Thai Town, a six-block stretch of Hollywood Boulevard between Western and Normandie, has long been a destination for food-loving Angelenos – a pilgrimage, even. This neighborhood is home to some of the city’s best Thai restaurants – most of them tucked inside strip malls that get so busy at night they need valet parking. In 1972, Bangkok Market opened on the eastern edge of Melrose Avenue. It was the first Thai market in the United States, owned by the parents of celebrity chef Jet Tila, who has appeared on various U.S. food television shows.

Whether it’s a weekend morning or weekday dinner, the 20-seat Azay in Little Tokyo is packed. On a nice day, extra tables are set up on the sidewalk, also filling up quickly. Inside the restaurant, chef Akira Hirose and his son, Philip, work the kitchen, while Akira’s wife, Jo Ann, greets customers. Azay only opened in Little Tokyo in 2019, but the legacy of chef Akira Hirose and his family goes much further, both in the Los Angeles food scene and in Little Tokyo in general.

Eating in the city of Angels is always exciting, with new restaurants and pop-ups continuously appearing and long-time restaurants still holding their own. Cliché as it may sound, Los Angeles is a true melting pot of cuisines where you can find food from pretty much every corner of the globe, as well as a new generation of third-culture chefs creating dishes inspired by their experiences growing up in a global city like L.A. It was no easy task to narrow our choices down, but these are the memorable meals that made it onto our Los Angeles Best Bites list for 2023.

In the grab-and-go section of Katsu Sando’s second L.A. location hangs a T-shirt that reads: “Krispy and thicc sandos bruh.” That’s not a typo. The extra “c” in “thicc” refers not only to the audibly loud crunch you get from the casual Japanese restaurant’s panko-crusted pork and chicken cutlets, but to the generous fillings and fat slices of honey-milk bread that make up its eponymous dish, the katsu sando. Katsu is a fried cutlet, an iconic element of Japanese cooking. But sando is not just a shorter way to say sandwich. It is the translation of a Japanese interpretation of a “Western-inspired sandwich” – a fitting star dish for this L.A. spot. The bread itself (shokupan), made with milk and honey, is meant to be an elevated version of fluffy American sandwich loaves like Wonder Bread.

It’s no secret that Los Angeles has an amazing Korean food scene. L.A.’s Koreatown is the largest in the United States, with over 500 restaurants, so Angelenos are lucky enough to find restaurants that specialize in less common dishes, beyond the popular Korean barbecue or bibimbap. One such dish is yeomso tang (also spelled yumso tang), a stew traditionally made with Korean black goat meat, which we tracked down at Mirak. Black goats get their name, naturally, from the black hair that covers their body. They are native to Korea, where eating black goat is believed to have numerous health benefits. Not only is it a leaner meat, it’s also believed to be very nutritious.

To find the entrance to the Attari Sandwich Shop, you need to listen for the sounds of a bubbling fountain and the chatter of groups of people dining. While the official address is on Westwood Boulevard, the entrance is actually around the corner on a side street due to a remodel of the building. There’s a sandwich board sign aiming you in the right direction, but it tends to be blocked by parked cars, so it’s important to keep ears and eyes open. When you do find it, you will walk through a patinaed gate into a small, inviting courtyard area with the water feature in the center and the smells of food being grilled wafting through the space.

At a quick glance, the dimly lit entrance of Chinatown’s Far East Plaza shows a handful of humble restaurants selling familiar rice noodle dishes, banh mi sandwiches, and pho. Once inside, rays of light guide you to a busy open-air plaza that hosts a thriving, out-of-sight destination for curious eaters where vendors have long lines, sell-out early, or prefer reservations. Among the many businesses celebrated here, open only Friday through Sunday and selling out within a few hours, is Baker's Bench by Jennifer Yee. Peering into a small glass case as if they were gazing at precious gems, customers visiting Baker's Bench are privy to rows of flaky chocolate croissants, moist blueberry muffins, rich black sesame cookies and buttery Danish pastries.

At lunchtime, a line starts to form in front of Lu’s Garden in San Gabriel. Right in front of the entrance is a narrow walkway and a long counter with a line of buffet trays filled with braised pork, lap cheong (a type of dried, sweetened Chinese sausage) and more. Stacked behind them are bowls filled with more dishes like sautéed string beans and bok choy. The kitchen staff can be seen replenishing the various buffet trays seemingly every five to ten minutes, keeping them full as hungry patrons file through. Both dine-in and takeout customers choose their dishes based on what’s at the counter – there are more than enough options, as Lu’s Garden generally has fifty different dishes at a time.

