luxury coddling of seafood.

11 Sonoratown
WHENEVER I BITE into one of Sonoratown’s tortillas, my brain flickers on like the downtown skyline at dusk. I flash on the near-impossible thinness of an expert dumpling wrapper and the elusive mastery of pie crusts that are at once flaky and buttery.

12 Pasjoli
OUR SERVER at Pasjoli drops off a plate holding a whole tomato. It has been blanched and peeled, as if readied for a canning project. I cut the fruit in two, revealing its surprise viscera of tuna tartare.

14 Osteria Mozza
I SHOWED UP early on a Thursday evening to attempt my first dinner at Osteria Mozza, less than a year after the restaurant opened in mid-2007.

13 Holbox
GILBERTO CETINA has earned kudos for his mariscos stand near the entrance of Mercado La Paloma in Historic South-Central, but I’m not sure that praise has been heard broadly or frequently enough.

15 Orsa & Winston
ON THE five-course tasting menu at his tiny, 9-year-old downtown den of creativity, Josef Centeno will always serve the restaurant’s North Star dish: rice porridge, the short grains nearly as translucent as tapioca pearls,...

16 Here’s Looking at You
LIEN TA and Jonathan Whitener’s Koreatown restaurant, Here’s Looking at You, could have vanished forever as one of the pandemic’s countless casualties.

18 Sushi Kaneyoshi
THE ELEVATOR descends toward the basement of Little Tokyo’s Kajima Building. The doors open onto a waiting area.

17 Pizzeria Bianco
PIZZERIA Bianco’s arrival in Los Angeles, the first location outside Arizona, has been long in coming. Its first months in downtown’s Row DTLA complex coincided with a pizza-themed season of Netflix’s “Chef’s Table” series, which includes a moving episode about Chris Bianco.

20 Mélisse
LATE IN 2019, a few months before the shutdowns, Josiah Citrin debuted a new two-in-one direction for his Santa Monica bastion of French-ish, American-ish haute cuisine: The main dining room became Citrin, serving a la carte crudos; pastas like his signature lobster Bolognese; and Wagyu sirloins.

19 Heritage Barbecue
As with many savants of the new generation, Castillo looked to Central Texas to master technique; he perfumes meats over California white oak in four 1,000-gallon pits.

21 Tsubaki
CHARLES NAMBA and Courtney Kaplan’s Echo Park gem exists at the intersection of Japanese pub, neighborhood restaurant and tiny atelier — the kind of place where the owners present their latest fixations on the plate and in the cup, so that you too become rapt.

22 Cassia
THERE IS NO other cuisine in the Los Angeles area, or arguably anywhere, like Bryant Ng’s. He culls his Chinese-Singaporean heritage, wife and business partner Kim Luu-Ng’s Vietnamese background, his Parisian culinary training and his work at places like Pizzeria Mozza.

24 Poncho’s Tlayudas
WHEN Alfonso “Poncho” Martinez’s Friday night pop-up in South L.A. returned in March after two long years, so too did one of the city’s defining dishes.

23 Pearl River Deli
ANY CHANCE you tried Johnny Lee’s stir-fried pork jowl chow mein, or his lemonscented fried chicken, or the silky crab omelet over onion-laced fried rice with crab gravy?

25 Saffy’s
OF THE TWO hummus plates on Saffy’s menu, one is an advanced course in subtle contrasts: chickpeas blitzed to weightlessness; a dollop of lemony, long-simmered fava beans; and a pool of good olive oil to unite them.

26 Chi Spacca
IT’S BEEN A DECADE since Nancy Silverton’s “Italian meat restaurant” emerged from the catering and cooking-class space at the corner of Melrose and Highland avenues, though Chi Spacca still feels like the unruly younger sibling to the adjacent Osteria Mozza and Pizzeria Mozza.

27 Ammatolí
WITH A SOARING, plant-filled extension to her dining room and a remodel of her open kitchen, Dima Habibeh’s Long Beach restaurant feels all the more like a hub of community.

29 Bridgetown Roti
IN 2020, RASHIDA Holmes moved from cooking at restaurants like Botanica and Rustic Canyon to running a pop-up selling roti and other dishes of her Bajan heritage.

28 Felix Trattoria
EVAN FUNKE HAS necessarily funneled his attention into Mother Wolf, his new Roman restaurant in Hollywood, and his hands are deep into planning future projects. Felix, though? Paradoxically or not, it’s better than ever.

