Open for lunch daily in Culver City, Sobar specializes in buckwheat soba noodles served with a variety of dipping sauces.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
20 stellar lunch spots from the 2024 101 Best Restaurants guide
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Lunch in Los Angeles can be as simple as tacos eaten on the hood of your car, or as elaborate as a 14-course omakase at a celebrated sushi bar. “Let’s do lunch” is an invitation to explore the city’s diverse culinary landscape, regardless of the length of your lunch break.
These 20 recommendations were drawn from the most recent guide to the 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles, written by me and restaurant critic Bill Addison. Whether you’re ducking in for a quick bite or looking for somewhere to linger over a meeting, there’s something to fit nearly every occasion.
You’ll find a French restaurant in Hollywood with first-rate pastries alongside one of the city’s most decadent burgers, a full spread of vegetarian dishes in Koreatown, Laos crispy rice salads in Orange County and fried chicken, macaroni and cheese and collard greens from one of the country’s premier soul food destinations. — Jenn Harris
Showing Places
(Ron De Angelis/For The Times)
Ammatolí
Long Beach Middle Eastern $$
The calming, sun-drenched corner restaurant in downtown Long Beach, run by chef Dima Habibeh and her family, continues to grow in dimensions and ambitions. In her cooking, Habibeh — born to a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother and raised in Jordan — poignantly evinces her origins. Solo diners will be happy at the plant-draped bar, rapt by garlicky chicken shawarma at lunch or sea bass over spiced rice with caramelized onions and nuts, with perhaps a glass of white wine from Lebanon’s Bekka Valley, at dinner. Even better is gathering a crowd for a spread that begins with too much mezze: hummus with pine nuts, yielding grape leaves, labneh dyed fuchsia from pureed beets, fried kibbeh stuffed with ground beef or spinach, fattoush sharpened with sumac, a mix of the savory hand pies called fatayer. Kebabs and rotisserie chicken on a bed of subtly smoky freekeh might arrive next, followed by crunchy-cheesy knafeh scented with orange blossom syrup and date cake for dessert. To that end, the Habibehs recently debuted a third room, all white walls and curving ceramics, designed for group dining. I don’t know of a more gracious setting for consummate Levantine cooking in Southern California.
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(Ron De Angelis/For The Times)
Asadero Chikali
Inglewood Mexican $
Earlier this year, I described the carne deshebrada with refried beans from the East Los Angeles Asadero Chikali stand for our guide to the 101 Best Tacos in the city. It was the taco I was handed when I asked the taquero to surprise me with his go-to order. It’s still the taco that comes to mind when someone asks for my favorite in all of Los Angeles. The meat is tangled with stewed tomato, onion and peppers. It’s my preferred filling for the exemplary flour tortillas, rolled by hand and cooked on a flat-top until mottled with toasty brown bubbles. They’re buttery, slender and surprisingly sturdy; I could eat a stack on their own. Asadero Chikali (Chikali is the locals-only nickname for the border city of Mexicali) recently opened its first bricks-and-mortar restaurant in a small strip mall in Inglewood, not far from SoFi Stadium. There, the tacos come with a tray of salsas and pickled onions. Though I can’t seem to quit the deshebrada, I always get at least one carne asada “Chikali style,” with the bits of smoky meat served under a dollop of guacamole and beans. And I never leave without a dozen tortillas to go.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Azizam
Silver Lake Persian $
The cooking of Iran has historically been a cuisine with distinct expressions inside and outside the home. Family settings often involve dishes that can be exceptionally labor-intensive or stews so nuanced and subtle they defy professional kitchen standardization. Most restaurant menus are purposefully designed around crowd-pleasing, fire-kissed kebabs, creamy dips and snowdrifts of seasoned rice heaped on platters. Cody Ma and Misha Sesar have poignantly narrowed the divide at the Silver Lake cafe they opened in March. The star among their concise mix of mazeh (cold small plates), sandwiches and mains is the kofteh Tabrizi, a giant beef-and-rice meatball riddled with herbs and steeped in a tomato-based sauce electric with Persian dried lime. Your spoon soon finds its sweet, secret heart: a filling of dried apricots, prunes, barberries and walnuts. Look to turmeric-marinated chicken over rice for sheer comfort. In the several years that Azizam previously ran as a pop-up, Ma and Sesar mined an exploratory streak in their cooking, finding the similarities and differences in their individual families’ regional recipes. I’m betting as they settle into the restaurant’s early success, we’ll see more intricate khoresht (seasonal stew) specials like a brothy June stunner of lamb neck with apricots.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Borit Gogae
