Photograph by Marie Astrid Gonzalaz

In the 1977 film Annie Hall—the movie in which Woody Allen observed that the only cultural advantage to living in Los Angeles was being able to turn right on red—there's a scene in an outdoor café on Sunset Boulevard. Allen peruses the menu, clearly appalled by the options, finally telling the waitress, "I'm gonna have the alfalfa sprouts and, uh, a plate of mashed yeast." This summed up what for many was the prevailing impression of L.A. cuisine: stultifyingly healthy, with a slice of cantaloupe on the side.

The idea that L.A. food is uninspired has stuck to the city like gum on a shoe, but easy jokes hide what insiders have known for a long time: The restaurants here are among the most innovative and influential in the world.

Jonathan Gold has been covering the restaurant scene for 30 years, at the L.A. Weekly and now the Los Angeles Times, where he became the first food critic ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. Gold is, with no hyperbole, the city's culinary godhead. I ask him for a brief history of L.A. food, which strikes him as funny. "We're supposed to be a place that's resistant to history," he says. But then he quickly reels off the highlights: Michael McCarty introducing us to California nouvelle cuisine in 1979 at his eponymous Santa Monica restaurant, which took the Chez Panisse idea of using fresh, specifically sourced food and cooking it with impeccable French technique. "We're used to restaurants listing where their produce comes from now, but it was considered an affectation when Michael did it back then," says Gold.

Wolfgang Puck popularized casual fine dining (food prepared with French technique but served without the formality) and Asian fusion at Spago in Beverly Hills. Dudley Moore and Tony Bill's restaurant 72 Market Street, in Venice, made comfort food chic in 1984 (you can thank them for the now inescapable mac and cheese). The opening of the original Matsuhisa in Beverly Hills, in 1987—introducing Nobu Matsuhisa's Peruvian-influenced approach to sushi—transformed a Japanese appetizer into the de rigueur power lunch. Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton championed the then-radical idea of seasonality when they opened Campanile on La Brea Avenue, in 1989. (The restaurant's closing, in 2012, still brings a tear to many an L.A. foodie's eyes, though you can still get Silverton's La Brea Bakery bread in local supermarkets.) The '80s, Gold says, "was when Paris started looking to L.A."

Gold himself—according to Dan Barber's new book, The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food—introduced the now overused term farm-to-table in a review in Gourmet in 2000. "It surprised me, since I make fun of it so often," says Gold, who, like many of the cutting-edge chefs here, has moved on to the next logical obsession, foraging, which was first popularized by the Danish chef Rene Redzepi at his Copenhagen restaurant, Noma.

Ari Taymor, co-owner of downtown L.A.'s Alma (voted Bon Appétit's best new restaurant of 2014), is one of those chefs; he buys from local foragers (a salad might include chickweed and oxalis), and he partnered with a local farmer so that the majority of his produce can be grown in his own garden. In his 2012 review of Alma, Gold wrote, "You're not quite sure what any bite you're eating might be, but it tastes gloriously of early California fall… Nobody is cooking quite like him in L.A."

Taymor isn't going to Redzepi-esque extremes; not many chefs are. "Maybe Chris Jacobson at Girasol in the Valley, or the [Vietnamese restaurant] Red Medicine," says Gold. Still, in compiling this year's 101 Best Restaurants Guide, he was tickled by the fact that he was "eating weeds from a chef's back yard. But I also like it and think it's exciting."

So, apparently, do L.A.'s nonprofessional eaters, as evidenced by the traffic jams created by the Hollywood Farmers Market every Sunday. "The market has become a sacrament," says Gold, who favors Weiser Family Farms for carrots, potatoes, and melons; Windrose Farm for greens and peaches; ABC Rhubarb for herbs; and Kenter Canyon for flour made from local wheat. "If people don't go, they at least feel guilty about not going." He laughs. "I'll admit that if I'm not at the Hollywood Farmers Market on Sunday morning, I know in every fiber of my being that I'm not at the farmers market."

The musician Moby, a restaurant owner and noted vegan who moved from New York to L.A. in 2010, says forget the Academy Awards; the farmers market is Hollywood's "biggest cultural institution at this point."

L.A.'s most recent contribution to the nation's cuisine—the food truck phenomenon—came courtesy of chef Roy Choi and Kogi, his mashup of Mexican and Korean cuisine, which debuted on Sunset Boulevard in 2008. "Roy wasn't the first person to make a Korean taco, but he was the first to make one that actually tastes good," Gold says. Choi's wild success had a lot to do with the simultaneous debut of Twitter. "It's hard to remember a time when I wasn't on Twitter, but I did specifically join to follow the Kogi truck," Gold says. "And I don't think I was the only one."

It also had to do with Choi's combination of street savvy and mastery of French technique; he was top of his class at the Culinary Institute of America. The idea of chefs using classic methods for non-French cuisine started at Spago, but now there's a new generation of Mexican, Chinese, Korean, and African-American chefs who are using it to heighten their native foods. "Other than David Chang in New York, nobody else is doing that," says Gold. "I mean, using the technique you expect at a place like Le Bernardin in order to make your noodles better? That blows me away."

For a chef like Taymor, L.A.'s "insane diversity" distinguishes it from every other city in the country. Here, you don't just go to a Mexican restaurant; you go to a restaurant from a specific neighborhood in Puerto Vallarta. Gold attributes that to ethnic populations so huge that the chefs are cooking for one another, not the mainstream. "They aren't adjusting the food to our taste," Gold says.

That kind of granular exposure trickles down into the food chefs are cooking at the city's top restaurants. "I think chefs in L.A. are a little ahead of the dining public. But that's a good thing," says Taymor, who appreciates the freedom and openness to unconventional ideas. "The food scene isn't entrenched; it's growing and still maturing." Hopefully not to the point of undermining what Gold sees as the city's greatest gift to American cuisine: "a lack of pretense." Then again, just try to get a table for two at Alma less than two weeks ahead.

Read more of our L.A. portfolio here.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io