Clarissa Wei

Handmade noodles from Shaanxi Gourmet

There are few things in life better than a bowl of authentic and properly-constructed handmade noodles. Even in the San Gabriel Valley, it's hard to find a noodle place with the real thing, made by a seasoned chef trained in China. We've encountered some: Kam Hong Garden from Shanxi, Sweethome Grill from Henan, and Shaanxi Gourmet from Shaanxi. Noodle making is a dying art form; chefs who can properly make a bowl of mian stand out.

The classification of Chinese noodles, a Northern China (bei fang 北方) specialty, gets complicated. Handmade can mean a lot of things: hand-kneaded, hand-pulled, hand-torn or knife-cut. The knife-cut variety (dao xiao mian 刀削面） originates from Shanxi, and is made by shaving off a kneaded piece of dough with a small blade. The hand-pulled version (la mian 拉面) is a Lanzhou delicacy and is crafted by repeatedly stretching the dough. Noodles need to be kneaded for long periods of time to get a chewy consistency.

Note that handmade noodles aren't just limited to Lanzhou and Shanxi. Shaanxi (a different province than Shanxi), Henan and Xinjiang have their own version of handmade noodles as well. The common denominator: They're all provinces in Northern China.

Despite the technicalities, we've scoured the city and rounded up the 10 best Chinese handmade noodle restaurants in Los Angeles. We took into account the quality of the dishes, the "Q" (al dente in Chinese) factor of the noodles and the overall atmosphere of the restaurant. Turn the page.

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T. Nguyen

Tacos al pastor at Tacos Leo

Los Cincos Puntos, one of our favorite places for a taco, is located right near a cemetery. This is fitting, in a way: After all, in Los Angeles, nothing can be said to be certain except death and tacos. Indeed, we're willing to bet that if you peeked in backyards across town during Memorial Day weekend, you'll find tortillas and carne asada grilling on the Webers as readily as you'll find hot dogs and buns, and kids will be adding salsa to their tacos the way your 10-year-old self topped your hot dog with relish. Summer can't come soon enough.

Beyond the backyard, we're fortunate to have a landscape dotted with great taco trucks and taquerias. And while there are countless ways to connect these dots to come up with a top 10 list, ours is comprised of tacos that are not only stellar in their own right, but so fantastic that we would drive clear across town for them. Turn the page for the full list.

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Clarissa Wei

Har gow

Los Angeles is a special place. While the rest of America opts for eggs and a mimosa on Sunday mornings, a good portion of Los Angelenos prefer Chinese banquet-style restaurants for their weekly fix of turnip cake and tea. The long impatient lines and lack of parking spaces on Valley Boulevard is proof of that.

With the San Gabriel Valley, the city boasts so many of the top Hong Kong-style restaurants in the United States that it's hard to pick just one -- much less ten. Many of the menu items are identical, service is notoriously lacking and the wait time can reach up to two hours in a crowded parking lot. Even the decor is similar. And in the SGV especially, a lot of the top restaurants have at some point or another swapped chefs or owners. But the distinctions, however subtle, are there. Turn the page for our round-up of the 10 best dim sum restaurants in Los Angeles.

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NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Earth Day is this Sunday, April 22, and regardless of where you stand on the dietary spectrum, consider curbing your carbon footprint with a meal free of animal byproducts. Nonprofit organization Environmental Working Group found that eating one less burger per week for a year equates to reducing 320 car miles driven. Even if you only swap out one meal in observation of Earth Day, that's six miles you just saved.

This meal need not stray too far from your preferences. Not when there are such wide-ranging options like vegan ice cream, pizza and com ga hai nam available. Turn the page for our 10 Best Vegan-Friendly Restaurants, keeping in mind that, ultimately, one person's pumpkin seed chorizo wrap is another's jackfruit taco.

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Rachael Narins

Grilled Cheese

What is a grilled cheese sandwich? It's comfort food. It's warm and retro-yet-now and endlessly customizable. It's something that can be lowbrow, high-end and everything in between.

How is it defined? For the purposes of this guide, we're saying a grilled cheese is a vegetarian sandwich that's served hot and consists of 80%-90% melted cheese on sliced bread that has been pan-fried or griddled. Plain and simple. If it's mostly pulled pork, or short ribs, that's not a grilled cheese -- that's lovely hot pulled pork or short rib sandwich with cheese. Is that good? Yes. No doubt. That just doesn't make it right for this list.

For those times you're craving rich-fatty-carbohydrate-heavy goodness, there are lots of local spots willing to feed your need; and we suggest one of the following. Having meticulously sampled them all (and then some) and gained a few pounds in the process (because we care!) we present the Top 10 Best Grilled Cheese Sandwiches in Los Angeles. We still haven't quite figured out why it's called grilled cheese, when there's rarely a grill involved, but we're willing to let that one go.

