These are the 101 best restaurants in Los Angeles
There is no such thing as the quintessential Los Angeles restaurant.
That’s the soul-deep beauty of dining in our city. The street stand where burnt-orange birria juice drips onto your T-shirt from your third taco defines the L.A. experience as much as the holiest omakase counter, the scrappiest natural wine bar and the latest steakhouse-style burger sensation.
Some chefs arrange lettuces among summertime peaches so otherworldly in flavor they all but cross into science fiction. That describes our glory with salads — as do the stinging lime and crisped rice of nam khao tod, and the specific tang of dried mint and pomegranate molasses in fattoush made by careful, practiced hands.
It’s the collective greatness, the sum of our exquisite differences, that makes L.A. remarkable. Perhaps such a thought can comfort in dark times.
The 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles, now in its 12th year, is an annual guide to excellence but also the annual family photo: The calendar flips and we don’t look quite the same as before.
Food columnist Jenn Harris joins me as co-author of this 2024 edition. After several cycles of tackling the 101 project solo, I’ve been traveling more to report on dining across California, so our two-person approach to surveying L.A.’s paragons made wonderful sense. We crisscrossed the region for months, checking in on stalwarts and swapping notes on potentially overlooked contenders. We agreed a lot and debated plenty (especially about pizza). We asked ourselves over and over: Which mix of restaurants tells the most compelling, complete and delicious story about Los Angeles? This is our answer.
These restaurants are so defining of what it means to eat and live in Southern California — that they’ve earned a place of honor for all time.
The lineup includes 27 new entrants. They’re bright lights, braving fresh perspectives, in a time of economic upset for the restaurant industry that has witnessed dozens of closings over the last year.
Among the newcomers: the Silver Lake cafe rewriting the Persian menu playbook with intricate stews and a giant meatball; the downtown Arts District bistro where Japanese and French flavors meet in a bowl of spaghetti or a billowing pot pie; and a stall at the Mercado La Paloma where masa made from heirloom Mexican corns receives its due as an art form.
Restaurant critic Bill Addison and columnist Jenn Harris share seven of their favorite spots to drink in Los Angeles, from cocktail and wine bars to Middle Eastern coffee.
Additionally, Jenn and I welcome five honorees to the 101’s Hall of Fame list. These are icons with names you’ll likely recognize, run by chefs who’ve fundamentally shaped L.A. dining. We also point out seven of our favorite new places for drinking — mostly wine and spirits, but including a Studio City shop serving Middle Eastern-inspired coffee brewed in sand.
If our dining culture defies easy categorization, at its finest it also embodies creative possibility and connection at the table. Our lives, it seems to me, could use these virtues more than ever.
— Bill Addison, restaurant critic
From Jonathan Gold to Bill Addison and Jenn Harris, the L.A. Times 101 Best L.A. Restaurants list is not just about splurge spots but all of the places that make Los Angeles an exciting place to live and eat.
Locol
Kang Kang Food Court
Mario's Butcher Shop
Crossroads Kitchen
Surawon Tofu House
Origin
Nok's Kitchen
Bistro Na's
Las Segovias
Tokyo Fried Chicken
Lasita
n/soto
Bhookhe
Hakata Izakaya Hero
Mr. T
Stir Crazy
Lalibela
Post & Beam
Tacos La Carreta
Sincerely Syria
El Bacano
Sobar
Hu Tieu De Nhat
Another for the short list: Hu Tieu De Nhat, a nine-table storefront in Garden Grove’s Koreatown community. The specialty is hu tieu, a noodle soup vital to Saigon’s street-food culture that distills Chinese, Vietnamese and Cambodian influences. Concentrate on the “Nam Vang” section of the menu, choosing from among three noodles: egg, rice or “glass” made from potato starch. Order them in combinations to accentuate the bouncy, squiggly contrasts. Bowls arrive arrayed with shrimp, pork belly, ground pork, fishcake and quail eggs. “Soup or dry?” the server asks. If there are two of you, try one of each. The broth, flavored with pork bones and dried shrimp, comes on the side for the dry version: You might add it a little bit at a time, along with crucial condiments like pickled garlic and a chile oil reminiscent of XO sauce. It might take a minute to tune your seasonings, but when your chopsticks finally plunge into your hu tieu, the tastes and textures are symphonic.
Camphor
Yess Restaurant
Villa's Tacos
Cassia
Found Oyster
Macheen
Borit Gogae
My 2 Cents
Bar Chelou
Pizzeria Bianco
Ladyhawk
Pine & Crane
Barsha
Damian
Poncho’s Tlayudas
Dulan's on Crenshaw
Delmy's Pupusas
Asadero Chikali
Majordomo
Danbi
Henry's Cuisine
Mae Malai Thai House of Noodles
Kuya Lord
Yang's Kitchen
Si! Mon
Mori Nozomi
Birdie G’s
Bridgetown Roti
Vespertine
In April Jordan Kahn reopened Vespertine, his polarizing modernist restaurant that employs the arts — theater, music, painting, dance, perfumery; I could even argue for literature in the description of courses — in ways that no other restaurant does in California, possibly the world. Dinner in architect Eric Owen Moss’ Culver City building, aptly named “Waffle,” costs $395 per person. If you enjoy haute cuisine as high culture, and you can swing the bill, go for the operatic experience. (Go early; the evening runs about four hours.) Service and atmosphere can feel rigid in their idiosyncrasies, but the evolution of the cooking delivers far more tangible pleasures than pre-pandemic Vespertine. Four years ago, what you were fed could come across as alien and hostile. While Kahn still pushes food to the furthest edges of abstraction, there are more moments of warmth and relatability now too. You will leave satiated, and perhaps a little confounded. I’ve come to believe that’s the point.
Dear John's
I wasn’t around in the early 1960s, when Frank Sinatra and his celebrity pals filled the dining room. But Hans and Patti R?ckenwagner and partner Josiah Citrin breathed new life into the space when they saved the building from demolition in 2019. An initial two-year lease has been extended through 2028 and I, like many customers, am happy to delay this Hollywood ending.