HIT SINGLES

By JONATHAN GOLD

April 28, 1996 12 AM PT

Where to find the best Belgian waffle? A magnificent mole verde? To-die-for dim sum? Times restaurant reviewers Linda Burum, Michelle Huneven, Jonathan Gold, Max Jacobson and S. Irene Virbila give their favorite platters a spin.

Smoked pomfret, bronzed and gleaming, at the splendid Monterey Park Hunanese restaurant Charming Garden, might be the most beautiful plate of food in the San Gabriel Valley--it looks like a patinated Han Dynasty fish sculpture displayed on a handsome plate. The large fish, which the restaurant flies in from Taiwan, smells almost too strongly of smoke, but the rich, pale, slightly oily fish is unexpectedly delicate and worth every cent of the jillion dollars per pound the restaurant charges for it.

Charming Garden, 111 N. Atlantic Blvd., No. 351, Monterey Park, (818) 458-4508. Smoked pomfret, $19 per pound.

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Jonathan Gold

Jonathan Gold was the restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2007 and was a finalist again in 2011. A Los Angeles native, he began writing the Counter Intelligence column for the L.A. Weekly in 1986, wrote about death metal and gangsta rap for Rolling Stone and Spin among other places, and was delighted that he managed to forge a career out of the professional eating of tacos. Gold died July 21, 2018.