LAGuide

The Best Restaurants In North Hollywood

16 places for a great meal in North Hollywood.
The Best Restaurants In North Hollywood image

photo credit: Jakob Layman

Located in the shadow of all the major movie studios, North Hollywood is a suburban neighborhood in the Valley littered with actors seeking low rent and more black box theater spaces than you ever realized existed. But more than that, it’s home to a diverse and exciting crop of restaurants, with many of them in unexpected places (see: gas stations or swap meets). So there’s no excuse to be eating chain burgers when you probably live a few blocks from a Venezuelan breakfast cafe or pizza and wing specialist. If you don’t know where to start or find the Valley sprawl as overwhelming as we do, stick to these 16 spots that won’t disappoint.

THE SPOTS

photo credit: El Bacano

Dominican

North Hollywood

$$$$Perfect For:LunchCasual Weeknight Dinner
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We can probably count every Dominican restaurant in LA (in Southern California?) on one hand. That’s a shame, but thank goodness we have El Bacano. This small, colorful strip mall spot offers a wide range of Dominican staples, like tostones, various habichuelas, and, our favorite, their sancocho. This soup is only available three days a week, but feel free to plan your visit around it because it’s worth the trip. Big pieces of pork, chicken, and beef bob inside a salty, zippy broth that’s cloudy from rendered fat. It’s a big portion, so maybe split it with a friend and order more dishes for the table.

$$$$Perfect For:LunchWalk-Ins

Kim Thai Food is a food stall inside La Fiesta Swap Meet, a shopping mall where you can buy sneakers, stock up on holistic medicinal remedies, and get your eyebrows threaded in one trip. This neon-lit stall near the back does a mix of Thai and Laotian dishes, like duck larb with scorched chilis and fresh herbs, bowls of kaeng lao, and their specialty, mok pa. These curried catfish parcels come wrapped in a banana leaf and hit you with wafts of lemongrass and chilies when you open them. The flaky and saucy fish goes great with sticky rice and their citrusy, extra-light tom yum, flavored with a mix of fresh and dried chilis that add heat to the clear broth. Cash only.

Much like jury duty or reading Animal Farm in school, experiencing the Thai street food market at Wat Thai should be a citywide mandate. Every weekend, this Buddhist temple hosts nearly a dozen food vendors in its parking lot, and locals show up by 9am to beat the lines. On the menu is everything from mango sticky rice and BBQ beef skewers to spicy som tum and duck noodle soup, and the most popular stalls tend to sell out by noon. If you get excited about dining at picnic tables covered in street food, Wat Thai will give you goosebumps. Just remember that it’s cash only and you’ll need to exchange your money for $1-$2 tokens that you’ll use to order food.

There are two reasons to come to Gorilla Pies in North Hollywood: wings and pizza. The former are excellent across the board, with crisp, potato-chip-like skin, and the pizzas are solid too, especially if you like busy pizza with personality. There’s a good chance the owner will greet you from behind the counter while spreading pickled fennel, smoked sauerkraut-kimchi, char siu, or tater tots over fresh dough (the simpler options here are our favorites, though). This counter-service spot is in a strip mall—parking is abundant, and seating is limited, especially on weekends. With leather booths and a by-the-slice case, Gorilla Pies has the charm of sitcom pizza parlors where teens hang out after school.

Cilantro resides inside a Chevron off Sherman Way and is easily our favorite place to eat inside a gas station. Pretty much everybody at this order-at-the-counter Mexican spot is here for the excellent $12 burritos. Whether it’s a breakfast burrito filled with eggs and turkey sausage, the off-menu surf and turf with Angus beef and seared shrimp, or the house carne asada burrito served enchilada-style, these are well-composed, quality burritos that make you realize how many other places are phoning it in. That said, don’t you leave without tacking on a carne asada or beef barbacoa taco, too.

Sri Siam is a seemingly random family-run Thai restaurant right off the 170 freeway. We say “seemingly random” because it’s actually not random at all. Open since 1984, Sri Siam has been serving dishes like papaya salad, boat noodles, and khao soi long before you could easily find them outside of Thai Town. But aside from its historical standing, the food tastes incredible. We suggest the crispy rice salad, the panang curry, and the off-menu radish cakes. Then sit with your feast and watch Wheel of Fortune play on loop on the TV in the corner.

