Dentists in Van Nuys, CA: Local Guide

Quick answer: Van Nuys, CA has 139 dental practices in the Dental.me directory. 76 are rated on Google, averaging 4.37★ across 6,553 reviews. Top by independent Dental.me Score: GOHAR HOVSEPYAN D.D.S., INC., Elizabeth Rojas, VOSSOUGHI DENTAL PRACTICE PC. Compare them below and shortlist two or three near you to call.

Van Nuys is a city where the ratings vary far more than the average suggests. That sounds harsh, but the numbers say it plainly. Across the 139 dental practices Dental.me tracks inside the 91401–91411 corridor, the average rating sits at just 4.37 — noticeably lower than most San Fernando Valley neighborhoods. That single number hides the real story, though. Van Nuys isn’t a mediocre market; it’s a split one. It has a deep bench of highly rated offices and, sitting right alongside them, a long tail of practices that patients rate poorly. In a town like this, the skill isn’t finding a dentist. It’s telling the two halves apart.

So this guide is built differently from the usual “top 10 dentists” list. We’re going to teach you to read a busy, uneven market — because that’s the actual challenge in Van Nuys.

What 6,553 reviews reveal about this market

Of those 139 practices, 76 carry a public Google rating. Between them they hold 6,553 Google reviews — an average of about 86 reviews per rated office. That is a reasonably large sample per office: a rating built on 86 reviews moves less with any single one than a rating built on two or three. It still measures what reviewers wrote, not the dentistry.

But notice that last tile. Only 45 practices — less than a third — maintain a working website. That is low, and it changes how much you can learn before you call: where an office publishes no site, there are no hours, no insurance list, and no booking page to check, so those questions all move to the phone. The Van Nuys dentist directory narrows that gap by putting the Google rating, the review count, and the listed specialties into one comparable view, so an office with no website of its own is still something you can compare rather than skip.

The rating spread — and why it’s the whole game

Here’s where Van Nuys separates itself. Break the 76 rated practices into bands and the market almost splits down the middle: a strong top, and a surprisingly heavy bottom.

Read that carefully. 42 of the 76 rated practices — about 55% — score 4.8 or higher. That’s an excellent top tier, and it’s why the city rewards patients who do a little homework. But look at the bottom: 14 practices sit below 4.0, and another 13 land in the mixed 4.0–4.49 zone. Together that’s more than a third of the rated market that patients have flagged as anything from uneven to poor. This is the exact opposite of a neighboring town like Encino or Sherman Oaks, where nearly everyone clusters near the top. In Van Nuys, the 4.37 city average isn’t the typical experience — it’s a midpoint between two very different groups. Land in the top band and you’ll be delighted; drift into the bottom and you’ll understand where the low reviews came from.

The practical takeaway: a rating floor is non-negotiable here. Set 4.8 as your starting line, then let review volume break the ties.

Who the top of the market actually is

Apply that 4.8 floor and rank by review count, and a clear leaderboard emerges. These are the Van Nuys offices with the highest Google ratings and the most reviews behind them:

• Mehrzad Firouzbakht Dental, Inc. — 4.9 stars across 609 reviews, the largest Google reviews base in the city. When an office holds a 4.9 over 600+ visits, that’s consistency, not luck.
• Gohar Hovsepyan, D.D.S., Inc. — a perfect 5.0 over 539 reviews, one of only a handful of offices anywhere to keep a flawless score at that volume.
• Dr. Jeannie Ann Molato, D.M.D. — 4.9 stars over 432 reviews.
• Robert Fields — 4.9 stars over 349 reviews.
• Nisman & Bacquet, D.D.S., Inc. — 4.9 stars over 254 reviews.
• Elizabeth Rojas — a perfect 5.0 over 198 reviews.

Notice the pattern: two offices (Hovsepyan and Rojas) hold perfect 5.0 marks, while Firouzbakht carries a near-perfect score across the deepest review base in town. Those are two different kinds of proof — flawlessness versus durability — and both are legitimate reasons to shortlist. You can compare every one of them side by side on the main Van Nuys directory page.

Matching a specialist to the work you need

General dentists dominate the count, but Van Nuys carries a solid specialist bench — important, because you don’t want a general office improvising an implant or a root canal when a focused provider is a mile away.

The depth is real where it counts. Dental implants lead with 19 practices, and cosmetic dentistry and teeth whitening each list 18 — so if you’re rebuilding a smile or brightening one, you have room to be picky. Families are well served too, with 12 pediatric dentists and 11 orthodontists offering braces and Invisalign. Where the market thins is at the surgical edge — only 5 oral surgeons and 5 denture providers — so for those, book early and don’t assume same-week availability. And with 10 emergency dentists on call, a cracked molar on a Saturday is a solvable problem, not a crisis.

A vetting method that works in a split market

Because Van Nuys has that heavy bottom tail, calling the closest place first tells you nothing about how it is rated. Here’s a four-step method for working down to the 42 highest-rated offices.

Step one, the rating floor, is the one that does the heavy lifting in Van Nuys. It instantly removes the 34 rated practices that scored below 4.8 — and, statistically, that’s where the disappointing visits cluster. Step two weights by volume, because a 5.0 built on 12 reviews is a rumor while Firouzbakht’s 4.9 across 609 is a track record. Step three matches the specialty to your actual need. And step four is the phone call — the only thing the data can’t confirm for you. Ask whether they’re in-network for your plan, what a first visit costs out of pocket, and (given how few local offices publish this online) what their real hours are. If you want to understand the exact review and rating logic behind these placements, our how we rank methodology lays it out in full.

One more reason step four matters so much in Van Nuys: with fewer than a third of offices publishing anything online, price transparency is thin, and quotes for the same procedure can swing widely from one practice to the next. Before you commit to major work — a crown, an implant, or a full course of orthodontics — it pays to know the typical national range so you can tell a fair quote from a padded one. Our guide to dental costs gives you those benchmarks, and armed with them, a five-minute call to two or three top-tier Van Nuys offices will usually surface a real difference in out-of-pocket cost. In a market this uneven, that phone-and-benchmark habit is the difference between overpaying and choosing confidently.

When to look just past the city line

Van Nuys sits in the dense center of the Valley, which means excellent alternatives are minutes away if your top pick is booked or out of network. It’s worth keeping the neighbors in view: Sherman Oaks and Encino to the south tend to run higher on average, while Lake Balboa, North Hills, Panorama City, and Panorama ring the immediate area. For a routine cleaning, staying in Van Nuys and choosing from the top tier is the easy call. For a big-ticket procedure — an implant, full-mouth work, or a second opinion — comparing a Van Nuys specialist against one a few minutes away is exactly the kind of homework that pays for itself.

The bottom line for Van Nuys: this is a market with real winners and real losers, and the gap between them is wider than almost anywhere else in the Valley. Don’t let the 4.37 average scare you off or lull you in. Use the floor, respect the volume, and start your search on the Van Nuys dentist directory.

Dental.me organizes dental directory data so patients can compare offices with confidence. Use each practice profile and its available website, map, and phone details for current appointment, payment, and care decisions.