It takes about 20 minutes for the kitchen to ready an order of sesame bread, but when the bread ships out with slices spilling off the plate, you know the wait was worth it. Every batch is afforded the option of having green onions kneaded into the dough (a must for more flavor), but the [...]

This is not your Thinking Man’s Pizza—no corn toppings, no clay ovens—just dough, sauce, cheese and your fixings. But that’s not to say it isn’t good. From the Pesto Pizza to the old stand-by Hawaiian, Long Beach Pizza Company aims for satisfaction over surprise. But one topping listed on the pizza menu does stand out: [...]

What makes Pupusería San Sivar’s pupusas remarkable isn’t just variety—it’s that each one fluffs up in the same style as a flour tortilla, lightened to the point that they might as well be injected with air. It’s with that puffed-up edge that the pupusas are able to fare so well as a meal of their [...]

If ever there was a dish that actually ate with all the synesthetic flash usually attributed to excellence (ingredients as bright as the day, flavors that blend together like colors), it would be Renu Nakorn’s nam kao tod. The plate is a mix of half-moons of Issan sausage (which isn’t far off from a Louisiana [...]

Down deep on Mangia-Mangia’s menu is the restaurant’s Sicilian training, represented best by its bucatini. Bucatini is long, spaghetti-like pasta, the difference between the two being that bucatini noodles are actually tubes, thin little cylinders that fatten up to the size of pipe cleaners. But the bucatini is just an accent here—the dish belongs to [...]

Nothing out of the restaurant’s country kitchen satisfies home-cooked cravings more than its ribs. The baby back pork ribs are perhaps the most pleasing of the bunch, colored such a potent pink from slow smoking that the meat almost seems unnatural. The beef ribs, however, are just as good, trading in the pork’s pink streaks [...]

Honduars Kitchen keeps conch on the menu for more native tastes, but the restaurant’s pollo frito is excellent, too—a few lightly fried hunks topped with chismol, a fresh salsa familiar to fans of pico de gallo. On the side is a hearty slop of beans and some rice. You get your choice for a third [...]

For 30 years, Isaac’s has been hidden away on Fries Avenue, set up in a colorless building barely painted a blank beige. But that’s okay because at Isaac’s, simplicity matters. The easiest way to start is with the red burrito, which contains a pile of shredded beef drenched in a mildly spicy stew of red [...]

What makes Moscow Deli the most worthwhile is its fresh foodstuffs. For the obvious entrée, order the pirozhki, which are baked to a golden brown and stuffed with chicken. Unlike the Polish-style pierogi, the pirozhki benefit here from the addition of yeast in the dough, which lightens the football-shaped puffs to dinner-roll-like levels. For possibly [...]

To get into Toko Rame’s Indonesian state of mind, the best bet is the nasi bungkus. The dish is fitted for on-the-go appetites: rice, chicken, beef rendang, tofu and a hardboiled egg all piled inside banana leaves and wrapped up for what’s close to pocket-like portability. But the miracle of nasi bungkus isn’t just in [...]