The Summer I Ate Los Angeles
My quest to eat at 101 classic LA restaurants, and what I learned along the way
I’ve always been interested in how food, culture, and personality interact. From the time I was a child, my dad was taking me to old, greasy, hole in the wall type places. You know, the kind of places that fit under the umbrella of Diners, Drive-Ins, and/or Dives. It was clearly a different experience for my dad taking me to these places than, say, taking me to McDonald’s. Somehow, it was like he was revealing a little piece of who he was when we’d drive 30 minutes out of the way to some 19th-century saloon with surprisingly delicious Italian food or roast beef sandwiches. And seeing the history of the place where I grew up, as viewed through the lens of historic regional food establishments, gave me a richer appreciation for where I lived and the people who lived there with me.
Although I’ve moved a few times in my life, I’ve always tried to understand whatever place I ended up in through the food that’s unique to that place. I don’t think that’s all that strange. I was born here, moved to the Bay around age 10, then moved back to Los Angeles around 2010 to attend UCLA. I, like many, had lunch at Pink’s Hot Dogs within the first few days of moving to LA. I’m not sure why Pink’s has this reputation as the place to go when you come to LA. But whatever it is, in addition to seeing the beach or the Hollywood sign or the Tar Pits, it is considered an essential experience to eat a hot dog at Pink’s, or a French dip at Philippe’s, or a taco from a taco truck. And it seems to matter that these places have been around a long time. Even people who aren’t “foodies” or who otherwise don’t really care about food will occasionally go out of their way to these places. And it’s not just LA; if you’re visiting New York, you try to visit Katz’ Deli or Russ & Daughters. When you visit Seattle, you go to Pike’s Place Market, at least once. When you visit Philadelphia, you go to Pat’s King of Steaks. Or say you’re a slightly more advanced tourist, then you go to Cosmi’s and get a roast pork instead of a philly cheesesteak in Philadelphia. Either way, people trust these old places to some extent to represent their city. It’s not just that the food is good, in fact many of these places are considered overrated or past their prime, and the tourists know it deep down. It’s that their presence says something about the city.
What they say depends on the city and the restaurant. Take, let’s say, Musso & Frank. Do people go there because they have the best lamb kidneys with bacon, or jellied consomme, or chicken a la king? Nobody seeks these dishes out elsewhere, but for some reason, we suspend our momentary convictions that foods invented before 1970 are inherently yucky and we actually deign to try them. Why? Partly, it’s because these dishes were favored by Hollywood stars from yesteryear, and that’s uniquely part of LA’s history. I mean, we’ve all heard of Charlie Chaplin, but are we as a society regularly watching silent Chaplin shorts for our own entertainment, and that’s the reason we want to try his favorite meal? No, but he’s an influential figure in the city’s history, and so I guess we are interested in him, including in the foods he ate, like Musso’s lamb kidneys.
But I think more than anything when it comes to local favorite restaurants, they establish a continuity between ourselves and the city’s past. By growing a certain loyalty and affection for these old dives, we make the city mean something to us. We have these experiences as individuals that kind of initiate us into this collective called the citizens of Los Angeles. I may not have been to Philippe’s with you, exactly, but we’ve all been there at least once probably. And even if a place is something of a tourist trap, it could only get that way if a lot of locals vouched for it first. It’s something we have in common, a little fiber of connection and mutual understanding in a modern cityscape that can sometimes feel cold and alienating, let’s admit it. We’re not all right up next to each other all the time like in New York. We get in our little car, drive ourselves alone to our destination and leave alone; we might have friends who live in the Valley or on the other side of the 110 dozens of miles away. It can be a little exhausting. When our second hour sitting in traffic begins, we start to wonder what it all means. Why am I here? Why is LA even here? Sometimes, those questions look a little less unanswerable when you’re at some place and you realize you’re sitting at the same counter stool that Charles Bukowski did 50 years ago.
