Love Local: Time Out supports and celebrates local food, drink and culture

Hibiscus is a rosemallow by any other name, and there’s hibiscus sprinkled throughout the menu at Rosemallows, Long Beach’s new tropical bar and restaurant from the team behind Beer Belly.   The fun concept with a Miami Vice-like setting takes its name from a scientific term for the colorful flower, and the ingredient finds its way into chicken wings and burgers and other beachy bar bites and sips (all of which are available for takeout and delivery right now). Not to be confused with a tiki bar—there’s one of those attached to Rosemallows already—the drinks here are less rum-forward and more explorative; think fewer by-the-books mai tais and more space for general manager, lead bartender and creative director James Squire to experiment. It’s the next evolution for Squire and proprietor Jimmy Han, who flipped the Long Beach Beer Belly space in late November. The duo removed a few tables and chairs from the craft-beer destination, adding a pool table in their place and lining shelves with old VHS tapes and vintage boomboxes. Rosemallows isn’t kicking craft beer out of the building entirely, but now you’re more likely to sip a coffee martini featuring house-made horchata than you are a dozen saisons and IPAs. “I think craft beer—in general—had its moment but now is on its way down,” says Han, “or it’s not that super big draw.” Instead of heading to a beer bar, he says, now people buy straight from the breweries themselves. Photograph: Stephanie Breijo So now there are tropica

Kwang Uh and Mina Park filled nearly 200 half-pint containers with their luxurious banchan for opening weekend. By Sunday evening, only one remained. The husband-and-wife team heralded for their genre-bending Korean restaurant, Baroo—and then its 2019 reprise, Baroo Canteen—soft-opened their long-awaited food stall within Grand Central Market last weekend and, unsurprisingly, the new homestyle products and packaged goods flew off the shelves of Shiku. Starting this weekend, expect even more to try.  Shiku launched with an array of banchan, each one a labor-intensive side dish bursting with ingredients like sesame, house-made gochujang and perilla seed, as well a line of Baroo-branded soy sauces, chili pastes and fermented-plum jams. Starting on Friday, which marks the food stall’s grand opening, Uh and Park will unveil a menu of doshirak—or Korean packed meals—that each include Korean steamed rice, three banchan and one main dish. You might find galbi, as well as pork belly marinated in a thick ssamjang, with doshirak priced between $11 and $15 per box.  Photograph: Stephanie Breijo Eventually there will be family-style meals, as well as a value doshirak planned at a priced below $10 that sports house-made spam. While Baroo, which might return again one day, buried its ratatouille-inspired “Jangtatouille” under artful tangles of mustard leaves and a sprinkling of parilla powder, Shiku will showcase comforting, more straightforward classics just when we all need a little com

Bold layers of Korean texture, flavor and and color will unfold at a new restaurant pop-up this week, but first you’ll need to unwrap that bojagi.  At Naemo, a new West L.A. venture from two vets of tasting-menu–driven Atomix in New York City, the ikura gets marinated in soy. The mandu trade dumpling dough for hollowed-out chicken wings. The japchae is served with wagyu, and the namul is topped with Santa Barbara uni—each delicate banchan filling a square of boxes imported from Japan, all wrapped up in a patterned, folded cloth to untie. The thoughtful new curbside-pickup operation is a joint concept from executive chef Ki Kim and operations manager Arnold Byun, both of whom recently landed in Los Angeles after years in some of the world’s most famous Michelin-starred kitchens and dining rooms. It’s also a contender in a growing fine dining movement, one where Korean flavor is finally front and center in exquisite forms and exciting new presentations. “A lot of the Michelin-starred restaurants we’ve worked in are honestly not Korean—they’re either Japanese or French, Italian, what have you,” says Byun. “So the concept is: Let’s take California cooking and produce and apply our identity as Korean-Americans and what we know, and try to put Korean flavors at the forefront of our minds as we build out the menu for our pop-up. [It’s] California cooking with Korean flavors and finesse.” Photograph: Courtesy Naemo/Ben Hon The format is simple, the pricing, affordable: Each meal i

