In L.A., where vegan restaurants abound, there’s been a dearth of high-end spots. Enter Tal Ronnen's 2-month-old Crossroads. “It’s an all-plant-based restaurant without being in your face,” Ronnen told The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s my idea of Mediterranean.” Fan Ginnifer Goodwin added: “There’s no reason to preface that it’s vegan — it’s just an insanely cool restaurant.”
LIST: The Hollywood Reporter's 20 Most Influential Chefs in Hollywood
Local treasure Goin, left, opened Lucques with business partner Caroline Styne in 1998. Her assured vision became the touchstone for rustic-refined Mediterranean and begat A.O.C. “I’ve had a certain idea of California dining,” says Goin, who added Brentwood’s Tavern in 2009. HBO Entertainment president Naegle's favorite dish? Polenta with mushrooms and mascarpone at A.O.C.
Wolfgang Puck’s Spago aside, Beverly Hills hasn’t been a hotbed of culinary ideas. Yet Puck’s countryman, Patina prodigy Mairinger, has put the Golden Triangle on the map again with his modern-Austrian BierBeisl, near UTA. “Puck told me he doesn’t have to go back to Austria anymore. He’s had the entire menu, from the schnitzels to the strudels,” Mairinger said with a laugh. Reiner is a fan, sometimes getting takeout for fellow legendary comic Mel Brooks.
Just as there are writer’s writers and artist’s artists, there are chef’s chefs. And Taymor — the nephew of choreographer/director Julie Taymor — is their prince of the moment, the still mostly unknown talent most frequently invoked by others on this list as the one to watch. His Alma has become a byword for ambitious, superseasonal cooking. Regulars include Alison Brie and Dave Franco.
Today, as every other new menu in town offers biscuits, it’s worth remembering that 18 months ago, Tominaga and Dunsmoor prompted the copycatting with their acclaimed Venice pop-up Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing and its cornbread-and-pimento-fueled inquiry into Cal-Southern cooking. The pair unveiled their follow-up, The Hart and the Hunter, in October, with an even more pronounced Dixie flair.
One of L.A.’s most prominent practitioners on the underground tasting-menu scene, Thornton has in just a few short years hijacked the imagination of foodies both local and nationwide. With his Wolvesmouth, a gastronomy experiment-slash-supper club that he conducts monthly in his downtown L.A. loft, the chef has distinguished himself by employing such dramatic flavor contrasts as halibut with blood orange, coffee, sunflower and beets, to name just one example.
Myers opened Hinoki & the Bird, his passion-inducing outpost mere steps from CAA, ICM and Fox, five months ago. There, he's contemporizing pan-Asian cooking, resulting in dishes like a lobster roll with Vietnamese green curry on a bun blackened by Japanese charcoal. “Right now people want unique flavors, but they want them unadorned,” he says. “They want the equivalent of a great pair of jeans and a really nice T-shirt.”
These days, nearly every Italian restaurant seems to be cooking some variation on home-style regional fare. Yet Angelini, who opened Angelini Osteria in 2001, popularized the trend by presenting a gastronomic journey through his native province of Emilia-Romagna. “I went to the memory of my mother and my mother’s mother — high-quality food, but very simple,” says Angelini, whose latest, the more grandly scaled RivaBella, opened in January.
L.A. is renowned for its sushi spots tucked away in anonymous strip malls from Santa Monica to Studio City. None is like Urasawa, the namesake chef ’s tiny, hidden, whispered-about dining den in Beverly Hills, where he administers kaiseki, extensive tasting menus that incorporate not just raw rarities — firefly squid from Toyama, Japan, or uni from Hokkaido — but other elements of traditional Japanese cooking, including shabu-shabu.
Having made his name at NYC’s Porchetta, Neroni burst onto the L.A. scene in 2011 at Osteria La Buca, gaining acclaim for his ways with pig. But when Paul Hibler, owner of Venice’s Superba, invited him to helm the restaurant in July, he changed course. “Chefs take turns in their careers, and I’ve always been interested in vegetables,” he says. “I worked at Chez Panisse."
Formal venues have been on the wane for years. But Patina, the flagship of Splichal’s 48-restaurant empire — ensconced at Walt Disney Concert Hall — is one of the few temple-of-cuisine holdouts. The classically trained German chef, who originated Patina in Hancock Park in the space Providence now inhabits, has since imprinted his precise Cal-French sensibility on a staggering array of venues (not to mention events like the Emmys, which he caters).
