OC Restaurant Gems: A Food Lover’s Guide

Explore Orange County's diverse culinary scene! From Naples-style pizza to Korean home cooking and Michelin-recommended halal fare, discover hidden gems and acclaimed dining spots with unique flavors.

Detailed as one of the best pizzas in America by the Washington Message, the pies at Fuoco Restaurant Napoletana arise from an almost 1,000-degree wood-burning oven built in Naples by Stefano Ferrara– generating crusts that are airy, raw, and char-kissed. The area hums with local satisfaction and the eating space loads up promptly.

Fuoco’s Authentic Pizza

This Taiwanese restaurant in Irvine serves Chinese-style crunchy pork chop over rice and thousand-layer pancakes, but the noodle dishes are not to be missed out on, including a beef noodle soup with deep peppery broth and noodles with ground pork. For diners that enjoy warm, the food selection additionally features numerous Sichuan-style dishes, like beef tendon with garlic sauce and spicy wontons with a tip of sweet taste and warm that doesn’t subdue.

Taiwanese Delights in Irvine

This modern-day French-Californian dining establishment from cook Tony Esnault and Yassmin Sarmadi is ripe for congratulatory meals. The three-course lunch and four-to-six-course dinner prix fixe menus change commonly. One week, it’s French black truffles; an additional evening, it’s a Nowruz supper with recipes by Shamsi Katebi, prepared by Esnault and his kitchen group.

French-Californian Fine Dining

As one of the oldest restaurants in Anaheim’s Little Arabia District, Kareem’s stays a best for Middle Eastern food. Owner Kareem Hawari’s very closely held family members falafel recipe is so popular that the Hawaris began marketing it wholesale to grocery stores and other restaurants. The baba ganoush, grape leaves, and hummus are staples not to miss, but Kareem’s more recent food selection things– vegetarian wraps, falafel burgers, and feta french fries– also supply contemporary takes on dishes without sacrificing traditional flavor. The tiny restaurant obtains packed during the lunch thrill yet restaurants can typically locate outside patio area seating to delight in a leisurely spread.

Kareem’s Middle Eastern Flavors

George Barker opened up Mayfield in 2020 and triggered a new eating movement in San Juan Capistrano. The food is affected by Levantine local tastes, with tips of North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East blended with traditional Californian methods. Locate a strong hamburger with harissa aioli at delighted hour and za’atar fried poultry for dinner. For breakfast, there’s avocado toast and egg sandwiches, yet there are also Turkish eggs with labneh and intense tomato shakshuka, showcasing the selection from the cooking area. The dining establishment is additionally understood for its cocktails: sip on a papa picante topped with habanero bitters or a durable negroni.

Mayfield’s Levantine Influence

The revolving specials board consists of fish and chips, and Texas cheese and porchetta sandwiches. The kindly stocked shop markets a remarkable variety of cheeses, homemade salads, olive oil, charcuterie, and various other premium foods.

Alta Baja Market’s breakfast and lunch menu consists of dishes such as New Mexican blue cornbread with honey butter and Woman C’s eco-friendly chile eggchilada, which looks like a morning meal covered dish making use of La Princesita tortillas. The market’s specialty grocery store area consists of one of the largest options of Mexican white wines in the U.S., along with a variety of antique corn, grains and beans. La Chiquita, made with interest fruit, is a wonderful and spicy enhance to any type of dish.

Alta Baja Market: Mexican Wines

San Juan Capistrano’s award-winning pitmaster Daniel Castillo– a 2025 James Beard Award finalist for Ideal Cook: California– takes bbq to the following degree with wood-smoked brisket with deep bark, sausages, turkey, ribs that drop tidy off the bone, herb-seasoned poultry, and more. Get the charred broccoli with cheesy mornay sauce if it’s on the food selection.

Korean home cooking offered in large parts is what Yigah is recognized for in Orange County. The restaurant located within the Ruby Jamboree shopping mall serves steamy galbi flavor, beef short rib soup, along with the bossam dish with boiled pork belly, napa cabbage, and spicy marinaded radish. The soups– particularly the spicy beef or oxtail selections– show up steaming and filled with depth, while crisp tonkatsu and searing hot-stone bibimbap complete the soul-warming schedule. The space is as informal as it gets, the type of place you can turn to on silent weekends and cold nights.

