(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
21 romantic spots to reserve from the 101 Best Restaurants guide
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In Los Angeles, romance ensues over the pluming smoke of a tabletop Korean barbecue grill, around an enormous platter of Lebanese mezze, sharing a perfectly lacquered Peking duck or splitting roast chicken surrounded by the week’s vegetables from the markets. The scope of our cuisines and communities leaves plenty of room for love’s many dimensions.
These 21 restaurants are assembled from the recently published edition of The Times’ 101 Best Restaurant in L.A. written by columnist Jenn Harris and me. They convey “celebration” and “togetherness” in various expressions, among them an intimate pizzeria, an Arts District newcomer that redefines the bistro for Los Angeles and a swank Panamanian seafood-focused restaurant in Venice.
Usually this is where I add the time-worn food writers’ plea to consider a night in February to express your devotion other than Valentine’s Day, which is usually an overbooked occasion with crushingly high expectations. But you know what? Given the start to 2025 that restaurants have already faced in the crisis of the Eaton and Palisades fires, I say go for any reservation you can snag, on Feb. 14 or otherwise. – Bill Addison
Showing Places
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Bar Amá
Downtown L.A. Tex-Mex $$
Josef Centeno named his 12-year-old downtown Tex-Mex bastion in honor of his great-grandmother Gabina Cervantes Martinez. She made her family Tejano dishes alive with fresh vegetables from the farmers market or her garden — an ethos that resonates through the decades in Centeno’s adaptive, borderless Los Angeles kitchen. Peaches are sauteed with hazelnuts and goat cheese in the summer; coconut butter and pomegranate molasses gloss sweet potatoes come wintertime. His mom’s weekday staple recipe, green chicken enchiladas blasted with tomatillo salsa and bubbling with cheddar and Monterey Jack cheeses, has become one of the city’s enduring comfort foods. They soothe even more alongside guacamole, queso (including a gold-standard vegan version) and a limey margarita. The genius of Bar Amá, and Centeno, is the sureness behind his culinary unpredictability. An inspired lobster ravioli in green mole with the unorthodox nip of tarragon might appear on the menu, as will bäcos, his longtime signature flatbreads, perhaps folded around fried shrimp or twangy chicken escabeche with Thai-chile aioli. His whimsies, backed by commanding skills, keep us guessing and returning.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Bar Chelou
Pasadena French $$
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. In his hands a pile of sinewy lamb ribs, for example, arrives dotted with buckwheat groats and tiny edible flowers, taking the form of a curious (and also delicious) floral arrangement. But mostly I’d just say the man excels at flavor combinations. Dill and bottarga blast awake the flavors in a brothy bowl of shelling beans. Shredded carrots anchor a salad pooled in coconut-ginger dressing with lime leaf and scattered Thai basil … but then Rankin piles on a maniacal hill of potato sticks. A signature rainbow trout entree is presented sauced in twinned nouvelle cuisine squiggles of garlic-chive oil and pil pil (traditionally made by blending salt cod, garlic and olive oil) and served over rice pilaf caramelized in corn juice to achieve a ragged sort of crispness. Housed in the same 99-year-old Spanish Colonial Revival complex as the Pasadena Playhouse, the restaurant inhabits its name with a central oval bar and a louche, dimly lit vibe to the open dining room. Cocktails laced with absinthe or yellow Chartreuse feel wholly appropriate.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Bavel
Downtown L.A. Middle Eastern $$$
| 2019 | #11
| 2020
When you go to Langer’s, you order pastrami. Howlin’ Ray’s? The fried chicken sandwich. Ignoring a specific dish at a certain restaurant can be blasphemous. Here is the dilemma with Bavel, Genevieve Gergis and Ori Menashe’s Levant-spanning Arts District restaurant. To experience it best, you need as large a group as you can manage. I wouldn’t dream of starting a meal without swiping a hot puffy pita through silky hummus blasted with spicy duck paste. The natural next course is a plate of oyster mushroom kebabs tart with lemon and sumac. The malawach bread, with its abundant flaky layers and side of strawberry zhoug, is non-negotiable. I crave the breaded and fried quail painted with chile oil more than I do some of this town’s best fried chicken. I still see stars when I take that first bite of lamb neck shawarma. Whatever seasonal fruit Gergis has turned into a tart, cobbler or ice cream is the one to order. When Bavel opened nearly seven years ago, it was the restaurant name on everyone’s lips. It’s still a tough weekend reservation and just as raucous at 5 p.m. as it is at 10:30 p.m. And in case you’re still wondering, it’s pronounced “buh-vell.”