In the wake of a public health emergency and economic downturn, one of the nation’s hardest-hit realms is indisputably the restaurant and bar industry. Millions of restaurateurs and employees working this essential service are struggling to navigate labor, food costs, rent and their own safety through modified re-openings, mandated closures and the sporadic announcements of dining regulations, and the cost and uncertainty are proving too great for some—resulting in the closures of some of the best restaurants and bars in all of L.A.  A few of the city’s restaurants have pivoted to takeout and delivery specials, while others launched to-go cocktails and patio dining. Some are waiting to reopen in any form, hoping to weather the pandemic without business or staffing; the restaurants below have found that despite their best efforts, their restaurants or bars can no longer hold on. 

As we sort out our at-home New Year’s plans and brace ourselves for an evening of sky-filling, not-so-legal pyro, we thought the time was right to share some brief thoughts about the year that must not be named.  First, a parade of “thank yous” is in order: to the frontline workers and the social justice demonstrators. To the distilleries who started making hand sanitizer and the restaurants that flipped into corner pantries. Thank you to every independent venue that makes us Love Local. And thank you to the People’s Bodega and L.A. Community Fridges for keeping Angelenos hydrated and fed, the Broad for bringing a bit of infinity to our homes, the Getty for classing up our Animal Crossing islands, Disneyland for blessing us with Dole Whip and churro recipes and the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve for streaming its bloom. And actually, that last one reminds us that we want to extend an extra thank you to nature, basically the only living thing outside of our own house that we could touch without fear in 2020. In a year that made most indoor activities an impossibility, we’ve never been more grateful to live in a city whose best assets are outdoors anyway. The brief closure of beaches and trails in the spring aside, being able to hike up a hillside, walk through a street lined with jacarandas, escape into the mountains, relax at a botanical garden or dip our feet into the ocean (especially when it was turning a shade of Lisa Frank blue) provided instant mood-lifting pi

This was—to put it nicely—a year for spending time indoors, and as we ran through our stocks of dried beans and canned chickpeas and tried (and failed) our hand at baking sourdough, we wondered just how professional chefs do it. Thankfully some of the best in L.A. clued us in with hundreds of tips and cooking tricks. Cocktail pros, James Beard Award winners, food hosts, and even an action star turned taco authority all released stellar cookbooks this year to help level up the time we spend in our own kitchens. Nancy Silverton’s meat palace chi SPACCA showed us how to perfectly sear a steak and char our vegetables. Café Gratitude’s affirmation-based, totally vegan samosa chaat can finally be ours at home. Apotheke’s botanical cocktails helped trick us into drinking nutritional elixirs with our booze.  Whether you’re still hunting for holiday gifts or shopping for yourself, L.A.’s best cookbooks of 2020 are sure to help in 2021 and far beyond—after all, there’s so much more than sourdough to master. See Also: The 15 Best New L.A. Restaurants of 2020, The 25 L.A. Dishes that got us Through 2020, The Best L.A. Cookbooks of 2019, The Best L.A. Cookbooks of 2018 Courtesy Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Wyatt Conlon AMBOY: Recipes from the Filipino-American Dream Before Alvin Cailan founded Eggslut, before he helped reinvigorate Far East Plaza with incubator Unit 120, before he hosted The Burger Show and before he launched Amboy and then Amboy Quality Meats (now home to one of L.A.’s b

Southern California restaurants are banned from offering on-site dining, but per L.A. County rules, drive-ins can remain open even with food service—and one of L.A.’s best pizzerias is pivoting to match. On Wednesday, Hollywood’s L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele launched drive-in screenings in an adjacent parking lot, propping up a screen, stringing some bulb lights through the space and providing a new format to serve their Neapolitan-style pizzas, fresh pastas and antipasti, a possible lifeline during this financially dire time for restaurants. L.A. County recently shuttered all dine-in service, most notably outdoor seating, and while a county judge overturned the county board of supervisors’ ban this week, California’s new regional restrictions still outlaw on-site dining—meaning L.A.’s restaurants and bars must continue to operate with takeout-and-delivery–only models. Despite officials’ suggestion that Angelenos remain in their homes, per county regulation as long as residents remain in their cars and adhere to the 10pm curfew, drive-ins are still allowed. So L’Antica built a drive-in. The setup is contactless and the format is casual: No tickets are required, and guests must remain in their vehicles at all times. Upon entry they'll receive a flyer with three QR code squares to scan using their smartphones: One code leads to the full food menu, one leads to the restaurant’s market and pantry selection (should you need to pick up olive oil, produce or any other home items wh