Korean Comfort at Yigah

Cook Nokmaniphone Sayavong’s Laotian food developed a cult following with her smoked sausage and tum mak huong, grated papaya salad blended with tomato and seasoned with fish sauce. Nok’s transforms out dishes that stabilize home-style comfort with dining establishment polish.

Laguna Beach residents love this place for its white table linens, acclaimed a glass of wine program, and stellar steaks. The vivid carrot and sundried tomato ravioli stuffed with cheese is a striking starter, while a fragile souffle completes the dish. Previous Anaheim Ducks hockey gamer and six-time Olympian Teemu Selanne is among the dining establishment’s owners, so be on the lookout for Orange Area A-listers. Prime cuts, abundant sauces, and a deep storage of wines define the experience, while the converted 1930s home offers it character. It’s a location for events, proposals, or simply unapologetically indulgent evenings by the shore.

This Michelin-recommended halal restaurant incorporates the flavors of India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan with a contemporary Californian spin. The tender boneless poultry karahi is served with tomatoes and shishito peppers, and the butter hen with dried fenugreek is one of the restaurant’s even more popular dishes.

Halal Culinary Fusion

The counters are simple and the plates generous: think ceviche towers, shrimp or fish tacos (fried or barbequed), smoky marlin, and butterflied raw shrimp aguachile platters with whole lots of lime. What you won’t get anywhere else is the cahuamanta, a spicy soup made with shrimp and manta ray, a stimulating pottage that has its roots in caguama (Mexican sea-turtle soup that came to be banned once the types ended up being jeopardized). El Yaqui’s cahuamanta does not cut corners on the manta, whose taste is comparable to that of squid.

The omakase-only Hana re is a 10-seat sushi-ya helmed by Atsushi Yokoyama. Situated in a commercial storage cage at the Lab in Costa Mesa, the counter, which held a Michelin celebrity from 2019 to 2024, feels like a hidden gem, despite the fact that its outstanding fish preparations are obvious anymore. Yokoyama and one web server, who additionally helps with a glass of wine pairings, put out an omakase experience that includes bite sized crab perched atop eel tempura, scallops enveloped in gelee, welk shellfish with celery delicacy, origin and shiso. Appointments can be made using text at (714) 545-2800 for the $250 omakase.

Michelin-Starred Sushi Hana re

Chaak Kitchen in Old Community Tustin is the sibling dining establishment to Gabbi’s Mexican Kitchen area in Orange. The food draws motivation from Yucatán, Mayan, and European flavors– wood-grilled meats, smoky recados, and masa in all its wonderful kinds. Beginners such as sikil p’ak, a velvety pumpkin seed dip, and mains like the cochinita pibil, achiote smoked pork shoulder remain examples of how this rich, modern dining establishment, with its retractable roof covering and enough walkway patio eating, presses the expectations of Mexican food located in Orange Area. Do not skip the glass of wines from Mexico and mixed drinks from its robust food selection.

Florent and Amelia Marneu’s white tablecloth restaurant is a stalwart in the Orange Region penalty eating scene. The Newport Beach dining establishment offers typical French faves such as baked poultry cordon bleu and duck confit. Amelia’s chopped salad with French feta, cucumber, mint, and honey grapefruit vinaigrette showcases The golden state produce. Other standout recipes include hamachi with a jalapeño-tinged mango-yuzu sorbet, beignets with Maryland soft shell crab, and the turning desserts dreamed up by the Marneus.

The family-sized portions permit restaurants to snack on numerous recipes at once. Rotund matzo rounds are offered in Shirley’s chicken soup and rye bread pastrami sandwiches remain a Katella favorite.

Chef Richard Mead is an enduring figure in the Orange County dining scene. At the Farmhouse at Roger’s Gardens, the cook showcases the most effective that the season needs to use from the region’s lots of manufacturers, which means ever-changing handles dishes like sea scallops, along with shrimp and mussels offered in a tomato-Pernod broth with a polenta cake made from blue corn sourced from the Tehachapi Heritage Grain Task. Surrounded by greenery, this outdoor dining establishment networks farm-to-table sincerity with The golden state simplicity.

