14 Restaurants That'll Make You Fall In Love With LA Again

"Just when we think we’ve experienced all the treasures of the San Gabriel Valley, a restaurant appears that makes us giddier than a toddler with a bubble machine. That’s how we felt the first time we visited Alice’s Kitchen, a larger-than-life Hong Kong cafe in Monterey Park that opened in 2019. This bright and busy diner is a full-on Hong Kong theme park, complete with an imported taxi cab outside, action movie posters on the walls, and a big family-filled patio designed to look like a street market. The food is fantastic—get the potent milk tea, pork chop pineapple bun sandwich, and the condensed milk-oozing Ovaltine french toast—but mostly we love what Alice’s represents: a lovingly oddball tribute to another part of the world that makes perfect sense here. " - brant cox, garrett snyder, jess basser sanders, nikko duren, sylvio martins