Can somebody define a “great” restaurant for me. I’ve spent all but two years of my adult life in LA (grad school in New York) but I travel a decent amount and still haven’t been able to figure out what makes a great restaurant. Every time I eat in New York, the restaurants are cozier, but the service is the same and the food is fine. When I went to Union square cafe this spring, they were using Harry’s berries lol.
Do we just have an interior design problem? Are people subconsciously biased against La restaurants bc we are never walking down cold streets and finding refuge in a well/lit brimming LES haunt, already a glass or two deep? If we could more easily eat at a wine bar then stroll down the street then walk home does our restaurant scene get better?
A Vin Mon Lapin or Noble Rot or, better yet, a Sportsman would be wonderful but it’s not like Montreal has 50 better restaurants than here.
Is Tokyo a good restaurant city? Or is it just an amazing food city? This is a pretty earnest response lol.
I would say that Tokyo has 1,000+ restaurants that are better than, say, the 100th best restaurant in LA.
I would say that there’s a 1/4 mile radius circle around Landmark in HK that is miles better overall than the entire LA and OC area combined.
Generally, I think people care more about food in some places than others. LA people don’t seem to care that much about food, at least compared to other cities. I’ve met dozens of wealthy people here who have never heard of Osteria Mozza.
I agree that the scene in Tokyo is way better than here! I’ve been twice in three years bc it’s so wonderful. But I’m asking more about the correlation between food and restaurants, which LA always seems to do poorly in. All my Tokyo meals are memorable bc of the food! Not so much the spaces or the service or even the energy. In the Japan thread, Ukiyo is getting some raves right now, and it was great! I loved it! The service was mediocre and the space itself was overwrought and silly. Is that a great “ restaurant?”
When you say “pound for pound,” do you mean in terms of geographic distribution? Colapasta, Petit Grain, Chaumont, Doner Corner, and all of Sawtelle are pretty close to me, and there’s like halfway decent Chinese near me, too. Haven’t been to a Persian place outside of Taste of Tehran (edit: haven’t been to another place in awhile), but I’m sure there’s got to be a pretty good place in this area.
Haven’t been to Citrin or to Pasjoli. But there’s Rustic Canyon. And there’s 2 good Thai places, too.
I wouldn’t have dreamed of having all of this kind of variety and quality when I first moved to this area 15 yrs ago, and none of those place are ultra high end (and many of them are what I would consider average nowadays, in terms of cost).
Nailed it re: service, but it’s more than that, it’s the totality of the hospitality experience. Almost no mid-priced restaurants in LA seem happy for your business.
My hypothesis is that comparatively low density of LA for a large city makes it hard for more interesting restaurants outside the high end to survive. IMO it’s exactly what you mention here:
If we could more easily eat at a wine bar then stroll down the street then walk home does our restaurant scene get better?
Good places aren’t close together, the number of people who are “close” to a place is lower than a denser city, and the time it takes to get somewhere interesting is an impediment. In Tokyo or NYC the number of people within a 10/20/30 minute journey of a restaurant is much higher. The percent of those people who are interested in a restaurant’s food is their pool of possible regular diners that can sustain their business.
So because of that risk-taking restaurants that have a smaller audience have a much harder time surviving. They can’t attract as many of the people in LA who would potentially be supporters, because many of them are just too far away. Instead restaurants have to lean on repeat clientele in the neighborhood that can easily access them. Since that audience is smaller, they need to tune their menu to be more broadly accessible (i.e. burgers for everyone!).
And yes, it’s about density and vibes too. I think Montreal (to your earlier example) and London both have 50+ “neighborhood” restaurants that absolutely blow LA out of the water in totality of experience: food, staff, beverage programs, QPR, etc.
I guess what I’m saying is I’m not finding other cities’ spots to be that much more compelling than LA’s, even though I agree with your points about density and access.
In my little quadrant, I’m about ten minutes from Lasita, Barra Santos, Holy Basil, Sam’s place, Baby Bistro, Perilla, Dunsmoor, Frontera, Majordomo, etc. These are literally spots that take ten minutes or less.
My best friends live in crown heights and they got a car. I’d much rather have my ten minute radius than theirs!
I am kind of here, too. When I think about great restaurants I am thinking about their contact with and participation in their city and neighborhood. For this reason, I would put, like, Otafuku in a “great restaurant” bucket, one that I would enthusiastically recommend because the experience has a singular personality, along with excellent food; the service here is strong for the establishment’s style and meets and exceeds my expectations. But it’s a “great” restaurant because not only because of who it is, but also where it is and for whom the place is treasured. Its intimacy does not feel manufactured, affected, but earned, and you can feel that walking in.
