The Best Places to Eat and Do in Los Angeles

1. Eater The Best Pancakes in Los Angeles

1. Eater The Best Restaurants in Highland Park

A Sichuan restaurant on York Boulevard with a bright green facade that makes it hard to walk past, even if you're committed to a different dinner. The cooking leans on the chef's Chengdu roots while poking at newer ideas, and the wings and fries come dusted in ground spices, which is how fries should be seasoned. The noodles are handmade nearby, and they're the reason to bring a table full of people.

1. Eater The Best Restaurants in Highland Park

Clam-shaped pendant lights from Fritz Hansen set the tone at Marée, a French-California bistro and wine bar that sits just above the chef's Michelin-starred Lielle, a little more relaxed and a little less reverent. The menu leans on French technique and California produce, moving through truffled onion soup and escargot beignets toward pastas and a bouillabaisse, with pillar candles and a green onyx bar keeping things properly moody throughout.

1. Eater The Hottest New Restaurants in Los Angeles

A food hall in West Adams where the stalls read like a who's-who of L.A.'s best operators: Thai fried chicken from the Holy Basil crew, tlayudas from Poncho's, tamales and weekend barbacoa from Tamales Elena. The rotating pop-up slot keeps regulars guessing, and Sook sells Levantine pantry goods alongside pre-packaged dishes for the commute home. The full-service Maydan restaurant anchors the back with hearth-fired Lebanese-leaning spreads and whole roasted mains.

1. Eater The 38 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles

Mistral has been a French institution on Ventura Boulevard for what feels like forever, and a new team has stepped in after the founding owner retired, refreshing the room and the menu without abandoning the bistro bones. French onion soup arrives crowned with a Comté grilled cheese, and four versions of steak frites suggests a kitchen that takes the assignment seriously. A sommelier handles the wine list, and a full cocktail menu is there if you need it.

1. Eater The Hottest New Restaurants in Los Angeles

Modu is a Highland Park bakery that started as a pandemic baking hobby and now has a bright, spare room that looks like Copenhagen was asked to keep it down. The Korean-leaning pastries sit in a glass case like museum pieces, which makes ordering feel faintly like an acquisition. Bring a few people and split several, since a cinnamon roll, a mochi bar, and a tart each look too good to commit to alone.

1. Eater The Best Restaurants in Highland Park

A build-your-own instant ramen bar does a lot of the talking at this Korean cafe and market tucked behind a Highland Park pocha. The team behind Be Bright Coffee runs the drinks side, with the 2024 U.S. Barista Champion pulling banana matcha lattes alongside grab-and-go banchan, Spam musubi, and a braised oxtail hand pie. It's the kind of neighborhood spot that makes a convincing case for ramen at any hour.

1. Eater The Hottest New Restaurants in Los Angeles

Dominique Crenn, the three-Michelin-starred force behind Atelier Crenn, set up her Los Angeles return on the top floor of the Dior flagship on Rodeo Drive, which tells you almost everything about the vibe before you sit down. It's an all-day restaurant with a full tasting menu, à la carte options, lounge bar plates, and an afternoon tea complete with the requisite tower of sandwiches and sweets, all served somewhere between a couture house and a dining room.

1. Eater The Best Beverly Hills Restaurants

Beijing duck carved tableside is the move at Mr. Chow, the Beverly Hills fine dining institution that helped reframe what Chinese food could look like in America. The room leans glamorous, the prices lean ambitious, and the clientele leans toward people who treat both as a given. Dumplings, hand-pulled noodles, and stir-fries round out a menu that draws from upscale pre-revolution Chinese cooking rather than the takeout canon. Steely Dan wrote about it, which tells you something.

1. Eater The Best Beverly Hills Restaurants

1. Eater The Hottest New Restaurants in Los Angeles

Fruit tarts are the whole point at this Taiwanese bakery in Alhambra, where the crusts are milled from Tehachapi Sonora wheat and the fillings lean on local farms, including strawberries from Harry's Berries. The chef trained at Le Cordon Bleu and did time at Milo and Olive, and the drinks menu runs single-origin espresso, hojicha, and seasonal sparkling sodas alongside. A focused, careful little shop doing one thing with very deliberate ingredients.