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Birdie G’s
Santa Monica American $$$
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. His matzo ball soup, heavy on the dill, is better than my grandmother’s. Why not smear nduja onto fried matzo? The hot, porky funk of the salami paste is the perfect match for the humble cracker, now deep brown and extra savory after a dip in the fryer. The hoshigaki you see hanging along the pass and over the main dining room is massaged by hand every other day to soften the persimmon pulp and bring the natural sugars to the surface as the fruit dries. Sweet, candy-like slices of the persimmons that were hung in 2022 are splayed over a yam casserole that tastes like the holidays. Fox’s cooking is playful and wildly creative, capable of delivering comfort and nostalgia in ways you’ve likely never imagined. At the end of a recent dinner, while we finished off the last remnants of Cookies and Cream ice cream fashioned from trimmings of the restaurant’s chocolate cake, a friend turned to me, half dazed, and asked what kind of food we just had. All I could answer was “joy.”
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Bistro Na's
Temple City Chinese $$$
Your meal at Bistro Na’s is meant to be regal, or as close to regal as one can come in a Temple City strip mall. This is food fit for an emperor, with a menu bound like an ancient text and dishes inspired by Chinese imperial kitchens. There are platters of pork feet jelly, golden soup teeming with the jewels of the sea. Shrimp are fried and lacquered with a sticky glaze made from sweet hawthorn and dried chiles. The Peking duck requires a table reservation and preordering one week in advance. Making the duck is a three-day process that involves marinating, scalding the skin and hanging and drying the bird multiple times before it’s roasted. The finished duck is presented whole to the table, impossibly plump with shiny skin the color of warm honey. Each crisp square of skin seems to shatter, then melt on the tongue. There are gossamer chun bing for wraps and a third course of soup or deep-fried bones. I prefer the soup, a calming respite between bites of lavish skin, shrimp and the rest of your royal feast.
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(Ron De Angelis/For The Times)
Camelia
Downtown L.A. French Japanese $$$
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 that gave them room for creative growth. They reenvisioned a lofty space in downtown’s Arts District, once occupied by long-running Church & State, into a Midcentury Modern vision of an enveloping bistro: globe lighting that casts a butterscotch glow on the grainy wood paneling and handsome brick floors. The menu splices French and Japanese cuisines, a choice that reflects their hospitality backgrounds and their inspiration derived from Tokyo’s thriving French restaurant culture. In the kitchen, Namba and his team take the synergy dish by dish. A composition such as scallops over dashi-lime cream with maitake and king trumpet mushrooms, chestnut-date puree and Tokyo negi threads the two cuisines with surgical dexterity. To sharpen the soft flavors of beef cheeks simmered in red wine, wasabi cleverly replaces the more traditionally Gallic horseradish. A tall, hefty dry-aged cheeseburger with fries? No twists necessary, it’s simply a fantastic burger. Kaplan, one of L.A.’s most gifted beverage pros, has the chance to flex her knowledge of wine as well as sake. The notes on her list detailing current obsessions (say, a consideration of ancient vines versus ancient strains of rice) are always absorbing; I could read a book full of them. Open since July, and honing its strengths month by month, Camélia has emerged as one of the most exciting new restaurants in Los Angeles.