But the food does matter. It’s not just an excuse to go to some place where people are. There’s a reason LA has the best tacos but can’t compete with New York on bagels, or why we have the best Korean BBQ but can’t quite top San Francisco when it comes to dim sum. It’s because of the history of the people who live here, all the people interacting and jostling one another, that LA’s food culture is what it is. We drive a lot of cars here; ergo, of course we like a drive-thru, of course we have old restaurants with big neon signs you can see from the road. Or you know, Southern California’s climate is pretty similar to Iran’s, so of course we have a lot of Iranian people living here, and so of course we have some of the best Persian cuisine in the country. Then again, some questions aren’t so easily answered, like why do we have better tacos, but San Francisco generally has better burritos? But looking for the answers, even in times where it turns out there are no answers to be found, teaches you so much about history and about people.
I moved back to LA in summer 2023 after a couple years away. In order to reacquaint myself to my home city, to really get my Southern California groove back, I decided to go on a quest. To eat at one hundred (and one) classic, vintage LA restaurants in one summer. I see myself first and foremost as an Angeleno, it’s part of who I am. Even when I've lived in other places I saw myself as an Angeleno away from home. My quest to eat at 101 classic LA restaurants was a quest to become local again. I began on May 27th by eating a cheeseburger from Bill’s Burgers in Van Nuys, and ended with a meal at Dal Rae on September 17th. Now no one can tell me I have not earned the right to call myself a local of Los Angeles. Summer 2023 will forever go down in history as The Summer I Ate LA.
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Starting in 2020 I noticed that COVID lockdowns were causing some of these old, iconic businesses to close forever. This really moved me, so I wanted to create a running list of old-school LA restaurants and bars that were still open. Eventually that list turned into an enormous project, and I decided to map these places instead of making a list so they’d be even easier to search for. This eventually became the 1000 Old LA Eateries map, which has now been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. I did my best to document every restaurant I could find in LA county that had been open for longer than 20 years (which, at the time, meant restaurants opened in 2001 or earlier). Once the map started to get really big though, I separated the map into tiers you could toggle on and off. The highest tier is the 101 LA Legends - restaurants that have been around long enough to have interwoven themselves into the fabric of the city, or otherwise just seem quintessentially LA.
Which restaurants made the list was determined by me after many hours of research and decision making. A lot of factors went in to an eatery’s placement on the list - how old it is, how reflective it is of the people who live near it, whether it represents a culinary style or tradition that seems unique to LA, whether it has a signature dish, if it has an interesting history or is tied to interesting events nearby, if the style of food made there is archaic or hard to find elsewhere, etc. There are many great old places that I just didn’t feel made the cut of 101 LA Legends - and you can find the rest of them on my map. Feel free to disagree with my choices. This is purely a labor of love and personal interest, so if you think you can do better, be my guest.
But why old restaurants? Why not just good restaurants? Well, because “good” is subjective, whereas history is something more universal. There is a place in this world for food bloggers who look for the newest, the cheapest, the most exotic, the best rated on the big food blogs, or in some way “the best.” And that's great, but not the point of what I do. I'm not looking for the best food, per se, I'm looking to put together a story about LA's culinary history and culture.
And, frankly, I’m tired of old places where I’ve made such great memories being replaced by soulless, corporate-minimalist dining experiences that serve pointless fusion food or “elevated comfort food” at mind-boggling prices. I do not care for passing trends or gimmicks, I hate fusion food, and I hate “chef-driven” food. I don’t like going to places where I have to wait in a line out the door to pay out the nose. I don’t like places that inflate their wait times to give them an air of exclusivity. I don’t like places that play loud music to make it seem like it’s really busy and happenin’ and you should therefore be grateful you made it in the door. I don’t like the cookie-cutter look of new restaurants with all white walls, pink fake-neon signs, exposed brick, incandescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling, uncomfortable chairs, creatively arranged succulent plants, the color white everywhere. Haven’t we had enough by now? This stuff was cliche 10 years ago!
I don’t like paying $23 for a burger made by someone who went to culinary school and has a Misfits tattoo. I don’t like chefs who try to fool us and themselves into thinking they’re singularly creative, atomized individuals who aren’t part of any particular tradition and their culinary output is entirely original when it almost never is. Food for me is unique amongst art forms, because it is created by communities, not individuals. I don’t like fusion food that exists for the sake of fusion and doesn’t respect the logic of the respective cuisines. The world does not need sushiritos.
