This week on Five Rules for the Good Life, I sit down with Los Angeles Times restaurant critic Bill Addison to break down the art of reading restaurant lists to celebrate their annual 101 Best Restaurants in LA list. We talk through his Five Rules for Navigating a Restaurant List, what makes a place worth your time, how to spot the real gems, and why great dining recs go way beyond buzzy names with tasting menus. From affordable neighborhood spots to splurge-worthy tables, Bill shares how he evaluates restaurants and what it takes to make a place unforgettable. If you’ve ever planned a trip around where to eat (or wanted to), this one’s for you.

This episode hits home, especially for someone who travels with their stomach leading the way. Bill gives a masterclass in parsing the hidden signals in a restaurant list—what’s missing, what’s included, and what it says about the person writing it. He also reminds us that real culinary culture lives not just in the fancy spots, but in the mom-and-pop joints and immigrant-run kitchens that define a city’s soul. Whether you’re planning your next big trip, trying to eat better in your own backyard, or just want to level up your restaurant intel, this is required listening.

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Hello, and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life. I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz.

Today, I sit down with my friend and restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times, Bill Addison, who shares his five rules for navigating a restaurant list to celebrate the newspaper’s annual release of their 101 Best Restaurant List.

He talks about the importance of trusting the experts, understanding the context of any list you delve into, and how by financially supporting newspapers and newsletters, you’ll get the most out of any research you read.

It is an insightful conversation from one of the people behind one of the most influential lists in all of America.

One technical note: there was a little bit of distortion during our recording, so please ignore any pops you might hear.

So let’s get into the rules.

Bill, so good to see you. Always a pleasure. Thank you for making time before the LA Times 101 Best Restaurant list drops. I know you’re a busy man, so I appreciate it.

Great to see you there, and thank you for having me.

We’ve talked a lot about finding and searching for new restaurants in your own city or abroad. Can you describe that feeling when you find a new place and it actually hits?

Yeah, I’m thinking of a restaurant in Paris called Datil that I went to this summer that just blew me away. I mean, I almost wanted to cry through the meal. It was mostly vegetarian cooking, but it was done with such finesse. And it was something that I feel like we’re missing in California with all our crazy, beautiful bounty here. I just felt emotional through it.

When something really hits, it hits more than the palate. It hits more than the senses. Yeah, it makes you think. It makes you feel. It just brings you back to your own humanity.

I’ve found that when I find these places, it feels like I found another home. And I know that when people find those places, you are in the envious position of people wanting to share them with you. Especially in Los Angeles, as people go, like, I found this gem, I found the spot, is it on your radar?

But I have to imagine it’s overwhelming. How do you handle so many recommendations coming to you all the time?

I’m looking more than ever in my 20-plus years of reviewing restaurants for a narrative that grabs me. If someone kindly emails me and tells me about a wonderful Italian restaurant in their neighborhood, I will certainly go to the website and scan the menu. But what gets representative of that cuisine, which is really many regional cuisines, on restaurant menus in America is often quite repetitive.

I’m always excited when somebody thinks outside the box, cooks from their own perspective, cooks from an intense curiosity that led them to some sort of contextual expertise. That just doesn’t apply to Italian food. That applies to every cuisine on the globe.

The known beauty of Los Angeles is that so many of them are here or so many of them will show up because our immigrant communities are what give the city meaning.

That’s one of the things a lot of people have come to love and respect about your own list, the 101 best restaurants in Los Angeles, is that it is diverse. It does represent a lot of the city.

How do you marry an editorial approach with utility when putting the list together?

I am thinking about excellence and narrative or representation in equal amounts. Excellence is so subjective, but it’s very easy—or has been easy—in considering restaurant culture to just default to the fanciest, most ambitious restaurants.

I love that this decade, this moment in restaurant culture, for people who really care about dining, care about this subject, we all know that excellence comes in many, many forms.

It is amazing. My job, our job, is to think about that as broadly and as deeply as possible, which includes an awful lot of research and eating and following up and asking myself where a specific restaurant fits within the fabric of the community.

I think it’s really interesting to look at the community on both sides of the list—both those who are being put on it and those who are using it—either those who are locals or those who are coming to a city, whether it’s LA, Florence, Tokyo.

Because a lot of times you can look at these lists, especially when the numbers are in the 10, 20, 30, 40 recommendations and not sure how to use it, not sure how to read it. Which is why I’m so excited to have you here to share your five rules for navigating a restaurant list.

All right. Before we get into the rules, though, you mentioned you wanted to set up a little bit of framing, which I think is great because sometimes people just open a list and they haven’t even asked themselves, what am I looking for?

So let’s set the personal parameters of how you’re setting up your five rules before we get into the rules themselves.

I would say I present these rules, these thoughts, with the hypothesis that the listener knows, first of all, what they’re looking for or what interests them in a restaurant list at any given moment.

Are you looking for fresh inspiration? Are you looking for the worthiest splurge to celebrate a special occasion? Does the guide double for you as a cultural read?

The best lists probably address more than one of these needs. That’s the context when I thought through these five rules.

There’s a lot of thought that went into these rules. There’s a lot of research that goes into these lists.

I think it’s fair to say that not all lists are created equal. Some are written from one point of view, and some are crowdsourced.

Your first rule focuses on picking the list by someone who’s done all of the research. What’s your rule number one?

Rule number one is: Believe in expertise.

We do live in an age of all-around distrust. Media more than ever seems to bring out the negativity bias baked into our human survival mechanisms.

The number two and number three top ranked restaurants in Los Angeles on TripAdvisor—no shade, no judgment. Number two is Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. And number three is a Denny’s.

I want people to believe in those of us who are paid to eat, even if you don’t wholeheartedly agree with opinions of specific writers, because we really do have your interests at heart when we write a big list. We’re thinking within the context of a citywide dining scene.

And I think all good lists have a specificity to them, right? They nod to the obvious but also hope to encourage you in new directions, to point out people and cuisines that bring novel or specific perspectives.

That context and specificity can be easily missed if you just skip the opening, go straight to the spots listed, and say, “I don’t understand this perspective that’s being shared.”

Your second rule says, “Hold on, before you scroll down, read first.” What’s your second