The City
Things to do, by neighborhood
Places
440 placesEvery place we cover, A to Z. Pick a stop for somewhere to be before or after.
The original 10 Speed, opened in 2013 in the Pedalers Fork building in Old Town, where they still micro-batch roast everything they sell. It is a walk-up counter with a cycling slant, opens at 6am and closes at 3pm. There is a patio and the sound of the road outside. Beans by the bag if you want them.
Daily, 6am to 3pm
A strip-mall counter on East Valley Boulevard whose beef roll is the dish people drive for, a flaky scallion pancake rolled around sliced flank steak, hoisin, cilantro and green onion, cut into rounds. The rest of the menu is Shandong noodles and dumplings and it is all cheap. You order at the front, sit at a laminate table and it arrives fast.
Mon to Thu, 11am to 9pm. Fri and Sat, 11am to 10:30pm. Sun, 11am to 9pm
An Indian kitchen on 23rd Street that has fed USC for years, with a menu that also carries Mexican and American plates because that is what the block asked for. The chicken tikka masala and the garlic naan are what most tables order. It is fluorescent and unfussy and the food comes out quickly.
Daily, 10am to 9pm
A corner beer bar on Main Street in downtown Alhambra with thirty-eight taps, a long bar and a patio facing the sidewalk. It has been there since 2009 and the food is ale-house cooking, burgers and pizzas and tacos, served until close. The noise level is conversational rather than loud and nobody works the door.
Sun, noon to 9pm. Mon to Thu, 11:30am to 10pm. Fri and Sat, noon to 11pm
A small Black-owned counter on Vernon Avenue that took over the address Porterhouse Fried Chicken used to hold, doing birria tacos, fried chicken and sides on the same menu. It is takeout with a couple of seats and the hours are short, finishing before seven on weekdays. The birria quesatacos are the thing people drive over for.
Tue to Fri, 10am to 6:45pm. Sat, noon to 5:30pm. Closed Sun and Mon
A bar on Figueroa that has been serving USC students and whoever else walks in since 1947, known locally as the Nine O. It serves wings and burgers across a long bar facing televisions. On game day it is unusable, but most nights it is simply the nearest place to get a drink after something at the Shrine. Two for one drinks run until nine.
Mon, 3pm to midnight. Tue to Thu, 3pm to 2am. Fri and Sat, noon to 2am. Sun, noon to midnight
The 1939 May Company building on the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, converted into a film museum that opened in 2021. Permanent galleries explain how films get made. Rotating exhibitions share the building with two cinemas that run their own program. Tickets are sold at the door as well as online and the galleries take about two hours if you are moving.
Mon and Wed, Thu, Sun, 10am to 6pm. Fri and Sat, 10am to 8pm. Closed Tuesday
A Jamaican kitchen in Leimert Park Village run by the Mills family since the late nineties, doing jerk chicken, curry goat, oxtails and ackee with saltfish. Plates come with rice and peas and fried plantain. The space is small and warm and the reggae is on, and on a Saturday afternoon the village outside is at its busiest.
Tue to Thu, 11am to 8pm. Fri and Sat, 11am to 9pm. Sun, 11am to 7pm. Closed Mon
A small coffee bar on Cesar Chavez two doors from The Paramount, doing espresso alongside drinks built on cafe de olla, horchata and Mexican chocolate. The pastries come in from nearby bakeries and there are a few tables and a counter. It opens at seven and shuts at six, so it is the morning and afternoon answer on this block.
Mon to Fri, 7am to 6pm. Sat, 7am to 4pm. Closed Sun
A house and garden on the point between Malibu Pier and the lagoon, covered inside and out in Malibu tile, with carved teak doors and bottle-glass windows. The grounds are free and open from eight in the morning until sunset, and you can walk them without going inside. The small museum next to the house is free as well and the guided walk through the house costs seven dollars.
Grounds daily 8am to sunset. Museum Wednesday to Saturday 11am to 3pm. House tours Wednesday to Saturday, on the hour 11am to 2pm. Closed in rain
A queer neighborhood bar open on Sunset since 1996, with a happy hour that starts at 4pm and a back bar with a dance floor that opens later in the evening. No cover most nights.
Daily, 4pm to 2am
A walk-up window on First Street that has sold the same bean and cheese burrito since 1966, with green chile if you ask for it. There is no dining area to speak of, just a sidewalk and a couple of tables, and the order comes back in paper in about four minutes. Boyle Heights Beat put the appeal down to not having changed anything.
Tue to Sun, 10am to 7pm. Closed Mon
Charcoal-grilled chicken on East Compton Boulevard, sold by the half or whole bird with rice, whole beans, grilled onions, serranos, tortillas and salsa. The Infatuation's Compton guide says the chicken is not the safe order here but the right one. It is cash only, so bring some.
Daily, 9am to 7pm
A few tables sit inside this Washington coffee bar west of Vermont. The menu stays with espresso, drip and tea. It opens at half past seven and closes at five, so it is a daytime stop only. Students and people working from a laptop make up most of the trade during the week.
Daily, 7:30am to 5pm
A family soul food kitchen in the same West Compton Boulevard building as the museum, open since November 2016. It is named for Alma, who learned to cook from her mother Annie and her sister Betty Jean, both from Arkansas, and her daughter Corina runs the baking side after twenty years of catering. Oxtails, pork chops and fried chicken come with homemade cornbread, and the peach cobbler pancakes are the thing people order without being told to.
Wed to Sun, 11am to 5pm. Closed Monday and Tuesday
The Hollywood store moved two blocks east to a purpose-built space on Argyle in 2021 and brought the used bins and the listening stations with it. Staff still price used stock by hand and write the shelf talkers. Free in-store sets happen on a small stage near the front.