Garlic & Chives is among those Little Saigon areas that never ever seems to shed momentum. The Mall of Lot of money stalwart offers a variety of Vietnamese comfort dishes with unapologetic taste– crispy wings snuffed in garlic and Sichuan flavor, garlic noodles topped with plump black tiger shrimp, fried salmon stubborn belly, searing dices of toothpick lamb. This menu may be wide but its implementation is sharp; anticipate dishes to deliver lots of its name aromatics. Inside, the space hums with energy, plates struck the table fast, and every recipe really feels developed for sharing, particularly keys like lamb chops or caramelized catfish with pork belly. There’s little nuance which belongs to the joy.

Bites of the buttery toasted bun packed with delicious claw meat get interspersed with slurps of homemade chowder with entire infant clams– the dish stimulates memories of the best traditional fish and shellfish houses. Endeavor past the lobster roll: The rest of the menu includes favorites like crunchy beer-battered mahi fish and chips as well as wild-caught seafood for surf-and-turf plates.

The splurge-worthy Sushi II lies in Seafarer’s Point in Newport Coastline and provides 3 hyper-seasonal omakase experiences. Named after distinctive Japanese ceramic– Bizen, Oribe, and Karatsu– the menus range from $150 to $285 per person. Order the omakase coupled with benefit to experience master chef Susumu Ii’s washoku training to the fullest. The takeout offerings, such as the deluxe chirashi ($48) and a timeless Japanese cherry bloom chirashi for $27, are remarkably packaged for impressive dishes on the go.

The noodles below obtain made internal, each package springy and cool adequate to stun the taste buds in the finest way. The barbecue setup is classic: generous cuts, heaps of banchan, steamed egg, and the kind of energy that makes a weeknight really feel like a party.

Cook David Shofner and the Coyle family members are likewise understood for preferred Mission Viejo dining establishments Wineworks for Everyone and Dublin 4 Gastropub.

The tender boneless hen karahi is offered with tomatoes and shishito peppers, and the butter poultry with dried out fenugreek is one of the dining establishment’s even more preferred recipes. Sushi chef Gino Choi prepares a complex omakase for 10 restaurants at his namesake midtown Santa Ana restaurant. Nok’s turns out recipes that stabilize home-style convenience with restaurant polish. River Jetty Restaurant Group additionally runs A Restaurant’s sister places CDM Dining establishment, A Crystal Cove, and A Market, which are go-to warm places in Newport Coastline.

Cook Daniel Godinez’s Anepalco is one of the pioneers in Orange Area’s modern-day Mexican dining scene, incorporating genealogical foodways with contemporary techniques. The menu, which provides as refined yet familiar, runs the range from chilaquiles (legendary because it initially opened up for its dense disc variation of the meal) in great smoky guajillo sauce to mole enchiladas and mezcal-forward alcoholic drinks that make a strong case for sticking around. The vibe feels modern yet not fussy– sleek lines, warm lights, and plates that look just as good as they taste. It’s the type of dining establishment that made residents reassess what Mexican food can suggest in Orange County.

This partnership from cook Chris Decker, Michael Vakneen, Donna Baldwin, and John Arena brings several of the very best pizza in Southern The golden state to Dana Factor. Hearth-baked 12-inch American craftsmen pizzas like The Dante with vodka sauce, provola, chicken sausage, and pickled peppers emerge from the cooking area. The desired square pizzas, incorporate the fluffy chew of focaccia with a quintessential cheese pull. The timeless pepperoni is slathered with a nuanced California red sauce and topped with fresh and aged whole milk mozzarella and charred pepperoni. Save area for Strauss Creamery natural vanilla soft serve with drizzles of delicious chocolate sauce or streaks of pistachio.

Sushi cook Gino Choi prepares an elaborate omakase for 10 restaurants at his namesake downtown Santa Ana dining establishment. (Choi is additionally a self-taught carpenter who constructed the sushi counter, entranceway, and partitions himself.) Standout recipes consist of a luscious Hokkaido uni udon garnished with winter black truffles from Spain; Gino’s variation of tamago, flavored with shellfish; and a yuzu foam covered with slow-cooked black cod bedded together with green plum seasoned baked tomatoes. Choi offers 4 days a week with 2 seatings per evening; the expense is $250 each and bookings disappear quick.

From there, the Lido Isle restaurant weaves in between European meat and potato affects to pure The golden state food, like citrusy salads packed with cara and blood oranges, chevre, and crunchy quinoa. Myth offers it with dynamic crushed peas, hand-cut fries, and a curry remoulade sauce. Cook David Shofner and the Coyle family members are also known for prominent Goal Viejo restaurants Wineworks for Every person and Dublin 4 Gastropub.