Perusing the menus of most Indian restaurants in Los Angeles, one may forget that India is the seventh-largest country in the world, with over 30 states and union territories. A limited handful of the same recipes – chicken tikka masala, tandoori, naan – repeat themselves time and time again. These are the dishes most commonly found on Indian restaurants’ menus across the U.S., including Los Angeles, and they all hail from North India. Sridhar Sambangi is looking to change this at Banana Leaf, which serves regional specialties from South India. Sambangi spent more than 30 years working in technology startups, which included a cloud-based food ordering service for restaurants. Food has always been his passion, though, and he finally took the leap to start his own restaurant with Banana Leaf.

Editor’s note: In the latest installment of our recurring First Stop feature, we asked Javier Cabral, the Long Beach-based Editor in Chief of L.A. TACO, where his go-to spots are in L.A.’s last-standing working-class beachside community. He is the former restaurant scout for Jonathan Gold, the Associate Producer of the Taco Chronicles series on Netflix, and the author of “Oaxaca: Home Cooking From the Heart of Mexico” and “Asada: The Art of Mexican-Style Grilling.” Javier has been having the time of his life tasting through all of the Cambodian, Laotian, Thai, and Vietnamese noodles in Cambodia Town and Little Saigon in Westminster. Follow him and L.A. TACO on Instagram. Confession time: Moving to Long Beach straight-up reinvigorated my passion for eating out in my home city. Mainly because living in the middle of L.A.’s Cambodia Town and its universe of dank noodles, beef sticks, and mango salads is a hell of a lot more exhilarating than the wave of post-gentrification restaurants that have opened in Highland Park in the last decade.

Los Angeles winter is typically mild, sunny and dry (notwithstanding this past winter), so here it isn’t the warmer weather we await for every spring. Still, for a multitude of reasons, spring is a season many Angelenos celebrate. For me, spring signals the arrival of wildflowers and the beginning of spot prawn season, two uniquely Californian events that I anticipate each year. As California’s official state flower, the poppy flowers in Antelope Valley are the most popular wildflowers, but the poppy reserve tends to be way too crowded – especially on superbloom years. I like to head to Malibu instead for my wildflowers. The drive north along the ocean on Pacific Coast Highway is one of the most beautiful in L.A. – we could even already see some wildflowers along the way.

Every few months, a small part of quiet West 87th Street near the Los Angeles International Airport turns into a scene of nighttime street food. On these evenings, Ayara Thai – a family-owned restaurant that has been around for 19 years – sets up a makeshift kitchen on the street and puts tables out on their sidewalk and the street patio that was originally installed during the pandemic shutdown. Thai hotpot, barbecue and street food popups are among the special events Ayara Thai holds throughout the year, but there is one that is the most unique and perhaps the most popular: the kancha boat noodle. Thai boat noodle is a noodle soup with a rich broth made from pork or beef, dark soy sauce, herbs, and typically thickened with cow or pig’s blood.

For Eli Berchan, it certainly seemed like the universe was telling him to open his Lebanese restaurant, Sumac Mediterranean Cuisine, in Hollywood. Prior to coming to Los Angeles, Berchan was living in Lebanon and working in event management and organizing destination weddings. At the end of February, 2020, he had come to Southern California to attend an industry conference. “The last day of the conference was Covid day one, and I ended up being stuck here,” Berchan recalled. Since he wasn’t able to go back to Lebanon, he rented a place in Hollywood, and soon found out the owner happened to be Lebanese. Berchan was doing some private cooking to get by and sent his landlord, Ferris Wehbe, some traditional Lebanese food he had prepared to thank him.

Eating in the city of Angels is always an exciting time, with new restaurants and pop-ups continuously appearing and longtime restaurants still holding their own. Cliché as it may sound, Los Angeles is a true melting pot of cuisines where you can find food from pretty much every corner of the globe, as well as a new generation of third-culture chefs cooking amazing dishes based on their experience growing up in an immigrant family in the United States. It was no easy task to narrow our choices down, but these are the memorable meals that made it onto our Los Angeles Best Bites list for 2022.

When The Joint first opened on Ventura Boulevard in the summer of 2018, the concept of dry-aged fish was still very much unknown in Los Angeles, even though master sushi chefs typically age their tuna for a few days and have been doing so for some 400 years. At The Joint, though, owner and fishmonger Liwei Liao takes this a few steps further by dry-aging different types of fish and sometimes aging certain fish for up to three months. From salmon to mackerel to branzino, Liao has perfected the art of dry-aging fish over the years, and now he’s spreading the word.