30 Knife Pleat
CHEF TONY ESNAULT and front-of-house whiz Yassmin Sarmadi, who are married, left Los Angeles a few years ago to take up residence in the haute couture Penthouse wing of Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza.

32 Meals by Genet
LAST YEAR Genet Agonafer announced her semi-retirement — she’d prepare meals to-go from her Little Ethiopia stalwart Thursday through Sunday, and open her once-bustling dining room only for private events.

31 Soban
KOREATOWN: annex of Seoul (where a generation of Oaxacans and Salvadorans have also made a home); city within a city; civic treasure.

33 Bicyclette
BEFORE WALTER MANZKE opened République with his pastry chef extraordinaire wife, Margarita, he sealed his reputation for French-California cooking with cassoulets, bouillabaisse and fried pig’s ear during his run at Church & State, and with tenures at Bastide and Patina before that.

34 A.O.C.
IN THE ARC of A.O.C.’s two-decade evolution, from cramped wine bar to modern institution with beautiful locations in West Hollywood and Brentwood, Suzanne Goin essentially codified an entire branch of L.A.’s dining culture.

35 Damian
DAMIAN BEGAN as Mexico City-based chef Enrique Olvera’s grandly announced entrance to the L.A. market but has settled into a restaurant that feels intentionally engaged with the city, with progressively delicious results.

36 Shin Sushi
THE SAN FERNANDO Valley claims its share of top-tier sushi counters: I’d direct you to Brothers Sushi in Woodland Hills, Go’s Mart in Canoga Park or, for a glass of grand cru Chablis alongside your aji and hirame, Sushi Note in Sherman Oaks.

37 Causita
RICARDO ZARATE’S expression of Nikkei cuisine, the style of Peruvian cooking created over the last century by Japanese immigrants, lights up the palate with citrus and bright-tasting herbs.

39 Alta Adams
AT THE 4-year-old West Adams community beacon, chef and co-owner Keith Corbin continues to perfect the style of light-handed cooking he calls “California soul.”

38 Found Oyster
“THERE’S NO WAIT at 4 p.m.,” the Found Oyster team has lately taken to posting on Instagram with glamour shots of its namesake bivalves.

40 Birdie G’s
MATZO BALL soup, pecan kugel, Caesar salad dotted with fried oysters, an avant-garde jellied berry pie: On his ever-evolving menu of comfort foods, Jeremy Fox traces his zigzagging roots through Eastern Europe, the South, the Midwest and California.

41 Antico Nuovo
GIVEN HOW TIME has distorted lately, it feels remarkable that Chad Colby’s solo venture — his first after a star-making turn as chef of Nancy Silverton’s meat-immersive restaurant Chi Spacca — has been open three years already.

43 Mariscos Jalisco
IT’S MORE THAN 20 years now that Raul Ortega has been parking his white lonchera at a curb along Olympic Boulevard in Boyle Heights, serving fish ceviches, octopus cocteles and the crowning dish he credits to his hometown of San Juan de los Lagos: tacos dorados de camarón.

42 Henry’s Cuisine
AN EXCHANGE WITH David R. Chan, the Los Angeles native who has eaten at almost 8,000 Chinese restaurants across the United States, led me recently to the Alhambra restaurant run by Henry Tu and Henry Chau.

44 Quarter Sheets Pizza
QUARTER SHEETS began as a pandemic pop-up from the home that Aaron Lindell and Hannah Ziskin, both accomplished chefs, share in Glendale.

46 Petit Trois
• 718 N. Highland Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 468-8916, petittrois.com/home; 13705 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, (818) 989-2600, valley.petittrois.com

45 Kismet
SOME PARTICULARS around Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson’s nearly 6-year-old restaurant can be debated. Is the rabbit for two, spread over a garden bed of perfect lettuces, overpriced at $92? I’d argue yes.

48 Kuya Lord
CARVING INTO a spiral slice of “lucenachon” — Lord Maynard Llera’s nickname for his version of Filipino-style roast pork belly, its skin crackling and its rolled center stuffed with lemongrass stalks, red onion and fennel fronds — is a full-circle moment at Kuya Lord.

47 All Day Baby
ONE OF THE MOST effective tools that Lien Ta and Jonathan Whitener employ in their arsenal of talents is an element of surprise.

