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THE ESSENCE OF DINING IN L.A., IN 101 RESTAURANTS
There is no such thing as the quintessential Los Angeles restaurant.

TRACKING THE CLASSICS THAT MAKE L.A. DINING WHAT IT IS
We think of the Hall of Famers as restaurants so vital to the marrow of Los Angeles dining that they transcend the whims of list-making and rankings.

1 KATO
Hot pot. Stir-fried clams with basil. Newport Seafood’s famous peppery lobster. The dishes Jon Yao grew up loving in the San Gabriel Valley are the seeds from which his one-of-a-kind cuisine comes to light.

2 HAYATO
Dinner at Brandon Hayato Go’s seven-seat counter inside the Row DTLA is the most coveted reservation in Los Angeles. Slots open at the start of the month and disappear before the page can load. But if your name is plucked from the waitlist and you have the funds, the experience is unparalleled.

3 BAROO
The Times’ 2024 Restaurant of the Year centers on Kwang Uh’s lyrical modern Korean tasting menu, priced at $115 per person and reasonably paced to soothe Angelenos impatient with prix fixe dinners.

4 RÉPUBLIQUE
When the tower of starters hits the table, there’s an audible gasp. Shaved truffles cover tongues of uni balanced over soft-scrambled eggs on toast. Corn beignets are crowned with tiny dollops of jalapeño aioli, and crostini are covered in mounds of bluefin tuna with smoked heirloom tomato and caviar.

5 HOLBOX
A lunchtime line can stretch out the door of the Mercado La Paloma in Historic South-Central. What are all these people queued up for? They’re here to order at the counter of the stylishly angled marisquería where Gilberto Cetina approaches citrus-blasted, chile-ignited seafood with singular soul and finesse.

6 MORIHIRO
There are certain culinary experiences that make me feel lucky to be an Angeleno. Sitting at the sushi bar opposite Morihiro “Mori” Onodera while he expertly marries silvery-skinned fish and rice in the palm of his hand, raising his arms like a dancer to get the right angle, is high on that list.

7 PROVIDENCE
Michael Cimarusti and Donato Poto’s paragon of sumptuous, celebratory dining reaches its 20th anniversary on June 17, 2025. In high-end restaurant years that’s about the age of a mature redwood.

8 BARBACOA RAMIREZ
Steamy, fragrant, supple-ropy lamb barbacoa, when done right, is such a painstaking art that most local practitioners sell it only on the weekends.

9 N/NAKA
The dining room at n/naka feels like a portal to another dimension, a serene, minimal space where Niki Nakayama and Carole Iida-Nakayama carefully shape every aspect of your three-hour, 13-course dinner.

10 DUNSMOOR
The question “What is American food?” has only one unambiguous answer: It’s the culinary sum of all of us. Every chef seeks their own meanings. Brian Dunsmoor, who grew up in Georgia and spent childhood summers in Colorado, has mused on his regional origins during the last dozen years of his cooking career in Los Angeles.

11 ANAJAK THAI
How do you breathe new life into a neighborhood Thai restaurant that’s been open for four decades? You have your art director son take over the kitchen and introduce dry-aged fish, carnitas and Japanese coals to the mix. Ricky Pichetrungsi opened Anajak on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks in 1981.

12 ANTICO NUOVO
Shaved Sicilian bottarga blasts umami over piped Normandy butter alongside a crisp balloon of focaccia. Tiny cubes of veal tongue join silky beef cheeks in a ragù Bolognese that entangles pappardelle in meaty depths.

13 QUARTER SHEETS
Condensing the scope of Aaron Lindell and Hannah Ziskin’s unbridled artistry to “pizza” and “cake,” respectively, was probably always reductive. It was the easiest way to define the couple’s three-year-old Echo Park restaurant, a union of their talents hatched as a pandemic pop-up.

14 MOO’S CRAFT BARBECUE
It doesn’t matter if you’ve sampled the best barbecue in central Texas, enjoy debating the techniques of pitmasters or have read every Aaron Franklin book. There’s no denying that Moo’s Craft Barbecue is excellent barbecue, with a style that’s distinctly of Los Angeles.

15 HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU
In October my best friend and I were having dinner at a clubby West Hollywood restaurant where the food was meh and the evening needed salvaging. I knew how. “Let’s head to Here’s Looking at You for a cocktail and a burger,” I said. HLAY, as the regulars call it, offers a late happy hour menu at its bar from 8:30 to 10 p.

