The Lake Forest location House of Kabob made this list last year. This year, it expanded to Irvine and only got better. The rice, a free-flowing mountain of loose grains with a faint saltiness and a yogurt-y tang, is the anchor to every meal—meals that start with juicy, char-flecked kebabs of lamb, chicken, beef and koobideh, a ground meat tube as soft as crumbly meatloaf. In their addas polo, what amounts to half a chicken is buried under a Sahara desert of rice. This time, the grains are cooked with even more flavoring agents: dates, raisins, saffron and the chicken itself.