Monday to Thursday 11am to 8pm, Friday to Sunday 11am to 9pm
Mesquite-grilled Tijuana-style tacos off a sidewalk setup on Victory Boulevard, with the adobada off a trompo and a salsa bar you help yourself to. Angel Hernandez built this from one stand into a dozen across Southern California and the original Vineland pitch has since shut, but the Victory operation runs Tuesday to Sunday from about 4:30pm to 11pm. You eat standing up.
Tue to Sun, about 4:30pm to 11pm. Closed Mon
A two-car funicular that has climbed the Bunker Hill slope since 1901, moved one block south in 1996 and returned to service in 2017 after a long shutdown. The ride is under a minute and the fare is a dollar fifty, or seventy-five cents with a TAP card. The lower station sits beside Grand Central Market and the upper one opens onto California Plaza.
Daily, 6:45am to 10pm
Barbacoa de borrego cooked the way it is done in Texcoco, lamb wrapped in maguey leaves and steamed overnight in a pit, sold by the pound with consommé, tortillas and salsa borracha. The Pico Rivera branch sits on Whittier Boulevard with a plain dining area and a counter. Weekends are when the full cuts come out. It opens at eight in the morning, because barbacoa is breakfast.
Daily, 8am to 9pm
A diner on Eagle Rock Boulevard since 1962, with brown vinyl stools down a long counter and booths along the walls. The kitchen does corned beef hash, French toast and a cheeseburger club, and then it does Thai-American dishes on the same menu, including Thai-style fried rice with bacon and chicken sausage with rice and eggs. House chile salsa arrives in a jar.
Reported daily 7am to 3pm, with some listings adding a 5pm to 9pm evening service. No operator website exists, so none of this is confirmed.
A coffee house in a converted Tujunga Avenue bungalow with a wooden deck out front and a garden behind it, sharing a complex with a bookshop. Open from seven in the morning until nine at night every day, which is a wider window than almost anything else in this part of the Valley. Full kitchen as well as espresso, so you can actually eat.
Daily, 7am to 9pm
A deli on Ventura Boulevard since 1957, second generation in the same family, with a menu long enough to take a few minutes to read and a counter selling by the pound. The house line is that every sandwich is a work of Art, which tells you the register. Booths, matzo ball soup, pastrami cut thick, and a crowd of Valley regulars who have been coming since the 1970s.
Daily, 8:30am to 8pm
Armet and Davis built this in 1959, the firm that drew the Norms, Denny's and Bob's Big Boy prototypes, and it shows in the cantilevered swooping roof, the zig-zag railings and the freestanding sign. It opened as Conrad's, Peter Metsos took it over in 1974 and renamed it Astro, and the City Council made it a Historic-Cultural Monument by unanimous vote in October 2024. Pink leather booths, etched glass, a full diner menu.
24 hours, confirmed on the operator's own site. One review in April 2026 reported an unexpected closure, so an occasional gap is possible.
A used vinyl shop on the Magnolia antique stretch in Burbank, buying and selling records, CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays. The stock leans to classic jazz, sixties rock, punk and new wave, soul, blues, exotica and soundtracks, which is a narrower and more useful set of bins than a general shop. Open eleven to five, Tuesday through Sunday.
Tue to Sun, 11am to 5pm. Closed Mon
A counter at the back of Attari Plaza with a shaded courtyard of outdoor tables behind it. The menu runs to tongue sandwiches, kotlet and a bowl of ash reshteh that arrives whether or not you ordered soup. It has been on this block of Westwood Boulevard since the early 1990s.
Tuesday to Sunday 11am to 7pm. Closed Monday
An Ethiopian kitchen in the unit next door to The Mint, serving doro wat and vegetarian combinations on injera at a handful of tables. Portions are built to share and the bill stays low. It is a family operation with no bar and no hurry.
Tue to Thu, noon to 9pm. Fri and Sat, noon to 9:30pm. Sun, noon to 8pm. Closed Monday
A city park on the crest of Olive Hill with Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House at the top and a west lawn that looks across to Griffith Park and the hills. It is free to walk up and sit down. In summer the park runs Friday evenings on the lawn with wine and food trucks.
Park daily 6am to 10pm and free. Hollyhock House tours Thursday to Saturday 11am to 4pm, last entry 3:30pm
A family-owned Italian grocery on Lincoln since 1925, with a deli counter at the back and shelves of imported tinned fish, pasta and oil at the front. The Godmother sandwich is the reason most people are in line. You can order it on the deli's own site and skip the counter entirely.
Wednesday to Sunday 9am to 6pm. Closed Monday and Tuesday. Online ordering closes at 5:30pm
A family-run breakfast place in the Lakeside Shopping Center, open since March 2008 and run by Chef Bea. Seventeen versions of French toast on the menu and about twenty ways to have a waffle or a crepe. Gluten-free, lactose-free, vegan and vegetarian orders are all handled.
Daily 8am to 2:30pm.
Pomona College's art museum, on Bonita at the north edge of Claremont Village, and free to anybody who walks in. The galleries rotate through the college collection and visiting shows, and they stay open until eight on Thursdays, which is unusual for a campus museum. On the first Saturday of the month the hours stretch for the Claremont Art Walk.
Thu, 11am to 8pm. Fri to Sun, 11am to 6pm. Closed Mon to Wed
A former Red Car trolley yard off Olympic that the city turned into a complex of more than twenty galleries, all free to walk into. The buildings are corrugated sheds and the parking is on site. Santa Monica opened its own municipal gallery here in April 2026.