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(Ron De Angelis/For The Times)
Crossroads
Beverly Grove New American $$$
An enduring mystery of dining in Los Angeles: Why, with the state’s agricultural blessings, doesn’t the city have more vegan restaurants that focus on vegetables? Crossroads Kitchen certainly serves plenty of pasta dishes and Italian-leaning entrees that rely on meat substitutes. But crucially, chef-owner Tal Ronnen and his team also luxuriate in the seasons, arranging artful plates by which you can mark the calendar. Fried artichokes over saffron and lemon sabayon in the spring segue to summertime salads of tomatoes and stone fruit carved into half-moons and parsnips chiseled into bronze pegs with roasted grapes for fall. The restaurant has the in on next-level plant-based cheese, including Climax blue cheese, with just the right hit of funk, scattered over a riff on carpaccio made with pears. Crossroads now has locations in Calabasas and Las Vegas, but I’m forever loyal to the cozy, clubby Melrose Avenue original that’s long been an entertainment industry hangout.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Danbi
Koreatown Korean $$
John Kim, Patrick Liu, Alex Park and Yohan Park made a wise decision this year when they shut down their “Korean tapas” concept Tokki, housed in one of the corner spaces in Koreatown’s restaurant-filled Chapman Plaza complex, and reconceived it as Danbi. Under the direction of chef Lareine Ko, the menu ditches a misguided globalization of Korean flavors in favor of a streamlined collection of dishes that totter more thrillingly between tradition and innovation. Her version of haemul pajeon showcases tiny fried scallops that crackle against the pancake’s crunch. She pairs pine nut-scattered beef tartare with bone marrow for textural commentary (hot and cold, softly chewy and basically molten) and, for warming balm, fans the thinnest, milkiest slices of pork over rice in rich broth. Ko has a fantastic pastry counterpart in Isabell Manibusan, who has a talent for reimagining Korean staples in a California dessert context. She capped the end of summer with a corn flan (think cheese corn transformed into sweet custard) and riffed on the idea of a popular ice cream bar called Melona in an icy honeydew semifreddo. It’s been a year when locally and nationally we’ve seen an acceleration around notions of modern Korean cuisine. Danbi has joined the conversation with plenty to contribute.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Dunsmoor
Glassell Park American $$$
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. At his Glassell Park restaurant, the dining room’s faded brick, ambered lighting and central burning hearth (from which most of the dishes emerge) take me back to my years as a critic covering Atlanta. His menu moves with the calendar in rhythm to California, but the flavors register as patently Southern. Smoked pork is as much a part of Dunsmoor’s seasoning repertoire as salt or acid: Wood-fire warmth permeates his ham hock terrine tanged with pear and apple chutney, a salad of chicories wilted in hot bacon vinaigrette and a mushroom-crusted pork chop finished with smoked lard and thyme. He also knows when subtlety is the better choice, as in a spring dish of Carolina gold rice suffused with shrimp butter and Parmesan that sings of earthy sweetness. His famous chile-cheddar cornbread, baked in cast-iron skillets and literally dripping in butter, rightly namechecks Edna Lewis; everyone should know her contributions as one of the 20th century’s defining Black chefs and cookbook authors.
Another sensation the kitchen team pulls from the hearth: an 8-ounce burger made from dry-aged beef with a thick veneer of Comté and a crown of onion jam or thick-sliced tomato (depending on the season). The restaurant makes 20 burgers a night and serves them only in the bar next door. Its hedonism is itself worth a trip to the bar, though I have also started with a burger before a full meal next door and finished the evening without room for grape buckle cake but also with no regrets.
Another sensation the kitchen team pulls from the hearth: an 8-ounce burger made from dry-aged beef with a thick veneer of Comté and a crown of onion jam or thick-sliced tomato (depending on the season). The restaurant makes 20 burgers a night and serves them only in the bar next door. Its hedonism is itself worth a trip to the bar, though I have also started with a burger before a full meal next door and finished the evening without room for grape buckle cake but also with no regrets.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Here's Looking at You
Koreatown New American $$
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.m., during which the kitchen cranks out thick, dry-aged cheeseburgers embellished with peppery mayo and the sweet sting of fried onions. Settling in, we learned of a second, recently added option — steak frites featuring a sirloin cap (also known as a baseball cut) smeared with pink fermented radish butter alongside curly fries. Both were stellar. Bar director Danny Rubenstein had dreamed up a wild cocktail based on corn whiskey and avocado-washed mezcal that he named Jolene, which I trust is in honor of Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter.”
HLAY meets us where we are: in need of a mood shift, out for a casual celebration, up for some ambitious cooking with hip-hop as the background. Owner Lien Ta ensures that the tone of the dining room, with its abstractly Midcentury Modern vibe, stays welcoming and convivial. Founding chef Jonathan Whitener took all the cuisines that live in our heads as food-loving Angelenos and managed to graft them onto one concise menu. Frog’s legs splattered with salsa negra. A crazy, unerring chopped broccoli salad that includes pickled ginger and all sorts of seeds and nuts to mix together. Tomatoes sprinkled with frizzled lap xuong and splashed with bagna cauda. Whitener died unexpectedly and heartbreakingly in February. But when the room is full, and diners are swiping signature shishitos through creamy tonnato just as the burgers start rolling out, the restaurant feels like it will always be part of our lives. Which I hope it will be.
