The Best Splurge-Worthy Restaurants in Los Angeles

Whether celebrating a new job, an important anniversary, a milestone birthday, or just surviving the week, head to the places on this list for exquisite culinary experiences paired with thoughtful service and sumptuous environs. Advanced reservations, and sometimes even monetary deposits, are required at most of these restaurants, so plan ahead for a night of revelry. Here are the best splurge-worthy restaurants in Los Angeles.

Bistro Na's Bistro Na’s, which opened in Temple City in 2016, is the first U.S. restaurant to serve Chinese imperial cuisine.



The restaurant’s recipes were originally reserved for royalty and have been passed down through generations of chefs who worked in the imperial kitchen. Standout dishes — including chef Tian’s famed Peking duck which requires reservations two days in advance — are served in a room that feels like a traditional Chinese courtyard from the Qing Dynasty. Reservations are available on OpenTable .

Also featured in: The Best Chinese Restaurants in Los Angeles The 22 Essential San Gabriel Valley Restaurants UKA Find Michelin-starred UKA on the fifth floor of Japan House in the heart of Hollywood. Presiding over the fine dining experience is Yoshitaka Mitsue, a kaiseki master who prepares a winding, hyper-seasonal menu in front of diners using impeccably sourced ingredients. The current wintertime menu priced at $450 per person begins with a kombu kelp broth followed by a selection of appetizers, sashimi, wagyu shabu shabu, and more.

An abbreviated menu using the same ingredients is offered after 8:30 p.m. Also featured in: Los Angeles’s 2024 Michelin Stars, Mapped The 15 Best Restaurants in Hollywood Linden Linden, an ultra-sleek Hollywood restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, is a snapshot of chef Jonathan Harris’s New York upbringing , where he had exposure to cultures and foodways that now inform his Los Angeles cooking.

Dishes tell the story of how the Caribbean, Italian, and Jewish diasporas commingle in New York — a centerpiece wagyu pie brims with oxtails and gravy under a puffed “patty” pastry lid; prawns and polenta pool in a spicy arrabbiata cream sauce; a bread basket course features an oversized everything bagel with salty fried chicken butter. Drinks like the Lemon Ting and L.I.

R.R. also wink to Linden’s East Coast reverence, but the vibe is 100 percent LA: The interior is lush (plants veritably drip from the ceiling), the well-dressed clientele almost famous.

Cap the night at its chopped cheese sister restaurant next door, and you complete the full New York fantasy in the heart of Los Angeles. — Nicole Adlman, cities manager Also featured in: The Hottest Burgers in Los Angeles Right Now 10 Hot New Brunch Spots to Check Out in Los Angeles Ladyhawk Lebanese-born chef Charbel Hayek incorporates California produce into Mediterranean fare at Ladyhawk, which opened in West Hollywood in late 2023. A recent transplant to LA, the chef reimagined Ladyhawk’s stunning two-person mezze platter with riffs like an avocado and corn hummus served next to a remarkably creamy traditional version.

The spread also includes baba ghanouj, muhammara, falafel, Lebanese olives, halloumi with summer tomatoes, spicy harissa wings, and something called “mama ghanouj” made with confit onions, charred zucchini, and lamb chorizo ragu. Another menu charmer is the ahi tuna crudo, an artfully presented dish that won Hayek first place on Season 2 of Top Chef Middle East in 2022. That crudo, along with herby and heaping salads, a dry-aged Rohan duck with honey and rose water, and a braised beef tagine are more of what makes this restaurant tucked inside the Kimpton La Peer Hotel one of LA’s standouts.

— Mona Holmes, reporter Also featured in: The 20 Best LA Restaurants That Are Open on Monday Nights The 38 Essential Restaurants in Los Angeles Antico Nuovo Chad Colby’s enduring Italian restaurant, unexpectedly located in a Larchmont-adjacent strip mall, serves what may be the city’s most polished pasta, grilled meats, and rustic Italian fare through an incisive California lens. The menu includes a robust focaccia (“pane”) section with add-ons like burrata and scallion oil, marinated anchovies, whipped ricotta and pistachio pesto, or duck liver pate, while antipasti include seasonal salads and crudo. The windowless room manages to charm well-dressed diners eager to find stellar vintages on its wine list, and every table orders its share of house-churned ice cream.

— Matthew Kang, lead editor Also featured in: The Best Italian Restaurants in Los Angeles The 38 Essential Restaurants in Los Angeles Sign up for our newsletter. Check your inbox for a welcome email. Oops.

Something went wrong. Please enter a valid email and try again. Sushi Kaneyoshi There are many exquisite omakase experiences to be had in Los Angeles and the one served at Sushi Kaneyoshi is arguably the best.

Chef Yoshiyuki Inoue serves an edomae-style progression in a hidden-away basement in Little Tokyo. The menu is priced at $300 per person. Reservations are available on Tock .

