How to Ride the D: 10 Stops, 10 Restaurants, One Very Long, Very Good Day

Until last week, "I stopped in Beverly Hills for lunch on the way to my K-town meeting" was a sentence you could not say in the city of Los Angeles without running the risk of social scrutiny that ends in being called a transplant tourist. That time is over.

After more than a decade of construction, a closure or two that tested the city's patience, and enough jackhammer foreplay to make us all forget what Wilshire used to sound like, the D Line extension is finally open. Eleven stops. Three brand-new stations. One straight shot from Union Station to the eastern edge of Beverly Hills that did not exist in our wildest dreams just years ago.

Say it with me… LA is SO back. The city is awake, properly awake, everything-shower, full-glass-of-water-on-the-nightstand, slightly-dangerous awake, and Wilshire Boulevard is electrified for the first time in our lifetimes. Restaurants we used to plan an entire evening around, the parking, the valet, the post-dinner DUI math, are now a $1.75 fare away from each other on the same gorgeous underground line.

Here's the move: ten stops, ten restaurants, one all-day subway crawl that will wake your taste buds up as hard as this train is waking up the city. Some of these spots are a hundred years old. Some opened last year. One is the original restaurant that taught Nobu Matsuhisa how to be Nobu Matsuhisa, and it's all. Right. HERE.

By stop three, lightly buzzed. By stop five, you'll have said "this is what infrastructure is for" out loud and meant it, while blissfully showing off your new "Ride The D" merch. By stop seven, top button unbuttoned. By stop ten, at the bar at Matsuhisa, $200 lighter, and already planning the next one.

Get on. Eat west.

1. Lasita — Union Station

You step off the train. Union Station hits you like a 1940s film set, terrazzo floors, leather club chairs, the kind of architecture that briefly convinces you you're as cool as your thrifted mid-century modern coffee table. Eight minutes through Olvera Street's tortilla smoke and across the Cesar Chavez crosswalk, and you're standing in Far East Plaza, slipping into a glass-walled corner where chef Chase Valencia has been spinning rotisserie chickens and shaved pork belly that the Michelin Guide has, accurately, lost its mind over.

Lasita is the Bib Gourmand modern-Filipino joint that opened in 2022 and has been quietly running away with it ever since. The lechon kawali is fatty in a way that requires you to acknowledge its dominance. The pancit is bright with calamansi and pork fat in roughly equal measure. There's natural wine, lots of it. There's karaoke energy in the design even at 11 a.m. You will sit down a person who took the subway and stand up a person who now considers 11 a.m. a perfectly reasonable hour to start drinking skin-contact riesling.

Order it: Lechon kawali plate, a half-order of pancit, the cheapest glass of skin-contact on the list. You have nine more stops.

2. Sushi Gen — Civic Center / Grand Park

Back on the train. Three minutes later you're at Civic Center, and from there it's a flat seven-minute walk through Little Tokyo to one of the most famous lunch counters in the city. Sushi Gen has been on First Street since 1980. The sashimi deluxe lunch special is sub-$30. There is always a line. There has always been a line. There always will be a line. Don't fight it; the people in front of you are correct.

Sit at the bar if you can. Order the sashimi deluxe. Watch a chef who has been doing this for longer than you have been an adult, slicing a piece of toro with the kind of casual precision that should be illegal in at least four states. The fish is glossy. The rice is warm. The ginger is housemade. You eat the whole thing in twenty minutes and walk back out onto First Street with the specific look of someone who just had a religious experience for $28.

Order it: Sashimi deluxe lunch. Save the dinner omakase for a night you have less ground to cover.

3. Sonoratown — Pershing Square

Pershing Square is downtown's beating heart, and Sonoratown is the reason you got off the train. It's a Bib Gourmand operation slinging Sonoran-style flour tortillas, handmade, paper-thin, slightly charred, the kind of tortilla you find yourself holding up to the light like a counterfeit hundred. The kind that will, possibly permanently, ruin all other tortillas for you. The carne asada is grilled over mesquite and tastes like it was kissed by something it shouldn't have been (definitely should have been). The chivichanga (tiny fried burrito) should not be as good as it is. The salsas come in tiny condiment cups and you will use and abuse all of them.

It's a counter spot. It's fast. It's cheap. It's so good it caused a small civic crisis when the Westside location opened, like, do we deserve this in Mid-City too? Yes, apparently. But this is the original, and you're at the original, and it's still lunch.

Order it: Two chivichangas, one carne asada taco, a Mexican Coke. Eat standing.

4. Sugarfish — 7th St / Metro Center

This one is almost too on the nose: Sugarfish is inside the 7th & Fig complex, sharing an elevator bank with the Metro Center entrance. You get off the train. You ride one escalator. You sit down. You order the Trust Me.

The Trust Me, for the uninitiated, is a $50 prix-fixe set of edamame, sashimi, nigiri, and a toro hand roll, executed with the warm-rice precision that the late Kazunori Nozawa spent his life perfecting. You don't need to know what to order because Nozawa decided what to order for you in 1987. You eat it on the ground floor of a half-empty downtown office tower at one of the most efficient sushi counters in the country. You leave smelling faintly of soy sauce and feeling like you just committed a small, delicious fraud.

Order it: Trust Me or Trust Me Lite. Add the toro handroll. Do not overthink it.

5. Langer's — Westlake / MacArthur Park

This is the stop where the line earns its name as a public good. Langer's has been across the street from MacArthur Park since 1947 and will be, hopefully, until the heat death of the universe. The #19 is hot pastrami, Swiss, cole slaw, and Russian dressing on rye that's been double-baked to a structural integrity most pastry chefs would kill for. It is, in the considered opinion of approximately every food writer who has ever weighed in on it, the best sandwich in America.

