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This feels weirdly personal:
Roasted root vegetables
Brasato
Frisee aux lardons
Shrimp and grits
Armenian-style chicken kebabs with brothy rice
Spaghetti carbonara/spaghetti alla Gricia
Sole meuniere, little roast potatoes
Risotto Milanese
Tonkatsu
Slow-roasted pork shoulder with rosemary and wild fennel
Pan-roasted chicken with white wine and thyme
Roast chicken with bread salad
Umbrian-style sausage and grapes
Oricchiette with sausage and rapini
Sliced skirt steak with arugula
Crisp duck legs with polenta
Fried chicken with spoonbread
Miso-marinated black cod
Soupe au pistou
Farfalle with long-cooked romanesco and anchovies

I'm still using the Le Creuset oven my grandmother got as a wedding present in the early '30s. It was probably expensive then too, but if you figure it has been used 200 times a year for almost 80 years, the per-use cost is pretty reasonable. I love the terrines and the ridged grill pans too, although the skillets are better for cooking down onions or tomato sauces than they are for searing.

I've had all of it but the ortolan and the casu marzu, although I'd welcome the opportunity to try either of them. That being said, except for the live octopus and perhaps the huitlacoche, I can't say that I crave any of them. Durian is foul - and the best durian is the foulest of all, like an onion forgotten behind the refrigerator for six months. Balut is disconcerting if you look at it, but basically tastes like crunchy, goopy chicken soup. Snail caviar tastes like nothing; kopi luwak is a stunt coffee; and bird's nest soup, like most Cantonese luxury foods, is all texture. Blood sauces can be awfully good though - the reason coq au vin is never any good here is because nobody puts in the blood.

For non-Angeleno readers, it must be stressed that neither location of Carney's has ever appeared on any reputable list of great Los Angeles hamburgers, and that like the late Tail of the Pup, its photoreadiness has gone a long way toward establishing its reputation. That being said, on those days when you feel like eating a B-minus hot dog in a train car overlooking the Strip, there's really no other choice.

The food is worth it. The food is totally worth it. Kenny is an incredibly gifted, if intuitive, cook, and if he had a tenth as much self-discipline as he has imagination, he'd be up there with Ripert and Ducasse. People always do concentrate on the rules, which are silly and wonderful and arbitrary, at the expense of the cooking. Every restaurant has its ways of excluding undesirable clientele, whether by velvet rope, exorbitant prices, exotic monolingualism, loud music, dim lighting, bland or spicy food, strange location or infuriating reservations policies. Kenny (and his wonderful late wife Eve) tended to be just a little less passive about it.

I submit that the finest ice cream experience to be had in the United States is the fresh-strawberry milkshake at the Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham, Alabama.

Alabama strawberries!

White Lily isn't the only, or even the best Southern flour. I've been mail-ordering for years from Weisenberger Mills, a family-owned, century-old water mill in Midway, Kentucky - if there are better biscuits than those made with Weisenberger flour, I have yet to taste them. The grits aren't sad either.

www.weisenberger.com

If by most important restaurant in America you mean restaurant most reminiscent of Marie Antoinette playing shepardess with perfumed sheep, you are correct.

Even the idea of a contest is absurd: Los Angeles is the second-largest city in greater Mexico, with millions more Mexicans than even Guadalajara. There are restaurants, taquerias and trucks from almost every conceivable region of Mexico in the metro area; an extensive network of farms and ranches growing Mexican-specific produce; and a hungry audience that knows exactly what the food from their village needs to taste like. Anybody who would posit another U.S. city as a better place to eat Mexican food is myopic, suffering from extreme nostalgia, or more likely, not getting to the right places in Los Angeles.

Actually, the charcuterie is not particularly exciting. And perhaps, compared to the high-level Spanish and Italian charcuterie we've all been eating, the restrained world of terrines, pates and galantines is fairly tame, but really - who wouldn't rather have a slice of Babbo's testa than Bar Boulud's pallid head cheese, which is not even best of breed in New York; who wouldn't prefer a bit of Iberico, not even the bellota, to Bar Boulud's wet, underflavored ham? The boudin blanc is pretty extraordinary - Boulud would get his Lyonnaise stret cred yanked if it weren't - but the bar for meats is much higher than it was even a couple of years ago.

Phillip's Barbecue. Los Angeles. But I do like Southside's hot guts.

The six-quart is just slightly too small to braise six chicken thighs or comfortably brown a pound of stew meat all at once, although I have to admit that I do both pretty regularly. The extra squosh of room in the seven-quart would be welcome, I think.

Claude's in the West Village for pain au chocolat, croissants, almond-apricot croissants, raisin rolls and delicious eclairs. Claude, who is always there, is the very model of a neighborhood artisanal baker.