HLAY meets us where we are: in need of a mood shift, out for a casual celebration, up for some ambitious cooking with hip-hop as the background. Owner Lien Ta ensures that the tone of the dining room, with its abstractly Midcentury Modern vibe, stays welcoming and convivial. Founding chef Jonathan Whitener took all the cuisines that live in our heads as food-loving Angelenos and managed to graft them onto one concise menu. Frog’s legs splattered with salsa negra. A crazy, unerring chopped broccoli salad that includes pickled ginger and all sorts of seeds and nuts to mix together. Tomatoes sprinkled with frizzled lap xuong and splashed with bagna cauda. Whitener died unexpectedly and heartbreakingly in February. But when the room is full, and diners are swiping signature shishitos through creamy tonnato just as the burgers start rolling out, the restaurant feels like it will always be part of our lives. Which I hope it will be.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Kismet
Los Feliz Californian Mediterranean $$
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. As with everything Kismet, the lineup revolves with the findings of its market coordinator, Anna Polacek; a recent spread included a few soft dates; kale tahini paired with pomegranate molasses, ideal for dipping Bub & Grandma’s barbari bread; herbed cucumbers over labneh; two halves of an egg with the requisite jammy yolk; feta and walnuts drizzled with honey; and cherry tomatoes with creamy beans, which I alternated in bites with plump green olives. If there is breakfast in the sweet hereafter, I hope it looks and tastes like this. If you’re sharing a meal, maybe throw in an order of homey challah French toast doused in blueberry-studded maple syrup. Dinner maintains Hymanson and Kramer’s elegant aesthetic for matching herbs and seasonings from the Levantine canon with California produce — and a couple of higher-food-chain staples like lemony chicken and pine nut hand pies. The pair released their cookbook this year, as colorful and as uplifting as their cooking. I’m grateful to know I can replicate the Persian-style crispy rice and their “stewy cranberry beans + greens” at home, but mostly I’ll keep relying on the experts at the restaurant.
Through February this year, Hymanson and Kramer have transformed their menu into a steakhouse homage full of classics: shrimp cocktail, wedge salad, an excellent 20-ounce ribeye for sharing and a mighty bistro burger with fries. They’ll never abandon vegetables, of course: a center-cut “cabbage steak” delivers its own righteous heft.
Through February this year, Hymanson and Kramer have transformed their menu into a steakhouse homage full of classics: shrimp cocktail, wedge salad, an excellent 20-ounce ribeye for sharing and a mighty bistro burger with fries. They’ll never abandon vegetables, of course: a center-cut “cabbage steak” delivers its own righteous heft.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Ladyhawk
West Hollywood Mediterranean $$
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. Give the black-lacquered tray a spin, turntable-style, to reach hummus in two variations; baba ghanouj jeweled with pomegranate seeds; muhammara, ruddy with roasted red pepper and walnuts; labneh, its creaminess offset with minced makdous (pickled eggplant); falafel, dark as rich soil on the outside, spring green with herbs on the inside; and cubes of fried potatoes radiating garlicky heat. The feast, which includes hot-from-the-oven Arabic bread and costs $130, presumably is designed for groups to kick off their meal, but I’ve seen couples split it as dinner, with plenty of leftovers for the next day’s lunch. It’s a viable strategy, to which I might only add a clever roast chicken entree. Whipped toum (garlic sauce) and tiny pickles flank the bird. They’re classic flavors in a Lebanese chicken shawarma, deconstructed here for universal appeal — an implied directive in a hotel restaurant — while still shouting out Hayek’s home country.