Most galleries Tuesday to Saturday, roughly 11am to 5pm or 6pm. Closed Sunday and Monday. Individual galleries vary
An ice cream counter on Yale Avenue with a candy case at the front and a line that runs out onto the sidewalk on a warm evening. They make their own and the waffle cones get pressed where you can see them. It opens at noon and runs to nine most nights and ten on Friday and Saturday, which makes it the Village's default after-show stop.
Mon to Thu, noon to 9pm. Fri and Sat, noon to 10pm. Sun, noon to 9pm
The menu is three things: fish tacos, shrimp tacos, potato tacos. Corn tortillas are made on site and whoever takes your order fries the seafood behind the counter while you wait. You get the taco plain and then dress it yourself at a bar of cabbage, lime-soaked radish relish, chipotle crema and house salsas. A fish taco is $3.50, shrimp $4.25, potato $3.25.
Daily 11am to 9pm, from listings. The operator publishes a menu but no hours.
The only natural geothermal spring still running in central Los Angeles, drilled in the 1910s and turned into a bathhouse. Hot and cold mineral pools, a steam sauna and a dry herbal sauna, with separate facilities for men and women. Water comes up at around 105 degrees at a quarter of a million gallons a day. Bring nothing; they hand you what you need.
Daily 10am to 8pm
A poetry center founded in 1968 that occupies the old Venice city hall on Venice Boulevard. The bookshop carries what it says is the largest selection of new poetry titles for sale anywhere, and the archive behind it holds more than forty thousand small press and limited edition volumes. Readings and workshops run in the evenings.
Bookshop Thursday to Saturday 1pm to 6pm in winter, Thursday to Sunday 1pm to 6pm from Independence Day to Labor Day. Readings run later, check the calendar
A Thai dessert shop and mini-mart in the same strip mall as Ruen Pair, making kanom krok and mango sticky rice on the spot and stocking packaged Thai sweets that are hard to find anywhere else in the city. You can also just buy snacks for the drive home.
Daily, 10am to 10pm
Steve Boardner moved his bar to this address on Cherokee in 1942 and the deco bar and tilework are the ones he put in. Behind it there is an open-air patio that most people walking down the street never see. Saturday nights the back is given over to Bar Sinister, a goth night that has run since the 1990s.
Daily, 5pm to 2am
This is the old Harvey's Broiler on Firestone, a 1958 Googie drive-in that was illegally half-demolished in 2007 and then rebuilt from the original drawings with the sign and the canopy back where they were. Carhops still work the lot on weekend nights and there is a counter and booths inside. It is a burger, a patty melt and a hot fudge cake, at drive-in prices.
Daily, 8am to 9pm
The oldest Bob's Big Boy left standing, built in 1949 and designed by Wayne McAllister, with curving window walls, a cantilevered canopy and the tall sign out front. California has it on the register as a Point of Historical Interest. Car hop service runs on Saturday and Sunday nights and the lot fills with classic cars every Friday. It is open past midnight every night of the week.
Daily from 6am, to midnight Sunday to Thursday and to 3am Friday and Saturday. Classic car show Fridays 4pm to 10pm
Forty-plus taps on the ground floor of the 3 Vinos building, with burgers, sandwiches and a short list of larger plates to go with them. Happy hour runs all day Wednesday and Thursday and from five to seven the rest of the week. Live music and karaoke take over on weekends, and the bar stays open past midnight on Friday and Saturday.
Wed and Thu, 5pm to 11pm. Fri, Sat and Sun, 3pm to midnight. Closed Monday and Tuesday
A record shop on Railroad Ave started in May 2018 by Ingrid, Steve and Anthony, two of whom had spent over twenty years selling at record shows and online before they took a storefront. Soul, jazz, rock, punk, new wave, prog and oldies, with clothing and jewelry along one wall. It is small and it is browsable in fifteen minutes or an hour depending on how much you dig.
Mon to Wed, 10am to 6pm. Thu to Sat, 10am to 8pm. Sun, 10am to 6pm
Glenn Goldman opened this on the Strip in 1975 and it holds around 60,000 titles, weighted toward art, film and photography. The aisles are narrow and the stock is stacked on the floor where it has run out of shelf. Author events run most weeks and are usually free.
Monday to Saturday 9am to 10pm, Sunday 9am to 7pm
The first gastropub to open in Compton, pouring eight taps drawn from South LA breweries alongside pub food. It sits at the east end of Compton Boulevard, a few doors from Taqueria El Poblano. It is closed on Mondays and does not open before noon on any day.
Tue and Wed, 4pm to 9pm. Thu and Fri, 4pm to 10pm. Sat, noon to 9pm. Sun, 2:30pm to 8pm. Closed Monday
A plain bar on Whittier east of Soto with a pool table, a jukebox and beer at neighborhood prices. It runs to two in the morning on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, which makes it one of very few verified late options east of the river. Cash is the safer assumption and the crowd is local.
Fri to Sun, open until 2am. Earlier close on weekdays, call ahead
Built in 1893 to a design by draftsman George Wyman, with a glass roof over a court of open-cage elevators and wrought iron stairs. It is a working office building, so the public sees the ground floor and the first landing. Admission is free and the whole visit takes ten minutes.
Mon to Fri 9am to 5pm. Sat 10am to 5pm. Closed Sunday
A pub on the same block as the theater with a rotating draft list and a kitchen that does a pastrami burger and fish and chips in portions people complain about finishing. The beer board changes often enough to be worth reading before you order. It is closed on Mondays, which is the one day the block loses it.
