The Forkstrike 25, Seafood: LA County's Best Score Is in Downey, Not on the Coast
The highest seafood score in Los Angeles County belongs to a room on Firestone Boulevard in Downey, about as far from a view of the water as you can get and still be in this county.
Mariscos Choix sits at 98, four points clear of anything on the coast. That is the shape of this whole list, and it is the part worth sitting with.
This Is Built From Reviews, Not From Meals
Before the list, the same thing we say every week, because it governs everything below it.
LET THE PEOPLE SPEAK!!!!
No critic ate at these restaurants to produce this ranking. Nobody from Forkstrike, and nobody from Food Journal Magazine, sat down and worked through a menu to arrive at these numbers. The Strike Score is calculated from publicly available review data over a rolling 180-day window, weighted so that recent opinion counts for more than old opinion.
It measures what diners have been saying lately. It is not a verdict on which seafood in Los Angeles is best.
The Coast Does Not Win
Seven of the 25 are on the water. Eighteen are not.
The top four are all inland: Downey, South Los Angeles, Montebello and Koreatown. The best-scoring waterfront room is King's Fish House in Long Beach at 92, fifth overall. The most postcard-coastal restaurant on the entire list, The Lobster, sitting at the foot of the Santa Monica Pier with the ocean filling the windows, finishes 25th at 81.
Run down the inland names and a pattern shows up fast. Crabby's Seafood in Montebello. Rockin' Cajun in Carson. Krab Kingz on Wilmington. Boston Lobster in Rosemead. Grab A Crab in Monterey Park. Ondal Crab House in Koreatown. These are boil houses and crab shacks, paper on the table, bibs optional, and in this dataset they beat the view.
The reading we would offer is not that the coastal rooms cook worse. It is that a restaurant with a $40 view collects a different kind of review than a restaurant with a $35 crab plate, and recency-weighted sentiment rewards the second one.
Gladstones Is Open, And People Still Think It Is Not
Gladstones lands 18th at 86, which is unremarkable until you remember where it sits.
The restaurant is at 17300 Pacific Coast Highway in Pacific Palisades, and it came through the January 2025 fires. Diners on its own Google listing keep writing some version of the same sentence: that it is open, that it has been open for about a year, and that people still believe otherwise. One recent review mentions the tribute inside to the fire department that protected the building.
A restaurant scoring 86 while a meaningful share of the city assumes it burned down is a strange position to be in, and it is the kind of thing a score built on recent reviews is actually good at surfacing.
Slapfish Is Still Climbing, And It Is In A Terminal
Readers who followed our Forkstrike coverage in October will recognize this one.
Slapfish at LAX Terminal 2 turned up on Forkstrike's list of places Google undersells, carrying a Strike Score of 90 against a Google rating in the twos. It is now at 91, marked Striking, and sitting 8th in seafood for the entire county. Its Google rating today reads 3.3 on 732 ratings.
The gap has narrowed and has not closed. Whatever is happening behind that counter in Terminal 2, recent diners are reporting it well before the lifetime average catches up.
Where Providence Lands
Providence is 21st, at 85.
Michael Cimarusti's Melrose dining room is the most decorated seafood restaurant in the city and it finishes below six crab houses. We flagged the same mechanism in the sushi edition and it applies here unchanged: a tasting-menu room serving two seatings a night generates a fraction of the reviews a 200-seat crab house generates in the same week, and the score is built on volume of recent sentiment.
Providence holds a 4.7 on Google across more than a thousand lifetime ratings. The Forkstrike number is answering a narrower question than the one most readers think it is answering.
The Forkstrike 25, Seafood, Los Angeles County
Scored on the last six months of reviews as of October 26, compared with the October 20 reading. Each name links to its Forkstrike profile. Where no trend word appears, there is not yet enough recent movement for a verdict and the score stands on its own.
Mariscos Choix, Downey. 98, Steady.
Holbox, South Los Angeles. 96, Steady, $$$.
Crabby's Seafood & More, Montebello. 96, Striking, $$$.
Ondal Crab House, Koreatown. 95, Steady, $$$.
King's Fish House, Long Beach. 92, Steady, $$$.
Rockin' Cajun, Carson. 92, $$$.
Parkers' Lighthouse, Long Beach. 91, Steady, $$$.
Slapfish, LAX Terminal 2. 91, Striking, $$$.
Water Grill, Downtown Los Angeles. 90, Smoldering, $$$$.
Krab Kingz, Los Angeles. 89, Steady, $$$.
Bluewater Grill, Redondo Beach. 89, $$$.
Boston Lobster Seafood Restaurant, Rosemead. 88, Steady, $$$.
Avra, Beverly Hills. 87, Steady, $$$$.
22nd St. Landing Seafood Grill & Bar, San Pedro. 87, Striking, $$$.
Boathouse on the Bay, Long Beach. 86, Steady, $$$.
Catch, West Hollywood. 86, Striking, $$$$.
Sonmari, Los Angeles. 86, $$$$.
Gladstones, Pacific Palisades. 86, Steady, $$$.
Found Oyster, Los Angeles. 86, Steady, $$$$.
Newport Seafood Restaurant, San Gabriel. 85, Steady, $$$.
Providence, Los Angeles. 85, $$$$.
Tangaroa Fish Market, Los Angeles. 85, Smoldering, $$$.
Ocean Prime, Beverly Hills. 84, Smoldering, $$$$.
Grab A Crab, Monterey Park. 83, $$$.
The Lobster, Santa Monica. 81, Steady, $$$$.
The Week's Climbers
Mariscos La Chula, Downey: 71 to 74, up 3
Gladstone's Long Beach, Long Beach: 73 to 75, up 2
Crabby's Seafood & More, Montebello: 95 to 96, up 1
Ondal Crab House, Los Angeles: 94 to 95, up 1
Slapfish, LAX: 90 to 91, up 1
How 19,073 Restaurants Became 25
Forkstrike shared the full funnel:
19,073 scored places in Los Angeles County
437 of them seafood
128 cleared 40 or more reviews read inside the window
38 sat in the $$$ or $$$$ band, or cleared 300 reviews read
30 survived the no-chain rule
30 after one seat per brand
25 shown
One detail worth noting. The brand rule removed nobody this week. In the sushi edition it took out KazuNori and SUGARFISH. Seafood in this county is less consolidated than sushi, and the funnel shows it.
About The Data
This week's seafood cut was provided to Food Journal Magazine by Forkstrike, which scores restaurants using publicly available review data over a rolling 180-day window, weighted for recency. This edition covers Los Angeles County, scored as of October 26, 2026 and compared with the October 20 reading.
Qualifying rooms carry 40 or more reviews read in the window and sit in the $$$ or $$$$ price band, or clear 300 reviews read. One location per brand, no national chains. Neighborhood labels, current open status and the Google ratings quoted above were checked against Google Business Profile on October 28, 2026.
Food Journal Magazine has a working arrangement with Forkstrike. We did not visit these restaurants for this article, and the scores and rankings are Forkstrike's rather than ours.
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