49 Yangban Society
KATIANNA AND JOHN John Hong met working at Mélisse in Santa Monica. After years in the fine-dining realm, the couple opened their first restaurant with a retuned philosophy; they’ve mined their personal narratives as a reclamation of their Korean American identities.

50 Grand Central Market
THERE IS NO RUSH of sensation quite like entering the halls of downtown Los Angeles’ 105-year-old landmark, long a juncture of what the city has been, what it is becoming and what we’re hungry for right now.

51 Smorgasburg
SMORGASBURG L.A. is the city’s great incubator of culinary talent. We convene on Sundays in Row DTLA’s back lot to plug in, to mingle, to eat our faces off.

52 Bestia
BESTIA TURNED 10 this year. In the decade since Ori Menashe took California-Italian cooking by the scruff and clobbered it with fermented chiles, smoked anchovies and frizzled breadcrumbs, Los Angeles and the world have changed profoundly.

54 Pijja Palace
HAVE YOU recently driven by the Silver Lake strip mall where the legendary Happy Foot Sad Foot sign spun for 30-plus years? During dinner hours, crowds swarm the parking lot for one of the year’s breakout sensations — a sports bar that serves Indian American dishes.

53 Konbi
AKIRA AKUTO AND Nick Montgomery hatched their tiny Echo Park business out of its takeout chrysalis this year, and it took off in two new directions.

10 places to drink right now
THIS IS NOT the hot chocolate you might be used to — the kind where you pour heavily sweetened powdered cocoa mix into a mug of watery milk and stir.

55 Rocio’s Mexican Kitchen
“LA DIOSA de los moles,” “mole queen,” “mother of moles”: Each of the nicknames that Rocío Camacho has earned over the years honors her command of laborious, symphonic moles.

57 Pizzeria Sei
THROUGH A plexiglass window, from a seat at the counter in a tiny Pico-Robertson dining room, watch how William Joo crimps the edges on his neo-Neapolitan pizzas.

56 n/soto
“ACCESSIBLE” can be an overused and twisty word in food writing, but in its most basic definition it aptly describes the new Mid-City restaurant from Niki Nakayama and her wife, Carole Iida-Nakayama.

58 Villa’s Tacos
WHEN I’M LIFTING one of Victor Villa’s queso tacos out of a takeout container, I have an inkling of how an alien god might feel plucking a landmass right out of the ocean.

59 Sichuan Impression
RESTAURANTS IN the San Gabriel Valley are far from monolithic, but Sichuan cuisine has plainly dominated the region’s culinary narrative in the last decade.

60 Post & Beam
AT THE CROWN-JEWEL restaurant of Baldwin Hills Crenshaw shopping plaza, John and Roni Cleveland serve cheering dishes inflected with the flavors of the American South: shrimp and grits with shrimp butter and beef bacon, jerk catfish over dirty rice, a scarf-it-down grilled cheese rich with braised oxtail meat and smoked mozzarella.

62 Courage Bagels
I UNDERSTAND that I might be ruining this hack as I type, but I have found the line is shortest at Courage Bagels around 9:15 a.m. on weekdays.

61 Mini Kabob
CHEF ALVARD MARTIROSYAN, her husband, Ovakim, and their gifted, social-mediasavvy son Armen have been achieving near perfection with skewered meats for 27 years.

63 Mother Wolf
FOR MOTHER Wolf, Evan Funke went Hollywood in every sense. His loud, posh, 200-seat spectacle in a 1930s-era Art Deco building rages nightly with a Negroni clutching who’s-who crowd. Funke, an L.A.

64 Pine & Crane
IN JUNE, Vivian Ku opened her second location of Pine & Crane, in downtown L.A. It’s larger and sleeker than the beloved Silver Lake flagship, with a calming indooroutdoor design adjacent to a small park. Most important, the new outpost serves breakfast.

66 Rossoblu
STEVE SAMSON’S restaurant in downtown’s City Market South complex, now in its sixth year, has been slowly moving away from its original premise as a reclamation of his childhood spent in foodobsessed Bologna.

65 Jitlada
FEW MODERN restaurant legends have endured like the story behind Jitlada: Chef Suthiporn “Tui” Sungkamee, who died in 2017, and his sister Sarintip “Jazz” Singsanong took over the long-running restaurant and introduced a then-untranslated back page full of radically spicy Southern Thai specialties.

