14 Restaurants That'll Make You Fall In Love With LA Again

LA can be a tough place to call home. There’s the isolating urban sprawl, brutal housing costs, weather patterns that skip from wildfires to atmospheric rivers, and, of course, the final boss of them all, traffic. So the next time you find yourself romanticizing a different life someplace where finding parking doesn't require the ruthlessness of a Mad Max character, head to one of the restaurants on this list. They’re part of what makes LA so magically weird, wild, and wonderful—and they couldn’t exist anywhere else.

THE SPOTS

Mariscos El Faro

Life in Los Angeles is fast-paced, even when you’re going 15 mph on the 110. That’s why we need places like Mariscos El Faro to remind us to slow down and enjoy a leisurely lunch. This Highland Park food truck parks on a quiet street beside a park flanked by shady trees. A friendly mother-and-son duo set up a few plastic tables and stools, so you can sit down with a salt-cured sea bass tostada that tingles your lips with chiltepín, oysters doused with Valentina, and a crisp michelada that tastes twenty times better under the sun. And once you finish the mound of shrimp you ordered, maybe take a nap on the grass.

Jones Hollywood

It’s 7pm, you just slid into a bar seat at Jones, and a gin martini and an order of fried calamari are on their way out. If there’s a more beautiful sentence in the English language, we don’t know it. This dark, sexy Italian spot has held court in West Hollywood for three decades and remains what we refer to as an ace restaurant: A place you can take anyone for any occasion and have a great time. Nights here aren’t necessarily about red sauce pasta and other nostalgic dishes—though their skillet apple pie is the stuff of legend—it’s about basking in a place that exudes the essence of what makes Hollywood cool in the first place.

Philippe The Original

How can you not be romantic about Phillipe’s? In a city known for bulldozing its history, this century-old lunch counter in Chinatown still has sawdust on the floor and a front counter where you can buy Necco wafers and a newspaper. But age isn’t the only reason that Philippe The Original—the inventor of the French Dip by legend—is an institution. Ordering the beef dip with swiss, ideally “double-dipped,” ideally with enough hot mustard to sting your nostrils, and ideally before or after a Dodger game, is a rite of passage for any Angeleno. Bonus points if you bulk out your cafeteria tray with pickled eggs and/or beets, a scoop of potato salad, chili with beans, a baked apple, and a 75-cent glass of lemonade.

Chaaste Family Market

Flipping through photos online doesn't do this strip mall spot in Pasadena justice. You might gather it's a half-market, half-Filipino restaurant with a turo turo counter in the back. But you haven’t experienced the beauty of Chaaste until you've sat down with a plate of homestyle cooking prepared by the cheery, close-knit family that runs this place. It also doesn't hurt that their adobo is so tender the chicken melts from the bone like halo-halo on a hot day. Mostly though, they specialize in stunning desserts like crispy hand-rolled turon and creamy ube flan (both are mandatory orders). For the full effect, enjoy a spread in the small seating area next to a mural of Manny Pacquiao.

The Old Place

LA’s concrete expanse is well-documented. But sometimes we all need a reminder that we’re surrounded by beaches, mountains , Dr. Seuss-esque deserts , and vineyard-filled valleys . Look no further than The Old Place for a change of scenery. Nestled in the Santa Monica Mountains, this saloon-ish steakhouse occupies a dusty former general store that’s been standing since the early 1900s. There’s usually a guy playing banjo in the corner, a retired ceramics teacher handing out friendship bracelets, and a parade of old-timey comfort foods from the kitchen: thick chicken pot pies, fruit cobblers baked in cast-iron, and oak-grilled ribeyes the size of your head.

El Mercadito Salvadoreño

They say you should never go grocery shopping while hungry, but in the case of El Mercadito Salvadoreño, we’ll make an exception. This Salvadoran street market takes up two blocks along Vermont Avenue in Koreatown and is home to dozens of food vendors selling Central American specialties like blood clam cocteles, sour green mangoes dusted with achiote powder, and fried yucca with chicharron. Pupuseria Jazmin’s #2, one of our favorite vendors, sets up a long banquet table where you can order cheese and loroco-stuffed pupusas and drink instant coffee as traffic zooms by. Time doesn’t exist when you’re snacking your way through this tented maze, so come with zero rush and a few friends who are in the mood to feast.

Ercole's 1101

We all know LA is expensive, but sometimes it feels like just standing around and existing costs money. Occasionally though, we’re reminded that while the best things in life might not free, they're at least cheap. Which is why we adore Ercole’s, an under-the-radar dive bar that serves an incredible $12 charbroiled burger (made with fresh ground beef from the butcher shop next door) and even cheaper beers on draft, all less than a block away from the sands of Manhattan Beach. We’ve spent less just parking at the beach. Those attributes alone make Ercole’s worthy of landmark status, and that’s before you realize they’ve been doing it daily since 1927. Which is a lot of burgers.

