Our annual mega-project is live!

Since 2013, The Times has published a yearly guide to the 101 best restaurants in Los Angeles, though in the six years now that I’ve been plunging into the project for months the word “essential” has always been more of a guiding precept for me. I want readers — you — to know about places that serve categorically delicious food, but I hope these very human endeavors also tell a bigger story about dining and life in Los Angeles right now.

Print subscribers will receive their copy of the magazine version, masterfully designed by Food section art director Brandon Ly, in the Sunday papers this weekend. You can also buy print copies at The Times’ online store.

The three magazine covers for the 2024 edition of the 101 Best Restaurants in L.A.

Just the two of us, we can make it if we try

For the last three years the 101, as the Food team calls it, was a solo endeavor for me. Plenty of the end-of-year lists flooding your algorithm, including others of ours, are group-thinks, and the collective wisdom of the hive mind has obvious value. As a lifelong student of restaurant criticism, I’ve always loved reading the rigorous takes of one person tackling the impossible job of defining a dining culture through 25 or 50 or 100 or 101 restaurants. It’s a glimpse into one palate and one mind, packed with context. It’s also probably more satisfying for people to aim their inevitable differences of opinion at a single critic.

This year, the plan was for me to spend time on the road reporting more broadly on dining across California, including producing fresh guides to popular destinations like San Francisco, San Diego and Palm Springs. Didn’t it make sense to partner with a colleague for this round of the 101? For her voice, her tirelessness and her outrageous depth of knowledge, Food columnist Jenn Harris was the clear choice.

I feel really proud of the results of our collaboration. We challenged each other on ways to make the mix as wide and deep as possible (101 restaurants is a minuscule number for Los Angeles!), to reassess which darlings might move along to make way for lesser-known restaurants we love. We crisscrossed the region, mostly separately, sending texts and DMs at all hours, reporting to each other on our latest bowl of noodles or shawarma wrap or tasting menu.. Two people will never entirely agree. We certainly would have created different lists individually, but we blew the parameters of our deadlines (sorry, editors) to be sure we both felt absolutely certain in our collective choices.

Moronga taco from Barbacoa Ramirez, a fantastic weekend pop-up in Arleta.

(Andrea D’Agosto / For The Times)

One new addition I’ll point out: Barbacoa Ramirez is a weekend pop-up that Bill Esparza wrote about in a feature for Eater in 2021, during the still-thick of the pandemic. He detailed the laborious process that Gonzalo Ramirez and his family undertake, from butchery to pit-cooking, to produce a singularly fragrant lamb barbacoa; they serve it weekly from their covered stand near the Arleta DMV building in the San Fernando Valley.

I’d had Barbacoa Ramirez on my long list to try for several years, but I didn’t go until the Food team was deep in research for our 101 Best Tacos in L.A. project (an excellent example of a group endeavor!) that published in July. Sleepy on a Sunday morning, I drove to Arleta with visiting ex-Angeleno friends who were craving tacos. It wasn’t just the lusciousness of the barbacoa that blew us away, but the rhythms of the family team making corn tortillas to order, ladling consommé, slicing moronga (herbaceous blood sausage) and scraping the pot to serve the last of the pancita, a chile-stained offal variation that always runs out first.

We ranked Barbacoa Ramirez high in our guide. It looks to be a sunny, mild weekend in Southern California. Maybe you’ll head to Arleta to see why we were so enamored?

A quasi-annual plea

With the publication of the guide, which I hope leads you to many joyful meals, comes the comments on social media griping that the 101 exists as a subscriber-only exclusive behind a paywall.

I get it. Paywalls make my chest constrict in agitation too. And yet, I will tell you that my employer paid for not only every research meal that Jenn and I ate, separately and together, but for many others that didn’t make the cut. This organization gives us the bandwidth to do our homework, and that’s a privilege that’s going extinct in journalism. Googling a new subscription to The Times tells me it costs $1 for the first four months. Consider this a plea to support journalists with a payment that sets you back a buck.

The return of Vespertine

The dish called Deep Ocean, served in a block of ice, at Vespertine in Culver City.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

The week also brings my review of Vespertine, the ever-polarizing, ultra-fine-dining restaurant by Jordan Kahn that reopened in the spring after a four-year hiatus. I can tell you with certainty that no place has inspired such a spectrum of feelings and thoughts in me over its existence. In its early inceptions I wanted to respect its art-world-level desire to confound the restaurant experience, but I couldn’t cope with the alien presentations of the food and detached style of hospitality. Then I couldn’t believe the beauty of the takeout menus he produced during the pandemic.

How do I feel now, after three dinners over several months this year? These are my thoughts.

Also …

• Last 101 plug, I promise! The guide also includes five new inductees to our Hall of Fame, including an evergreen for Cajun-Creole cooking and the restaurant that helped codify the city’s style of California-Mediterranean cuisine. Also, Jenn and I name some of our favorite new-ish places to drink. (Hint: We are both martini habitués.)

Ben’s Martini at the Benjamin in Hollywood.

(Andrea D’Agosto / For The Times)