LA Weekly's 99 Essential Restaurants: The Metropolitan Palate 2007

Jonathan Gold
June 20, 2007
LA Weekly

If you frequent a certain kind of restaurant, it may seem that every Los Angeles meal includes dandelion greens and pork belly, a broth of Spanish chorizo, and three kinds of Oltrepo Pavese by the glass. If your tastes swing in other directions, Los Angeles cuisine may involve $16 cheeseburgers and $14 cocktails, or perhaps charcoal-grilled sweetbreads and tripe, or the soupy, spurting dumplings called xiao long bao that may or may not be flavored with a bit of freshly picked crab. Los Angeles is widely acknowledged as the birthplace of New American cuisine, the polished, grill-happy, globally inclusive style of cooking that is still the lingua franca of most of the decent restaurants in the country. But the metropolitan area also bequeathed to the world McDonald’s, gourmet meatloaf and Tacones. In Los Angeles, we are many and we are vast, and our food no more speaks in one voice than the passengers on the Pico bus.

But an essential restaurant here does speak with a Los Angeles accent, whether it is reflecting the vibrant strength of our immigrant communities, our funky soul, or the city’s place at the center of one of the great agricultural regions of the world. It is when you feel the most as if you are dining outside Mexico City, or in Seoul or at the court of Louis Quinze, when the facts on the ground have been replaced by our own vivid green-screen reality, that you know you are really in L.A. Also check out our Google Maps navigator of the restaurants.

Article: http://www.laweekly.com/eat+drink/dining/99-essential-restaurants-the-metropolitan-palate/16634/