Yucatán Grill keeps on

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
Even with more than a decade of dishes behind it, Yucatán Grill remains stuffed, turning over tables with a speed usually reserved only for the most youthful restaurants. It never takes long to be squeezed into a booth, but while you wait—steadily sucking in the nearby sea air—you can’t [...]

Pâtisserie Chantilly’s creamy dreams

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
Most of Pâtisserie Chantilly’s pastries are a matter of memory, classic concoctions of culinary history so baked into our collective consciousness they’ve become monuments to the French tradition. Some were born between the walls of stately palaces; others received simpler, less immaculate conceptions hundreds of years ago. But centuries-old [...]

Sprouts takes the typical tropes of the farmers market and cooks them down to country-fried levels: barrels filled with nuts and candies, aisles marked by faux blackboards and sales spelled out in fat schoolhouse scripts. The market doesn’t dig as deep into the locovore tradition as it presumably could, but the brand-new Seal Beach outpost [...]

Porky’s BBQ brings the meat

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
There’s no shelter from the elements at Porky’s BBQ—even with a smearing of sunscreen, those with sensitive skin are bound to get cooked while waiting for their meals. And the air off Redondo Avenue only speeds up the process, thanks to a low-lying heat that gets kicked up [...]

It’s likely you already have your reasons for eating at Domenico’s—perhaps the house salad with giant black olives and garlic dressing, or popular special pizza topped with ground sausage, ground pepperoni and ground salami (!). But in case you need another reason to come here, or you’re just in the mood for a pleasant, light [...]

Letting go at Formosan

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
It starts with the menu, Formosan’s bilingual list of meats so long it leaves you susceptible to almost any suggestion. Then, after a quick pick, you wait, watching with an anxious appetite as steaming meals are sent to every corner of the dining room. Finally, it ends when a [...]

Leave your wallet open at At Last Café

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
There is something vaguely un-American (or at the very least un-Californian) about the interior of At Last Café—could be the number of tables (six), or the space between them (not much), or the separation between the dining room and the kitchen (there is none). For [...]

Try as some folks might to apply the “You seen one monkey . . . ” axiom to Mexican food, simply playing around with the same basic ingredients—tortillas, beans, cheese, cabbage, etc., etc.—in one kitchen as another does not guarantee you identical results. This is a beautiful thing—why, it’s the very foundation for our debates [...]

What you should learn in school, but won’t
Some nights, deciding where to eat or what band to see can be as difficult as settling on an elective course to round out your schedule. Whether you’re new to town or have been here since graduating college (in 1983), here’s our cursory course catalogue of Long Beach [...]

Sunnin stands apart from Second Street’s Lebanese trio

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
Sunnin is a restaurant turned outside-in, an alleyway of a place where fake balconies bulge out of the wall and decorative shutters stay permanently sealed. In that faux courtyard, the restaurant feels as though it has an open-air café stuck inside, lights streaming off the [...]