Tue, Wed and Sun, noon to 10pm. Thu, noon to 11pm. Fri and Sat, noon to midnight. Closed Monday
Brent's has served Parthenia Street since 1967 and remains family owned, and the one the rest of Los Angeles drives to the Valley for. Hand-cut pastrami, whitefish salad, a bakery counter and booths that fill by half past eleven. It has won the local reader polls so often that the awards are part of the decor. The only destination thing about it is the drive; inside it is a deli with a hostess and a wait of ten minutes.
Mon, 8am to 3pm. Tue to Sun, 8am to 8pm
A brewery on Main run by a brother and sister, with twenty taps and a beer garden out back. The kitchen cooks with the house beer rather than around it, so the menu reads as a gastropub list with the brewery folded into it. It opens at noon, which is unusual on this street and makes it one of the few places that can take a 1pm screening. Closed Tuesday and Wednesday, which matters more than anything else here.
Mon, noon to 9pm. Closed Tue and Wed. Thu, noon to 9pm. Fri and Sat, noon to 10pm. Sun, noon to 9pm
Forty-odd taps and about twenty bottles, pool tables, and enough games that people stay longer than they meant to. It sits mid-block on Lankershim in the middle of the theater district, which means the crowd after 10pm on a Friday is half people who were just at a show. Order at the bar. No table service worth waiting for.
Mon to Thu, 4pm to 10pm. Fri and Sat, noon to midnight. Sun, noon to 10pm
Christopher Tompkins started the company as a mobile raw bar and opened this counter in 2019. Malibu is the flagship and, by his own account, the strongest of the five. The butter-poached lobster roll is the order, alongside soft-shell crab sandwiches and seafood platters. The building came through the Palisades Fire, though the closures around it cost the business more days than its first five and a half years combined.
Daily 11am to 8pm.
Suye and Tokio Ueyama opened this shop on First Street in 1946, straight out of the incarceration camps, at the address where the first Japanese business in Los Angeles had stood. Irene Tsukada Simonian is the third generation to run it. The stock runs from ceramics and incense to calligraphy brushes.
Mon to Thu 10am to 6pm. Fri to Sun 11am to 7pm
A narrow black bar on Cahuenga that opens at 8pm and shuts at 2am, seven days. Loud rock, no food, no daylight. The speakeasy origin story attached to it is lore rather than anything documented. Cards carry a surcharge.
Daily 8pm to 2am
A take-out window in the front of the old banquet hall at 2811 East Olympic, selling the small guisado-filled burritos of Jerez, Zacatecas on flour tortillas pressed to order. The birria de res is the one people come for and a single burrito is about the size of your hand, so nobody orders one. The hall's license means beer and wine to go as well.
Mon to Thu, 11am to 6pm. Fri to Sun, 10:30am to 6pm
A corner market on Walker Avenue in a residential part of San Pedro, family run since 1978, where the sandwich counter does most of the trade. You order a hot pastrami or an Italian cold cut, it is built bigger than you asked for, and you eat it on the curb or in the car. Cash only, with an ATM by the door.
Mon to Sat, 10am to 5pm. Closed Sun
American-style karaoke at the back of a Wilshire strip mall, running seven nights a week since 1971. One stage, one list, everybody in the same space rather than a private booth, which is the opposite of how most of Koreatown does it. Parking behind the building on Mariposa is free after 5pm with validation.
Daily from 5pm to 2am, Monday from 8pm. Lunch weekdays 11am to 5pm
Anya Schodorf, who is from Nicaragua, and her husband Matthew opened this on York Boulevard in 2008. The house drinks lean Central American, including horchata with espresso and a latte campesino built on piloncillo, cinnamon, anise and orange peel.
Daily, 7am to 5pm
A coffee counter in the middle of Japanese Village Plaza, open since 2010, known for a green tea donut and a bacon-wrapped one. The seating is the plaza itself. It opens at 8am and runs into the evening, which is rare for a coffee place downtown.
Mon to Thu 8am to 7pm. Fri and Sat 8am to 9pm. Sun 8am to 8pm
French-owned by Claire Denis, formerly of Paris, with pastries and croissants, quiche and soups, and a strong vegan and gluten-free list. Half of it is a gift shop and the front is a planted patio.
Monday to Friday 7am to 2pm. Saturday and Sunday 7am to 4pm.
Built into a hillside on State Route 27, which is what the name is about, with a multi-level patio looking down the canyon. Almost all the seating is outdoors. They roast their own organic coffee, and the menu runs from avocado toast and grain bowls to lobster benedict and a Moroccan kofta tagine. There is a small shop.
Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm. Saturday and Sunday 8am to 4pm.
A Cuban bakery that has been on this corner of Sunset since 1975, best known for the guava and cheese pastelito and the cubano. It closed in late 2023 and reopened in March 2024 under new owners who kept the menu where it was.
Tue to Sun, 7am to 3pm. Closed Monday
A small independent café behind Old Town on Park Sorrento, near the civic buildings rather than on the main strip. Coffee, pastries and a few breakfast plates, with tables inside and a handful out front. It opens at 7am and shuts at 3pm. Quieter than anything on Calabasas Road and the people in it are locals working.
Daily, 7am to 3pm
A state museum in Exposition Park with three galleries and a theater wrapped around a glass-roofed sculpture court. Admission is always free and no ticket is needed, so you can give it forty minutes or two hours depending on when your show is. The program leans contemporary, with exhibitions on Black art and history in California that change several times a year.
Tue to Sat, 10am to 5pm. Sun, 11am to 5pm. Closed Mon
Eighty-six acres north of the Claremont Colleges planted entirely with California natives, which makes it the largest garden in the state devoted to them. The collections run past twenty-two thousand plants, some of them rare or endangered, and the paths are wide and mostly flat. It closes at five, so this is a daytime stop and a long one if you let it be.