16 TSUBAKI
Courtney Kaplan and Charles Namba’s 32-seat Echo Park gem follows the izakaya playbook: two dozen or so raw, steamed, fried and grilled dishes informed by Namba’s L.A.-native penchant for combing the farmers markets, and matched with Kaplan’s mastery of sake.

17 ORSA & WINSTON
If you were to come up with a chef who embodies the spirit of Los Angeles, whose career and cuisine have matched the ebbs and flows of the city, whose restaurants help codify what an L.A. restaurant could and should be, it’s Josef Centeno.

18 PASJOLI
There is a point during dinner at Dave Beran’s Santa Monica restaurant when the attention of the entire room shifts to a table in front of the kitchen.

19 PERILLA LA
If you could eat lunch from only one Los Angeles restaurant for the rest of your life, where would it be? My answer comes easily: Perilla LA. Jihee Kim’s banchan, so full of geometries and colors and so urgent in flavor, brings this class of Korean dishes center-stage.

20 KNIFE PLEAT
The dining room here, with its curved columns, soft light and plush purple banquettes, is an opulent cocoon in the retail maze that is South Coast Plaza. Yassmin Sarmadi and Tony Esnault’s restaurant is tucked into the Penthouse, with high-fashion neighbors that mirror its luxury.

21 AZIZAM
Iran’s cuisine historically has had distinct expressions inside and outside the home. Family settings involve dishes that can be exceptionally labor-intensive or stews so nuanced they defy professional kitchen standardization.

22 SAFFY’S
Labels settle easily onto restaurants, and it would be understandable to think of Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis’ East Hollywood blockbuster as “the fancy kebab place.

23 CHI SPACCA
In a city replete with excellent pizzerias and bakeries, Nancy Silverton’s focaccia di Recco remains one of the most impressive feats of flour, water and dairy.

24 MÉLISSE
Mélisse chef-owner Josiah Citrin once described his restaurant as “classic fine dining,” a term one might associate with a stuffy Eurocentric meal that lasts hours and can cost a month’s rent.

25 FUNKE
Evan Funke’s trilevel Beverly Hills restaurant is a temple of pasta, in very much the same vein as his Felix and Mother Wolf. But the eponymous restaurant may be the most theatrical of the three, with a sprawling open kitchen and pasta laboratorio on one level, a second dining room and a rooftop bar.

26 SONORATOWN
Jennifer Feltham and Teodoro Díaz-Rodriguez Jr. shifted their phenomenal Sonoran-style taquerias into expansion mode over the last year. Crowds never let up at the tiny eight-year-old original in downtown.

27 AL BARAKA
Aref Shatarah wheels out a cart full of dishes that his wife, Magida Shatarah, just prepared. Among them is kufta with tahini. Are those a few straggling fries sticking out of the appealingly murky sauce? Yes, and when I slide in a spoon, I lift out richly seasoned ground beef that’s been baked in the bottom of the pan.

28 RUSTIC CANYON
Like the ebb and flow of California harvests to which its menu so closely hews, Rustic Canyon has had its own seasons of change. Last summer Zarah Khan, then executive chef, made the most intricately spiced and cloudlike dal I’ve tasted in a restaurant.

29 KISMET
Pre-2020, daytime dining was a cornerstone of Sarah Hymanson and Sara Kramer’s nearly 8-year-old Los Feliz restaurant. This fall, the pair returned to the light with Saturday and Sunday brunch and their signature platter of small dishes to start the day.

30 OSTERIA MOZZA
In spring my partner booked a reservation at Nancy Silverton’s Melrose Avenue flagship to celebrate a colleague’s 20th birthday. I watched this singer take her first-ever bite of the restaurant’s legendary raviolo, her fork cutting the pasta so the yolk in the center ran onto the plate, bleeding into a slick of browned butter.

31 SUSHI INABA
Yasuhiro Hirano’s iwashi maki resembles a pane of stained glass, a small round neatly divided into sections of silvery sardine with a shiso-wrapped square of green chives and yellow ginger in the center.

32 SUSHI KANEYOSHI
Park in the structure adjacent to the1960sera Kajima building in Little Tokyo. A security guard will wave you toward an elevator that opens into a basement waiting room.

34 PIZZERIA SEI
The first time I had Japanese-style Neapolitan pizza was at a tiny pizzeria in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. The pizza seemed suspended in a pillow of crust, leopard-spotted like something you might find in Naples but puffier and reminiscent of fresh mochi.