When you hit the stretch of North Hollywood that’s basically just semi-trucks and loading docks, it means you’re close to Mi Ranchito Veracruz. This tiny order-at-the-counter Mexican restaurant has an excellent menu stacked with burritos and chilaquiles, but everybody’s really here for the tamales. They’re served Veracruz-style (wrapped in banana leaves instead of corn husks), are perfectly cooked, and slightly sweet. Sprinkling the spicy red table salsa on top is also a must. If you’re throwing a big house party, they also do catering.

photo credit: Jakob Layman

$$$$Perfect For:Breakfast

Despite a name that sounds like an overpriced drip coffee shop on Abbot Kinney, Coffee For Breakfast is a tiny cafe that serves traditional Venezuelan breakfast and lunch from 7:30am-4:00pm (6pm on Fridays). Our favorite section of the menu is easily the cachapas, which come with gooey, cheese-filled corn cakes, a protein of your choice on the side, and eggs. Round out your meal with a cinnamon cafe con leche. The place is pretty small, so if you’re with a bigger group, head out back where you’ll find a leafy, shaded patio with all the room you need.

Your refrigerator broke, your muffler is doing that thing again, and all your new headshots look like they were taken in the dark. It’s been a rough week and you need comfort. Go to Mofongos. Our recommendation at this family-run Puerto Rican restaurant is to start with the appetizer platter that comes with beef-filled potato balls and yucca fritters, and then end with the carne guisada mofongo. It’s a mountain of deep-fried green plantains topped with a savory beef stew that’ll make all your problems seem like a distant memory.

Walking into Chiba, the massive sushi restaurant in North Hollywood, is like walking into a sushi social club. No matter what time of day you come, this multi-roomed restaurant will be filled with birthday parties housing specialty rolls, solo lunchers making their way through the omakase, and booths of little old ladies sipping tea and complaining about their husbands. But Chiba is more than just a scene - they serve some of the freshest fish north of Ventura Blvd. If you’re coming in solo or with another person, sit at the bar, where the chefs will gladly inform you which nigiri is especially good that day.

This excellent birria specialist has a few locations around The Valley, but parks its truck in Noho every Tuesday-Sunday. For those mornings when you need something hearty, warm, and spicy to clear your brain fog, their birria en caldo is a guaranteed cure. This spicy broth is filled with plenty of onion, cilantro, and slow-cooked beef for a somewhat balanced breakfast. If you’re looking to throw something else into the mix, get their birria ramen, which is classic Maruchan noodles swimming in the house consommé. When it comes to feasting on birria, we throw the metaphorical rule book out the window, so don’t be surprised if you order a bit of everything and end up dunking your tacos in your ramen too.

photo credit: Jakob Layman

$$$$Perfect For:Dining SoloLunch

For all the regions of American barbecue that you can find in LA, Memphis-style is still a bit underrepresented. And that’s why when we first saw chef Manu Aka appear on KTLA in the summer of 2020 talking about his new Memphis Grill on Lankershim, we were excited. And then when we tried his food, we were really excited. Memphis-style barbecue leans heavily on pork that’s been smoked in a signature dry rub and served with a tomato-based sauce on the side, so when you’re at Memphis Grill, every meal needs to start with the pulled pork and baby back ribs. The meat here is sweet and zesty with a pronounced tanginess you can’t often find in LA barbecue. At $24, the 2 meat + 2 sides meal is a fantastic value for how much food you get.

It’s not that you’re antisocial, it’s just that you sometimes need an hour by yourself at lunch or you probably won’t make it through the end of the day. When it’s time for a solo meal in North Hollywood, head to Hayat’s Kitchen. This family-run Lebanese restaurant has excellent food (we particularly love the kebab platters and any of the hot maza), prices that hover around $15, and a quiet front patio that kind of feels like you’re in a forest. If sitting out here with big plates of meat and sides of hummus can’t clear your mind, nothing will.

The journey to find a healthy lunch spot that won’t make you sad inside is a long and winding one - even in this town. If you work or live around North Hollywood, HealthyCA is about as good as it gets. The tiny salad shop on Lankershim isn’t anything more than a counter and a few tables out on the sidewalk, so don’t come here for your weekly lunch outing with friends. Come here for a really fresh salad (get the namesake HealthyCA) on your lunch hour or in between auditions, and to eat it all in blissful solitude in your car.

With locations in both Noho and Lake Balboa, Salsa & Beer is one of the most popular Mexican restaurants in The Valley. It’s easy to see why - the large menu is filled with dishes ranging from sizzling fajitas to carnitas tortas, there’s a long list of Mexican beer and margaritas, and those unlimited chips, salsa, and bean dip are always free. But most importantly, Salsa & Beer has managed to keep that rowdy, neighborhood restaurant energy that makes it so hard to leave at the end of the night.

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