The LA 51 2025

[Loaxley]

LA 51 2025 — submissions open

How it works:

(1) Rank up to 51 LA County restaurants

(2) Submit your rankings

(3) Wait for the results!

How to submit:

(1) Navigate here:

LA 51 — Top Los Angeles Restaurants

(2) Click on “Submit Rankings”

(3) Rank your top restaurants!

What happens after I submit?

You will get an email confirming your submission.

There is also a link in the email which will allow you to view, edit or delete your submission.

Can I edit or delete my submission?

Yes. The email you get after submission includes a tokenized link which allows you to edit or delete your submission. If you accidentally delete the email, you can have the link re-sent by clicking “Get Submission Link” on the home page.

When do submissions close?

Tuesday, January 27, 2026 at 11:59 PM.

What happens if I add the same restaurant more than once?

That’s a great question; there’s only one way to find out

Why is restaurant x missing?

The list of restaurants is directly from a public facing database provided by LA County that should include all permitted restaurants in the county. However, there are two cases where you might not find a particular restaurant:
(1) The restaurant is so new that it opened after the last update to the public database that I am using. If that’s the case, post here and I can manually add it.
(2) The restaurant is named something different/weird in the county database. For example, Chi Spacca actually operates under Mozza To Go’s permit. You can try searching for a restaurant by address, but if you’re still not seeing anything plausible, post here and I can manually fix it.

How does scoring work?

I’m not entirely sure yet!

I wanted to get started with submissions now, and I will figure out the exact mechanics of scoring over the next few days.

One point per restaurant regardless of position?

Extra points for the top 1, 3, 5, 10?

Let me know your thoughts on how you think scoring should work!

[komajiyokai]

Are newer restaurants not going to show up? Chainsaw and Holy Basil Santa Monica don’t pop up.

[PeonyWarrior]

Points = (81 - rank).

Max = 80
Min = 30

You want to reward restaurants for getting high rankings while preventing a small number of people from skewing/ manipulating the overall score.

p.s.: I think 51 is too high. People are busy, lazy, etc. although I suppose there is no harm if people do less than 51. Maybe offer a min list of 10 and a max of 51.

[Loaxley]

@komajiyokai

Are newer restaurants not going to show up? Chainsaw and Holy Basil Santa Monica don’t pop up.

The list of restaurants is directly from LA County’s database of all permitted food establishments. I presume the reason those two are missing is that the public facing database is updated periodically (instead of in real time) and those two places opened after the last database update.

I went ahead and added both manually - if you check back in ~10 minutes they should show up.

[komajiyokai]

Awesome - thank you! Is there anyway to allow submissions of less than 51 rankings, so that we can save along the way? Right now it’s requiring I fill out all 51.

[Loaxley]

@komajiyokai

Awesome - thank you! Is there anyway to allow submissions of less than 51 rankings, so that we can save along the way? Right now it’s requiring I fill out all 51.

EDIT: Saving drafts is now available - see this post

At the moment there’s no way to save a “draft” submission - only a complete submission. I’m in the codebase right now, so I will do a skim to see if this is a quick change that I can make now, otherwise if it’s a bigger change I will try to implement it later.

[AmaroNeverDies]

I’d suggest 1/rank as a scoring mechanism. In general ordinality is hard to gauge in aggregation since the gaps between levels aren’t homogenous. 1/r helps exemplify that imo

Also very cool work and appreciate the effort in doing this!

[robert]

51 seems way too long a list of nominations for a lot of people. Why require any minimum?

I suggest not capping the results at any arbitrary number. Just rank everything by number of votes from whatever the max is down to a list of single-vote places

[Loaxley]

@komajiyokai

Awesome - thank you! Is there anyway to allow submissions of less than 51 rankings, so that we can save along the way? Right now it’s requiring I fill out all 51.

You can now submit a draft to save your progress. The mechanics are the same as a final submission - saving a draft sends send you an email outlining your current choices and a link which allows you to continue editing the draft.

@komajiyokai

Are newer restaurants not going to show up? Chainsaw and Holy Basil Santa Monica don’t pop up.

Just checked and can confirm both are now in the database (see above image).

@robert

51 seems way too long a list of nominations for a lot of people. Why require any minimum?

I suggest not capping the results at any arbitrary number. Just rank everything by number of votes from whatever the max is down to a list of single-vote places

@PeonyWarrior

p.s.: I think 51 is too high. People are busy, lazy, etc. although I suppose there is no harm if people do less than 51. Maybe offer a min list of 10 and a max of 51.

Point heard. I definitely want to require a minimum number of selections, as I want to discourage low effort entries - like submitting Hayato at #1 and nothing else. Additionally, the more entries that people submit, the broader and thus more valuable the final ranking will be. That said, I don’t want to discourage submissions, and 51 is a lot. I’m leaning towards a minimum of 20-25 - I feel like most people (on this board) could name their top 20-25 restaurants without too much trouble.

[robert]

I don’t eat in LA enough to have much more than ten.

[Loaxley]

A few updates:
(1) I added a sticky sidebar to quickly see your current selections. This also makes it easier to reorder entries that are far away from each other in ranking.
(2) There are no longer separate Save Draft vs Submit buttons. Just click “Save” to update your list. Click the link in the email at any time before submissions close to edit your list. There is still language in there about what is a draft vs a submission, but it’s just text, there’s no longer a technical distinction.
(3) I have set a set a tentative limit of 25 minimum entries to count in the rankings. I may decide to count entries with less, or I may stick to this minimum, subject to change at any time before I calculate scores.

[robert]

Requiring a list of 25 seems likely to encourage people to include restaurants that wouldn’t make their “favorite restaurants” list. Or to give up because it would take too much time to come up with that many.

[js76wisco]

FYI Chi Spacca and Mother Wolf don’t come up when you search

[Loaxley]

@robert

Requiring a list of 25 seems likely to encourage people to include restaurants that wouldn’t make their “favorite restaurants” list. Or to give up because it would take too much time to come up with that many.

Anyone can submit a list with less than 25. I may or may not end up counting those in the rankings - it will probably depend on how many total submissions there end up being. I don’t want to set a floor of 10, because then people who might have submitted more than 10, may just submit 10 and call it a day, and then it will end up being a predictable aggregate ranking that says Hayato Somni Providence etc. I am interested in what board members’ 11th 12th 20th 25th 50th favorite restaurants are. I expect there will be much more diversity above the top 10.

[Loaxley]

@js76wisco

FYI Chi Spacca and Mother Wolf don’t come up when you search

Mother Wolf is coded in the county’s system as “CITIZEN NEWS” with “MOTHER WOLF” as a separate attribute - just pushed an update to address that. Alternatively, you can search by address to surface restaurants if the names are being wonky.

Chi Spacca is actually not in the county’s system at all. I think that it operates under Mozza to Go’s permit (that one is in the system at the same address). I just added Chi Spacca as it’s own unique entry.

[robert]

The UI is annoying. I have a list in a text file. I don’t want to have to copy and paste each one.

[AmaroNeverDies]

I thought this guy wasn’t participating

[PeonyWarrior]

I will participate but I’m too busy right now. Christmas lol

[PorkyBelly]

can you add restaurant ki? not getting any hits on their name or address.

[caleb]

professional hater