One of the places, Kabab Mahaleh, features a menu in Farsi (customers who need to see English have to request a special menu or trust their instincts) and offers a choice of beef or chicken kebab, grilled steak or chicken on skewers. For those feeling more adventurous, perhaps the best dish is khoresht ghormeh sabzi, a stew made with fenugreek and dried lemon, leeks, coriander and parsley. When asked if I would like lamb instead of beef, I happily said yes. The check for a meal I could only eat half of: $12.

New York City has no shortage of high-end kosher restaurants, with cloth napkins and extensive wine lists, and the check for two is seldom less than $100. Los Angeles kosher, on the other hand, is a much more casual affair, except for a few upscale steakhouses that have been around for decades to cater to the Hollywood-that-lunches set.

Still, it’s hard to complain when you have a choice of sushi, Thai, French, Israeli and Mexican in a five-block radius.

“Maybe food has finally hit a certain zeitgeist where people realized how underserved the kosher market really was,” said Elina Shatkin, an editor at Los Angeles Magazine and former restaurant critic for LA Weekly, who has seen the kosher corridor change significantly in the decade she’s lived nearby. “For so long, the food was so blah and mediocre, I would never take friends there. Now I can say, ‘Let me take you someplace where you can get something you can’t find anywhere else.’ ”

Perhaps no one has capitalized on the demand better than Mr. Tanabe, son of a Japanese father and Mexican mother who came to Los Angeles as a teenager. For the last several months, he has catered to young couples who ask for cuisines they have only seen or heard about. Mr. Tanabe brings a specialty chef to his kitchen, where the cooking is overseen to comply with myriad kosher rules. So far, the kitchen has turned out Korean, Indian and Southern barbecue, with Vietnamese up next.

There are plenty of ingredients that are not kosher, so Mr. Tanabe and the other chefs are forced to create their own. At Mexikosher, for example, Mr. Tanabe mixed his own guava paste using the fresh fruit, pectin and sugar. Beverly Hills Thai, which opened this year, has found a way to use fruit and vinegar as a stand-in for fish sauce, because under kosher laws, fish and meat are not allowed to mix.

Even the Israeli restaurants here seem more willing to take risks. After passing by a nondescript eatery called Haifa Restaurant dozens of times, I finally decided to stop for dinner. What had I been missing? House-made dips, including some of the most perfectly spiced Turkish salad I’ve ever tasted, along with an endless supply of warm pita and dried-fruit-braised lamb shank that could be eaten with a spoon.

The place was hardly fancy, with paper place mats and a television blaring an Israeli cable network. But it offered a kosher-in-L.A. moment the night I was there: among the six tables occupied, five languages were being spoken, and English was used only at mine.