In short, I just don’t like many of the trends in the contemporary restaurant environment, so a new place I actually like is rare. It’s not that I simply will not eat at a new restaurant. I just won’t eat at them because they’re new. Usually if I find and like a newer place, it’s because they have a hard-to-find ethnic or regional food, or they just manage to cut the crap in one way or another.
My big list of old restaurants has been called the “anti-Michelin Guide,” a designation I readily embrace. The Michelin Guide tells you where to find the Good Food™ but, especially in North America, pays little attention to regionality. Any Michelin restaurant, or any chefy-chef little place like Dunsmoor could conceivably exist just as easily anywhere else in the world. A Peruvian-inspired restaurant in Italy has just as much chance of getting a Michelin star as a French restaurant in Japan. Almost all of LA’s Michelin restaurants are sushi places—which, fair, LA has a big Japanese community and one of the most creative and energetic sushi scenes in the world—but the rest of them are some variation on post-Chez Panisse, ultra-post-modern, French- or Italian- or Asian-inspired gastronomy which has little to do with how Angelenos as a particular people approach or think about food.
But you know what? Fine, good for them.no'm not saying only places I like should exist. But I’m just not so concerned with what they have to say. What I’m interested in is food that is reflective of the people where that food is from. Because I am an Angeleno (though I partly grew up in the Bay Area, my parents and grandparents were from here, and I’ve lived most of my life here now), as well as a food lover, and a philosopher by trade, I’m concerned with understanding the city I call home and the people who live in it in terms of the food that is historically unique to it. You are what you eat, after all, so I am answering the question, “what is Los Angeles?” by asking, “what does it eat?”
So essentially, my commitment to old places is ideological. It mostly has nothing to do with whether the food is “good” or “bad” by the standards of modern, popular opinion. Granted, I don’t promote objectively unsanitary or disgusting food, but food that’s otherwise just-ok can be elevated by the love of the local community and a touch of romantic mythologizing. And to say mythology goes into the love for some of the restaurants I visited by no means detracts from their greatness. I think the act of mythologizing the things you care about is one of the most engaging ways to make this world one you can call home. And I happen to really love the ways Angelenos have made the city their home.
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My quest to eat at 101 classic restaurants took me high and low, there and back again. From Neptune's Net in the West, to Donut Man in the east; from Brent’s Deli in the north, to Chowder Barge in the south. I had chicken sausage in South LA, and straight-from-Bangkok Thai street food in North Hollywood. $12 glasses of juice in Beverly Hills, and $5 schooners of beer in Long Beach. Pork stomach tacos in Boyle Heights, and Sinatra-worthy lasagna in Burbank. I’ve had both of the classic French dips in town (they’re both good), and ate more chili in four months than I have in the last four years. I’ve tried the food of at least 18 different countries, which is still only a fraction of how many different nationalities are represented in LA. I’ve seen all kinds of people, at all hours of the day, in all kinds of establishments, from bars to diners to big cafeterias, tiny dives, grand dining halls and take-out windows. Here are just a few things I’ve learned eating my way through LA:
• LA is home to an incredible diversity of people, and in concentrations that are unique to the city. We have the largest population of Mexicans, Koreans, Persians, Armenians, Thai, and Hawaiians outside their respective homelands, and significant populations of many more peoples, like Peruvians, Salvadorans, Ethiopians, Chinese, Japanese, Greeks, Italians, and Vietnamese, among many others. Each of them have contributed in totally unique ways to the cuisine of Los Angeles. We would be nothing without, say, Korean BBQ or Greek-inspired pastrami sandwiches. And do you know how hard it is to find decent Hawaiian food in New York or Chicago? Next-to-impossible.
• It’s expensive to run a restaurant these days. Nearly every restaurant has had to raise prices since COVID, to the point where “cheap eats” in LA are almost nonexistent, besides perhaps Joe Jost’s $3 sandwiches. The price of everything is going up fast - rent, labor, utilities, cost of basic ingredients and materials, you name it. I honestly don’t know how LA expects to continue functioning when it seems like landlords are the only people served by city politicians and bureaucrats. But for whatever reason, some older restaurants are able to keep costs way down. Coffee’s still 45 cents at Philippe’s. Or you can get a whole sushi feast at Sushi Sakae for like, $15. More modern sushi restaurants, even if they wanted to keep prices that low, would probably not be able to figure it out. It would be unthinkable. And this happens all over, whether it's sushi or tacos or fried chicken or steak. So cherish the older places: the more business they get, the lower they can keep the prices.
