Plugs — Bill Addison

L.A. food, drink, and leisure recs from the Los Angeles Times restaurant critic + LINKS

Plugs is The Angel’s recs column. Every week, you’ll get six picks—a restaurant, a bar, a shop, an ingredient, a person, and a treat—from someone in Los Angeles who knows what they’re talking about, plus a selection of Angel-curated links. (Plugs are for paid subscribers of The Angel only; upgrade your subscription to receive all six!)

#78 is Bill Addison, the restaurant critic of the Los Angeles Times. If you read The Angel, you know Bill; he’s our city’s preeminent food critic, the man behind the annual 101 Best Restaurants package (having filled Jonathan Gold’s shoes quite nicely), and a lyrical writer on topics ranging from martinis to Maryland crab. Bill has held the critic role at the L.A. Times for over six years now, and, in 2023, he won the Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Review Award from the James Beard Foundation. Before setting down roots in his beloved Los Angeles, he spent more time on the road than not as Eater’s national critic, roaming the United States to pinpoint the best new restaurants year after year. And before that, he had his finger on the pulse of the Atlanta food scene, the Dallas food scene, and the San Francisco food scene, having worked as a critic and food editor for Atlanta Magazine, Dallas Morning News, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Bill is a food world icon, and, lucky for me, a friend. Here he is with his Plugs!

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Restaurant — Sora Craft Kitchen

To make his first restaurant a reality with no investors and (as yet) no other staff, Okay Inak settled into a space on a solitary but well-lit block near DTLA’s Fashion District. His menu, Turkish with a global perspective, is concise. He makes three singular dishes based on family recipes that are like nothing else in Los Angeles. The biggest dazzler is kitel, a variation on içli köfte (a.k.a. kibbeh) in the shape of a smooth, large dumpling made from pounded bulgur and filled with peppery spiced beef. The presentation pulls it away from the context of home cooking; Inak serves it in a ceramic bowl garnished with Aleppo butter, yogurt, and herb oil. It’s technically an appetizer but I’d even order two as an entree. Start with corti taplamasi, a cloudy, spicy soup based on fermented cabbage; we love kimchi-jjigae in this town, and this is the correlate from a culture 4,000 miles west. For dessert: kirecte kabak, hunks of butternut squash essentially slaked in lime so they become translucent and crackly on the outside but stay meltingly soft inside when cooked. Inak sweetens them in simple syrup and finishes the whole thing with tahini and pistachios. He’s also the friendliest guy, rushing dishes out from the open kitchen and then racing back to tend to everything he has going on the stove.

Photo by Bill Addison.