Koreatown Korean Barbecue $$
“Set menu with barley rice,” reads the modest description for the centerpiece meal at this two-year-old Koreatown breakout hit. For $30 per person, the staff delivers a near-overwhelming deluge of dishes to the table. Soups, mild pumpkin porridge, salad with bouncy cubes of acorn jelly and a few crunchy mung bean pancakes precede a spread of banchan-style seasoned vegetables (among them tea leaf, spinach, various mushrooms and an evolving selection of kimchi) arrayed on a woven basket. Bowls of barley rice also arrive, in which you assemble your lunch or dinner from the many elements, similarly to bibimbap, finishing with sesame oil and gochujang to taste. This is one of the most nourishing dining experiences in Los Angeles, and for gilding you can order extra meat options such as deeply savory grilled short rib patties. “Borit gogae” translates as “barley hump” and refers to a time of food scarcity in mid-20th century Korea. Owners Bu Gweon Ju and Sung Hee Jung, who are siblings, have reclaimed the phrase as a celebration of abundance, and the local community keeps the dining room full throughout the day.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Bridgetown Roti
East Hollywood Caribbean $
Free the shrimp roti from its wrapper paper and you notice the bundle has already been cut in half. Its colors and patterns mesmerize for a few seconds: The flaky folds of paratha seem to barely contain spice-crusted shrimp, a saucy aloo (potato) sofrito, streaks of bright green herb-chile sauce and purple veins of turmeric-tinged cabbage slaw. The flavors are as blinding as the colors; crunchy textures bump against smooth ones. Fans of Rashida Holmes’ Caribbean American cooking have waited nearly three years for moments like this — when her breakthrough pop-up finally transitioned to a permanent location. Bridgetown Roti debuted in July in a cheering East Hollywood storefront, with Joy Clarke-Holmes (Rashida’s mother) and Malique Smith as partners. Holmes channels the richness of Bajan and Trinidadian cultures in not only rotis but also delicate cod fish cakes dabbed with garlic aioli, callaloo simmered to melting surrender in coconut broth with peppers and her inimitable savory patties (curried oxtail for the win). Oh, and hands down the creamiest, crustiest, most superlative baked macaroni and cheese in Los Angeles.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Dolan's Uyghur Cuisine
Alhambra Uyghur
Among the constellation of cuisines that light up the San Gabriel Valley, Bugra Arkin’s restaurants in Alhambra and Rowland Heights (with a third location in Irvine) illuminate a culture specific to the autonomous Xinjiang territory in northwest China. The cooking of the Uyghurs, the region’s Turkic-speaking Muslims, culls centuries of spice trade influences, including from modern-day India, Tibet, Afghanistan and Iran. Most tables hold orders of the “big plate chicken” heaped with potatoes, chopped red and green peppers, slivers of garlic and dried chiles. Wide, looping noodles hide underneath. Currents of Sichuan peppercorns and star anise flow through the broth. It’s superb, as are stir-fried lamb freckled with cumin seeds; manta (plump pleated dumplings) filled with earthy diced pumpkin and minced onion; and laghman, long noodles nearly as thick as taffy, buried under stir-fried vegetables and tender beef strips. For fun, throw in quyash qatlima, a pinwheel-shaped savory pie full of spiced meat and oozing mozzarella. With murals of Uyghur life and details like globe-shaped glass lamps patterned in starbursts and other geometries, Arkin evokes his culture as much in the dining room’s aesthetics as in the food he serves.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Dulan’s on Crenshaw
Hyde Park American $$
Greg Dulan remembers his father, Adolf, teaching him to make fried chicken with a brown paper bag and a cast-iron skillet. The method creates a golden, rugged landscape of well-seasoned crunch and meat that drips when you take a bite. The Dulans have been serving that same fried chicken, and an array of soul food dishes, since Adolf and his wife, Mary, opened Aunt Kizzy’s Back Porch in Marina del Rey in 1985. The family expanded its soul food empire with restaurants in Inglewood, Gramercy Park and Crenshaw. Greg, who runs the Dulan’s on Crenshaw, reopened the restaurant earlier this year after a substantial remodel. A large kitchen absorbed the old hot bar, where patrons used to line up at the counter to watch their plates being assembled. The macaroni and cheese is some of the best in the city, the noodles completely engulfed in cheese. Once the collard greens are long gone, you’ll want to gulp, not sip the pot likker. I appreciate the new space, especially the blown-up picture of Greg’s grandparents Zady and Silas, who watch over you while you eat your fried chicken.