So I suppose evaluating a restaurant has to come down to, yes, a comprehensive consideration of the total aesthetic experience as much as you could. If you buy my criteria, then I think LA is underwhelming, where various “vibes” are “curated” into a simulacra of the kinds of intimacies that Otafuku and its peers have worked for, chasing deader ends that corner themselves into the kinds of performative spaces @set0312 was mentioning elsewhere on this forum.
On the other side of this engagement, a city, and the socio-cultural values it exists within, also contributes to the general baseline of a restaurant’s bones. I saw the freshest vegetables ever at a wet market in the French concession in Shanghai; fresh noodles every morning; all set in a multi-generational neighborhood where uncles dragged their feet in flip-flops and Gen Zers weaved through them on phones. The quality of that veg would have cost maybe about the $11 bag of lettuce I saw at McCall’s yesterday. Of course you have to think about the day-to-day costs of the population there, but I was getting the sense that, socially, their minimum standard is way, way higher than ours.
So, in that regard, LA will of course never be able to compare to other cities b/c it is structurally and socially not going to be the same as cities that have existed for several hundred yrs.
I dunno… LA is very different. I appreciate it for what it is and think the eating here is pretty good.
::shrug::
Marissainchina is a YouTube channel where she freq talks about food. She does actually have one short about this. The costs are astronomically different.
And as someone who is East Asian, I am very glad that my parents left what some (including myself) would feel is the suffocating and deeply inhibiting weight of societal expectations.
Right, I should have added that the delineation between LA as a “great food” town and a “great restaurant” town is warranted. I would agree that LA is a great food town. I’m in total agreement with your point above about the comprehensive variety and quality LA has. I think it is singular in the USA for that. We for sure eat well here. But is the majority of that done in great restaurants that offer holistic hospitality experiences? I would differ here. Arguably our most celebrated culinary culture – the taco truck – eschews almost all of the variables thus far discussed.
And yeah, I would echo your rejoinder that LA can’t hold its own against other cities because of that. The freeway system is by design anti-social, in that we are all on the road at the same time but cannot communicate with each other, as we can in other cities! Our socializations happen within the boundaries of our workplaces, the businesses near our homes… Those who do take our metro system likely know a completely a different LA than I do, and not just down economic or class lines.
I went looking for this, but she’s got a lot!
My mom bemoaned that she would’ve liked to have retired in her old neighborhood (the Concession), but for the country’s ills. I would not be here had my Mom not left China, and she’s happy she did, but the city still has a lot of pull for her.
LA will always suffer from being a very spread out metropolis with poor public transportation. Walking 1 mile in NYC or Tokyo seems much shorter than walking 1 mile in LA (I have zero true sense of this bc I’ve never walked 1 mile in LA).
There are certainly pockets where there are great restaurants within reasonable walking distance
Melrose/Highland
Abbott Kinney
Arts District
Koreatown
I have, and you are correct (it’s totally different). Where I live, at least, who WTF wants to walk that distance? You walk by… a strip mall, a building that is not at all designed to be welcoming to pedestrians, random scrub brush, and you are largely walking alone. It’s not pleasant.
Ah! A very important distinction. And, yes, on that, I would completely agree w/ you (and everyone else who might’ve been making that same point).
I should’ve also added that she only maybe makes a comment along the lines of “Oh, I know viewers talk about how cheap the food is in my videos, but the average person here makes $X amount.” So it is not a deep dive at all.
More amusing and witty than is marissainchina is “Japan Eats.” I LOVE his content, and it SO.MAKES.ME.WANT.TO.VISIT.JAPAN.JUST.TO.EAT. I want a bento box from a train station that has its own heating element (the bento box, that is)!!! And I want to see the seasonal, weird a$$ food at 7-Eleven!!!
Sushi Zanmai is a Tokyo sushi chain most notable for being open 24 hours a day. I went there often in the early morning hours. There would be people in there smoking. The sushi quality was amazing for the price and the setting. I doubt this location will be the same because it doesn’t have such easy access to the same quality fish.
Here’s a pic of one of their platters (not taken by me).
I want a bento box from a train station that has its own heating element (the bento box, that is)!!! And I want to see the seasonal, weird a$$ food at 7-Eleven!!!