Torigoya

Hidden on the second level of the Weller Court shopping center in Little Tokyo, Torigoya isn’t LA's only yakitori specialist, but it is the one that feels most like stepping through a portal to Tokyo. Through a light haze of poultry-scented smoke you’ll find chefs with bandanas tied on their heads hovering over the charcoal grill like DJs on turntables, dates clinking mugs of matcha-flavored beer at the wooden bar, and waitresses schooling first-timers of the differences between “special heart” and “special special heart.” The best meals at Torigoya involve eating more chicken parts than you knew existed, drinking good sake, then finishing with a bowl of oyakodon that will put you in a blissful stupor for the rest of the night.

Los Cinco Puntos

Great tacos are to LA what samples are to Costco. Without them, we wouldn’t feel at home. And few places make us feel more at home than Los Cinco Puntos in Boyle Heights. Step inside and you'll see rainbow-colored piñatas hanging from the ceiling as lunch crowds stroll around this multi-generational deli meets corner market. Unless you're here ordering dried chiles or Powerball tickets, head to the counter and load up. Their famed carnitas are impressive, but it’s the crackling chicharrón taco on a housemade corn tortilla with nopales salad and guac that always steals our heart.

Sushi Sasabune

On a pretty anonymous part of Wilshire on the Brentwood-Santa Monica border, Sasabune stands still in time, with a small sushi bar, a handful of tables, and what we like to think of as a quintessentially LA omakase. It starts with sashimi, ends with a crab hand roll, and includes a whole lot of nigiri in between. If that all sounds familiar, know that Sasabune does the Sugarfish thing better than anyone (even Sugarfish).  There are higher-quality sushi spots around LA, to be clear, but that’s not the point of this particular genre of low-key sushi joint: you can walk in pretty much whenever, eat a bunch of excellent raw fish, and feel instantly revived. Your Sasabune might not even be Sasabune. But the fact that we all have one is what makes Los Angeles so damn special.

Baja Subs Market & Deli

You’re cruising the Deep Valley. You pop into a strip mall convenience store for a bag of chips and an iced tea, then end up staying for an hour eating spicy banana leaf-wrapped rice, garlicky stir-fried noodles, and other dishes cooked by the couple who run the place. That’s the scene at Baja Subs, a Sri Lankan restaurant inside a sub shop inside a corner store in Northridge. It’s the kind of place where you hope you’re the only customer because that means more one-on-one time with the sweet owners who’ll pull up a chair and pry out your life story. Lines here are blurred in the best way. Is it a restaurant? A store where you can grab string hoppers and a lotto ticket on your way out? Why not both.

Yu Chun

Everyone deals with LA’s long hot summers differently. Aside from sticking your face directly in front of a window unit, it’s hard to imagine any of them are as satisfying as an icy bowl of naengmyeon at Yu Chun. The lunch crowd at this Koreatown noodle spot usually involves a few groups of chatty aunties stirring hot mustard into their handmade arrowroot noodles and Balenciaga bros slurping the semi-frozen, vinegary broth straight from the bowl. Once the weather cools down, Yu Chun’s gochujang-slathered bibimbap served in a sizzling hot stone pot is the star of the show, complemented by trips to the self-serve bone broth station in the dining room.

Poncho’s Tlayudas

LA is the land of great meals in unexpected places: bowling alleys , repurposed garages, grocery stores . But what makes eating at Poncho’s Tlayudas special is that it’s as much a backyard cookout as a restaurant. This Oaxacan spot operates every Friday evening in front of an Indigenous community support house near USC, and there’s one thing on the menu: giant meat-stuffed tlayudas so good we’ve planned our whole week around them. Just follow the banda playing from Poncho’s speakers and the chorizo smoke drifting off the charcoal grill. The crisp tortilla relaxes on the grill until it’s foldable and chewy, the grilled tasajo is perfectly salty, the moronga (blood sausage) has a nice snap, and the taste of rendered pork fat, seasoned black beans, and melted Oaxaca cheese comes through in every bite. If your visit ends with a shot of mezcal, consider it a success.

Alice’s Kitchen

Just when we think we’ve experienced all the treasures of the San Gabriel Valley, a restaurant appears that makes us giddier than a toddler with a bubble machine. That’s how we felt the first time we visited Alice’s Kitchen, a larger-than-life Hong Kong cafe in Monterey Park that opened in 2019. This bright and busy diner is a full-on Hong Kong theme park, complete with an imported taxi cab outside, action movie posters on the walls, and a big family-filled patio designed to look like a street market. The food is fantastic—get the potent milk tea, pork chop pineapple bun sandwich, and the condensed milk-oozing Ovaltine french toast—but mostly we love what Alice’s represents: a lovingly oddball tribute to another part of the world that makes perfect sense here.