Los Angeles

Los Angeles's restaurant record begins downtown, where two lunch counters still argue over the same sandwich: Philippe the Original, opened by French-born Philippe Mathieu in 1908, and Cole's, each claiming invention of the French dip. In Hollywood, Musso & Frank Grill opened in 1919 as Frank Toulet's café, took its present name with Joseph Musso in 1923, and has kept much of the menu written by French chef Jean Rue.

Drinking culture here produced an export. After Prohibition ended in 1933, Ernest Gantt — later legally Donn Beach — opened Don's Beachcomber on North McCadden Place, whose rum mixology, bamboo interiors and Cantonese-Polynesian menu established the tiki bar and the American themed-restaurant chain.

The modern turn is usually dated to January 1982, when Wolfgang Puck and Barbara Lazaroff opened Spago on the Sunset Strip with a stage-lit open kitchen and wood-fired pizzas topped with smoked salmon and caviar; Chinois on Main followed in Santa Monica in 1983. Spago's early kitchen drew Mark Peel from Michael's, and with him Nancy Silverton. A second, street-level shift came in November 2008, when Kogi BBQ began selling Roy Choi's Korean-Mexican tacos from a truck routed by Twitter, work widely credited with shaping the contemporary food-truck movement.