Jessica Koslow

Ray's and Stark Bar

Cooking octopus can be tricky. But when done right, it's tender, delicious and loaded with health benefits (low-calorie, lean, vitamin-rich). Japanese and Mediterranean diets are swimming, as it were, with octopus options -- as is this town, where many restaurants have the dish on their menus. According to a sampling of chefs, the Spanish and Portuguese seafood are generally favored, and most cooks have a specific size they prefer -- from one to seven pounds -- for reasons ranging from tenderness to plate presentation. Some eateries serve octopus with spices from Peru, while others experiment with the flavors of North Africa. Turn the page for 10 of our favorite octopus dishes around town.

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Paul Bartunek

Carne asada fries at Taco Spot

Carne asada fries don't travel well, practically and ideologically speaking. They're increasingly hard to locate as you drive north from San Diego County, and surprisingly rare in Los Angeles, a city teeming with Mexican food, college students and medical marijuana cards. Piles of freshly fried spuds, laced with spoonfuls of guacamole and sour cream, don't tend to fare well on the short drive home, either. Wait too long to dig into a mound of the late-night favorite and you'll have some seriously bloated french fries on your hands ... and on your shirt ... and on your pants.

Around these parts, catching a fresh pile of cheesy carne asada fries takes some doing. There are a few local spots west of the 405, a couple of options around downtown and Highland Park, and some good leads near Torrance -- L.A. is not exactly a city teeming with the stuff. Still, there are great options to be had, if you know where to look. To the discerning diner, it's possible to sit down with a steaming pile of warm french fries, well salted and crisp, tucked underneath a cow's worth of tender, grilled beef and nearly overrun by fresh guacamole, sour cream and handfuls of gooey melted cheese. It may never make sense to stick fries inside your already overstuffed burrito, San Diego, but when it comes to carne asada fries, you just might be on to something.

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Anne Fishbein

The Agnolotti at Superba Snack Bar

It's easy to start nodding off when people drag out the old "New York vs. Los Angeles" debate; it's a tired one, and largely a comparison of Big Apples to orange groves, anyway. But after Bon Appetit listed its 20 most important restaurants in America and New York outshone L.A. by a factor of six, it got us wondering: Where do East Coast transplants like to eat when they're missing New York?

Die-hard New Yorkers may grumble forever at the idea of re-creating that perfect slice of pizza or ordering up a true Brooklyn bagel on the West Coast, but Los Angeles is doing a lot of great things with the foods that Gothamites have traditionally considered to be sacred territory. Here are 10 dishes that New Yorkers love to lament the loss of after moving to the City of Angels, from pizza to bagels to cheesecake, that Los Angeles is making fantastically well -- and often without regard to the way it's "supposed" to be made back east.

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Courtesy The Daily Meal

L-R: Jose Andres (chef-restaurateur), Bernardo Hernandez (director of product management, Google), Indra Nooyi (chairman and CEO, Pepsi), Ben Silbermann (co-founder and CEO, Pinterest), Michelle Obama (First Lady).

For the third year running, The Daily Meal has released a list of the 50 most powerful people in food, the people, as they say, "decide what and how you eat, whether you realize it or not." And while the list has its fair share of celebrity chefs -- the Wolfgang Pucks, the Anthony Bourdains -- there are also a lot of folks on the list that wield their power from a less visible vantage point.

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He's a cartoon in clogs, a hedonist of legendary proportions, and one of the very few food-related mega-celebrities we'd want to actually meet. As Bill Buford detailed in Heat, he plays Neil Young air guitar and likes to turn up a dinner party by delicately dosing guests' tongues with folds of lardo. As you might expect, Batali is a real beast on Twitter -- fielding questions from laypeople and firing off enthusiastic, exclamation point-laden posts. Celebrity disses? Menu suggestions? Cooking advice? He's got you covered. Below we've included seven of our favorite Batali tweets from the past week:

7.

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arnold | inuyaki/Flickr

Kyochon's fried chicken

In our last handy food flowchart, we tried to point you in the right direction for those times when you just need a bowl of phở to comfort your soul. Today, our flowchart helps you navigate the city when you're in search of another type of comforting soul food: fried chicken. And because sometimes you want that chicken with a side of kimchi pancakes or Japanese pub grub, we threw in a few suggestions that will satisfy your craving by way of Koreatown or the local izakaya.

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Joséphine Runneboom/Flickr

Alone at The Biltmore Hotel

"A is for dining alone," M.F.K. Fisher wrote in An Alphabet for Gourmets, "...and so am I, if a choice must be made between most people I know and myself." We feel ya, Fisher.

Like Fisher, we would much rather dine alone, or not at all, if the alternative is being forced to indulge some twat droning on and on about their so-called life, or to endure that awkward moment when all diners' shared interests have been thoroughly hashed and it's not even dessert yet.

Poor Fisher found 1949 Los Angeles a bit hostile to the idea of a woman eating alone in a restaurant. While some restaurants today still aren't quite optimal for singles -- dishes served family-style, for example, or tables so uncomfortably big that you feel like Edith Ann -- Fisher nonetheless would have been in a good company of misanthropes, introverts, alone-but-not-lonelies who eat alone, and eat well, in the city. In no particular order, here are our favorite spots to dine alone. Comfortably. Happily. Shamelessly.

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R.E.~/Flickr

Cupcakes were one of the most Googled terms of 2011

Much to our chagrin, the cupcake is a trend that just won't die: according to Google's 2011 Year-End Zeitgeist, cupcakes were one of the most popular Food and Drink search terms of the year. Other fascinating revelations about our food-related search engine habits: everyone in the world was constantly on the hunt for pizza, and Canadians sure do love making pork tenderloins.

As it has done every year since 2001, Google analyzed the billions of the terms that we users typed into its search box in 2011, filtered out spam and constructed "lists that best reflects the spirit of the times." Most of the search terms are ranked by popularity, though a few lists reflect the "fastest rising" searches - that is, the most popular queries in a particular category are compared to their popularity last year, then ranked based on their increase in search volume.

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Flickr/Kyle Strickland

In-N-Out Double-Double

With the mass exodus of thousands of UCLA graduates from their picturesque Westwood neighborhood -- picturesque if you've always envisioned a neighborhood where you'd search 30 minutes for a parking space before giving up, or if you've dreamed all your life of waking up at 8 a.m. to someone blasting Rihanna songs about S&M -- we not only say goodbye to our miniature apartments, we say goodbye to our favorite restaurants. The ones that we'll see on Alumni Day ten years from now and fondly say, "Hey, I got really drunk there."

To bid a fond farewell to the overpopulated student jungle, turn the page for the top 5 Westwood dishes UCLA graduates will miss the most.

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southerbornandbredgirl/flickr

Fried chicken livers

With food, one person's penance is another's pleasure. Many parents view dinner-time as an opportunity, not just to share food and company with their beloved offspring, but also to exert control. Sometimes kids are picky and sometimes parents are very, very cruel. Especially concerning liver. Read on as Squid Ink contributors shudder down memory lane back to most unappetizing dishes their parents forced them to eat. It goes without saying that some of these dishes no longer evoke the horror they once did. [Editor's note: Sure they do.]

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