1. Eater The Hottest New Restaurants in Los Angeles

Three pizza styles under one roof: puffy Neapolitan, fried montanara, and the thin Roman scrocchiarella. This Palms pizzeria is the grown-up version of a beloved Pico-Robertson original, now with a proper sit-down dining room and a menu that stretches to supplì and broccolini with bagna cauda. The kind of neighborhood spot that gets written about in cities far from Los Angeles, so booking ahead is wise.

1. Eater The Hottest New Restaurants in Los Angeles

Duck fesenjoon with pomegranate and walnuts is the kind of dish that makes you wonder why Persian food doesn't get more attention in this city. Rumi's Kitchen is a full-service Persian restaurant that started in Atlanta and has landed at Westfield Century City, bringing herb-heavy stews, saffron-marinated kebabs, and a menu that reads like a very convincing argument for going somewhere other than the food court upstairs.

1. Eater The Hottest New Restaurants in Los Angeles

1. Eater The Best Pancakes in Los Angeles

Sam's Place is a wine bar in a Highland Park bungalow with no website, no social media, and apparently no interest in either. Locals arrive with their dogs and split a platter of sausage, crusty bread, and cornichon butter alongside natural or Old World pours. Wood paneling keeps things cozy, weekends fill up without turning rowdy, and the bar steak is there if a snack plate doesn't count as dinner.

1. Eater The Best Restaurants in Highland Park

Enrique Olvera's Casamata group opened this seafood-forward Mexican restaurant in a space that has been an Olvera address before, which is either poetic or just convenient real estate. Chef Chuy Cervantes runs the kitchen, sending out mariscos that make a strong case for the coastal zip code: local rockfish ceviche, Dungeness crab tostada with furikake, oysters with turnip salsa. Wine, beer, and cocktails round it out.

1. Eater The Hottest New Restaurants in Los Angeles

A rooftop restaurant perched atop the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Skywalker Grill pulls its ingredients from George Lucas's own Skywalker Ranch, which is either a charming farm-to-table story or the most elaborate movie tie-in you've ever paid for, depending on your mood. The modern American menu runs from wagyu burgers and lobster corn dogs to chicken tenders served, with a straight face, alongside caviar ranch.

1. Eater The Hottest New Restaurants in Los Angeles

A former Silver Lake church became Hotel Lucile, and the team behind De La Nonna tucked this restaurant inside it, which gives the room more drama than most new openings deserve. The menu threads French technique through California farmers market produce, with a Southern ease in how it's all served. A full bar runs cocktails that lean tequila and mezcal, and the whole thing is relaxed enough that you won't feel underdressed.

1. Eater The Hottest New Restaurants in Los Angeles

The dry-aged bone-in ribeye arrives blanketed in hot butter, which tells you everything about the register this grand steakhouse is playing in. From the family behind Mastro's, Steak 48 fits Beverly Hills like a bespoke suit, with a seafood tower stacked high and sides that go past the usual (corn brulee, Hasselback potatoes). The room skews dressed-up and the tabs follow suit, but the kitchen keeps the promise the room makes.

1. Eater The Best Beverly Hills Restaurants

Daisuke Nakazawa trained under Jiro Ono, and that lineage hangs quietly over every piece of Edomae-style nigiri served at his Los Angeles omakase counter on South Robertson. The room is hushed and deliberate, the kind of place where you eat with full attention. An omakase here moves through nigiri flights with the optional chef's menu adding hot and cold courses before and between.

1. Eater The Best Beverly Hills Restaurants

Hidden in the valet-parking alcove of a Rodeo Drive retail building, this intimate omakase counter seats fewer than twenty people and pairs its high-end nigiri with wine instead of sake, which sounds like a sommelier's dare and somehow works beautifully. Six seats at the bar, a near-invisible entrance, and enough hush to make the whole thing feel like a pleasant conspiracy. The Valley outpost earned the devoted following; this one earns the real estate.

1. Eater The Best Beverly Hills Restaurants

A charcoal-fired street cart in a Silver Lake parking lot, doing Hermosillo-style asada the way it's meant to be done: beef piled onto tallow-rich tortillas with cabbage, guacamole, and a lineup of salsas that demands some decision-making. The team behind it brings serious pedigree, Atla among the past stops. The menu is short on purpose, asada tacos, burritos, and the fixings, and the line makes the case before you've ordered.