Tue to Sun, 8am to 5pm. Closed Mondays and on major holidays
Canter's has been on Fairfax since 1948 and in this building, the former Esquire Theater, since 1953. The deli case, the bakery counter and the pastrami sandwich are the same trade the Canter family started in Boyle Heights in 1931. Attached to it is the Kibitz Room, a cocktail lounge opened in 1961 that still books live music most nights and runs until 2am. Saturdays the deli does not close at all.
Mon to Fri, 6am to 11:30pm. Sat, open 24 hours. Sun, 5am to 11:30pm. The Kibitz Room runs 11am to 2am daily
A family-run shop open on Colorado Boulevard since 1956, still carrying CDs and 45s alongside the vinyl and still stocking classical and jazz in depth rather than as a gesture. The back wall runs to DVDs and Blu-rays. The hours are short and the shop closes at five most days, which is the one thing to know before walking over.
Mon to Thu, 11am to 5pm. Fri and Sat, 10:30am to 7:30pm. Sun, 11am to 5pm
A large city park on the east end of Soledad Canyon with open lawn, trails up into the hills behind it, an amphitheater and playing fields. It is open 6am to 10pm every day, which is a wider window than anything else out here, and it costs nothing. Worth it if you are already driving out to Canyon Country with time to spare rather than as a detour on its own.
Daily, 6am to 10pm
Two yellow Union Pacific passenger cars parked on Ventura Boulevard, serving chili dogs and burgers out of the galley since the 1970s. You order at the window, eat at a counter inside the car, and the whole thing takes twenty minutes. The Sunset Boulevard original came first and this is the second car. Mustard on wax paper, no table service, no ambition beyond the hot dog.
Daily, 11am to 10pm
The Lopez family cooks carnitas in copper pots on a lot off Soto Street, and has done since long before the storefront in Monterey Park existed. You order by the part you want rather than by the taco, and the buche and cueritos go before the maciza does. It is a yard with a tent, a plastic table and a long line of people who planned their afternoon around it.
Wed to Sun, 10:30am to 5pm. Closed Mon and Tue
A walk-up stand on North Broadway that has run around the clock for close to fifty years. Tacos, burritos and nachos at a window, with a few tables outside.
Open 24 hours, every day
A Mexican grill a block up Citrus with both indoor tables and a patio, doing a full sit-down menu rather than counter service. Sunday is a short day here, 10am to 3pm and then done. It is closed all day Monday.
Tue to Thu, 11:30am to 9pm. Fri, 11:30am to 10:30pm. Sat, 11:30am to 9:30pm. Sun, 10am to 3pm. Closed Monday
Rafael Vega opened this on Ventura Boulevard in 1956 and his daughter Christy runs it now. The interior is deliberately dim, with red vinyl booths, Christmas lights and paintings covering the walls, and the bar is the part people mean when they talk about it. The James Beard Foundation named it an America's Classic in 2022. The kitchen does the combination plates the Valley grew up on and the margaritas are the reason the bar is three deep on a Friday.
Mon to Fri, 11:30am to midnight. Sat and Sun, 11am to midnight
Rudy Del Campo, a dancer who appeared in West Side Story, opened this on Hyperion in 1962 with his wife Helen and his sister Beatriz. The family still runs it. Downstairs is the Cavern Club Theater, which has been staging drag and cabaret under the restaurant for decades.
Mon to Thu 11:30am to 9pm. Fri and Sat 11am to 10pm. Sun 11am to 9pm
Al Cassell opened a hamburger counter in Koreatown in 1948, grinding his own beef daily and broiling the patties rather than griddling them. The business closed and was brought back in 2015 in the ground floor of the Hotel Normandie, still grinding in house and still running the original broiler method. It opens at 9am, which makes it the rare Koreatown kitchen that serves breakfast.
Mon to Thu and Sun, 9am to 9pm. Fri and Sat, 9am to 10pm
Rafael Moneo's cathedral on Temple Street, finished in 2002, built out of ochre concrete with almost no right angles and lit through alabaster rather than glass. You enter along a long ambulatory rather than straight up an aisle. It is open to anyone to walk in and sit, and it costs nothing.
Monday to Friday 6:30am to 6pm, Saturday 9am to 6pm, Sunday 7am to 6pm
A city library rebuilt in 2002 with an exterior clad in titanium panels, which is not a thing any other library in the county did. Inside there is a full-size saltwater aquarium, a life-size model of a Tyrannosaurus, and an art collection hung through the reading areas. Anyone can walk in without a card. It sits in the Cerritos Civic Center, a short way up Bloomfield from the performing arts center.
Mon to Fri, 11am to 7pm. Sat, 11am to 5pm. Closed Sun
Opened in December 2005 in the old Le Bar, later Le Barcito, which was a Latino gay bar on this corner for years. The theme is Tijuana souvenir shop: thatched ceiling, sombreros, blacklight paintings, drag queen portraits and oversized black booths. There is a photo booth and a foosball table. A separate Cha Cha Lounge has run in Seattle since 1998 under the same brand.
5pm to 2am every day.
Korean barbecue over charcoal on the west end of Soledad Canyon, open noon to 10pm every single day with no reservations taken. The all-you-can-eat needs two adults, so a solo diner orders off the à la carte side, which the operator states plainly rather than burying. It is the only place on this stretch where the meal itself takes an hour and a half, so it belongs before a show and not after.
Daily, noon to 10pm. Last all-you-can-eat seating 9:15pm, last call 9:40pm
A small neighborhood park off Western with a playground, a lawn and a recreation building, ten minutes from Lico. It is a park for the blocks around it, and quiet in the middle of the afternoon. Benches, shade and somewhere to stand outside before you go in.