For seventy-eight years, getting here meant either circling MacArthur Park for parking or taking your chances on the Wilshire bus. The new D Line stop is directly across the street. If you call ahead, they'll hand you a sandwich curbside. Curbside. From the subway. This is what infrastructure can do for a city.

Order it: #19. No notes. Get a Dr. Brown's cream soda. Eat in the booth.

6. Dan Sung Sa — Wilshire / Vermont

Now we get into it. Wilshire/Vermont drops you a six-minute walk from one of the most beloved Korean watering holes in the city. Dan Sung Sa is a soju-and-skewer joint that operates out of a dim storefront covered in handwritten Sharpie signs and looks, to a first-time visitor, like a fever dream. It is a fever dream. That's the appeal.

The menu is in Korean and Sharpie. The lighting is mood. The skewers come on long bamboo sticks: corn-cheese, dried squid, gizzards, mushrooms wrapped in pork belly. The soju comes in green bottles. The kimchi pancakes come crispy. You came in for one round. You stayed for four. Someone bought a round. You bought a round. Your shirt now smells like grilled meat in a way you cannot wash out before Tuesday. The train is right outside. You know what the train is for.

Order it: Soju, kimchi jeon, corn cheese, pork belly skewers. Make a friend at the next table. Try something new every visit.

7. BCD Tofu House — Wilshire / Normandie

You're a little drunk. That's fine. That was the design. Wilshire/Normandie is one stop west and BCD Tofu is 24/7, three minutes from the station, and exists for exactly this moment. The sundubu jjigae, a roiling, lava-hot stone bowl of soft tofu, beef, kimchi, and broth so red it looks photoshopped, arrives at your table actually bubbling. You crack a raw egg into it. The egg poaches in front of you. You eat the whole thing with a metal spoon and seventeen banchan, and you sober up the right way, with capsaicin and rice and seaweed.

BCD has been doing this since 1996. It's the K-town hangover cure, the K-town pre-game, the K-town 4 a.m. pre-LAX move, and, most importantly, in my house, the LA penicillin. The fact that it is now a single train ride from Union Station is, frankly, a problem for the city's productivity.

Order it: Soon Tofu, spice level 2, soft yolk. Crack the egg yourself.

8. République — Wilshire / La Brea (NEW)

Here we are. The first new stop. The line that didn't exist last week. And waiting for you a one-minute walk from the station is Walter and Margarita Manzke's French bakery-brasserie, housed inside the 1929 building that Charlie Chaplin used as his studio offices. Arched ceilings. Mosaic floors. A pastry case that looks like a jewelry display. A kouign-amann that has reduced grown men to silence.

République is the kind of restaurant that didn't need the subway, it was doing fine. But the subway needs République, because how else are you supposed to celebrate the fact that Wilshire is now electrified in front of the people who still think Wilshire is for cars? Margarita Manzke is one of the most decorated pastry chefs in the country. Walter's dinner menu is doing duck confit and bone marrow flan and not apologizing for either. Belly up to any table. Mark the occasion.

Order it: Black sesame croissant + espresso before 5; the wine list and a tartine after. Do not skip the kouign-amann under any circumstances.

9. Lalibela — Wilshire / Fairfax (NEW)

Two stops further west and you're standing in the middle of Little Ethiopia, an official Los Angeles cultural district that has, until last week, been weirdly impossible to reach by transit. Lalibela has been on Fairfax since 1995. It is, depending on which Angeleno you ask, the best Ethiopian restaurant in the city. The doro wat is slow-braised chicken in berbere butter sauce so deep and red it has its own gravitational pull. The kitfo is hand-chopped beef with mitmita and herbed butter, served raw or warmed at your call, or your server's, who by now has become your menu guru. Everything arrives on injera, the sour, spongy, tear-it-with-your-fingers flatbread that turns the meal into a communal handshake.

You eat with your hands. You eat off the same plate as everyone else at the table. You leave smelling like berbere and feeling like a person who now knows where Little Ethiopia is on a map, because, finally, the rest of the city can know too.

Order it: Doro wat, kitfo, miser wat for the lentil people. Get the honey wine.

10. Matsuhisa — Wilshire / La Cienega (NEW)

Closing argument. This is where, in 1987, a guy named Nobu Matsuhisa picked up a knife on a strip of Beverly Hills that no one was paying attention to and started doing the kind of cooking that would eventually become a global empire of identical hotel lobbies serving miso black cod to people who think "sake" is pronounced "sah-key." This is the original. The mother church. The Nobu before Nobu.

For thirty-eight years, getting here meant driving. As of last week, you don't. You take a train. You walk five blocks up La Cienega like a person who has somewhere to be. You sit down at the restaurant that rewrote what fish was allowed to taste like, and you order the new-style sashimi like a person who actually did their summer reading.

It's expensive. You knew it was expensive. Don't apologize for it. Get the black cod, yes, the black cod, the actual black cod, the one Nobu invented before every chain restaurant in America stole it. Get the toro tartare with caviar. Tip well. Walk back to the train under the same Wilshire that just learned how to move people again, and ride home with the kind of satisfied silence usually reserved for the morning after.

You'll be back.

The Line Is OPEN. The City Is Hungry.

For two decades this was a pipe dream. For the last several years it was an extremely loud construction project. As of last week, it's a $1.75 fare and a very full day. The D Line extension isn't just a transit project; it's an argument, a slow, persuasive, slightly spicy argument, that Los Angeles can, in fact, be a city. That you can move through it without your car. That you can taste the whole shape of it in a single day, if you're hungry enough and you commit.

Wilshire is alive. The trains are running. The kitchens are open. You'd better make sure your Bluetooth headphones are charged.

LA is so back you can taste it.