As its name suggests, Heavenly Fish Palace is first and foremost about fish. You can get your plates grilled or fried, with straight-from-the-Bayou favorites like catfish, whiting and red snapper eating up most of the menu. In terms of pure flavor and texture, grilled is the way to go. And if you’re looking for something [...]

Kalguksu is the restaurant’s staple, a dish truly meant for all seasons—one that can warm you up in the winter and also take you to the sea in the summer. That’s because kalguksu is a noodle soup scooped up from the ocean, with fat, hand-cut noodles swaying like kelp among the soup’s seafood. Swimming through [...]

Central to the restaurant’s neighborly enthusiasm is Plums’ excellent breakfast. Thanks to the restaurant’s cold-weather style, the menu brings a most welcome addition: fish. Unlike the café’s Oregon pepper bacon (heavy slabs outlined with black pepper), its seafood dishes (an alderwood smoked salmon hash, a Dungeness crab and asparagus omelet) still eat light and are [...]

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 [...]