• The importance of diners and lunch counters. LA may just be the diner capital of America, New Jersey notwithstanding. Not only do we have dozens of classic, Googie diners all over the county, but we have diners to cater to everyone. We’ve got Mexican diners (El Tepeyac), Japanese diners (Otomisan), Korean diners (Mama Kim’s), Hawaiian diners (Gardena Bowl), Chinese diners (Paul’s Kitchen), and Jewish diners (Canter’s, which, I know, is also a deli) just to name a few. It doesn’t matter where you’re from or if you grew up eating at diners, the diner is a place of comfort, a place to put yourself at ease, somewhere to join the crowd when you’re feeling lonely, come as you are. I think part of that is the counter seating arrangement, which is less common in newer restaurants. When you belly up to the counter, you look your cook straight in the eye, you see your food on the griddle, you might make conversation with whoever’s at the next stool. It’s hard not to feel a small sense of camaraderie at a diner, even if you opt for the comfortable privacy of a booth over a counter stool. The diner is LA’s most sacred space.
• LA is a city of neighborhoods. Of course, every city has neighborhoods, but LA’s a little different. Sure, there’s the City of Los Angeles and it has its official boundaries, but they were set semi-arbitrarily 100 years ago. There’s nothing cultural that justifies Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, or Santa Monica being separate cities with their own separate city councils and police forces, while most of the San Fernando Valley, as well as random strips of land as far as San Pedro, are within LA city limits. For this reason among others I regard LA as an unofficial city-county like San Francisco. The urban sprawl does not end. It’s not like the Bay where there’s 20 minutes of wilderness to drive through between Oakland and Walnut Creek. LA is one huge city made up of many tiny ones. And getting to know these cities and neighborhoods really lets you appreciate how they all hang together, how the unique offerings of each place add up to one, big, Greater Los Angeles culture. And that even goes for neighborhoods that don’t exist anymore. The echoes of Bunker Hill or Chavez Ravine still ripple in their effects into the present day. And did you know that LA has had no less than three Chinatowns over its history (not counting Monterey Park)? Or that one of those Chinatowns used to be a Little Italy? Or that LA at one time even had a Little New Oreans down in Jefferson Park? And though those enclaves are gone, they still leave an impact, often taken for granted, on the current residents of those neighborhoods. Most of these old neighborhoods still have at least one restaurant that dates from those eras, their commitment to staying the same serving as the most powerful reminder of how much the city has changed, both for better and for worse.
• Once-fashionable restaurants still have things to offer. For example, tiki had mostly gone the way of the dodo until a recent revival. But the newer places don’t really get what tiki was all about. A visit to Tiki Ti can correct any misperceptions. Many people complain that Tiki Ti and other true vintage tiki bars are “too dark.” But that’s the point. It’s supposed to be dark and intimate, because it’s supposed to be a vacation from the world. It has to be dark enough that the illusion can work its magic. No loud music, no bright lights, just good drinks and good company, whether you come through the door alone or not. It allows you to unwind in a way that isn’t available in many places, not anymore. Taking your phone out at Tiki Ti makes you stick out like a sore thumb, so put it down for an hour at least, and see what it means to unwind like a member of the Greatest Generation. You’ll thank me later, I promise.
• The fascinating afterlife of formerly famous restaurants. If you peek under the surfaces of some restaurants, you can find a fascinating hidden history. For example, did you know The Prince, that bar in Koreatown, used to be a British chop house? It’s true, in fact LA had at least a dozen British restaurants (not pubs) scattered around the area, such as Billingsley’s, the Cock n Bull, the Tam O’Shanter, just to name a few, serving large beef roasts and meat pies. They were really popular in the 40s and 50s, but died a long death. The Windsor became The Prince in the 90s, and all but the Tam O’Shanter have closed by now. Why did we have so many British restaurants in the first place? Looking into these old places can set you off in search of mysteries, uncovering pages from the city’s past.
