Zach Pollack’s Essential Los Angeles Restaurants

It’s walkable to my house, which is rare in LA and especially rare in my neighborhood. The quality of the cooking and hospitality is extremely high for the price point. I love the monkfish liver, the rice donabe dishes, and the sashimi.

Shunji is across the street from Cosetta in Ocean Park, and it only has eight or so seats at the sushi counter. It’s not the sort of place you can just pop into. Unlike the slew of new high-end omakase spots around town, many of which are helmed by chefs enticed to move to LA from Japan by private equity, Chef Shunji has been quietly doing his thing here in LA for decades. He commands a mastery of traditional technique, but also folds in a local perspective that’s all his own.

If you twisted my arm to pick a single favorite restaurant in LA, it would be Hayato. When they opened in 2018, I had just been to Japan for the first time and, knowing absolutely nothing, I was skeptical that a kaiseki experience in Los Angeles could ever come close to the “real thing.” A few courses into my first dinner at Hayato, I realized I could not have been more wrong. What Chef Brandon is doing there is not only on par with what you might find in Kyoto (if you’re lucky), it is better than most. And the best part: you don’t have to suffer the judgment of not speaking Japanese.

Nancy Silverton is a household name in LA, if not the United States. By now, she has opened dozens of restaurants all over the world, but my favorite of them is her smallest. Chi Spacca feels intimate and personal, and its menu is 100 percent Italian without a single pasta or pizza on the menu. The Focaccia di Recco is rightly famous, but do not sleep on the veal tongue, chicken diavola, or milk-braised pork.

When you have eaten as much as I have, those moments where you bite into something for the first time and your head explodes become rarer and rarer. The last time this happened to me was with a croissant from here. This is highly technical baking at its finest, without unnecessary showmanship. It is a perfect example of “quiet technique.”