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(Innis Casey Photograph)
Mr. T
Hollywood Restaurant and lounge
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 the Paris bistro with the same name, has carved a niche for itself in the middle of the buzzy Sycamore District. At the bottom of the glass tower that houses Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, smartly dressed patrons flood the patio during breakfast and lunch. An impressive case boasts François Daubinet’s pastries. You can taste the butter in his croissants, and they shatter on contact. A few of the Paris restaurant’s dishes make appearances for dinner, like the mac and cheese with mimolette flambé set aflame at the table, but chef Alisa Vannah, who previously cooked at République, has made the restaurant her own. Vannah’s cooking is a quiet luxury, demure but powerful in its intention and flavors. Mackerel and yellowtail are dressed in a tomato water seasoned like dashi, with bonito, white soy and a shiver of yuzu. Lumpia are plump with chicken and shrimp. Treat Daubinet’s desserts as mandatory caps to the evening. His custard is nearly deliquescent, flooded with the sharp tang of passion fruit. Chocolate mousse is rich and fleeting, impossibly smooth before it vanishes on the tongue.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Origin
Koreatown Korean Barbecue $$
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. At Origin Korean BBQ, the cuts sizzling on every grill are the garlic-seasoned prime short rib and shaved pork belly. The short rib is moderately marbled and tender, fragrant with garlic and the smoke from the grill. The pork curls up as soon as it hits the heat, the thinness ensuring that each piece has just the right amount of fat with crispy edges. Each of the barbecue sets comes with a vat of brisket soybean paste stew crowded with bricks of tofu and ramen noodles. It’s reason enough to visit. Origin is part of the On6thAvenue group, which also runs Quarters BBQ across the Chapman Plaza. Perhaps it’s the newness of Origin that fills the dining room with a certain energy, attracting parties of mostly 20-somethings unbothered by the plumes of smoke from the tabletop grills and the decibel level. With soju and Terra beer flowing, there’s a celebration at every table.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Pasjoli
Santa Monica French
| 2020
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. Beran makes a show of breaking down a duck and stuffing the carcass into a medieval-looking contraption that compresses the cartilage, bone and tissue into a pink goo that’s then transformed into a luxurious gravy. The chef is charismatic and fluid in his movements while he chats up a captivated audience, some of whom have actually ordered the duck and some who have not. Pasjoli, like many restaurants around town, is finding a groove that feels right for its particular place in time. Beran recently switched the dining room’s a la carte menu to two prix fixe options, one centering around the duck and another that reads like a greatest-hits list for the five-year-old French bistro. Longtime favorites such as the foie brioche can still be ordered for the table. The new format straddles the line between destination dining and the kind of neighborhood restaurant everybody wants to have down the street. There’s a $65, three-course menu for diners who can make it in before 6 p.m. And at the bar, you can order thick burgers dripping with marrow aioli and what I strongly believe is the best grilled cheese sandwich in the known universe.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Petit Trois Le Valley
Sherman Oaks French $$$
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. I relish the pools of hot garlic butter that seethe under knots of escargot and dunk my torn pieces of baguette until they’re saturated and my fingers are shiny. Mounds of blush chicken liver mousse dwarf thick slices of toast shellacked with butter. A stark white sauce au vin jaune cascades over cylinders of leeks, a true celebration of the sharp, pungent wine. Lighter but just as lavish is the crab cake supreme, plump and drowning in sweet and salty nuoc mam. Lunch at the counter always seems to stretch lazily into the afternoon, my attention alternating between my own plate and the chefs working a mere few feet in front of me, arranging double cheeseburgers in pools of Bordelaise. I stare in awe at two swanky businessmen on the patio, who ordered a burger each for their serious lunch meeting. In about an hour, they’ll likely be slumped over their office desks, happy but too full to really function. You can have the burger, the crab cakes and whatever else your heart desires at Petit Trois’ more spacious Sherman Oaks location too, but I prefer the original, where my elbows brush against my neighbor’s at the counter and I can pretend I’m in a cramped, impossibly chic Paris bistro in the 6th arrondissement.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Pizzeria Sei
Pico-Robertson Pizza $$
