WHY For meticulously cooked tandoori specialties. WHAT It’s not until you take the first bite of flavor-packed free-range tandoori chicken that the virtues of this small, stylish restaurant emerge. Co-owner Tariq Amin, a graduate of cole Hôtelière de Lausanne in Switzerland, knows how to cook and source superior stuff—his halal birds, for instance, come from [...]
October 28, 2011 | Posted in
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WHY For evolved, lighter-than-you-expect Austro-Hungarian cuisine. WHAT At this pretty and secluded NoHo spot, everyone seems to know chef Laszlo Bossanyi, who for 20 years built a following with his Hungarian comfort food at shuttered Hortobagy in Studio City. He smokes his own lower-fat kolbsz (sausages), duck breast and salmon and makes such dishes as [...]
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WHY An unrivaled menu of Mumbai street food. WHAT Mumbai Ki Galliyon Se (literally ‘from the streets of Mumbai’) specializes in the street food of India’s largest city, a cosmopolitan menu of vegetarian curries, fritters, sandwiches and snacks. These are dishes you won’t find just anywhere: fried tapioca pearl patties, bowls of pulses and sprouted [...]
October 28, 2011 | Posted in
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WHY An LAX-adjacent taste of Burmese and Malaysian cuisines. WHAT Owner Myo Aung honed his simple, satisfying Burmese cooking at Jasmine Market, and here, he’s added a number of Malaysian specialties. It’s all halal, with standouts like the crèpe-esque murtabak loaded with ground chicken, finely spiced lamb biryani and daging lembu, a Malaysian stew of [...]
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WHY Inexpensive and excellent Gujarati food. WHAT One of Little India’s top chat shops, Jay Bharat is a standard-bearer on Pioneer Boulevard. And though you can eat well sampling the sweets and snacks, don’t ignore the precise Gujarati cooking. Everything is vegetarian—appetizers like the potato-patty slider pav vada and the pettis, a six-piece plate of [...]
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WHY For the delicious thrill of expanding your pasta connoisseurship. WHAT The house specialties, three northern Chinese noodle styles, open a window onto the earliest forms of noodle: dao xiao mian, absorbent ribbon-like noodles that are cleaver-shaved from a stiff dough roll resembling a yule log; cat’s ears, little dumpling-like blobs; and dumpling knots, spaetzle-like [...]
October 28, 2011 | Posted in
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WHY No-frills Filipino home cooking. WHAT Magic Wok prepares pork at its most glorious. Order the crispy pata, a bone-in leg of pork brined and fried until its skin is a crisp mahogany and its meat falls away simply because of gravity. Sisig, cubes of fatty, crunchy fried pork tossed with bits of ginger, scallions, [...]
October 28, 2011 | Posted in
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WHY The South Bay’s preeminent specialist in okonomiyaki, a Japanese pub dish that straddles the line between savory pancake and omelet. WHAT There’s more to Gaja’s menu than just okonomiyaki, but all the izakaya-style small plates combined can’t topple the popularity of its various permutations of the pancake-like dish. You can cook for yourself on [...]
October 28, 2011 | Posted in
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WHY For Caribbean specialties that are a cut above the usual hole-in-the-wall fare. WHAT Yes, Derrick’s offers the traditional beef patties, oxtail and a mean jerk pork. But at this stylishly decorated spot there’s more emphasis on seafood, lean chicken and fresh veggies: marinated grilled shrimp flamed with barrel-aged Jamaican rum, spice-infused grilled rainbow trout [...]
October 28, 2011 | Posted in
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WHY Because there’s nothing like it in Tarzana: an upscale but casual spot serving the kind of food we like to eat. WHAT A couple of smart restaurateurs (they own 22 places around the country) opened Bleecker Street late in 2009, in affluent but restaurant-challenged Tarzana, and it took off like a rocket. The two-story, [...]
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