Colette

The upscale Cantonese dishes at Colette, a strip mall dinner destination right on the Pasadena/Arcadia border, somehow manage to be familiar and novel at once. There’s crackly chicken skin stuffed with spongy shrimp paste, saucy beef bits under a crispy vermicelli noodle pancake, and stir-fried chayote tossed in a medley of minced pork and pickled olives. After serving American brunch classics for years, the restaurant brought on a new chef to run dinner service in 2022. Colette 2.0 is a huge upgrade—there’s solid dim sum on the daytime menu, but dinner is the real highlight. That’s when you can cover a big round table in creative Cantonese dishes as tasty as any you’ll find in the SGV. Bring friends so you try as much as possible.

photo credit: Nikko Duren