Daily, sunrise to sunset
Jay Fiondella opened this on Ocean Avenue in 1959 and it still has peanut shells on the floor and a jukebox people feed. The city has designated it a Santa Monica landmark. Steak and fish are served at the back and the front works as a bar.
Monday 5:30pm to midnight. Tuesday to Friday 2pm to midnight. Saturday and Sunday 10am to 1:30am
Gilberto Cetina's Yucatecan counter inside Mercado la Paloma, doing cochinita pibil, panuchos and a lime soup that is the reason a lot of people drive here. You order at the register, take a number, and eat at a communal table in the middle of the market. The same family runs the seafood counter across the aisle.
Daily, 9am to 9pm
A twenty-two foot fiberglass figure with a boy's body and a chicken's head, made in 1969 for a fried chicken stand on Broadway downtown. When the stand closed the statue sat in storage for twenty-three years until designer Amy Inouye bought it and put it on the roof of her Future Studio on Figueroa in 2007. It is a marked stop on Historic Route 66.
Visible from the sidewalk at any hour. The gallery below keeps limited and irregular hours
A 1946 counter with twenty-five orange vinyl stools set around one horseshoe, mountain and beach murals on the walls and the original neon out front. John Isaac started the first one in Green Bay in 1913; his son opened this one, and when Green Bay closed in 2020 Burbank became the only branch left. It is the oldest restaurant still trading in the city.
Tuesday to Saturday 11am to 8pm. Closed Sunday and Monday.
A horseshoe counter inside Grand Central Market that has been serving the same American-Chinese menu since 1959. You sit on a stool under a neon sign and order wonton soup or chow mein. The market around it dates to 1917 and the stall has outlasted most of its neighbors.
Daily, roughly 11am to 8pm. The market itself runs 8am to 9pm and vendor hours vary inside that window
The parent churreria has been in Mexico City since 1935. This opened January 29, 2026 in the old Patra Burgers stand on the Sunset and Laveta corner, painted white and trimmed in blue neon, and it is the first Los Angeles branch and the second in the country after Costa Mesa. Churros and thick chocolate are the whole point.
Sunday to Thursday 8am to 11pm, Friday and Saturday 8am to 1am.
A small storefront on Evergreen whose reputation rests almost entirely on flautas, fried to order and buried under guacamole and crema. It has been in the same family since the 1950s and the menu has barely moved. You order at the counter, sit at a formica table, and are out in half an hour.
Tue to Thu, 7am to 8pm. Fri to Sun, 7am to 9pm. Closed Mon
A counter in the strip at Fairfax and Melrose, opening at 6:30am and running to 6pm every day. Espresso, drip and pastries, with a patio out front that people sit on for an hour at a time. It is the longest daily window of any coffee on this stretch of Fairfax.
Daily 6:30am to 6pm
A free storefront museum on West Compton Boulevard holding the city's own art and its own account of itself, with shows that rotate rather than a fixed display. Admission costs nothing and the whole visit fits in half an hour. It keeps daytime hours only, Tuesday through Saturday.
Tue to Sat, 10am to 3pm. Closed Sunday and Monday
Connie Cossio's place on Imperial Highway does the Nayarit coast: pescado zarandeado, a whole butterflied snook grilled over wood, plus aguachile, smoked marlin tacos and shrimp. It is a low building with a patio and a bar, paper on the tables, and the fish comes out on a board for the table to pull apart. The zarandeado takes time, so order it when you sit down.
Mon to Thu, 10am to 8pm. Fri to Sun, 11am to 9pm
A two-level used bookshop on Franklin with a record store downstairs and a rare book area at the back. Stock is dense enough that nothing is alphabetised as neatly as you would like. It has been on this block since the 1970s.
Daily, noon to 8pm
A diner on the west end of Soledad Canyon known for omelets sized past the point of reason, with a set of house traditions built around finishing one. It is loud, it is full of families on a weekend, and it closes at 2pm every day, which makes it a morning stop and nothing else. The portions are the joke and the staff are in on it.
Daily, 7am to 2pm
An acre and a half in the southeast corner of the Cal State Northridge campus, started in 1959, holding over 1,200 plant species across California natives, Mediterranean climate beds, cacti and succulents, herbs and an ethnobotanical section, plus four greenhouses. Free to walk into on a weekday. It is small enough to see properly in half an hour, which is the right length for the gap before a curtain.
Mon to Fri, 8:15am to 4:45pm. Closed weekends and university holidays
A 1958 supper house on Washington Boulevard that never updated itself, so the pepper steak is still flamed at the table and the Caesar is still mixed in front of you. Booths are dark red leather and the lounge has a piano on Thursday evenings. Walk-ins are taken and the bar will seat you without a booking, though weekend dinner fills up. Prices are not cheap but nothing about it is fashionable.
Lunch Tue to Fri, 11am to 3:30pm. Dinner Sun to Thu, 4pm to 10pm. Fri and Sat, 4pm to 11pm. Closed Mon
Loyal Damon opened this in 1937 after running a chain of candy stores, moved it to Brand Boulevard in 1980, and his family still has it. An outrigger canoe hangs from a vaulted thatched ceiling over rattan walls, a saltwater tank, palm palapas and bamboo booths, with Bettina Byrne murals copying Eugene Savage's Art Deco work for the S.S. Lurline. Prime rib and pan-roasted pork chops on the plate, Mai Tais and Blue Hawaiis in the glass. Moe Elliott, behind the bar since 1956 and managing since 1980, wrote the house Mai Tai.
Daily 3pm to 10pm. There is no lunch.