The first time I had Japanese-style Neapolitan pizza was at a tiny pizzeria in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. The pizza seemed suspended in a pillow of crust, leopard-spotted like something you might find in Naples but puffier and reminiscent of fresh mochi. What William Joo is making at his Pico-Robertson pizzeria is a nod to what you’ll find in both Japan and Italy, but with a style all his own. While the most traditional Neapolitan pies are wet in the middle, Joo’s pinched, puffy crusts careen into centers that are damp but don’t collapse under the toppings. The Margherita Special showcases ultra-milky buffalo mozzarella and tomatoes left chunky for nice globs of acid. Another frequent special is the Mala Lamb Sausage, a smoky, savory pizza tricked out with Pecorino and smoked provola, crumbles of cumin-spiked lamb sausage and cilantro flowers. The mala spice powder scattered over the crust will leave your lips tingling. Seats at Joo’s monthly pizza omakase dinners sell out in a flash, so if eight to 10 courses of pizza sounds like your idea of a good time, follow the business on Instagram to learn when new dates will be announced.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Post & Beam
Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw Californian Southern $$
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. It’s been this way since Brad Johnson opened the restaurant in 2011, then handed the keys over to John and Roni Cleveland in 2019. The food celebrates the flavors and spirit of Southern cooking, where black-eyed peas share real estate on the table with catfish rubbed with jerk spice over a mound of dirty rice. The shrimp and grits, a dish most emblematic of Lowcountry cuisine, is long-cooked into something luxurious. The coarsely ground corn transforms into a smooth, creamy porridge studded with tiny squares of sweet red peppers. The way I feel about the braised oxtail grilled cheese borders on obsession. Brunch here is cheery. Parties merge and mingle over bottomless mimosas and plates of pecan pie French toast. It’s worth noting that the best seats in the house are at the bar, opposite the pizza oven, where you can watch trays of biscuits rise and turn a pale golden. These are the biscuits against which I judge all others, with flaky layers you can peel away and a tender crumb. With two to an order, you can eat one for brunch and one on the drive home.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Rustic Canyon
Santa Monica New American $$$
Like the ebb and flow of California harvests to which its menu so closely hews, Rustic Canyon has had its own seasons of change. Last summer Zarah Khan, then executive chef, made the most intricately spiced and cloudlike dal I’ve tasted in a restaurant. When she departed soon after, chef-owner Jeremy Fox (who also runs Birdie G’s across Santa Monica as part of Josh Loeb and Zoe Nathan’s Rustic Canyon Family restaurant group) stepped in, redirecting the menu toward a careful swirl of Italian, Japanese, Mexican and French flavors. Chef de cuisine Elijah DeLeon now builds on Fox’s aesthetic with his own vision. A late September meal mirrored the week’s weather: bay scallops surrounded by barely liquid tomatoes and bits of fried bread, a salad built around pears and dates, softly curried roast chicken with plums, an herbed pork chop covered in slices of poached quince. Was it summer or fall? The world isn’t always easily definable, but one thing came through clearly: Rustic Canyon is having another grand moment.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Si! Mon
Venice Panamanian $$
Last year Panamanian chef José Olmedo Carles Rojas partnered with Louie and Netty Ryan (whose projects include Hatchet Hall and Menotti’s Coffee) on a restaurant in the space that formerly housed Venice LGBTQ+ icon James Beach. As Si! Mon settled into its first year, the cooking has come into focus: This is a rare-for-L.A. feat of reimagined Central American flavors in a finer-dining setting. Carles Rojas and executive chef Christian Truong frame seafood strikingly. Surf clams wade in ceviche sunlit by culantro leche de tigre. Coconut milk and charred scallion oil add creamy-spicy contrasts to beautifully pleated shrimp dumplings. Miso butter and dried shrimp salt amplify the flavors of grilled branzino without overpowering the fish; be generous with the side of smooth salsa made from mild green cachucha chiles. Cocktails dip into the expected realms of rum and passion fruit. This martini drinker is very happy that the version on the menu labeled “very MF cold” delivers on its promise. Whether you sit on the semi-enclosed patio or the more cloistered dining room, look around at the clusters of lush plants and the ceiling pattern based on Panamanian Indigenous prints. They suggest the country’s tropical climate without ever devolving into kitsch.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Stir Crazy
Hollywood Wine Bars $$
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. Macklin Casnoff, Mackenzie Hoffman and Harley Wertheimer poured their tastes and hospitality knowhow into an enveloping 500 square feet along Melrose Avenue that for roughly 30 years housed a coffeehouse of the same name. The result: minimalist space, maximum impact. A warming renovation that serves form and function. A casual, Euro-Californian menu. An incredible wine program led by Hoffman. The kitchen team, under Caroline Leff, keeps a few perennial dishes in rotation. Among them is a celery salad with walnuts, aged Gouda and raisins that nicely pings between sweet and savory, soft and crunchy. As a main course, a link of mildly spiced German-style sausage, sourced from Mattern’s Sausage & Deli in Orange County, is presented with a mound of Japanese-style potato salad creamy from Kewpie mayo and a healthy dollop of mustard. Both dishes are forthrightly delicious, and the kind of untaxing combinations I could eat once a week, alongside a glass of Austrian Zweigelt that pitches cherry right down the middle. That’s precisely the aim.
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