Terrace by Mix: Filipino Cuisine

Lưu Luyến occupies the corner place of a shopping center, which means it has a whole row of car parking places to itself– ideal for the lengthy lines it consistently draws for its bánh cuốn. Fragile fit to be tied rice sheets are rotated paper-thin, then obtain stretched, filled up, and rolled to order with tasty pork, shrimp, or mushrooms. Each plate lands with shards of deep-fried shallots, aromatic natural herbs, and chile-infused nuoc cham sufficient for a mason container and ladle. Other meals consist of spring rolls, bun moc soup, nem heo (fermented pork), however the bánh cuốn are the reason to find. The little dining room fills up swiftly, so come early or be prepared to wait together with locals that understand exactly why it’s worth it.

Ross Pangilinan’s Terrace by Mix is understood for its outdoor patio and the cook’s. Filipino-inspired recipes, including his pork cheek adobo and lumpia, stand out as nods to Pangilinan’s origins.

Top Cook: All Stars’ Amar Santana opened this sleek Spanish hideaway in 2016 inside the Segerstrom Executing Arts. For good friends and family, a specially priced food selection only offered on Mondays, the wagyu and bone marrow burger gets punched up with Fiscalini cheddar, crisp cabbage, and truffle aioli. The chef’s snacks rotate frequently, yet the creamy hen croquettes and cozy pulpo with fingerling potatoes showered in Spanish olive oil continue to be mainstays considering that it opened.

Know prior to you go: The last Sunday of monthly is “Pozole Sunday.” Snell supplies 2 designs– Zacatecas-style pork pozole rojo and vegan pozole verde from Guerrero– from 10 a.m. until offered out. And they will certainly run out.

This comfy red booth hideout on Pacific Shore Freeway is recognized for its Rat Load ambience. The classic martini reigns at the chicken and the bar pot pie is only offered on Monday and Friday, however residents like the steaks, the confited Mary’s organic hen, and pan-seared Niman Ranch pork chops. Put just: The restaurant is traditional done. River Jetty Restaurant Group additionally runs A Dining establishment’s sister locales CDM Restaurant, A Crystal Cove, and A Market, which are best locations in Newport Coastline.

Phở 79: A Timeless Classic

Tucked inside a silent plaza, chef Jimmy Stafford’s Parlor restaurant transforms out fresh pastas like rigatoni Bolognese, bucatini all’Amatriciana, sausage and rapini paccheri, and rosemary focaccia worthy of its own Netflix special. The area leans casual-industrial with counter-order service, making it the kind of weekday haunt that’s simple to go down right into for takeout or an easygoing supper.

Cook Shachi Mehra integrates her Jersey origins and Indian heritage to create a tangy goat cheese-filled naan. The RFC sandwich combines flavors of a prominent Rajasthani snack, which acts as a finish for crunchy fried poultry served inside a customized bun made by Dean Kim’s OC Cooking Business.

This is not simply one more pho shop– Phở 79 is the establishment. Thọ Trần and Liễu Trần’s restaurant has actually ladled out hot bowls of steaming pho given that 1982. Step in and find a spartan yet inviting sunshine-yellow interior decorated with a wall of honors– James Beard America’s Standards honor and a Michelin Bib Gastronomist being the most prominent. The broth runs deep and fragrant with celebrity anise– a base that can hold brisket, ligament, oxtail, or, preferably, all three. Since the location is so liked, anticipate waits, however there’s a rhythm to the space that feels like clockwork accuracy– service is quick and tables transform fast. Some places obtain crowded since they’re stylish; this one stays crowded because it’s ageless.

The menu includes TikTok-worthy coffee drinks topped with salted egg yolk and fragile meals like curry crab omelet. Nep’s second area in Irvine opened in the same plaza as Kei Concepts’ Sup Noodle Bar.

Probiotics regulation at Fermentation Farm– many thanks to virtually a lots different on-tap kombucha tastes, and food choices like a French onion soup with raw cheese and a kraut-filled smoked cheese sandwich. When a farmers market featuring produce from Rosewood Farms and Sunny Cal Farms pops up in the dining establishment’s parking whole lot, browse through on Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.. The menu modifications daily, constructed around probiotics, whole grains, and the philosophy that food must make you feel good. Still, eating right here feels alternative, not restrictive. A second area opened at River Road Market in San Juan Capistrano.