Los Angeles' 15 Best Restaurants

Let's get two things out of the way off the bat. There are two dishes on the menu that are each nearly $200 and take nearly an hour to prepare: the 42-ounce bistecca Fiorentina ($175), and the 50-ounce costata alla Fiorentina ($210). These two dishes pretty much best summarize chef Chad Colby's 30-seat, dinner-only restaurant Chi Spacca. This Osteria Mozza offshoot overseen by Nancy Silverton is not cheap, and the meat (these two spectacular and talked-about dishes in particular), is what you're here for. You'll want to order the baked shell beans, the cured-meat board, the testa frittata, and the "tomahawk" pork chop too, so find three other people to share them with you, dig in, and if they're not great eaters, well, you're set for tomorrow night when you'll finally be hungry again.

Former Top Chef winner Michael Voltaggio proves that his world-class culinary skills aren't just camera tricks at ink., a restaurant that sets out to help define and interpret modern Los Angeles cuisine with its menu full of creative shareable plates. Expect everything from oatmeal, to pig's ear, and octopus to make an appearance. The long-awaited restaurant opened its doors in September of 2011, and has since received plenty of national notices, including GQ, which named ink. America's Best New Restaurant in 2012.

You could drive yourself insane trying to score a "ticket" to Trois Mec — available through their website every other Friday morning at 8 a.m., and not too soon after. But there's a reason for the huge demand at this hot Hollywood spot, of course. Chef Ludo Lefebvre's — who was known for his wildly popular string of pop-ups before Trois Mec opened last year — has struck California cuisine gold with his first brick-and-mortar that features five-course, French-inspired dinners with more than a touch of invention.

Wolfgang Puck helped invent California cuisine (and gave us California-style pizza) at Spago, pioneered Asian fusion food at Chinois on Main, and even figured out a way to produce decent airport food at his many Wolfgang Puck Express outlets, so we shouldn't be surprised that with Cut in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Puck has also reinvented the steakhouse. (There are now spin-offs in Las Vegas, London, and Singapore.) The traditional red leather booths and bucolic paintings have given way to a cool white interior by rationalist architect Richard Meier and a series of pieces by conceptual artist John Baldessari. In place of iceberg wedges and grilled swordfish, look for warm veal tongue with baby artichokes and roast Maine lobster with black truffle sabayon. Oh, and the steaks? Not the usual four or five choices, but a total of 17 cuts and places of origin are available, from Australian filet mignon to Illinois bone-in New York sirloin to genuine Japanese Wagyu rib-eye from Shiga Prefecture.

Chef Josef Centeno's Bäco Mercat in the Old Bank district of Los Angeles is funky and fresh restaurant that serves a menu spanning Western and Eastern-Mediterranean influences. Big plate specials including the likes of a whole-roasted New Zealand snapper, 16-ounce beef ribeye, bone-in lamb steak, confit half duck, and 32-ounce pork porterhouse, with an option of a fixed, family-style menu served to parties of 7 or more. But you're going to have to try at least two signature dishes the first time you visit: The original bäco (a kind of flatbread sandwich) featured crispy pork belly and beef carnitas with caraway pepper, but they're now made with pork, beef, poultry, seafood, and yes, vegetables. You may as well go directly to the big one though, "The Slayer," which features pork belly, beef carnitas, mozzarella, and tomato, and if you want to go all the way, a fried egg. Up next is the "bäzole," described by LA Weekly's Amy Scattergood as "a sort of Vietnamese play on posole, engendered by the bäco," the bäco being the "taco-gyro-pizza that the chef invented once for a staff meal" at his other restaurant Meson G. 

It's not easy to open an immensely successful restaurant from scratch in Los Angeles, but that's exactly what chefs David Myers and Kuniko Yagi did when they opened this Century City hotspot in January 2013. The Silk Road-inspired restaurant is not only a great place to sip a craft cocktail and nosh on snacks like fried oysters and chili crab toast, it's also an experience for all your senses. Myers (who rose to fame with Comme Ça and the Michelin-starred Sona) traveled Japan extensively before opening the restaurant where he fused the finest attributes of Japanese dining (the room is scented with hinoki, a Japanese cedar, and the patio resembles a Japanese garden) with the most fun aspects of American dining. Several of the dishes, including the hinoki-scented black cod with sweet potato and pistachio, coconut-curried mussels with sausage and cauliflower, and lobster roll with green curry and Thai basil, are already signature menu items. 

Nancy Silverton, whose La Brea Bakery changed the game for artisanal bread in America, teams up here with New York-based Italian-food moguls Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich in this lively urban restaurant, complete with a mozzarella bar, unusual pasta (calf's brain ravioli, spaghetti with marinated white anchovies), and main dishes ranging from grilled quail wrapped in pancetta to duck al mattone.  

At this ultimate haven for adventurous carnivores, chefs Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo have won a host of awards for their hearty, straightforward, and innovative cooking. Dishes like crispy pig head with short-grain rice, bulldog sauce, and soy egg; marrow bone with chimichurri and caramelized onions; and crispy sweetbreads with black sriracha and finger lime keep chefs and civilians alike coming back for more. Animal may be small, loud, and perpetually crowded, but it sets the standard for uncompromising all-American (which of course means multi-accented) straightforward cooking in the 2010s.