As L.A. languishes in the gastronomic doldrums, Santa Monica has proven itself the most vibrant restaurant enclave in southern California.

Which shouldn’t really surprise anyone. After all, the first stirrings of “new California cuisine” were at Santa Monica’s superb Michael’s, and it was at Wolfgang Puck’s Chinois on Main that East-West “fusion” cuisine was born. Santa Monica is also home to so-Cal’s most innovative Mexican restaurant, Border Grill, and no one would dispute that Benita’s Frites has made the French fry into an art form.

What’s more, Santa Monica is where you’ll find the finest Italian restaurant in the U.S.—the great Valentina, where owner Piero Selvaggio and chef Angelo Auriana have transformed Americans’ ideas of what cucina italiana is all about by serving exquisite regional dishes, like a tumballo of fresh porcini mushrooms with a saffron fonduta, house-made tagliatelle, with a duck ragu, grilled branzino (sea bass) slicked with virgin olive oil on a bed of artichokes, and chocolate-mascarpone ravioli with pistachio sauce. Selvaggio lost thousands of bottles of rare wines in the 1994 earthquake, yet he still stocks one of the grandest, most award-winning wine lists in the world. And on any given night, you’re likely to run into those few showbiz stars who favor fine dining over public appearances, like regulars Robert Redford, Sean Penn, Donald Sutherland, and Isabella Rossellini.

Two new restaurants are carrying on Santa Monica’s gastronomic

tradition of good taste with none of the Hollywood crapola you find in the bistros of Beverly Hills and Melrose, where pretty women and studio trolls trade cell-phone numbers over Caesar salads. Chefs (and childhood buddies) Josiah Citrin and Raphael Lunetta, who’ve worked for both Puck and Joachim Splichal, took over a defunct Indian restaurant and turned it into the cheery JiRaffe, where they’ve proven themselves to be among California’s brightest young talents. If they served only vegetables, I would eat here once a week, because they coax extraordinary flavor out of every green bean and red pepper. But they also blend them with wonderful meat and seafood, like their roast rabbit with polenta gnocchi and oven-dried tomatoes and their coriander-dusted whitefish in a ginger emulsion. Desserts, alas, need a little work.

Next, 2424 pico is both the name and address of a brightly hued storefront restaurant where you’ll find chef David Wolfe turning out vibrant, novel dishes heavy on exotic seasonings and ingredients, like his Chilean sea bass crusted with Aleppo chile pepper, served with papaya-and-basil salsa and black japonica rice cakes. And if you’re not getting enough monkfish liver (ankimo) in your diet, this is the place to have it, with grilled persimmons, quinces, and onions with an orange-ginger reduction. The warm chocolate cake is surreal, and trust sommelier Scott Tracy to choose a gently priced wine for you from a terrific list.

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