Los Angeles does not have a shortage of restaurant recommendations. It has a shortage of recommendations you can trace back to somebody eating.
Most of what ranks well here is ranked by volume: how many people posted, how recently, how loudly. That measures attention. It does not measure whether the food was good on a Tuesday, whether the room is bearable at 8pm, or whether the thing that made a place worth the drive two years ago is still on the pass. I have cooked in this city long enough to know how far those two numbers can drift apart.
What this is
In the Mood For is a chef-edited dining publication for Los Angeles. It does one thing that most of its competition does not: it separates what we know about a restaurant from what we recommend.
The directory is the first part. It is a record of Los Angeles restaurants — where they are, when they are open, what they serve, what has changed. You can look up any of them. Most of them we have not been to, and every one of those pages says so, in plain language, where you cannot miss it.
The recommendation is the second part, and it is much harder to get. An editor goes, unannounced, and pays. The restaurant is scored out of 100 — 70 for food, 10 each for service, room, and value. Above 80, an editor can approve it. At or below 80 it stays a record. Ninety and above takes two separate visits, because one very good night is not evidence of a very good restaurant.
That is the whole mechanism. There is no tier a restaurant can buy, no placement to sponsor, no way to pay for a score or to pay to have one removed.
Why the site looks unfinished, and will for a while
Because it is. Six hundred restaurants are in the directory and almost none of them have been visited yet. Recommendations will arrive one meal at a time, at the speed one editor can eat and pay.
You will also see empty photograph frames on restaurant pages, each one naming what is missing: the room in service, the street outside, the food. We could fill those tomorrow by taking pictures from elsewhere. We are not going to. Every photograph here is ours or licensed from the person who took it, which means we ask first and record the answer. An empty frame is a true statement about what we have. A borrowed one is a false statement about a restaurant.
What you can do
Search for what you actually want. The field at the top of the homepage takes a sentence, not a keyword — a dish, a mood, a neighbourhood, a kind of evening. Ask it for a quiet booth, or late-night tacos, or somewhere you can hear your friend talk.
Tell us what we have wrong. Hours change, chefs move, rooms close. Every page takes a correction, and corrections are published rather than quietly absorbed.
And if you photograph the places you eat, send one. Four contributors and an editor’s check is enough to publish a restaurant’s photography — credited to you, licensed by you, taken down the moment you ask.
Los Angeles deserves a restaurant guide that can show its work. That is the only thing being attempted here.
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