1. Eater The Hottest New Restaurants in Los Angeles

The menu changes six days a week and gets posted to social media, so regulars follow Tevin Love's feeds the way other people follow sports scores. This Vermont Square soul food and Caribbean spot grew from home-cooked meals sold out of Love's house, and the dining room still carries that energy. Oxtails, jerk chicken wings, and macaroni and cheese anchor the rotation, but the jerk salmon and lamb chops, when they appear, tend to disappear fast.

1. Eater The 38 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles

1. Eater The Hottest New Restaurants in Los Angeles

An Italian-leaning specialty food shop that doubles as a sandwich counter, with crusty bread packed with combinations like fried zucchini and pesto or prosciutto and coppa. The shelves hold artisanal cheeses, salumi, preserves, and breads for anyone who wants to assemble something impressive at home. Been around forever under different ownership, and the new team moved it into a brighter space without losing the plot.

1. Eater The Best Beverly Hills Restaurants

A Sunset Strip breakfast diner where the pancakes run about twelve inches across and the menu lists twenty variations, which means the only real decision is how much butter you want on your Oreo stack. The crowd on weekend mornings makes the sidewalk look like a casting call, but the line moves. A casual, cash-friendly spot that takes pancakes more seriously than most places take anything.

1. Eater The Best Pancakes in Los Angeles

A post-fire renovation gave this Abbot Kinney neighborhood restaurant a fresher face, but the kitchen's restless energy is the same. Chef Casey Lane shops the farmers market in the morning and writes the menu by evening, so the charcoal-kissed dishes you order barely existed as an idea at breakfast. Pasta, whole fish, and whatever looked good at the stalls that day fill a room that Venice locals treat as a standing appointment.

1. Eater The Hottest New Restaurants in Los Angeles

The front window is how you order, the aguas frescas are poured cold, and the adobada is quietly the whole argument for coming. This Echo Park taqueria is a branch of a Tijuana original, serving the usual lineup of proteins as tacos, mulitas, burritos, and vampiros. It landed on Eater's hottest new restaurants list, which tracks, given how fast the neighborhood found it. First-timers are pointed toward the adobada, and regulars tend to agree.

1. Eater The Hottest New Restaurants in Los Angeles

Vaca is a polished Spanish restaurant by the FIGat7th mall, an Orange County import that landed where the consultants and the company cards are. Tapas like gambas al ajillo and croquetas start around $20, ribeyes and paellas run much larger, and the steaks climb past $100. It suits a client dinner, a power lunch, or a parent you'd like to impress. Wear the good blazer, and let the expense report take the hit.

1. The Infatuation The 19 Best Restaurants In Downtown Los Angeles

Lobster rolls come two ways here, cold New England-style or warm with butter, which tells you most of what you need to know about West Side Oyster Club. It's a casual seafood spot on Ocean Avenue doing clam chowder bread bowls, fried oysters, shrimp tacos, and po'boys in a room dressed in rustic wood and white tile, the whole thing quietly pretending the Pacific isn't right outside.

1. Eater The Hottest New Restaurants in Los Angeles

Sand coffee brewed over heated sand until frothy is the move here, and Yala is one of the only coffee shops in the city serving it. The Middle Eastern cafe on Sunset leans into fig matcha lattes and espresso-apricot tonics alongside the traditional stuff. It shares a block with a natural wine bar and a flea market, so the sidewalk patio fills with the kind of Silver Lake crowd that has strong opinions about both coffee and vintage denim.

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Yi Cha means "second round" in Korean, which tells you the plan: show up already fed and keep going. It's a Korean gastropub on North Figueroa, doing pub food with a Korean American accent, like nachos piled with ginger-braised pork and chicken wings in gochujang Buffalo sauce. The cocktails run toward lychee and soju, and the bubbling gamjatang is a fine reason to ignore your original dinner plans.

1. Eater The Best Restaurants in Highland Park

A former bike shop on York Boulevard that now runs eggs and cocktails out of the same kitchen, Zero Fox is a family-owned all-day cafe and bar doing brunch in the morning and burgers after the sun dips. The menu shifts by the hour: chilaquiles and hot honey chicken and waffles give way to nachos and wings, with aguas frescas on one end and a chile-rimmed Foxirita on the other.

1. Eater The Hottest New Restaurants in Los Angeles

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