As bars with food go, the Tavern is a lot like Joe Jost’s: they don’t make it until you order it—and they make it right there. At a place known for burgers, one of the best is the Pendejo Burger: served with a split ortega chili atop the patty, a slice of jalapeño jack cheese, [...]

Longtime favorite Delius digs in to Signal Hill

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
It used to be that at Delius, you had to have faith. Dining was mostly out of your hands, locked up instead in the restaurant’s prix fixe meals, all based on set menus and served at set times. And it was that fixed experience that [...]

Suzanne Tracht brings her classics to town

TRACHT’S by ROSHEILA ROBLES
The menu posted outside Tracht’s reads a lot like something you might find at a basement pot luck: steaks, roasts, deviled eggs, puddings. But anyone who has eaten at Jar—Chef Suzanne Tracht’s tremendously popular LA restaurant, from which her Ocean Boulevard chophouse was spun off—knows that [...]

The food’s still great, and the charm’s off the charts

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
In the days when we lived near Second Street—great days, those—we ate well. There were then, as there are today, lots of great places to eat on the street, and we indulged in most of them, because then, as opposed to now, we [...]

Lapping up M&M’s familiar tastes

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
For a lot of people, soul food is a kind of hesitant paradise—an always enticing, always gratifying cuisine that, once it draws you in, stuffs you so full that you can’t even feel regret. What’s more, it’s only afterwards that you even remember you had limits—that you promised [...]

Reminiscing at the Pike Bar and Grill

PHOTO by ROHSEILA ROBLES
Outside the cluster of shops known as the Pike at Rainbow Harbor, one of the last remnants of Long Beach’s Coney Island past sits on a series of wooden supports. There, at the far end of a parking lot, the peaked, circular roof of Looff’s Lite-a-Line [...]

You’ll Welcome the Quaint Charm of the Starling Diner

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
For most people, I’d imagine, heading to one’s “happy place” involves multiple, spliced images of the tropical variety: piña coladas served inside coconut shells, a hammock tied between two palm trees, tanning without fear of UV rays and/or visible stretch marks. My happy place [...]