Best thing I ate: Under the spell of mushrooms in Newport Beach

Hambone’s Bar & Grill in Huntington Beach is first and foremost a barbecue restaurant. But there’s more to it than that. This is also a burger joint. The pastrami burger at Hambone’s Bar & Grill in Newport Beach (Photo by Brad A. Johnson, Orange...

It’s getting easier to find a decent pad Thai in Orange County. A memorable yum woon sen, too. In a surprising twist of good news, Thai restaurants have been opening at almost the same clip lately as Japanese ramen shops. I’ve already written...

It’s hard to recall a better piece of fish lately than the roasted sea bass at Detention, the restaurant formerly known as Playground in downtown Santa Ana. The skin is crisp and delicate, like a micro layer of chicharron. The flesh underneath...

I am not a fan of stuffing just any kind of food into a tortilla and calling it a taco, but the pastrami taco from a pop-up restaurant called Malli could be the most Los Angeles, of-the-moment thing I’ve eaten all year. When it works (e.g., Roy...

There is an entire universe of alternative proteins that mimic beef, chicken, pork and fish. There’s even a hunk of mycelium (the fibers that make up nature’s fungal network) created to look, feel and taste like a chicken breast. What follows are...