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(Ron De Angelis/For The Times)
El Bacano
North Hollywood Dominican $
Siblings Deany Santana and Jonathan Santana worked together years ago in their family-run Dominican restaurant in Anchorage; in summer 2023 they reunited to serve their mother’s and grandmother’s recipes from a 16-seat storefront in a North Hollywood strip mall. They unlock their doors at noon but plate a quintessential Dominican breakfast that greatly comforts at any time of day: mangú (mashed plantains) with los tres golpes, or “the three hits” — two fried eggs, slices of griddled salami and thin rectangles of queso frito. A staffer will ask if you prefer the plantains green or ripe, and my answer is the one the Santanas recommend: a smooth yet textured mixture of the two. Deany often can be viewed through the kitchen window tending pots of various meats infused with lime juice, onions, garlic, oregano and other spices. I’m especially partial to Santana’s chicken, Jonathan’s renaming of the classic Dominican pollo guisado. The bird is richly browned and simmered with thinly sliced peppers in a bit of liquid that forms a brothy, potent gravy. Start with an empanada, its half-moon shape shattering into flakes to unleash a lava flow of yellow cheese and diced salami.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Holy Basil
Atwater Village Thai $
Since 2020, food obsessives have been converging at the window in downtown’s Santee Passage food hall from which Wedchayan “Deau” Arpapornnopparat serves visceral, full-throttle interpretations of Bangkok street food. His pad see ew huffs with smokiness from the wok. The fluffy-crackly skin of moo krob pops and gives way to satiny pork belly underneath. Now comes the blockbuster sequel, which Arpapornnopparat opened with his wife, Tongkamal “Joy” Yuon, early this year. The space might be small, with much of the seating against a wall between two buildings, but the cooking is tremendous: Arpapornnopparat leaps ahead, rendering a short, revolving menu of noodles, curries, chicken wings, fried rice and vegetable dishes that is more experimental, weaving in elements of his father’s Chinese heritage, his time growing up in India and the Mexican and Japanese flavors he loves in Los Angeles. One creation I’ve thought about all year: fried soft-shell crab and shrimp set in a thrilling, confounding sauce centered around salted egg yolk, browned butter, shrimp paste and scallion oil. In its sharp left turns of salt and acid and sultry funk, the brain longs to consult a GPS. But there is no map. These are flavors from an interior land.