68 Northern Thai Food Club
THE STRATEGY at “Nancy” Amphai Dunne’s 12-seat restaurant in Thai Town has always been to interact with her over the steam table, surveying the dishes inspired by the cooking of Chiang Rai, Thailand’s northernmost province.

67 Gish Bac
AMONG DOZENS of restaurants that serve absorbing surveys of Oaxaca’s regional specialties, I am continually drawn back to Maria Ramos and David Padilla’s restaurant in Arlington Heights.

69 Lalibela
IN LITTLE ETHIOPIA I seek out the dulet (raw minced beef liver, tripe and other cuts in spiced butter) at Messob; a vegetarian platter followed by a cup of strong,...

70 Selva
CARLOS JURADO — a veteran chef of Los Angeles restaurants, including stints at Vespertine and Border Grill — had drifted toward consulting and recipe development before partnering with restaurateurs Geoff and Karna Rau.

71 Flavors From Afar
CO-FOUNDER Christian Davis describes the mission of Flavors From Afar this way: “We highlight cooks and chefs who are refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants making cuisines from around the world.

72 Angry Egret Dinette
WES AVILA never stays still. When he’s not overseeing the menu at Yucatánthemed Ka’teen at the Tommie Hollywood hotel, he’s devising the day’s out-of-leftfield specials at Angry Egret Dinette, his project in Chinatown’s Mandarin Plaza.

73 Sun Nong Dan
IT’S GOOD TO remember now and then that Sun Nong Dan’s initial focus was seolleongtang (the restaurant spells it “sulung tang” on the menu), a silvery-milky beef broth known as a curative and designed to be seasoned to taste at the table.

74 Ngu Binh
ORANGE COUNTY’S Little Saigon — bestriding Westminster and Garden Grove, and encompassing the U.S.’ largest Vietnamese population — could and should have its own 101 best restaurants list.

75 Dulan’s Soul Food Kitchen
WHEN THE LINE at Dulan’s has inched along enough that I can gaze at the entire topography of the restaurant’s steam table — with its mountains of baked and fried chicken, bogs of greens and foothills of mashed potatoes and black-eyed peas — I’m looking first for the oxtails piled like boulders.

77 Connie and Ted’s
THE swooping front patio canopy constructed during the pandemic’s darkest months has been disassembled, and customers have returned inside Connie and Ted’s curvy, Atomic Age building — an ode to the Googie coffee shops of midcentury Los Angeles — that is now a West Hollywood icon in its own right.

76 Bar Amá
I IMAGINE Josef Centeno wearing a gardener’s expression of patient concentration while dreaming up vegetable dishes in his downtown kitchen. He flashes on saffron honey drizzled over squash-blossom fritters as a color-coordinated garnish.

78 Tokyo Fried Chicken Co.
KOUJI YAMANASHI spent several years polishing the recipe for the phenomenal fried chicken he serves at his Monterey Park pub.

79 Woodspoon
NATALIA PEREIRA’S menu expresses the flavors from many cultures (African, Indigenous Brazilian and Portuguese among them) she knew growing up in Minas Gerais, an interior state of southeastern Brazil that, like California, experienced a gold rush that triggered mass immigration and often brutal societal shifts.

80 Majordomo
FIVE YEARS feels like a long time ago and also a blink. David Chang christened Majordomo in January 2018; it was the first California restaurant in the Momofuku empire, and it landed raucously amid a maze of Chinatown warehouses.

81 Al Baraka
IN AUGUST, Anaheim’s Little Arabia district received its official designation from the city after years of petitioning. Aref Shatarah and his wife, Magida Shatarah, quietly opened their first restaurant in the heart of the community in 2021.

83 Ipoh Kopitiam
IN THE YEAR since Kenji Tang opened his homage to the coffeehouse culture of Ipoh, his hometown in Malaysia, the eternal lines trailing out the door have yet to wane.

82 Hotville Chicken
NASHVILLE-STYLE hot chicken swept in as a craze late last decade; rather than blaze and fade, the dish has begun blending into our chile-laden landscape. For a taste of the dish’s true lineage, head to Kim Prince’s restaurant at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw mall.

84 Taste of Tehran
TO EXPERIENCE the fuller glories of the Persian table in L.A. — baghali pokhte (fava beans with mint and pistachio sauce), chicken and herb stew with three kinds of citrus, the range of egg dishes called kookoo — you’ll likely need an invitation to someone’s home.