33 HOLY BASIL
Since 2020, food obsessives have been converging at the window in downtown’s Santee Passage food hall from which Wedchayan “Deau” Arpapornnopparat serves visceral, full-throttle interpretations of Bangkok street food. His pad see ew huffs with smokiness from the wok.

35 YANGBAN
When Katianna and John Hong opened their Arts District restaurant, it had the restless spirit of a wild child, ever-evolving and experiential. It was partly due to the nature of the couple’s cooking, drawing heavily from their Korean American backgrounds while weaving in the Jewish influences of both their childhoods.

36 AMMATOLÍ
The calming, sun-drenched corner restaurant in downtown Long Beach, run by chef Dima Habibeh and her family, continues to grow in dimensions and ambitions. In her cooking, Habibeh — born to a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother and raised in Jordan — poignantly evinces her origins.

37 BAR AMÁ
Josef Centeno named his 12-year-old downtown Tex-Mex bastion in honor of his great-grandmother Gabina Cervantes Martinez. She made her family Tejano dishes alive with fresh vegetables from the farmers market or her garden — an ethos that resonates through the decades in Centeno’s adaptive, borderless Los Angeles kitchen.

38 KOMAL
The tortillas at Fátima Juárez’s new restaurant and molino in the Mercado La Paloma are a revelation. Delicate but supple, they taste of the sun and soil, earthy and bursting with the sweetness of summer corn.

SIPS, TIPPLES AND CAFFEINE
From Boulevardiers in downtown L.A. to ice-cold martinis in Hollywood and rare ryes at a beloved bar brought back to life, there has never been a better time to go out for a drink in Los Angeles.

39 BAVEL
When you go to Langer’s, you order pastrami. Howlin’ Ray’s? The fried chicken sandwich. Ignoring a specific dish at a certain restaurant can be blasphemous. Here is the dilemma with Bavel, Genevieve Gergis and Ori Menashe’s Levant-spanning Arts District restaurant.

40 FAT + FLOUR
The scent of butter and sugar grips you as soon as you walk into Nicole Rucker’s Culver City cafe. In the pastry case are slices of pie with chunks of sunset-colored peaches spilling from the middle, wedges of custard pie with burnished meringue tops and mountains of cookies, brownies and cheddar and chive scones.

41 SUSHI KISEN
Kisen, tucked into the corner of a crowded Arcadia strip mall, feels like two restaurants in one. The main dining area is a raucous room where you can order grilled chicken and plates of vegetable tempura for the kids who can’t seem to stay in their seats and cucumber rolls for your sister who doesn’t eat raw fish.

42 MINI KABOB
I don’t know that I’ve had a juicier piece of chicken kebab, a more succulent beef cutlet or a more precisely seasoned lule than what I’ve eaten out of the takeout containers at Mini Kabob. What the Martirosyan family is preparing out of their itty-bitty storefront in Glendale should be classified as meat magic.

44 DOLAN’S UYGHUR CUISINE
Among the constellation of cuisines that light up the San Gabriel Valley, Bugra Arkin’s restaurants illuminate a culture specific to the autonomous Xinjiang territory in northwest China.

43 ALTA ADAMS
What makes a pancake a really good pancake? I found myself mulling that very important question during a recent brunch at Keith Corbin and Daniel Patterson’s West Adams restaurant.

45 PETIT TROIS
The concepts of time, calories and overindulgence do not exist at the Petit Trois marble counter. Ludo Lefebvre created a place of pure excess that operates uninhibited by such conventions. Mounds of blush chicken liver mousse dwarf thick slices of toast shellacked with butter.

47 TWO HOMMÉS
It’s difficult to put a finger on the cuisine at Two Hommés, Abdoulaye Balde and Marcus Yaw Johnson’s Inglewood restaurant. Though the two describe it as “an Afrocentric eatery,” the menu actually circles the globe.

46 CAMÉLIA
Having built Tsubaki, their tiny Echo Park izakaya, and next-door sake bar Ototo into community havens, Courtney Kaplan and Charles Namba wanted a third project with room for creative growth.

48 HERITAGE BARBECUE
Pitmaster Daniel Castillo and executive chef Nicholas Echaore are among the few practitioners forging a regional vernacular for barbecue in SoCal.

49 DEAR JOHN’S
I experience a sort of existential shift every time I part the heavy red curtains of Dear John’s. My eyes widen to acclimate to a darkness so deep it sucks the tension right out of my shoulders.

50 VESPERTINE
“This is the Obsidian Mirror,” croons the server, motioning to the earthen dish in front of us. Its surface shimmers black and reflective.