The pair — who starred on Food Network’s 2 Dudes Catering — gained acclaim in 2008 for kick-starting L.A.’s nose-to-tail craze at meat mecca Animal. But it’s Shook’s and Dotolo’s fish-centric Son of a Gun that’s at the forefront of a high-end rethink of the traditional East Coast seafood shack. More than any other L.A. chefs, Dotolo and Shook churn out talked-about instant-icon items — from sriracha mayo Chinese shrimp toasts to a fried chicken sandwich with spicy pickle slaw.
If downtown L.A. is the most dynamic dining scene in the city at the moment, Centeno is its most virtuosic chef. He was an eclectic interpreter of the gastropub trend at Lazy Ox Canteen before opening the boisterous Baco Mercat (408 S. Main St.) nearby in 2011. In December, he tapped into his Tex-Mex past with Bar Ama (118 W. Fourth St.), where he’s turned down-home Frito Pie and Velveeta-esque bowls of queso dip into must-orders for urban sophisticates.
Already a critical darling from stints at L’Orangerie and Bastide, ABC’s The Taste judge Lefebvre pioneered the pop-up model popular among young chefs today with his LudoBites series starting in 2009.
"When I opened Campanile in 1989, the L.A. restaurant scene was grim," says Silverton. "A food desert." But the desert bloomed, partly thanks to her. Silverton has gone through distinct phases: Campanile’s Thursday sandwich night with now-ex-husband chef Mark Peel was a smash, and her La Brea Bakery fed a town starved for good bread (the business sold for $6 million in 2001). The to-die-for dough at Pizzeria Mozza (641 N. Highland Ave.) and fancier Osteria Mozza (6602 Melrose Ave.) with partner Mario Batali put Hancock Park on the culinary map, and her new Chi Spacca (6610 Melrose Ave.) has become the town’s alpha grill, with salumi made on-site.
When Matsuhisa started out in the restaurant business in the 1960s, it was hard to find sushi, even in Japan, believe it or not. But he loved it so much that he pursued his dream of running his own sushi place, moving to Peru, Argentina, Alaska and at last to Los Angeles, where, after 11 years of exceedingly hard work and virtually no profit, his gift paid off. Now, in tandem with patron-turned-partner Robert De Niro, Nobu owns dozens of eponymous restaurants around the world. (The flagship is located at 903 N. La Cienega Blvd.)
In April 2009, L.A.’s Peruvian cuisine pioneer Zarate opened low-key Mo-Chica in a Hispanic market stall in the shadow of the 110 Freeway. It caught blogosphere buzz, and by 2011 he had Picca (9575 W. Pico Blvd.)
"Peruvian cuisine is wide and there’s a lot for me to explore," said Zarate, who worked at London’s top Japanese restaurant Zuma and notes the parallels between the melting-pot metropolises of L.A. and his Asian-immigrant-influenced hometown: "When I see Los Angeles, I see Lima."
Choi's roving Kogi food trucks, supported by oft-tweeted location updates, popularized a kimchi-and-bulgogi taco that took the city by storm in 2008. He solidified his influence by making successive sensations out of Asian rice bowls (in a Chinatown mall, at Chego on 727 N. Broadway), picnic basics (in a renovated IHOP at A-Frame at 12565 W. Washington Blvd.) and home-style Jamaican staples (at Sunny Spot in Venice at 822 W. Washington Blvd.).
Since 2009, Feniger’s been out on her own with Street (742 N. Highland Ave.), a general assembly for global curbside cuisine, including Moroccan spiced lamb belly, with a keen inclusion of vegetarianism. "I remember taking my first trip to India and saying to longtime collaborator Mary Sue Milliken, 'We’ve got to put a vegetarian dish on the menu,’ " Feniger told THR. "Twenty five years ago, this was a big deal. Now it’s expected."
"Food in L.A. has totally changed mainly because now we have so many chef-owned restaurants," said Puck. "In the old times, like Chasen’s, it had to be very formal, like being at your grandmother’s. Now, young chefs do whatever they feel like, and it’s much more exciting than it ever was."