Food destinations that are more iconic than Grand Central Market. The best of Los Angeles for free. By entering your email address, you accept our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and agree to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and promotions from partners. The rise of dining rooms in Southern California has changed the way we dine.
Here's our guide to the best. Eat a sandwich here, drink a plate of ramen there and, before finishing, with some ice cream. When it comes to preparing the best food, it's always fun to choose at the diverse restaurants in Southern California, where you can find small businesses and some of the most thoughtful, creative, and tough chefs in the region. Across Los Angeles.
Check out our guide to our favorite restaurants in Los Angeles and Orange County and start planning your next visit. An email you'll love Step into the arch of this arcade-style 1924 mall and you'll find a glass-roofed alley dotted with restaurants and shops. Crowds are still scarce (it doesn't compete with Grand Central Market), but the food supply is solid. Stop by the Guisados stand for tinga or a chorizo taco with horchata; order succulent char siu rolls, porchetta and eggs with cheese at Rice Box, a quick and casual Cantonese destination; and if you're looking for brunch, there's nothing better than Blu Jam.
Would you like to have a drink? Step inside Garçons de Cafe, a bar and wine boutique that will instantly transport you to Paris. Walk around 4th Street Market and you might think this food hall is small. Take a closer look and you'll discover that there's a lot at the Santa Ana hangout, with more than a dozen vendors serving everything from pan-fried pizza to falafel to ice cream sandwiches. However, you must first stop by Alta Baja Market, a specialty food and delicatessen store that highlights the flavors of California, Mexico and the American Southwest with dried peppers, baked goods, cheese plates, and more.
Then, tour the food hall and stop by the nationally recognized Burritos La Palma, the Golden Eatery, Nashville's chicken specialist, and many others. An outdoor patio hosts occasional bands, while Recess by Playground invites visitors to relax with a craft beer or glass of wine. Yamashiro is the ideal place to enjoy views across Hollywood and the greater Los Angeles basin. On clear nights, diners can eat sushi, noodles, meatballs and more as they watch distant planes land at LAX or in the bright lights of downtown.
It's not every day you're going to be able to convince yourself (or anyone else) to go to Burbank for an elegant dinner, but when it comes to The Castaway, you make it happen. Yes, it's a bit pricey here, but they recently redesigned their menu and it was a much needed improvement. With that said, everyone is still here to curl up around one of the outdoor fire pits and contemplate the (surprisingly) beautiful San Fernando Valley. Located above the Santa Monica Proper Hotel, Calabra is a cozy Mediterranean restaurant with an indoor lounge, a poolside patio, and curved sofas that you can rent for more privacy.
On weekends, the music is loud and people dress up to be seen drinking mai tais next to the giant circular bar. However, it's also just a couple of blocks from the water, meaning you'll enjoy unobstructed ocean views and, occasionally, a flurry of salty marine air. When it comes to Hollywood rooftops, this exclusive Italian venue atop The Aster is one of the few you'll want to spend a lot of time at. Lemon Grove's menu includes a good mix of fusion-style pasta and small plates that work well for a cool date night, but the real draw is the outdoor patio.
It has postcard-like views of the Capitol Records building, luxurious patio furniture, and you can usually get in without having to wait for a table to arrive. Stop here to enjoy a Manhattan mezcal before a show in the Pantages or dance to disco music in one of their weekly DJ sets. There must be something about the airports just outside LGB in Long Beach. The Hangar houses more than a dozen food vendors in a 17,000-square-foot former aviation hangar.
Here, now, there are restaurants and bars to enjoy the views of the greater Los Angeles area, from the valley to the center of the city and to Malibu. San Laurel is one of apparently five hundred dining concepts at Conrad Los Angeles, a large high-rise hotel within the larger Grand LA complex in the center of the city. Most restaurants are generalists, with no real theme or theory behind selecting vendors, but NorthRidge Eats is a little more specific than that: it's an Asian food hall. Every restaurant or bar in this outdoor food court is powered by reused metal shipping containers from the port of L.
Maybe it's a little less elegant than other restaurants. You never quite forget that you're in a mall in front of an industrial park deep in the valley, but the options are good and there's plenty of seating, a good option if you visit CSUN or the Chatsworth Courthouse. First opened more than a century ago, Grand Central Market didn't begin as a food hall, but its move to new, more striking tenants about a decade ago kicked off the trend of larger dining rooms in Southern California. For most, the trip to the restaurants starts at a ski lift that takes people directly to the stone patio and, from there, continues with breakfast, sandwiches, simple salads and endless views of the greater Los Angeles area.
Now that spirit is extended to the dining space with Citizen Public Market, an elegant food hall built on a former publishing house in downtown Culver City. Los Angeles enjoys sunshine and amazing views, from the soaring mountains to the downtown skyline and the endless ocean. Like the food truck craze and the pop-up window craze, restaurants, at their best, are an incubator for exciting new culinary talent and a relatively low-risk way for established chefs to try something different and (hopefully) creative and strange. Anaheim, no longer just for Los Angeles games and Disneyland trips, now has a namesake dining room that has helped usher in a new era in the city's dining and nightlife scene.
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