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(Ron De Angelis/For The Times)
Komal
Historic South-Central Mexican $
The tortillas at Fátima Júarez’s new restaurant and molino in the Mercado La Paloma are a revelation. Delicate but supple, they taste of the sun and soil, earthy and bursting with the sweetness of summer corn. Júarez sources, nixtamalizes and grinds different heirloom Mexican corn varieties to make fresh masa for a short menu of antojitos. Chalqueño corn from the state of Mexico and Oaxacan blue bolita are featured in tlacoyos, griddled corn cakes stuffed with ayocote beans and generously garnished with nopales and salty crumbles of queso fresco. The best way to appreciate Júarez’s fresh masa (besides a stack of tortillas you can order by the dozen) may be the flor de calabaza quesadilla. The folded tortilla is brimming with Oaxacan cheese and a corn sofrito. Júarez’s mole, the culmination of a childhood spent in Oaxaca, is dusky and intricately spiced, noticeably sweet and redolent with toasted chiles. After I finished my molotes de platano, I took a warm tortilla, rolled it into a loose cigar and dipped it into the leftover mole for dessert. There’s already talk of a weekly tasting menu. But for now, sampling all the antojitos is a great way to spend a lunch break.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Kuya Lord
Hollywood Filipino $$
Behold the behemoth “Kuya Tray,” the fastest and most comprehensive introduction to the cooking at Lord Maynard Llera’s 28-seat Melrose Hill restaurant. Sized for two, each platter contains canary-yellow spiced rice, sauteed vegetables, achara (pickled green papaya) and a choice of six meats or seafood. I’ll point you to a hypnotically spiral slice of “lucenachon,” Llera’s nickname for his version of Filipino-style pork belly stuffed with lemongrass stalks and fennel fronds, or to blue prawns simmered in garlicky crab paste. In the afterglow of last decade, which witnessed the brightest-ever spotlight turned on modern Filipino cuisine, Llera, who won the James Beard Foundation award this year for Best Chef: California, stepped into the arena as a gripping new expressionist. He keeps the menu restaurant concise, but it still harbors two relative sleepers: mami, a sustaining egg noodle soup with pork belly and garlic-chile oil; and laing, a delicious mulch of taro leaves braised in coconut milk and shrimp paste for nine hours. Llera, true to his individualism, adds smoky katsuobushi with pickled chile as an umami bump at the end.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Lalibela
Little Ethiopia Ethiopian $$
Tenagne Belachew’s quiet haven is one of the places I most consistently bring out-of-towners for lunch. We build our meal around the 11-dish “veggie utopia,” uplifting in its chromatics of salads, simmered vegetables and thick lentil purees spiced to profound, molecular levels. Sometimes I veer to bozena shiro, a bubbling chickpea stew laced with a bit of minced meat, or yebeg alicha wot, a mild and creamy lamb sauté. Always, though, I return to the “special kitfo,” beef tartare glossed in butter infused with mitmita (a rounded, cardamom-forward spice blend) and matched with fluffy curds of fresh cheese and pureed collards. Little Ethiopia, in general, is a treasure. Meals by Genet, reopened in early 2024 for weekend dinner hours, has ascended to the 101 Hall of Fame. I sometimes can’t decide between the dulet (raw minced beef liver, tripe and other cuts in spiced butter) at Messob; a vegetarian platter followed by a cup of fortifying, freshly roasted coffee at Rahel Ethiopian Vegan Cuisine; or turmeric-stained alicha tibs at Awash just technically outside the neighborhood. Most often, I return to Lalibela.
