For decades, this paper has entrusted its restaurant critics with the job of deciding the city’s best restaurants. In the 1990s, critic Ruth Reichl, followed by S. Irene Virbila, put together Top 40 Restaurants, an unranked list of the year’s best “special occasion places,” as Reichl wrote in 1990. “Most people can’t afford to eat in them very often,” she admitted. “I can’t either.”
The restaurants she ate at “again and again,” she said, were “the great, inexpensive” restaurants from cultures all over the world “that make living in Los Angeles so exciting.”
When restaurant critic Jonathan Gold revived list making at The Times in 2013, he insisted that his picks would not be limited to special-occasion places. He also decided the list should be ranked from 1 to 101. So it was a big deal when a food truck — Roy Choi’s Kogi — was not only included in Gold’s first 101 list but ranked No. 5.
Current restaurant critic Bill Addison has embraced that approach. The lists he curated with co-critic Patricia I. Escárcega in 2019 and 2020, then on his own for three years and now, for the first time, with columnist Jenn Harris, easily weave excellent pizza, taco and barbecue places in among essential splurge restaurants. Consider that No. 8 on the 2024 list is a taco stand near the Arleta DMV serving lamb barbacoa on Saturday and Sunday mornings.
Look back at every 101 guide since 2013 and you will find a complex story of dining in Los Angeles. In 2020 and 2021 the list was unranked due to the pandemic, as it was in 2018, the year of Gold’s death when the food team, led by editor Amy Scattergood, scrambled to compile “101 Restaurants We Love.” Then there is the growing dominance of omakase and excellent pizza, plus the appearance of restaurants serving Laotian, Uyghur, Caribbean, Syrian, fine-dining Central American and many other world cuisines.
The rankings also tell a story. As much thought goes into determining which restaurant will be No. 1 (Michael Cimarusti’s Providence in 2013, Jon Yao’s Kato in 2024) as No. 101 (Apple Pan in 2013, Watts’ Locol in 2024).
Above all, these are critics’ lists curated with a critic’s sensibility of the restaurants that are not just making good food but also adding something vital to the evolving conversation about how we eat in Southern California.
—Laurie Ochoa