51 BRIDGETOWN ROTI
Free the shrimp roti from its wrapper and you notice the bundle has been cut in half. Its colors and patterns mesmerize: The flaky folds of paratha seem to barely contain spice-crusted shrimp, a saucy aloo (potato) sofrito, bright green herb-chile sauce and purple veins of turmeric-tinged cabbage slaw.

52 BIRDIE G’S
Jeremy Fox’s Santa Monica restaurant never ceases to surprise me. His Hungarian-inspired dumplings are pillowy balls of ricotta cheese tossed in a bright Sungold tomato sauce with fresh basil, lots of Parmesan and a sprinkle of fennel pollen.

53 MORI NOZOMI
Mori Nozomi easily rates as the most exciting sushi arrival of 2024. Chef-owner Nozomi Mori grew up near Osaka. She began her career in luxury retail before moving to L.A. in 2017. She landed a job making sushi and knew she’d found her calling.

55 YANG’S KITCHEN
Chris Yang’s Alhambra restaurant somehow bridges the divide between what my 89-year-old grandmother considers “good enough to wait for a table” and my graduate school friends’ proclivities for orange wines and kid-friendly brunch food.

54 SI! MON
Last year Panamanian chef José Olmedo Carles Rojas partnered with Louie and Netty Ryan (Hatchet Hall, Menotti’s Coffee) on a restaurant in the space that housed LGBTQ+ icon James Beach.

57 MAE MALAI THAI HOUSE OF NOODLES
Malai Data began serving her superlative version of boat noodles — a recipe gleaned from her mother-in-law, who’s made the dish professionally in Bangkok for decades — from a stand in front of Silom Supermarket in Thai Town in late 2022.

56 KUYA LORD
Behold the behemoth “Kuya Tray,” the fastest and most comprehensive introduction to the cooking at Lord Maynard Llera’s 28-seat Melrose Hill restaurant.

59 DANBI
John Kim, Patrick Liu, Alex Park and Yohan Park wisely decided this year to shut down their “Korean tapas” concept Tokki, in Koreatown’s Chapman Plaza complex, and reconceive it as Danbi.

58 HENRY’S CUISINE
Dinner at Henry’s is a chaotic, bustling affair, where families rotate lazy Susans crammed with sticky honey-and-garlic pork chops, tiger prawns over glass noodles and mountains of fried rice flecked with bits of salty fish.

60 MAJORDOMO
Majordomo is a no-skip-record of a restaurant. You could blindly point to a spot on the menu and know that whatever arrives will be something you’ll still be thinking about on the drive home.

61 ASADERO CHIKALI
Earlier this year, I described the carne deshebrada with refried beans from the East Los Angeles Asadero Chikali stand for our guide to the 101 Best Tacos in the city. It was the taco I was handed when I asked the taquero to surprise me with his go-to order.

62 DELMY’S PUPUSAS
Ruth Sandoval started Delmy’s Pupusas in 2007, named for her mother, who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s during the Salvadoran civil war. She serves variations on El Salvador’s national dish, popping up weekly at farmers markets including Silver Lake, Atwater Village, Echo Park, Torrance and Hollywood.

63 DULAN’S ON CRENSHAW
Greg Dulan remembers his father, Adolf, teaching him to make fried chicken with a brown paper bag and a cast-iron skillet. The method creates a golden, rugged landscape of well-seasoned crunch and meat that drips when you take a bite.

65 DAMIAN
An oval huarache piled with fried artichokes and spread with potato puree. Glossy costillas enmoladas served with pickles and wraps inspired by Korean bo ssam. Salmon tostadas spread with Sungold tomato sauce and smoky, glassy chicatana ants (a luxury ingredient in Oaxaca and other regions of Mexico).

64 PONCHO’S TLAYUDAS
It is Friday night, time to head to South L.A. for the weekly pop-up serving one of our city’s defining dishes. Among billows of mesquite, under a tent in a shrubbery-filled yard, Alfonso “Poncho” Martínez will be grilling and folding tlayudas in the style he grew up loving in Oaxaca’s Central Valley.

66 BARSHA
I had my first brik a decade ago, at a long-shuttered restaurant in downtown L.A. appropriately named the Briks, a melting pot of Middle Eastern and Spanish influences with a focus on the phyllo-wrapped pastry ubiquitous across Tunisia.

67 PINE & CRANE
Vivian Ku’s three Taiwanese restaurants — the original Pine & Crane in Silver Lake, its second location in downtown L.A. and her slightly more casual spinoff Joy in Highland Park — can be, and usually are, mobbed at any given time of day.