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(Innis Casey Photography)
Mr. T
Hollywood Restaurant and lounge
Angelenos are fickle creatures. Restaurants from around the world have attempted moves here, only to find that we’re unfazed by their popularity elsewhere. Mr. T, the two-year-old location of the Paris bistro with the same name, has carved a niche for itself in the middle of the buzzy Sycamore District. At the bottom of the glass tower that houses Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, smartly dressed patrons flood the patio during breakfast and lunch. An impressive case boasts François Daubinet’s pastries. You can taste the butter in his croissants, and they shatter on contact. A few of the Paris restaurant’s dishes make appearances for dinner, like the mac and cheese with mimolette flambé set aflame at the table, but chef Alisa Vannah, who previously cooked at République, has made the restaurant her own. Vannah’s cooking is a quiet luxury, demure but powerful in its intention and flavors. Mackerel and yellowtail are dressed in a tomato water seasoned like dashi, with bonito, white soy and a shiver of yuzu. Lumpia are plump with chicken and shrimp. Treat Daubinet’s desserts as mandatory caps to the evening. His custard is nearly deliquescent, flooded with the sharp tang of passion fruit. Chocolate mousse is rich and fleeting, impossibly smooth before it vanishes on the tongue.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Nok's Kitchen
Westminster Laotian $$
Nokmaniphone Sayavong’s Laotian-style grilled sausages are brute links of pork with a pronounced texture, intense spice and sour zing. Each bite is its own adventure. One piece may surprise with a quarter clove of garlic while another might be embedded with a whole piece of diced scallion. The bitter, floral sharpness of lemongrass is ever-present. The former restaurant server started selling sausages during the pandemic and opened her small restaurant in a Westminster strip mall in 2022. She coarsely grinds pork butt and aromatics for the sausages, building on recipes her mother taught her when she was a child in Laos. Dishes spark with acid and heat, whether it be the fish sauce and Thai chiles in the larb rib-eye or the lime-and-chile-intensive dipping sauce that accompanies the skewers or bits of fried pork belly marinated in coconut milk and ginger. She makes a version of the crispy rice salad you can find at many Thai restaurants, served with nuggets of cured sour pork and peanuts. Only Sayavong’s rice is arranged in crunchy clumps that are soft in the middle and with a faint coconut flavor. It encourages an even more zealous appreciation for carbohydrate-intensive salads.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Perilla L.A.
Chinatown Korean $
If you could eat lunch from only one Los Angeles restaurant for the rest of your life, where would it be? My answer comes easily: Perilla LA. Jihee Kim’s banchan, so full of geometries and colors and so urgent in flavor, brings this class of Korean dishes center-stage. Eaten collectively, they land in the Venn diagram linking light, nourishing and compelling. Expect straight-from-the-farmers-market produce prepared in intuitive variations of freshness and fermentation — garlicky eggplant, sesame-speckled green beans, complex kimchi made from collard greens or daikon — and perennials like her stunning seaweed-rolled omelet cut into circles with hypnotic, spiraling centers. Small portions of the day’s banchan selection also come over rice as part of a compartmented dosirak tray, served with warm doenjang-marinated chicken or cod. My dream hack: Swing by on a Monday, enjoy a dosirak at one of the shaded tables outside Perilla’s tiny gabled home in a converted garage, then take home four or five banchan to eat midday for the remainder of the week.
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(Ron De Angelis/For The Times)
Pine & Crane
Downtown L.A. Taiwanese $$
Vivian Ku’s three Taiwanese restaurants — the original Pine & Crane in Silver Lake, its second location in downtown L.A. and her slightly more casual spinoff Joy in Highland Park — can be, and usually are, mobbed at any given time of day. Each has a slightly different fast-casual menu that quells cravings for shrimp wontons with satisfying snap, dan dan noodles plunged in peanut-sesame sauce and comforts like minced pork over rice gently revved with soy-braised egg and daikon pickles. Her connection to the Taiwanese dining culture in the San Gabriel Valley, where she gathered with relatives growing up, animates the spirit of her cooking. She credits her penchant for light, clean flavors to her grandmother, who immigrated to Taiwan from China in 1949 before the family moved to America. The DTLA outpost holds special appeal because it also serves riffs on Taipei-style breakfast dishes every morning, including crunchy-soft fan tuan wrapped tightly with soy egg and pork floss, savory “thousand-layer” pancake wraps that make great on-the-go meals and dan bing (rolled egg crepe crunching with corn kernels and shaved cabbage). An extensive beverage program centered around but not limited to Taiwanese whiskies draws me back downtown in the evenings.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Saffy's
