A local’s guide to the best places to eat in Los Angeles

Los Angeles doesn’t have a dining scene so much as several dozen of them – layered across a sprawl of neighbourhoods, strip malls and freeway-adjacent enclaves. The city’s enormity is a feature, not a bug: it means that some of the most extraordinary food in the city is being made from a converted church in Northeast LA, a Sunset Boulevard strip mall or a family counter in Boyle Heights – often within a few kilometres of a Michelin-starred tasting menu. 
 
Price point or postcode isn’t the common thread here; it’s the city’s radical, restless diversity. Los Angeles is home to the largest Korean, Mexican, Armenian, Khmer and Salvadoran communities outside their home countries, and all of them have put their culinary stamp on the city. 
 
This means the only way to guide you around LA’s restaurant scene is personally. Read on to find my list of places that are most representative of this incredible city – places that make Los Angeles one of the greatest food cities on earth. 

1. Burritos La Palma 

The Bañuelos Lugo family opened their first taqueria in the Mexican state of Zacatecas in 1980, brought their recipes to Los Angeles shortly after, and have been feeding the city ever since from multiple locations, including my favourite at 2811 E Olympic Boulevard. Burritos La Palma’s calling card is the Zacatecan-style burrito: handmade flour tortillas, generously filled with slow-cooked birria, chicharrón, or chile verde, and served with a ladle of salsa especial that remains a family secret after almost 50 years. The late critic Jonathan Gold – the most authoritative voice LA dining has ever produced – named the birria burrito one of his five favourite burritos in the city. 

2. Langer’s Deli 

Opened in 1947 across from MacArthur Park, Langer’s Deli is the rare institution that deserves the name. The #19 – hot pastrami, Swiss cheese, coleslaw and Russian dressing on double-baked rye – is the pastrami sandwich against which all others in the city are measured, and has been since before most of its regulars were born. The room hasn’t changed much in decades, and neither has the clientele: retirees, film industry veterans and pastrami evangelists sharing booths.

3. Luv2Eat Thai Bistro 

Hidden – like so many of LA’s best restaurants – in an unremarkable Sunset Boulevard strip mall, Luv2Eat has been a Michelin Guide selection since 2019 and a James Beard Award semi-finalist. Chefs Fern and Pla are natives of Phuket, and their Southern Thai cooking reflects that heritage at every turn: the crab curry is turmeric-bright and deeply aromatic, while the moo ping (grilled pork skewers) rivals anything you’d find at a Bangkok street stall. When the menu says spicy, it means it. Order accordingly.

4. Dolan’s Uyghur Cuisine 

I think Dolan’s Uyghur Cuisine might be my favourite restaurant in America. Uyghur food – shaped by the Central Asian Silk Road, with Turkish, Persian and Chinese inflections – is almost impossible to find outside the Xinjiang region, which makes Dolan’s in Alhambra one of the most singular restaurants in Southern California. The food is a revelation: big plate chicken, hand-pulled laghman noodles heaped with stir-fried lamb and peppers, goshnaan meat pies fresh from the oven, and polo rice pilaf slow-cooked with carrot and onion. The portions are huge and everything is Halal – which means no booze. Instead, I recommend a drink at the Northern Chinese skewer and karaoke bar next door afterwards. 

5. Daisy Margarita Bar 

The team behind Los Feliz’s award-winning Mírate opened Norteño-style cantina Daisy Margarita Bar in Sherman Oaks as a love letter to the margarita – and then proceeded to dismantle and rebuild the drink entirely. Beverage director Max Reis works with obscure Mexican spirits and culinary techniques to produce versions with chamoy (a pickled fruit sauce), pasilla chiles and clarified citrus. Chef Alan Sanz’s food holds its own – especially the excellent tostadas – ensuring that even your designated driver will leave happy. Come for one drink, but brace yourself for more than you planned. Two or three chile verde margaritas at Daisy can only be described as a supernatural delight.  

6. Hermon’s 

The newest entry on this list, Hermon’s opened in late 2025 in the tiny Northeast LA neighbourhood from which it takes its name – occupying a converted church banquet hall filled with half-moon booths and a U-shaped bar. From the Last Word Hospitality group behind Found Oyster and Queen’s Raw Bar & Grill, chef David Kolender’s menu reads like the neighbourhood restaurant everyone always wants but rarely finds: steak frites, vongole-style pasta, branzino and a cheeseburger topped with soubise fondue and bordelaise onions. Their ice-cold martinis are so small that you can have four without anyone judging. Book ahead. 

7. Baroo 

Chef Kwang Uh first opened Baroo in 2015 as a tiny, almost monastic East Hollywood counter serving fermented grain bowls. When it closed in 2018, the city mourned. Its return – in a spare Arts District loft, with co-chef and co-owner Mina Park – has surpassed the original. The six-course tasting menu at US$125 (HK$980) per person is built around fermentation and the Korean Buddhist concept of baroo, the monk’s bowl, with courses conceived as a continuous cycle of birth, growth and renewal. The cooking draws on Californian produce filtered through Korean temple cuisine and European technique: precise, quietly thrilling and unlike anything else being served in the United States.