Los Angeles

This gargantuan upscale Italian market/cafe/eatery boasts white marble floors, a show kitchen, and shelves stocked with specialty ingredients like Australia-imported pear fruit paste and locally handmade Valerie Confections chocolate. The banquette-lined restaurant does fresh fare like thin-crusted fennel sausage pizza and oven-roasted black cod, and the market boasts a deli case with 200+ prepared dishes, like a Brie/apple/watercress panini, osso bucco, garlic-studded pork, and Bibb salad -- with the way you eat, as if there were any other kind.