A Korean tent-bar done indoors, with wood-plank walls that customers have been writing on for years and a menu of skewers meant to be eaten with soju rather than instead of it. Orders go on a board rather than a printed list. It is loud, cash-friendly and built for sitting for three hours.
Daily 4pm to 2am
Opened in 1964 by Dobrivoje Tanasijevic, a Serbian former soccer player who had been maitre d' at La Scala. He kept the neon sign frame from the restaurant he took over. Around twenty tables in a 1929 bungalow, red checked cloths, and dishes named after regulars. The Troubadour is next door.
Dinner nightly, hours not confirmed by the operator
A long narrow bar on South Main in the Pomona Arts Colony with art on the walls that changes for the twice-monthly gallery hop, over two hundred wines and fifty beers. Bands and DJs play the back end on weekends. It opens at four and runs to two in the morning on Friday and Saturday, which matches what the Glass House does.
Mon to Wed, 4pm to 10:30pm. Thu, 4pm to 11:30pm. Fri and Sat, 4pm to 2am. Sun, 4pm to 10:30pm
A coffee shop that opened on Soledad Canyon in August 2026, which makes it the newest thing on the strip and the only independent espresso counter east of Sierra Highway. Small, bright, a short menu, and the ratings so far are from a few dozen people rather than a few hundred, so read it as a new place rather than an institution. It shuts at 5pm.
Mon to Sat, 8am to 5pm. Sun, 9am to 4pm
Cookies have come through this Broxton window in Westwood Village since 1983 and started making ice cream sandwiches to order in 1995. The line moves because there is one decision to make. It stays open later than almost anything else in the village.
Tuesday to Thursday and Sunday noon to 10pm. Friday and Saturday noon to 11pm. Closed Monday
A bright corner cafe on Wilshire a few doors from the Wiltern, with a long bar and enough tables that people work here all day. Multi-roaster pour-overs alongside standard espresso drinks. It is the only serious coffee within sight of the Wilshire and Western corner.
Daily 7am to 6pm
The coffee shop occupies the corner storefront at Main and Bay that was Jeff Ho Surfboards and Zephyr Productions, the shop the Z-Boys came out of. Alva boards hang on the wall alongside the espresso machine. Breakfast burritos are the volume order.
Daily, 7am to 2pm
A walk-up fried chicken stand on North Garey with a hand-painted sign and a line that forms on the sidewalk at lunch. It is cash only, they will not take an order over the phone, and the chicken comes in a box with a roll. There is no dining space to speak of, so people eat in the car or take it somewhere.
Daily, 10am to 7:30pm
A diner counter that has been in the Farmers Market since 1938, with its own door on the Third Street side and its own hours, later than the market around it. Pancakes and pies come from a full breakfast menu at any hour it is open. The booths are vinyl, the coffee is refilled without asking, and on a weekend it runs past midnight.
Sun to Thu, 6am to 9pm. Fri and Sat, 6am to midnight
Named for Duke Kahanamoku, who taught surfing in Malibu and appeared in more than twenty-eight films. Kathy Kohner Zuckerman, the real Gidget, works here as Ambassador of Aloha. There is a casual Barefoot Bar side with island plates and tropical drinks and a separate dining side doing fish and steak. Hula Pie is the dessert everyone orders.
Lunch daily 11:30am to 4pm. Dinner Sunday to Thursday 4pm to 8:30pm, Friday and Saturday to 9pm.
Adolf Dulan's soul food counter on Crenshaw, where you move along a steam table picking three sides against smothered chicken, oxtails or short ribs. The cornbread comes with the plate and the greens are cooked down properly. It has been a Crenshaw institution for decades and the line at one in the afternoon is a line that moves.
Tue to Fri, 11am to 8pm. Sat and Sun, 10am to 8pm. Closed Mon
Adolf Dulan built his name on soul food across South Los Angeles, and this Manchester Boulevard location carries it on under his family. You read the steam table, point at what you want, and carry the tray to a table. Oxtails and smothered chicken bring people back. Peach cobbler does too. The restaurant fills up with Inglewood regulars rather than with arena traffic.
Every day, 11am to 8pm
Charles and Ray Eames built this in 1949 as Case Study House No. 8 and lived in it for the rest of their lives. Two steel-framed boxes sit in a meadow of eucalyptus on a bluff above the ocean, the industrial frame ordered out of a catalog and then filled in with colored panels. The January 2025 Palisades fire did not burn it. It came through with smoke and fire-retardant contamination, closed about five months, and reopened in late July 2025. Since then the visit has included Charles and Ray's private studio, which had never been open to the public.
Grounds and Studio Visit runs April 5 to October 31, with slots at 10am, 11am, 1:30pm and 2:30pm
The Earle brothers have been selling sausages on Crenshaw since they started from a cart in 1984, and the counter now runs beef, turkey, Polish and a vegan line with chili and slaw on top. You order at the register and take a tray to a table. It is the kind of address people from the neighborhood have been using their whole lives.
Mon to Sat, 10:30am to 9pm. Closed Sun
Claud Beelman's thirteen-story tower, opened on September 12, 1930 after nine months of building, clad in glossy turquoise terra cotta trimmed in deep blue and gold. A four-sided clock tower carries the word EASTERN in neon and is topped by a smokestack with four stylized flying buttresses. The sidewalks on the Broadway and Ninth Street sides are multi-colored terrazzo laid in zigzags and chevrons, and the recessed two-story entrance holds a blue and gold terra cotta sunburst.
Sidewalk, at any hour
A narrow bar across from Mariachi Plaza that opened in 2006 and became the place where the argument about who Boyle Heights belongs to got held out loud. Live mariachi turns up, DJs play through the week, and the karaoke nights are built around mariachi standards and Selena. A small stage faces downtown from the door. Some nights have a cover.
