A fresh take on L.A. eats.

How do you capture the essence of dining in Los Angeles? In the beauty of a just-puffed tortilla pulled fresh from the comal, or in the benediction of a chef silently placing a single, perfect piece of nigiri on the sushi bar? In the moment a bubbling cauldron of soondubu jjigae finally cools enough to sip its broth, or on the early fall morning when figs replace peaches in the local bakery’s pastries? There’s no one way to express our food culture’s mix of transience and tenacity, to fully fathom its greatness.

Still, it’s our job to give readers some guidance. Between us we’ve logged more than 1,000 restaurant meals in the last year, including the visits that inform our weekly reviews. This list is our current working definition of where and how to eat in L.A.

We began our jobs as The Times’ restaurant critics last December, days after the release of 2018’s 101 list written by our Food section colleagues Andrea Chang, Jenn Harris and Amy Scattergood — with collected contributions from the late Jonathan Gold’s last year of reviews.

Our living portrait of L.A.’s culinary preeminence caps a decade in which the city received the national and international attention it deserved — for our bleeding-edge creativity married to peerless abundance, for our pop-up chefs who become household names, for the wealth of immigrant communities that inform our tastes and, by extension, America’s tastes. Everyone knows our tacos are superior; our tasting menus probably are as well. Who knows what delicious revelations the next year will bring?

—Bill Addison and Patricia Escárcega