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The Joy of Sushi

Does Los Angeles boast the best sushi in the entire country? If even Ferran Adriá is on our side, we can probably feel confident it's true.

The factors that allow our city to be blessed with such a ridiculous bounty are fairly apparent: proximity to superior fish markets, a healthy roster of master itamae, and a populace hungry for exotic and healthful cuisine. But exactly which among them are the finest of the finest?

Our wallets are significantly lighter and our mercury levels rival Jeremy Piven's, but the extensive research was worth it -- we've finally compiled our own list of the finest sushi experiences available without a passport. Turn the page.

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J. Ritz

Vintage tin at Son of a Gun.

With all the talk in our culture of locavorism, sometimes the noise of that discussion can have the odd effect of drowning out one of our region's signature wild-food sources. We do live in a coastal city, after all, and stretching back millennia, inhabitants of the Los Angeles area have sustained themselves on proteins caught from the ocean. This tradition still lives on, thankfully, and thrives, often now in concert with other overlapping environmental and culinary pursuits. It's a beautiful thing when a piece of big-eye tuna meets pickled watermelon rind, red onion and shiso that likely were bought at the Wednesday Santa Monica farmers market. Or when word gets out that a sliver of a restaurant on Pico procures bloody clams on a regular basis. And yet, despite best intentions, we often wind up eating seafood from globalized sources despite our immediate access to the Pacific. (It's complicated.)

Regardless, print out your Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch pocket guides or get the app if so inclined, or maybe even read up on your alarming-but-hopeful Paul Greenberg analysis of the current state of ocean-derived foods today. But don't let that destroy your appetite, since most of us could use an omega-3 boost. So turn the page for our picks for the 10 best seafood places in town.

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Anne Fishbein

grilled pork belly at Palsaik Samgyeopsal

Los Angeles' Koreatown probably doesn't need another BBQ place -- well, at least not another Korean one. There seems to be a restaurant with tabletop grills in every plaza, strip mall and food court, cannibalizing another one's business two doors down or across the street. Let's be blunt: Entrepreneurial first-generation Koreans are noted more for their work ethic and competitive streak than for their originality. Still, we love Korean BBQ and can't complain about having so many specialty restaurants to choose from. Turn the page for our picks for the 10 best Korean BBQ places in town.

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Daina Beth Solomon

A Good Martini

The handful of establishments that made our 5 Best Martinis in L.A. list are not notable for their martini happy hours, Kim Kardashian-friendly accommodations or cute cocktail names. They simply make a fine martini. Vodka or gin, dealer's choice or your choice, depending on how you like to roll on a Saturday night.

Full disclosure: We started with a much broader list, including a basil-infused summer version by the beach, a seasonal pomegranate or some such holiday creation downtown. But we just couldn't bring ourselves to include them. These are martinis we are talking about.

That said, we did make one exception. We have an apple martini, though notably not a green apple version, on the list (yeah, yeah, we know). But we included the fresh apple version in the interest of future road-trip fun, when the only options for dinner are at an urban sprawl-fueled corporate chain (Outback, Bennigan's, we could go on), and we will inevitably find ourselves back in a sea of green apple martinis. The very same cocktails we remember from what seems like decades ago, the ones that never seem to change. These are the moments we can remember that one inspired version we had, back home in L.A., of what is perhaps our city's worst lingering contribution to general American cocktail ideology.

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Daina Beth Solomon

A Fantastically Plain (Freshly Made) Margarita

Ten years ago -- maybe even five years in Happy Hour time -- compiling the 5 Best Margaritas in L.A. would have been a syrupy lime-mix task. Now we're awash in so many small-batch tequilas and fresh-squeezed lime promises on cocktail menus that the idea of a $100 margarita is somehow (?) not terribly shocking. Much as we wanted to include some of our favorite places for Mexican eats and old-fashioned good times (any of Guelaguetza's outposts, El Carmen in West Hollywood, Lares in Santa Monica, we could go on), imbibing-wise, the drinks at our regular haunts are more like those side orders of rice -- not nearly as good on their own as they are with heaps of spicy food alongside.

On the flipside, while we think today's trendy pomegranate-mango and cucumber-muddled margarita variations can be great tequila-based cocktails if the right bartender is involved, to us they're tequila-based cocktails, not margaritas, much as anyone behind the bar will try to convince us otherwise (see our #2 pick). Ah, semantics. And yes, we realize our old-school Texas margarita authenticity stance makes it even more hilariously ironic that our favorite "classic" margaritas today are centered in L.A.'s cocktail alley, that corridor of downtown where $12 cocktails are mixed by suspender-clad hipsters in bars that could double as Boardwalk Empire sets. Ah, the glory days of average -- but affordable -- $6 margaritas served up with free chips, salsa and plenty of dive-bar sass.

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