PRICE:
Frommer's Highly Recommended

It's an amazing story how this Beverly Hills restaurant came to be. Helene An, matriarch and executive chef of the An family restaurants, is by title a Vietnamese princess, great-granddaughter of the vice king of Vietnam. When she and her family fled from Saigon penniless in 1975, they relocated to San Francisco, purchased a small deli, and introduced the city to their now-legendary recipe: An Family's Famous Roast Crab and Garlic Noodles. This single dish spawned a Horatio Alger story and a family restaurant dynasty. The Beverly Hills location is pure drama from the moment you walk in: You're immediately scrutinized by the patrons to see 1) if you're a somebody and 2) what you're wearing. However, you're too busy admiring the Indochina-themed decor -- a curvaceous copper bar, balcony seating, a bamboo garden, a waterfall, and an 80-foot-long "stream" topped with glass and filled with exotic koi -- to notice. What you won't see is the Secret Kitchen (literally, it's off-limits to most of the staff), where the An family's signature dishes such as tiger prawns with garlic noodles, roasted lobster in tamarind sauce, and roast Dungeness crab are prepared. Although all these dishes are quite good, they're also heavy on the butter -- I prefer the lighter sea bass dish with ginger and garlic-black bean sauce. On weekend nights, Helene (a real sweetheart and timeless beauty) often holds court, making sure your dining experience is faultless.

Copyright: Excerpted from Frommer's Los Angeles 2009, (c) 2008, Wiley Publishing, Inc.

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