East Hollywood Middle Eastern $$$
Labels settle easily onto restaurants, and it would be understandable to think of Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis’ East Hollywood blockbuster as “the fancy kebab place.” It’s true there is nowhere else where meat on sticks is imagined quite like Saffy’s ground veal and Ibérico pork seasoned with floral-sweet baharat, lime and poppy seeds, or its lamb shashlik marinated in labneh and sparked with paprika and cumin. But the dozen-plus appetizers are equal portraits of technique and outside-the-box combinations. Roasted celery root set on a fluffy ring of allium cream, for example, is forested with curry leaves, strands of sauerkraut, spicy-sweet apple harissa and dried rose petals. The flavors and fragrances leap between India, Africa and Eastern Europe. Saffy’s also has quietly become a daytime restaurant: Breakfasts of shakshuka or smoked salmon tartine jump-start the day and, returning to the kebab theme, chicken shashlik zinged with herb chutney and tahini in a pita makes for fortifying lunch-meeting fuel.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Sobar
Culver City Japanese $$
At Sobar, Masato Midorikawa’s Culver City restaurant, your bamboo sieve of noodles comes with a set of instructions. First, taste the noodles bare. Next, sprinkle some yuzu salt onto one bite. Then try matcha salt on another. Only then should you dip your noodles in the provided bowl of cold or hot broth. This is the way to fully appreciate ju-wari, a style of soba made from only buckwheat flour and water. Each morning, Midorikawa mixes the flour and water, then uses a machine he developed with a partner in Japan to make every tray of noodles to order. The earthy flavors are deeper and more intense than soba made with the addition of wheat flour, and the speckled gray noodles are denser and more brittle. The yuzu salt heightens the nuttiness of the buckwheat, while the matcha salt is more subtle and grassy. There’s a small menu of appetizers and sashimi to help round out the meal. The kakiage, served as a tangled cylinder of fried onions and shrimp, is the preferred soba sidekick, but there’s karaage, agedashi tofu and assorted Japanese pickles too.
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Sonoratown
Mid-Wilshire Mexican $
Jennifer Feltham and Teodoro Díaz-Rodriguez Jr. shifted their phenomenal Sonoran-style taquerias into expansion mode over the last year. Crowds never let up at the tiny eight-year-old original in downtown. This summer, they debuted a michelada bar at their Mid-City outpost, where you can also snack on loaded nachos alongside your tacos and quesadillas. They opened a third location in Long Beach in September. What hasn’t changed is their attention to quality and consistency. Julia Guerrero ensures the excellence of Sonoratown’s flour tortillas: thin, flaky, durable yet delicate, almost buttery with lard. My order usually involves the famous Burrito 2.0 and at least one chivichanga, a mini-bundle swaddling shredded chicken or beef cooked down with tomatoes, Anaheim chiles and cheese into a dense, gooey guisado. Another prize on the concise menu: the caramelo, elsewhere sometimes fashioned from two tortillas bound by cheese. In this case, a large-format taco engulfs Monterey Jack, pintos and cabbage for crunch, plus avocado and spicy red salsas. Meat options make for the toughest decision: Classics include costilla (short rib and chuck robed in mesquite smoke), grilled chicken, tripe and chorizo. Cabeza, a new entrant, simmers to such tenderness that the clove-scented molecules transform into beefy custard.
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(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Sushi Kisen
Arcadia Japanese $$
Kisen, tucked into the corner of a crowded Arcadia strip mall, feels like two restaurants in one. The main dining area is a raucous room where you can order grilled chicken and plates of vegetable tempura for the kids who can’t seem to stay in their seats and cucumber rolls for your sister who doesn’t eat raw fish. The sushi bar is a serene omakase experience where the chef will design a personalized procession of nigiri and small bites based on your appetite and penchant for stronger or milder fish. It’s on par with some of the most compelling sushi bars in the city, without the sticker shock at the end. I like sitting at the bar during lunch, where I can marvel at how the chefs manage overflowing bowls of chirashi for the dining room while simultaneously creating a semblance of calm, focused attention for patrons at the bar. My chef nods approvingly when I tell him I favor kohada, sardines and all kinds of mackerel. He rewards me with a Japanese sardine scored with a million knife cuts, which melts on my tongue, and a slab of silver-skinned kohada tucked into a sleeve of crisp seaweed. I appreciate the excellence without a smidge of stuffiness.
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