68 LADYHAWK
The mezze platter at Charbel Hayek’s debut restaurant at the Kimpton La Peer Hotel in West Hollywood is the swiftest, most celebratory introduction to the restaurant’s elegant Lebanese cooking.

69 PIZZERIA BIANCO
The most compelling plate of vegetables in L.A. may be the antipasto platter at Chris Bianco’s pizzeria. He has a hands-off approach to our local produce: “You just need to not screw it up.

70 BAR CHELOU
Chelou is a French word that various translation apps interpret as “weird,” “strange,” “unexpected” or “dodgy.” You get the idea. One might occasionally apply such an adjective to Douglas Rankin’s modernist plates.

71 MY 2 CENTS
When I think of the dishes integral to this city’s taco identity, Alisa Reynolds’ oxtail tacos at her California soul restaurant are some of the first that come to mind. The velvety strands of oxtail are braised for six hours until the meat is slack, succulent and nearly spreadable.

72 BORIT GOGAE
“Set menu with barley rice,” reads the modest description for the centerpiece meal at this two-year-old Koreatown breakout hit. For $30 per person, the staff delivers a near-overwhelming deluge of dishes to the table.

74 FOUND OYSTER
Seafood-centric restaurants with raw bars aren’t quite the anomaly they once were in Los Angeles, but a meal at Ari Kolender’s petite Found Oyster remains unparalleled.

73 MACHEEN
Breakfast burrito culture in Los Angeles is as limitless as tacos. Do you want yours bursting at the seams and crusted with cheese? With equal parts pastrami and eggs? There are thousands of places to indulge your particular craving for egg and cheese in a tortilla.

75 CASSIA
I’ve happily followed the breadcrumbs of Bryant Ng’s career, from his pizzas at Pizzeria Mozza to his now-shuttered Spice Table, where he served fried soft-shell crabs with salted egg and smoldering beef rendang.

76 VILLA’S TACOS
No two queso tacos look exactly alike emerging from the griddles at Villa’s Tacos. Sometimes the blue corn tortillas fuse with cheese to form the jagged rhombus shapes of continents. Or the cheese runs like thinned crêpe batter that seizes into lacy edges.

77 YESS
The dining room at Yess is a remarkably serene space, pure pale wood and smooth concrete, with the scents and sounds of a five-star spa. Junya Yamasaki’s cooking is equally subtle but purposeful, his interpretation of Japanese food ambitiously leaning into the plurality of Southern California with sustainable seafood in mind.

78 CAMPHOR
When is a bistro also not a bistro? When chef Max Boonthanakit turns soupe à l’oignon inside out, setting down toast covered with gently broiled Comté, Gruyère and caramelized onion mousse in a moat of duck broth.

80 SOBAR
At Sobar, Masato Midorikawa’s Culver City restaurant, your bamboo sieve of noodles comes with a set of instructions. First, taste the noodles bare. Next, sprinkle some yuzu salt onto one bite. Then try matcha salt on another.

79 HU TIEU DE NHAT
Orange County’s Little Saigon, home to one of the U.S.’ largest Vietnamese populations, has enough culinary density for its own edition of 101 Best Restaurants.

81 EL BACANO
Siblings Deany Santana and Jonathan Santana worked together years ago in their family-run Dominican restaurant in Anchorage; in summer 2023 they reunited to serve their mother’s and grandmother’s recipes from a 16-seat storefront in a North Hollywood strip mall.

82 SINCERELY SYRIA
Adham Kamal, raised in As-Suwayda (sometimes also spelled Sweida) in southwestern Syria, brings to Los Angeles the surprisingly delicate, deep-down-marinated shawarma he learned to make as a teenager.

84 POST & BEAM
I think of Post & Beam as one of the beating hearts of the city, a sort of central hub where the biscuits and the shrimp and grits possess a gravitational pull that directs people straight to the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw mall.

83 TACOS LA CARRETA
Late in 2020, José Manuel Morales Bernal began serving tacos from a food truck on the northern fringes of Long Beach. They mirrored the style his father had learned growing up in a town called El Verde in Mexico’s Sinaloa state.

85 LALIBELA
Tenagne Belachew’s quiet haven is one of the places I most consistently bring out-of-towners for lunch. We build our meal around the 11-dish “veggie utopia,” uplifting in its chromatics of salads, simmered vegetables and thick lentil purees spiced to profound, molecular levels.

