Food Truck BBQs Its Way Onto LA Weekly's 'Gold 99' Restaurant List

August 28, 2009 at 11:26 AM | by Heidi Atwal | Comments (0)

LA Weekly is every Angeleno's go-to guide for local news, legit entertainment reporting, and event listings. Like other weeklies, it can easily be found at any number of freestanding news kiosks, or piled high in front of trafficked restaurants. We're hesitant to admit it, but there's one useful piece of information that's stuck with us after watching reruns of perkier-than-thou Rachael Ray's food travel show $40 a Day: The local paper is a prime source for learning about a city.

Arguably, the Weekly's crown jewel is food critic Jonathan Gold's column, a helpful survey of the Los Angeles restaurant scene, from $5 pho to prix fixe dinner menus. Honored with a Pulitzer Prize for his writing, Gold is something of a local hero, so when his Gold 99 list of Essential LA Restaurants is released every year, copies of the Weekly seem to disappear from newsstands quicker than normal.

Released this week, 2009's Gold 99 is a diverse map of all things culinary in La-La Land, giving props to long-time favorites like every wino's favorite small plates restaurant, A.O.C., Nancy Silverton's upscale pies at Pizzeria Mozza, and also nodding to current trends, like the mobile food resurgence led by KogiBBQ (that's @KogiBBQ on Twitter).

If you prefer a gastronomic adventure to a tour of stars' homes, then use Gold's list to mark down places of interest, then breakout your LA Streetwise Map and plan your haul across the city's savory landscape. You're guaranteed to "come hungry; leave happy," but eat a helluva lot better than you would at IHOP.

The entire Gold 99 list is available on LA Weekly's website for easy access. If we have but one small gripe with the way it's organized, we'd like to suggest that the usual dollar-sign designation be attached to the reviews (indicating how expensive a restaurant is, from "$" to "$$$$"), which it strangely is not.

[Photo: alonzoD]

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