With Lines Out The Door, Yelp's Top LA-Area Vietnamese Restaurant Serves Unlimited Noodles

Formal awards and official accolades sure are nice, but most restaurants simply strive to serve their communities to a high enough degree that people keep coming back. Real-life regulars are a reliable litmus test, but there are also plenty of virtual spaces for folks to share their hospitality opinions. For 13 years now, amateur review site Yelp has published an annual list of its users' top 100 restaurants in the United States that more or less reflects foodies' favorite neighborhood spots, accounting for star ratings and sheer volume of reviews. And for 2026, Gardena, California's Nam Kitchen came in at No. 3 among Yelpers' highest-ranked restaurants nationwide.

Since it opened in April 2024, the Vietnamese-Peruvian restaurant about 15 miles from downtown Los Angeles has managed to amass more than 1,600 5-star reviews, according to Yelp's calculations. That's a lot of love in less than two years of operation and inclusion on the platform. It's also a lot of unlimited noodles, an abundant offering available with the dine-in bowls of herbaceous, long-simmered pho. (Yelpers appear to favor the rib bone and filet mignon varieties.) Nam Kitchen's menu features 10 of those pho varieties in addition to spicy wontons, shrimp rolls, yuzu pepper pork cheek, oxtail fried rice, and a whole host of other dishes, plus drinks to wash them down with.

Day trippers should include Nam Kitchen on their lists of what to eat with 24 hours in Los Angeles, but unless you're cruising on an uncharacteristically light traffic day for the region, note that potential wait times can be even more unpredictable than the gridlock. While only a handful of the 2,000-plus total contributors mentioned lines of people waiting to be seated, you might just find yourself in one when you decide to drop by. That small fraction of those who've noticed a queue, plus the restaurant's absence from reservation platforms and its abundance of seating, implies a reasonable expectation that it will be able to accommodate pop-ins quickly, but that doesn't mean you won't have to wait at all.

Once you're seated, you'll find the restaurant's dining room features wooden tables surrounded by potted plants and abundant overhead lighting so you, and your camera, can enjoy Nam Kitchen's food in all its glory. Yelpers ambitiously promise an "amazing experience from start to finish." The restaurant's eponymous chef Nam Lam, who Yelp notes was born in Vietnam and has Vietnamese, Chinese, and Khmer culinary roots, aims to deliver, too. As Nam told Yelp, he opened Nam Kitchen to show diners real Vietnamese flavors.

California took nine total spots on Yelp's century list, including one more in the top 10. Los Angeles' Broken Mouth, a food hall destination that Yelp categorizes as Korean Hawaiian, came in at No. 7 (in 2023, it ranked first overall). Including California, seven total states were recognized in the top 10: New York, Texas, Hawaii, Louisiana, Utah, and Ohio. The Golden State, Texas, and Hawaii each took two slots on that shortlist, so denizens of the nation's other 47 states (plus D.C.) will have to get to reviewing should they demand greater representation next year.

Over on the East Coast, the nation's largest city took five of the hundred positions, including No. 1 overall with Manhattan's Ci Siamo, which you'll also find on our list of the best Italian restaurants in NYC. Close readers and many restaurant devotees will note that plenty of entries on the Yelp 100 aren't quite as well-known among the professional best-of lists in any given jurisdiction. But you can always peruse the hidden gems in our local roundups, like restaurants that never disappoint in NYC, according to a local.