85 Crossroads
CALAMARI, Bordelaise, Bolognese, homemade Italian sausage, vanilla ice cream: Crossroads Kitchen doesn’t bother to rechristen the plant-based foods it serves that mimic meat, dairy and eggs.

86 WangJia Restaurant
IN THE San Gabriel Valley, the cuisines of Shanghai and the surrounding Jiangnan region never quite bask in the same attention afforded to the Sichuan firebrands that have arrived over the last decade — nor the Cantonese and Taiwanese standard-bearers that preceded them.

88 La Pupusa Urban Eatery
SUNNY-SIDE-UP is the way to go for the eggs on La Mañanera, an ideal choice for late breakfast or early lunch when Stephanie Figueroa and Juan Saravia’s Pico-Union restaurant opens mid-morning.

87 Gjelina
GJELINA IS STILL the place of choice for friends visiting from the East Coast — the ones you love the most, whom you battle through LAX’s traffic nightmares to collect.

90 Mayura Indian Restaurant
MAYURA’S INDIAN menu goes on for pages; chicken vindaloo, gobi Manchurian and other restaurant ubiquities fill its columns. The key to accessing the kitchen’s greatness is to know that owner Padmini Aniyan grew up in Kerala, the coastal southwestern state of India.

89 Jerusalem Chicken
AFTER YEARS OF running the small local deli chain Orleans & York, Sami and Maria Othman founded their fast-casual Palestinian restaurant in View Park-Windsor Hills in 2021.

91 Fishing With Dynamite
MANHATTAN BEACH’S star seafood bar has always been a tough reservation. Weekend dinner slots are usually booked weeks out, unless you’re hungry at 4:45 p.m.

92 Yang’s Kitchen
CHRISTIAN YANG and Maggie Ho’s Alhambra restaurant has been a beautiful shape shifter through the pandemic. In the last year the concentration has been on breakfast and lunch — though a new dinner service just launched — and the cooking, as ever, shows little worry over labels or provenance.

93 Park’s BBQ
COME TO PARK’S with a group. A meal goes by in an exhilarating blur of fellowship and meat. Make decisions easy by asking for the “Taste of Park’s” that includes five cuts of beef.

95 Surawon Tofu House
SUN LOS LEE grew up in a restaurant family; her parents took over the Prince in Koreatown in 1991, serving pajeon and fried chicken alongside martinis and highballs while maintaining the bar’s ageless, crimsonsoaked kitsch from its days as the Windsor.

94 Elite
THE QUESTION OF which restaurant makes the most superlative dim sum in the San Gabriel Valley will never have a static answer. Making the rounds is part of the fun.

97 Eat Joy Food
THE TAIWANESE MENU at Eat Joy Food is as sprawling as the Pearl Plaza shopping center in Rowland Heights that houses the restaurant. Industry veteran Arthur Chen — who previously ran Cafe Fusion, a family-style Taiwanese restaurant in Arcadia — took over the space in October 2019.

96 Holy Basil DTLA
THERE ARE tables at last in the Santee Passage food hall where its first tenants, chef Wedchayan “Deau” Arpapornnopparat and beverage pro Tongkamal “Joy” Yuon, opened a takeout window in late 2020.

98 Madre
OF THE THREE Madre restaurants that Ivan Vasquez operates across the L.A. metro area, I will point you first to his palatial 7,000-square-foot space housed in an Old Town Torrance shopping complex.

99 Apey Kade
CHEF NIZA HASHIM and her husband, Lalith Rodrigo, are natives of Colombo, Sri Lanka’s portcity capital. The name of their Tarzana restaurant translates from the Sinhalese language as “our store.

100 Skaf’s
TO UNDERSTAND what makes the Skaf family’s cooking stand out among the region’s Lebanese restaurants, start with the kibbeh. Its raw form, kibbeh nayeh, was traditionally ground lamb pounded with fine bulgur and spices into a smooth gloss.

101 Clark Street Diner
FOR 20 YEARS the 101 Coffee Shop (known before that as the Hollywood Hills Coffee Shop) was a steady, low-key hang for actors, screenwriters and literary types, tourists and locals.

Savor all 101 restaurants
Bar Amá Bavel Bestia Bridgetown Roti Damian Grand Central Market Hayato Holy Basil DTLA Kato Orsa & Winston Pine & Crane Pizzeria Bianco Rossoblu Smorgasburg Sonoratown Woodspoon Yangban Society.