Also featured in: The 22 Best Sushi Restaurants in Los Angeles Los Angeles’s 2024 Michelin Stars, Mapped Baroo After taking several years off to build a family and Grand Central Market restaurant, Shiku, with wife Mina Park, Kwang Uh brought his celebrated fermentation restaurant to the Arts District in 2023. Baroo’s reincarnation in the Arts District — a tasting menu restaurant with creative cocktails, beers, sul, and wine — has placed it firmly at the top of LA’s modern Korean food movement. Though the exploration of Buddhist philosophy is a part of the menu’s overall direction, Uh and Park aren’t heavy-handed with the ideology.

Instead, expect a gorgeous, thought-provoking journey through a proverbial life cycle in Buddhism, from youth to maturity, exhibited as courses like battered skate wing with seabuckthorn wrapped in lettuce or pork collar with goulash jjigae and baek kimchi. Priced at $115 before drinks, tax, and tip, Baroo is now the experience it should have been from the start. — Matthew Kang, lead editor Also featured in: The 38 Essential Restaurants in Los Angeles 16 Best Arts District Restaurants in Los Angeles Kato Restaurant Chef Jon Yao and his team have carried the torch of Taiwanese cuisine for almost seven years since its origins at a West LA strip mall.

In its dining room in Downtown LA’s expansive Row project, Kato has a menu focused on the subtle, elegant flavors served in a handsome but relaxed space. The tasting menu, featuring intricate bites of caviar-studded Dungeness crab with Chinese celery or grilled freshwater eel served over seaweed fried rice, costs about twice what it did in West LA. But the menu boasts a more thoughtful progression of whimsical bites to more substantial explorations of Taiwanese comfort fare, and the service situation is multitudes better than the original Kato.

Plus, everything from the wine list to the cocktail menu are world-class, with compelling vintage bottles to inventive milk punches or shaken drinks designed by bartender Austin Hennelly. — Matthew Kang, lead editor Also featured in: The 17 Best Restaurants in Downtown Los Angeles 16 Best Arts District Restaurants in Los Angeles Mori Nozomi Nozomi Mori has assembled an all-female hospitality team at her namesake omakase counter in West Los Angeles, serving a beautiful and thoughtful parade of Japanese seafood. Mori’s delicate, mindful actions and intricate cooking mark the arrival of one of LA’s newest sushi stars, capped with luxe ingredients like uni, caviar, and hairy crab broken down in full in front of diners for maximum theatricality.

The restaurant only seats eight people for three nights a week, making reservations tough to get, but they are worth the effort. — Matthew Kang, lead editor Also featured in: The 22 Best Sushi Restaurants in Los Angeles N/Naka Chefs Niki Nakayama and Carole Iida-Nakayama serve a 13-course modern kaiseki experience for $310 per person. The menu changes with the seasons, along with the chef’s whims, while the flow of the meal adheres to Japanese traditions.

The three-hour experience is beautifully orchestrated and paced just so, leaving diners pampered, satisfied, and feeling thoroughly justified for indulging in something so extravagant. Reservations are available on Tock . Also featured in: Los Angeles’s 2024 Michelin Stars, Mapped 14 Essential Omakase Feasts in Los Angeles Mélisse Restaurant Fine-dining chef Josiah Citrin and chef de cuisine Ken Takayama know how to dazzle diners at this two-Michelin-starred restaurant.

Snag a seat in the 14-seat dining room for an eight-course, two-and-a-half-hour culinary experience that can include a seaweed tart with smoked salmon and roe, A5 wagyu beef with morels and pickled ramps, and more. The meal costs $400 per person and reservations are available on OpenTable . Si! Mon Si! Mon swept into Venice’s beachside dining scene in late September 2023, bringing with it Panamanian flavors and dishes that span foodways from across Central America.

Behind the menu is chef José Olmedo Carles Rojas, who grew up in Panama City and opened his seminal restaurant Fonda Lo Que Hay there. Now, in Los Angeles, Rojas has grappled with how to merge the flavors of his home city with the appetites of Angelenos. At every turn, he succeeds: The tightly composed menu zig-zags from buttery, briny starters like uni and littleneck clam shooters to razor-thin, achiote oil-splashed tuna carpaccio draped over a yuca tostada to double-fried green banana patacones served with a lip-puckering ajillo sauce.

The pièce de résistance, however, is the gluten-free fried chicken drumsticks , which are lollipopped and dusted with a verdant seasoning salt comprised of pulverized roasted rice, shiitake mushrooms, and an intoxicating blend of alliums and herbs. (Diners also can’t go wrong with the crispy pork belly lettuce wraps served alongside coconut vinegar-spiked beans and the banana leaf-steamed kanpachi.) Planted in the former James Beach space, which has been done up with rich tropical colors and midcentury furniture, Si! Mon proves to be an unbeatable night out by the boardwalk.

— Nicole Adlman, cities manager Also featured in: The 18 Best Restaurants With a Fireplace in Los Angeles The 20 Best LA Restaurants That Are Open on Monday Nights.