Hotville began as a pop-up in Chinatown in 2016 and has since expanded to a full fledged restaurant. The hot chicken is served in breast and leg quarters and as wings at the new restaurant with five heat levels.

Try the oxtail hash or fried chicken and waffles for brunch and the jerked catfish for dinner.

Hawkins is known best for its baroque Angus beef burgers; try the Whipper Burger, a double-patty burger with pastrami and a hot link. If you're hungry enough, try the Leaning Tower of Watts.

"Oxtails taste like home," Bill Addison, one of our restaurant critics says. This place does it right. For sides, he recommends collard greens, mac and cheese, and black-eyed peas.

A mainstay in our 101 Best Restaurant list (placing 23rd in 2019), Meals by Genet is home to warming Ethiopian cuisine. In his 2015 review, renowned restaurant critic Jonathan Gold says: "It has never been easier to find gored gored or a plate of tibs; stacks of freshly made sour injera or fitfits of every description. But it is hard to stay away from Genet Agonafer's softly lighted bistro."

The chef is making "California soul food." Among the highlights include hanger steak, cooked to a meticulous medium-rare, in a lush mushroom gravy spiked with Hennessy. Critic Bill Addison said he thought he had tried every method of fried chicken until he went to Alta Adams: "I’m obsessed."

The restaurant is known for the crunch of the battered, fried chicken made with a secret recipe in deep kettle drums, but also for that sweet honey.

Brisket is omnipresent, and Texas native Kevin Bludso is a forefather of L.A.'s modern barbecue boom, critic Bill Addison writes. Bludso's offers a sweet, peppery sauce, but the beef ribs and the sausage don't need it. Don't stray from the splendor of Bludso's phenomenal brisket, beef sausage and ribs with porky greens and banana pudding.

New Orleans-style po-boys and New York-style hero sandwiches meet in Los Angeles. For the po-boy, fried shrimp is layered with shredded lettuce and tomato on crisp and chewy bread, slathered generously with mayo. It's the NOLA po'boy you've been missing and likely dreaming about, writes Jenn Harris. Several locations.

You'll hear pickup orders called out: biscuit sandwiches, hot cakes, wings, cheeseburgers, tacos, red beans and rice. But it's the sausage that put Mama's Chicken on the map. An esteemed institution in South Los Angeles, the market's claim to fame is its perpetual bestseller: chicken sausage links.