North by Northwest at Plums Café

PHOTO by RICK POON
There’s a sharpness in the air around Plums Café, a clean scent that makes for the kinds of brisk breaths that usually only occur when flowers and trees all exhale at once. It’s hard to notice at first, but that crispness is part of Plums’ patio, a [...]

Number Nine succumbs to style

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
Number Nine echoes like an empty gallery, a long and lean place that bounces every sound back down to your table. Light doesn’t escape, either. It gets gathered up by walls painted the purest white and sent toward a ceiling that seems to rise up forever. It’s an [...]

Go rice-less at Lotus Chinese Eatery

PHOTO by RICK POON
Portion your order just right at Lotus Chinese Eatery and your meal won’t contain a single grain of rice. The restaurant does serve the stubby little staple (steamed as a side, fried as an entrée), but rice, a near necessity of so many Chinese meals, is left [...]

Pinto beans on your pizza and more at Long Beach Pizza Company

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
There are no walls lined with Little League team photos and no banged up Neo-Geo video arcade games, but Long Beach Pizza Company still recalls the familiar neighborhood pizza houses of my youth. You know the type: predictable, dependable and affordable, [...]

Pupusería San Sivar’s puffed-up pleasures

PHOTO by RICK POON
Even if you can’t see them, chances are the staff at Pupusería San Sivar can see you. That’s partly because of the two-way mirror that feeds into the kitchen, but it’s mostly just a simple fact of the lunch rush, the staff spread thin by eaters packed in [...]

Renu Nakorn evolves again

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
Above the restaurant’s burnt-orange booths is a retrospective piece of Renu Nakorn’s history. It’s there, hung up dead center, that a canvas collage compiles the reviews and recommendations that opened up the Norwalk restaurant to national appetites. Among all the overlapping words are those of LA legend Jonathan Gold [...]

Mangia-Mangia says hello from Sicily

PHOTO by RICK POON
There isn’t much to show for Mediterranean tastes these days—disposable houses sewn up in the sloppiest villa-like style, restaurants reduced to nothing but plates of the blandest red sauce. Mediterranean flavors and style have been co-opted, cut up and retouched until the influence is sometimes unrecognizable.
It’s because of [...]

Welcoming back Johnny Rebs’

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
There’s something sentimental about walking up to Johnny Rebs’ again—the gravel lot grinding its way into your soles, the sight of lunch lines already baking in the sun. But it’s the banner stuck up above the rebuilt façade that hits the hardest: “Welcome Home.”
For Johnny Rebs’, however, “home” isn’t [...]

Izakaya Zero balances bar food with grace

PHOTO by RICK POON
Before dark, Izakaya Zero seems a clinical place—the white walls and white menus and white chairs aren’t so much clean and modern as they are austere. But at night it transforms, shedding the orange shadows of sunset for some carefully controlled lighting, which hits all those [...]

A burrito for one is a burrito for all at Isaac’s Café

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
In a place like Wilmington, you learn to transform your surroundings. Close your eyes and cranes grow into trees, ships become mountains. Stacks of cargo containers warp into rusted monuments of industry. In a place like Wilmington, you learn how the [...]