Best Los Angeles Restaurants

Zagat Guide to LA and SoCal 2011

If you’re trying to find the best Los Angeles restaurants, then in our view the latest Zagat guide is a pretty good place to start. And not just LA - this 2011 guide to dining covers Southern California including Orange County, Palm Springs, and Santa Barbara. You don’t get the long and lingering, mouth-watering reviews of restaurants that you have with some dining guides, but what you get instead are the collected views of over 10,000 regular diners, rating 2,106 places to eat.

Best Los Angeles Restaurants
What we like about Zagat is that in trying to assess the best Los Angeles restaurants, they don’t just stay at the dining high-end. Their Top 20 list of the most popular LA eating spots includes delis and burger places, and even the Cheesecake Factory chain, alongside the likes of Spago and Mélisse. Sure, the list for Top Food is very different from the Most Popular places, but the reviewers - and editors - do take account of the fact that different diners want different things, and you also want different things on different days. Sometimes you just want a pizza - but a good one.

The Most Popular Los Angeles Restaurant
And, as it happens, the Most Popular Los Angeles restaurant according to Zagat reviewers is a pizza place: Pizzeria Mozza. It’s obviously no ordinary pizza parlor, though. Zagat’s reviewers say the whole thing is a ‘gastronomic experience’ and call their pies ‘delectable’ and ‘better-than-sex’. OK, make mine the Margherita.

Most Popular Santa Barbara Restaurants
This LA guide also covers Southern California, including Santa Barbara, and this is the Zagat choice of the five Most Popular restaurants in Santa Barbara:

La Super-Rica (Mexican)
Downey’s (Californian/French)
Ca’ Dario (Italian)
Hitching Post (BBQ)
Brophy Bros (Seafood)

Categorising the Best Los Angeles Restaurants
Another appeal to us is the way Zagat lists the best options under different categories - by cuisine, by location, by special features like wine lists or late dining, by views, best service, and also the best bang for the buck. You feel like Mexican? Babita is up there with the same Zagat rating as Spago. Best View? The Saddle Peak Lodge out there on Cold Canyon Road, which also gets rated as one of the two best romantic locations in LA. Best Value? The In-N-Out Burger chain.

Clear and Easy Zagat Guides
Zagat guides are easy to follow, with the restaurants listed alphabetically, first for LA, then Orange County, Palm Springs, and Santa Barbara. Each entry has full contact details, the write-up which consists of snippets from several different reviewers, and finally ratings in four categories: Food, Décor, Service, Cost. It’s a really simple approach and for us, it works.

Buying this Best Los Angeles Restaurants Guide
The Zagat Guide to Los Angeles and Southern California Restaurants 2011 is published by Zagat at $15.95 in the USA, $18.95 in Canada, and £10.99 in the UK. It is available on Amazon USA, Amazon UK,and worldwide.

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Pacific Coast Highway Hotels Guide 2012

To help you in choosing your Pacific Coast Highway hotel, guesthouse, inn, bed-and-breakfast, resort, motel or other accommodations, we've prepared our Pacific Coast Highway Hotels Guide ebook. In it we do mini-reviews of accommodations along the Highway, from Seattle to San Diego, through Washington, Oregon, and California.

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