• LA restaurants are influential around the country through media. You might not think of LA as a hotspot of red-sauce Italian-American restaurants such as you’d find in New York’s Little Italy or San Francisco’s North Beach. But you’d be surprised how much influence the places we do have can be. Walking into Dan Tana’s or Pinocchio, for example, you might feel like you’re walking into a cartoon. And there’s a reason for that; Pinocchio in particular is in an area of Burbank that’s very close to animation studios like Disney and Warner Bros. Naturally, some of those animators might have stopped in for lunch over the years, and being inspired by their surroundings, perhaps they snuck some visual references into their work. Suddenly, the way an Italian restaurant is supposed to look on TV or in cartoons is based on how specific Italian restaurants in LA look, setting up a feedback loop of expectations for how all Americans expect Italian restaurants to look, with the hanging chianti bottles and red checkered tablecloth and the whole nine yards. This imagery doesn’t come out of nowhere, it turns out we can point to specific places that have influenced our collective perceptions and expectations.
• LA isn’t all In-n-Out. With a few exceptions, I tried to avoid featuring well-known restaurant chains. In-n-Out might seem like a glaring omission for example, but look, I grew up in the Bay, we had it up there, I looked forward to trips to In-n-Out as much as anyone in SoCal. I think In-n-Out has transcended its LA origins to become more of a pan-California thing. And they don’t need my help just because they’re old. In-n-Out isn’t struggling like some of these places, they’re doing just fine. And to be honest, I find corporate fast food chains to be a really distasteful expression of culture. Every city in America has some combination of ground beef, bleached carbohydrates, and processed cheese that is beloved by locals, whether it's Culver's or Runzas or Pizzeria Uno. By skipping the chains, you get a far more unadulterated dose of local color.
• Because LA is so big, there’s a lot of diversity in its food scene. We couldn’t just be the city that invented the French dip, we had to have two places that claim to have invented it. Or take burgers for example. We have several different popular subgenres of burger that are more common here than elsewhere. We have shack burgers, like those from Bill’s or Yuca’s, greasy, no-frills, and crucial use of shredded lettuce. There’s lunch counter burgers like at the Apple Pan, obviously served at lunch counters and usually featuring a sauce/relish recipe that dates to the 1950s. There’s what’s known variously as the “‘hood burger” or ghetto burger; that is, very inexpensive burgers from places that invariably also have pastrami sandwiches. And there’s even a rare subtype of this genre known as the cheeseburger taco, found at legacy spots like Bill’s Taco House. It’s part of the reason why asking and answering the question “what is LA’s best burger?” has become something of a local pastime.
• There is a real, specifically LA cuisine. We have favored styles of preparation, favored types of establishments to find our favorite food, and specific dishes that form an LA food canon. Take pastrami for example. Nobody does it quite like LA. Sure, we have Jewish deli-style pastrami too, and places like Brent’s and Langer’s make some of the best versions of it in the world. But I’m talking something different. I’m talking about LA-style pastrami, those slightly chewy ribbons of brined beef sold more commonly at taco stands in East LA than they are at kosher-style delis. LA-style pastrami is a product of Greek immigrants (Greeks, coincidentally, invented pastrami or bastrma in Byzantine times, which was then picked up by the Ottomans who spread it to places like Romania, where Jews living there also got a taste for it before bringing it to the American East Coast). Based on a very old manner of preparation, they were able to take cheap and otherwise undesirable cuts of beef and make it into something affordable and accessible for the hungry masses of Los Angeles. And they’re still quite affordable compared to the $25+ overstuffed monstrosities at some delis. But that’s not even the end of the story. Most LA-pastrami is sold in the form of a dip - a French dip that is. What places like The Hat will do is, they’ll boil the pastrami in a seasoned broth, then they’ll dip the top half of a French roll in the broth, then stuff it with pastrami and maybe a little mustard. It’s a French dip, but with pastrami instead of roast beef, and it ends up being an affordable meal for hundreds if not thousands of Angelenos every day, whether its from pastrami specialists like the Hat or casual drive-up burger stands that also happen to have pastrami (and tacos, and chicken, and any number of popular-in-LA treats) like Patra's Burgers in Echo Park. Or, take Cal-Mex cuisine. It’s like Tex-Mex; that is, a regional style of Mexican cuisine developed in one of Mexico’s former territories still largely populated by Mexicans. Purists or uneducated haters call places like Tito’s Tacos or El Coyote “inauthentic,” but they couldn’t be more authentic to the area they were created. And for the record, most of these places are owned by Mexican-American families, and serve a largely Chicano customer base, even if white Americans also find it familiar and comforting after many years of exposure to it. Go to El Cholo in Koreatown and you’ll hear plenty of Spanish spoken by customers. Conversely, go to Al & Bea’s in Boyle Heights and most of their customers may be speaking English. I see food writers today wrestling with notions of authenticity when it comes to newer ethnic restaurants, and I just have to laugh a bit. LA has many “authentic” international cuisines, but the food that has originated and been popularized right here is no less authentic. It’s 100%, authentically LA.
