99 Reasons to Love Eating in L.A.

For newcomers or even L.A. oldtimers, you could definitely do worse than simply consulting Jonathan Gold's 99 Essential L.A. Restaurants feature in last week's LA Weekly.

As a matter of fact, I'd love to see a similar feature devoted to other cities, such as New York, Chicago and San Francisco. A list that would capture the essence of eating in a city -- picking the excellent restaurants that best define the town, even if it means leaving several better restaurants off your list.

This list, I'd say, gives a pretty solid snapshot of how to eat Los Angeles circa 2006. Gold explains his rationale in the feature's lede:

It isn’t necessarily a list of the very best restaurants in Los Angeles; that would almost certainly include L’Orangerie, which has been the most rigorously French restaurant on the West Coast for decades, as well as Belvedere at the Peninsula Hotel, Noe at the Omni, and too many high-end sushi bars to count, Mori, Shibucho and Wa among them. Nor is it a roster of the most influential restaurants: Valentino, Chinois and Patina are conspicuously absent. It certainly isn’t an inventory of the most popular places to eat — we do include Casa Bianca and Pink’s, but Langer’s Delicatessen is included instead of Junior’s and Brent’s, and you will find the quirky Mexican cooking of Babita instead of the throng-pleasing cuisine of El Coyote, Marix or Mexico City.

An essential restaurant is a restaurant that reflects Los Angeles in a startling and unusual way, that uses fresh local ingredients in a fashion that respects the land in which they were grown, that showcases cooking echoing both foreign-trained chefs’ region of origin and the hypercharged mosaic of the Los Angeles dining scene. An essential restaurant moves people, inspires them to think about food in a new way, inspires them to think about Southern California as a great agricultural region, a great port, a builder of the shiny symbolism that is a large factor in how the rest of the world thinks of itself. And it’s also a damned good place to eat.

Damn straight. It was nice to see a whole slew of Franklin Avenue faves -- some that we've already reviewed in Rate-A-Restaurant, and some that we've eaten at -- but for one reason or another we haven't had a chance to include on the blog just yet.

But here's a sampling of restaurants from Gold's list that we have featured on this here site:

A.O.C.

Beacon: An Asian Cafe

Campanile

Casa Bianca

Chameau

Citizen Smith

Ciudad

Cobras & Matadors

Ford's Filling Station

Langer's

Philippe's

Pink's

Susina


Like I said, not a bad list. Next time you're hungry, but looking to try some place you've never been, you oughta look at Gold's list o' 99 first.