As Shania Twain once sang: looks like we made it. We’ve persevered through everything 2020 had to throw at us and we couldn’t have done it without the help of Los Angeles restaurants. As always, they’ve been there for us when we needed comfort, when we were too lazy or overwhelmed to cook and needed delivery, when we needed to force ourselves to eat a vegetable or when we simply required a tray of gelato to the face.  We reflected on 2020 and all the meals that helped us get through it, whether it was a new underground pizza pop-up so good we ordered it twice in one week or the stalwart sushi that never lets us down. Here are the dishes that helped keep us sane and fed through it all. So long and thanks for the memories, 2020. (Just kidding—the real thanks go to the restaurants, this year’s real MVPs.) See Also: The 15 Best New L.A. Restaurants of 2020, The Best L.A. Cookbooks of 2020 RECOMMENDED: Full guide to the best restaurants in L.A.

In one of L.A.’s coolest new restaurants, food meets fashion meets family meets art in a setting that feels more like a scene from a vaporwave thriller set in Shanghai than it does a homestyle family operation in the heart of Eagle Rock. But Humberto Leon asks: Why can’t it be both? We assumed Chifa would be fashionable given the designer cofounded Opening Ceremony—a trendsetting clothing label known for its playful individualism—but his first major foray into the restaurant world wound up building one of the city’s most colorful and unique dining rooms. As soon as indoor service returns to L.A.—Chifa is currently only open for takeout—you’ll be able to sit among plush velvet stools and wavy green-and-white marble tabletops while holding even wavier gold flatware to dig into generational recipes for Chinese, Peruvian and Taiwanese dishes. In the kitchen whipping up that brûléed char siu and soy-sauce–poached chicken? His mom, “Popo” Wendy Leon, and his brother-in-law, John Liu. Helming the operation as CEO? Humberto’s sister, Ricardina Leon. It’s a full-on family affair and one that’s decades in the making: Popo first opened her own restaurant—also called Chifa—in Lima, Peru, in 1975. It was traditional Cantonese-leaning Chinese food made for Peru’s sizable Chinese population, at least until the Leons immigrated to the U.S. and landed in Highland Park not far from where the family’s new Chifa stands today. View this post on Instagram A post shar

With four new restaurants, 200 outdoor seats and a rooftop, Culver City’s new food hall is already a sight to behold—and it’s got more on the way. The sprawling 7,500-square-foot Citizen Public Market opened in November in the Citizen Publishing Company building, and now the historic former home of Culver’s most influential newspaper—and even some fictional ones for nearby movie studios—is the site of some of L.A.’s coolest new dining concepts. Even if you can only get the food to-go for the time being, it’s more than worth checking out. The building blends Art Deco and Beaux Arts architecture, and under its grand arches, exposed beams and large windows you’ll find a few of L.A.’s coolest culinary names—including Nancy Silverton, who just opened her much-anticipated pizza-leaning concept here. In total you can expect eight dining and drinking options housed within the two-story space, such as a new, forthcoming California soul food restaurant from Alta Adams chef Keith Corbin, plus a designated bar. For now only half of these concepts are open, and they all offer takeout and/or delivery services. Here’s what you’ll find in Culver City’s expansive new food hall. View this post on Instagram A post shared by goodboybob coffee (@goodboybobcoffee) goodboybob This is more than your average coffee shop, but if you just want coffee, goodboybob’s got you covered there, too. The Santa Monica café and roastery just opened a new