86 STIR CRAZY
The conception of a successful small restaurant — the physical and psychological dimensions, how the experience makes diners feel contained and secure rather than cramped and claustrophobic — is a specific art.

87 MR. T
Angelenos are fickle creatures. Restaurants from around the world have attempted moves here, only to find that we’re unfazed by their popularity elsewhere. Mr. T, the two-year-old location of that Paris bistro, has carved a niche in the buzzy Sycamore District.

88 HAKATA IZAKAYA HERO
Along a stretch of Westwood rich in Persian restaurants and groceries, it can be easy to miss the black-painted façade of Hiroki Chiya’s five-year-old izakaya. Open the door to find its tiny room brimming nightly with a multigenerational crowd.

90 N/SOTO
While securing reservations at Niki Nakayama and Carole Iida-Nakayama’s kaiseki showcase n/naka remains one of the toughest feats in the known universe, their Mid-City izakaya led by head chef Yoji Tajima slips far more quietly under the radar.

89 BHOOKHE
The nearly 100-item menu at Bhookhe, as with many other Indian restaurants along Pioneer Boulevard in Artesia, veers through some of the subcontinent’s most popular categories: pan-regional snacks; curries, including a smattering of North Indian classics like palak paneer; and Indian Chinese favorites such as tangy-sweet gobi Manchurian.

91 LASITA
The Filipino restaurant and natural wine bar run by Chase Valencia, wife Steff Barros Valencia and chef Nico de Leon remains centered on two dishes. Inasal, a chicken specialty of the western Visayan Islands in the central Philippines, soaks up a pungent cocktail of lemongrass, ginger, garlic and calamansi juice before being grilled.

92 TOKYO FRIED CHICKEN
For years, Tokyo Fried Chicken was a tiny operation in a strip mall in Monterey Park. One had to arrive an hour early to get on the waitlist.

93 LAS SEGOVIAS
Brick-sized Nicaraguan tamales, known as nacatamal, are superior to just about every other steamed leaf- or husk-wrapped tamale. I’m confident that you’ll reach the same conclusion at Las Segovias in Huntington Park. Green olives and raisins peek out from the masa filled with bone-in pork ribs or chops.

94 BISTRO NA’S
Your meal at Bistro Na’s is meant to be regal, or as close to regal as one can come in a Temple City strip mall. This is food fit for an emperor, with a menu bound like an ancient text and dishes inspired by Chinese imperial kitchens.

96 ORIGIN KOREAN BBQ
If you’re serious about Korean barbecue, you likely have a favorite restaurant for specific cuts of meat. Soowon Galbi is the place for 48-hour-marinated short ribs. If you’re looking for the sweet soy char of bulgolgi, head to Gwang Yang BBQ.

95 NOK’S KITCHEN
Nokmaniphone Sayavong’s Laotian-style grilled sausages are brute links of pork with a pronounced texture, intense spice and sour zing. Each bite is its own adventure. One piece may surprise with a quarter clove of garlic while another might be embedded with a whole piece of diced scallion.

98 CROSSROADS KITCHEN
An enduring mystery of dining in L.A.: Why, with the state’s agricultural blessings, doesn’t the city have more vegan restaurants that focus on vegetables? Crossroads Kitchen serves plenty of pasta dishes and Italian-leaning entrees that rely on meat substitutes.

97 SURAWON TOFU HOUSE
Some restaurants we treasure for the mercurial talents and seasonality on display; others, like Surawon, we value for their comforting constancy in a precarious world. Sun Los Lee studied traditional tofu-making in Korea and found that using black soybeans imparts to the bean curd flavors hinting of sesame and peanut.

100 KANG KANG FOOD COURT
When I wait in line to order at the Kang Kang Food Court in Alhambra, I like to chat up the people around me. Usually there’s someone who has driven from Westwood, Long Beach or maybe even Palos Verdes, willing to make the trek for a plate of Kang Kang’s sheng jian bao.

99 MARIO’S BUTCHER SHOP
The feelings I harbor for the sandwiches at Mario’s Butcher Shop in Newport Beach border on obsession. I can’t help but feel a certain way about a place that blasts Anita Baker and the Whispers and piles thick slices of smoked bologna onto a soft roll with an obscene amount of yellow mustard and white onion.

101 LOCOL
What is the purpose of a restaurant? Is it purely sustenance? Does it exist to serve the people of its neighborhood? These are questions I find myself pondering while digging into a piece of fried chicken at Keith Corbin and Daniel Patterson’s Watts restaurant.

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