There are many more things I could tell of my travels around the city. But that takes some of the fun out of exploring LA for yourself. It’s not just about the restaurants, after all. It’s just one way to get to know one dimension of such an incredibly rich place, culturally speaking. Many people, including many residents, sadly, have this picture of LA as being a sprawling nightmare full of influencere and plastic surgery disasters, but at the same time, the only part of LA they’re willing to explore or acknowledge as existing is maybe 8 square blocks of West Hollywood. Oh, LA is fake? What about East LA is fake? What about Montrose, or Long Beach, or Koreatown, or Torrance, or Pacoima, or Crenshaw, or Glendora, or El Segundo - what about these places is fake to you? LA is a huge place, and as influential as Hollywood is and forever will be, it’s not the end-all be-all of LA. The catch is, you have to be willing to drive for a long time from there to get anywhere different. But until gas prices surged to $7, that was never a huge barrier to me, because every time I ventured outside my comfort zone, I found something new and incredible. Hawaiian shirt emporiums in Downey, monumental artworks in Watts, whale watching in San Pedro, giant neon clowns in the Valley… I want all these places to continue existing, to be appreciated, to withstand the forces of inflation, recession, and gentrification. That’s really why I did all this. I want to encourage my fellow Angelenos to explore, to really get to know their city, and I mean the whole city, from Sylmar to San Pedro. Explore so that your experience of the city isn’t just a carousel of endless novelty. So that it can continue to be a healthy, thriving, diverse, infinitely rich city that I’ve come to love dearly.
You know, there’s this idea out there that just because you can use your money to buy up a piece of property, there is no valid reason for you not to. The simple fact that you have the power to do what you will with a little piece of the city is all the license people need to do so. But there are cities in the world that actually care about historical preservation, in Europe for example. If Los Angeles were in France, you’d see nothing but dingbat apartments and Googie diners and great big neon signs shining as far as the eye could see, instead of big gray rectangles full of condos.
Humans didn’t always live this way. Could you imagine explaining to an English peasant from the 1600s that someone just bought the house their family has lived on for generations, and they’re now being evicted by SoulCycle? This idea that land is just inert, dumb matter is only a few short hundred years old in the scope of hundreds of thousands of years of human history. But somehow now we’ve gotten to the point where rich, vibrant communities, with their own cultures and unique ways of life, can be displaced just because some tech bro decided to dabble in real estate on a whim. Of course, there’s nothing legally speaking I can do to stop you. But I can still declare “I see what you’re doing, and I don’t fucking like it.” Ultimately, gentrification is a bigger force than any of us can stop, any more than we can just collectively decide to stop inflation or the rise of far-right populism. But that’s why this project of mine was more than just a passing fancy. It’s about communicating a worldview, one in which we value our traditions as well as our diversity, rather than just bow down to the forces of change, be they good or bad.
Without getting any more polemical, I hope you enjoy my work, and use it to guide your adventures through the culinary mosaic that is Los Angeles. It’s a city that rewards exploration, getting out of your comfort zone, meeting new people, seeing new places, and being willing to slog through traffic just for a good lunch. I think the more that Angelenos are familiar with their city, and not just the handful of neighborhoods they spend most of their time in, the more they develop a deeper appreciation of the place they live in, and a greater respect for the people that live in it with them.