One order= One piece One order= One piece One order = One piece consuming raw or undercooked meats, poultry, seafood, eggs, or unpasteurized milk may increase your risk of foodbourne illnessNow that foie gras is just a delicious ghost of our culinary past, uni is the delicacy with top billing on every trend-conscious menu in L.A.It’s a strange food, when you think about it. How did anyone know to open up a spiny sea urchin and feast on its goopy orange gonads? Because of its unusual texture, color and provenance, there are many reasonable people who are afraid to eat uni. But these reasonable people have no idea what they’re missing. Good uni is as creamy as custard, and it melts with no resistance, releasing a rich, complex, unforgettable flavor full of cool sweetness and gentle salt. There are few foods more subtly exquisite.You can — and should — order uni at any of the sushi restaurants in L.A., but it’s always fun to see how the cool kids are using the ingredient du jour.

We are a city full of creative, food-obsessed minds, and some of them are sourcing top-shelf sea urchin to incorporate into a wide range of dishes and cuisines. Guerrilla Tacos: Guerrilla Tacos is a truck with limited hours and a constantly rotating menu that is never announced in advance. Its kampachi uni tostada is the hardest dish to track down on this list. It is well worth some vigilance. The tostada features Hawaiian kampachi and Santa Barbara uni, togarashi, pluots, George Bliss avocado, lime and serrano chile piled on a round of crunchy tortilla. It’s a pretty ambitious tostada with a lot of disparate elements, but each bite makes its own kind of sense. Each ingredient is top quality, including the silky kampachi and the ocean-fresh uni. At Blacktop Coffee, 826 E. 3rd St., Los Angeles, Thursdays through Sundays; Cognoscenti Coffee, 6114 Washington Blvd., Culver City, Wednesdays, (818) 640-3033; . $8.République: At Walter Manzke’s République, uni gets the breakfast treatment in a deceptively simple dish dubbed “eggs on toast.”

There are three pieces to an order, each built with a thick slab of toast, a layer of soft-scrambled eggs and a delicate piece of Santa Barbara uni on top. The eggs are as noteworthy as the uni, with that loose, wet consistency that I can never come close to accomplishing at home. They pair stunningly well with the uni — the flavors come off gentle but deep, and the textures blend softly with the fluff and crust of the toast. venta sushi online Paiche: Paiche is Ricardo Zarate’s latest L.A. venture, billed as an izakaya that calls on the Japanese flavors in Peruvian cuisine. sushi pack break ice online gameZarate is an inventive chef with a fun point of view, so it’s only natural that one of Paiche’s signature dishes is a quirky showcase for uni. sushi in oxford uk

The uni shrimp toast is a triumph of culinary fusion, combining sea urchin with shrimp paste and a rocoto honey sauce — a little brine, a little sugar and a whole lot of umami. It’s a unique creation guaranteed to ignite greed in any adventurous eater. $21.Petty Cash Taquería: Best known as a fancy taquería and cocktail bar, Petty Cash is also L.A.’s leading purveyor of uni-fied Latin cuisine. buy eel for sushiThis is premium guacamole topped with five velvet lobes of uni, served with a heaping can of spiced chicharrones. jiro dreams of sushi episode 2You’d think the subtle urchin would get lost in the folds of smooth avocado. comprar comida online curitibaIt shines, and it makes the avocado taste even better. buy eel sauce online

$12.Pot: Leave it to Roy Choi to cook up something as tasty/ludicrous as an uni dynamite rice bowl. The Beep Beep features a big mix of palate-blasting flavors: yuzu, seaweed, sesame and whatever goes into that spicy, tangy dynamite sauce. The uni might get lost if there weren’t plenty of it, but it does very well in the dish, adding its sweet briny flavor and a creamy texture that melds with the dynamite. The rice is slightly fried, adding another pleasurable layer to the dish. $18.A-Won: A-Won is your Korean mom’s favorite spot for Korean-Japanese seafood. It can’t rival Pot for hipness, but it offers an uni rice dish that would sell like spiky hot cakes if the place had an Instagram. For $15, you can get live uni with rice, a sort of bibimbap with the sea urchin shell as its bowl. It comes with rice, pickled radish, seaweed and sesame seeds, and you mix it all up, separating the uni from the walls of the shell as you go. It’s not always on the menu — ask for the saeng sunggae, which translates precisely, and insufficiently, to “live uni.” 

913 S. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 389-6764. $15.Marugame Monzo: There’s no place like Marugame Monzo for an artisanal bowl of udon, but the menu strays from the strictly traditional to our great benefit. The uni cream udon is a must-try, a giant bowl of slippery noodles swimming in an uni-and-cream-thickened broth that is halfway to a loose pasta sauce. It looks too heavy to gulp on its own when the noodles are gone, but I can attest that it’s delicious. There’s a lot of sea urchin in this bowl, disintegrating hunks of it floating in every spoonful. The udon comes topped with a shiso leaf and, if you’re lucky, a dollop of salmon roe. $15.95.EMC Seafood & Raw Bar: Uni cream pasta is a Japanese-Italian fusion classic, a concept that must be a bit older than the more recent uni tostadas and uni toasts. EMC does an excellent version, a bowl of spaghetti topped with uni, fish roe, chive and a sprinkle of dried seaweed. The pasta is cooked al dente, and the sauce is both light and rich, sea urchin liquefied with only a little fat.