Wed to Sun, 8pm to 2am. Closed Mon and Tue
A city lake with a lotus bed that blooms in summer, a fountain in the middle and a path all the way around. Wheel Fun Rentals runs swan-shaped pedal boats from the boathouse on the east side, one hour at a time. Walking the loop costs nothing.
Park open daily. Pedal boat rentals daily from 9am, last boats out about an hour before sunset
Fifty-five acres of Inglewood park, renamed for the city's first Black mayor. Sports fields, tennis courts, a playground, an Olympic-size pool and enough paths to walk for half an hour under mature trees. It is where Inglewood actually spends a Saturday, rather than a place anyone visits.
Every day, 8am to 8pm
A bar in a building that has been on this corner since 1878, a block off Main by the old rail line. The food is panini-style sandwiches built on naan, which is an odd thing to find in a bar and is the thing people order. It keeps the latest hours in Old Town Newhall, which in a valley where most of the strip is dark by ten makes it the only real answer to a film that ends at 10:30pm.
Mon, 3pm to 11pm. Tue and Wed, 3pm to midnight. Thu and Fri, 2pm to 2am. Sat, 11am to 2am. Sun, 9:30am to 11pm
Around fifty pinball and arcade machines with a full bar and an outdoor patio, on Fourth Place in the Arts District. Entry is free and first come first served, with no cover and no guest list. It runs until 2am from Tuesday through Sunday.
Tue to Fri 5pm to 2am. Sat and Sun 2pm to 2am. Closed Monday
The Montes family opened El Arco Iris on York Boulevard in Highland Park in 1964 and ran it until 2017, when they closed and later reopened in Lincoln Heights under a shortened name. The chile verde, mole poblano and carnitas came over with them.
Mon 11am to 9pm. Tue to Fri 11am to 10pm. Sat 10am to 10pm. Sun 10am to 9pm
A twenty-four hour taqueria on Whittier Boulevard, part of the small El Atacor group that Angelenos know for the fried potato taco. There is a drive-thru where somebody walks out to your car to take the order, and a walk-up window for everyone else. Asada, carnitas and the potato taco with a green salsa. Nothing about it closes, which is the feature.
Open 24 hours, daily
A family restaurant at Soto and Whittier that has been cooking lamb barbacoa since 2003, served with consommé, rice and the usual salsas. Weekends are when the barbacoa is at its best and the place fills with families eating before noon. It shuts in the late afternoon, so this is a daytime stop and nothing else.
Daily, 8:30am to 4pm
El Cholo started in 1923 and has been at this Western Avenue address since 1931, which makes it the oldest Mexican restaurant still trading in Los Angeles. Dark booths, tiled floors, combination plates and a bar that pours a green corn tamale alongside the margarita. The dining area is large and a walk-in on a weeknight is not a problem.
Daily 11:30am to 9pm
David Castro and Mario Jimenez opened this on Sunset in 1975 and it still runs on red vinyl booths and a mariachi trio working the floor most nights. The house margarita comes to the table on fire. Combination plates arrive fast and the bar does not slow down for anybody.
Monday to Thursday 11:30am to 10pm, Friday and Saturday 11am to 11pm, Sunday 11am to 10pm
Blanche and George March opened El Coyote in 1931 and moved it to Beverly Boulevard in 1951, where the dark booths, the paper lanterns and the servers in full Mexican dress have stayed put. The food is combination plates and the margaritas come in volume. It is cheap, it is dim and the dining area is big enough that walking in on a Friday usually works.
Wed and Thu, noon to 9pm. Fri and Sat, noon to 10pm. Sun, noon to 9pm. Closed Monday and Tuesday
A big corner operation on Pacific Boulevard with separate counters for tacos, tortas, aguas frescas and the panadería, so you order at whichever line is shortest and carry a tray to a table. The pan dulce comes out of the oven through the day and the agua de horchata is poured from glass barrels. Pacific Boulevard outside is the busiest shopping street in the Gateway Cities, and this is the corner everybody crosses.
Mon to Thu, 7am to 10pm. Fri and Sat, 7am to 11pm. Sun, 7am to 10pm
A family-run place on York that has been serving Highland Park for more than twenty years. The huarache is the reason to go, a long oval of fried masa with beans inside, crema and cheese on top and a choice of meat. Jonathan Gold named it in the Los Angeles Times list of essential restaurants in 2008 and it stayed on.
Daily, roughly 8am to 8pm. Listings disagree on the closing time and on whether it shuts on Wednesdays, so call first
A market on First Street, open since 1968, with produce and butchers on the ground floor, stalls selling boots and records in the middle, and a floor at the top given over to restaurants where mariachi and norteño groups play to the tables. You pay by the song or you sit near someone who is paying. People call it El Mercadito and they mean the top floor.
Daily, roughly 10am to 8pm, with the upstairs restaurants and music running latest on Fri to Sun
A Mexican restaurant and panaderia on Garey Avenue that opens at 5:30 in the morning and keeps going until the evening. The bakery case runs along one side and the kitchen turns out menudo, chilaquiles and plates of the standard sort all day. It is counter-forward and fast, and nobody minds how long you sit. Two blocks from the Fox Theater marquee.
Mon to Thu, 5:30am to 8:30pm. Fri and Sat, 5:30am to 9pm. Sun, 5:30am to 8pm
A Pico-Union restaurant whose menu is almost entirely goat birria, sold as stew or by the pound, plus an asada plate and menudo on weekends. It has been on this stretch of Pico for decades. Cash only.
Mon to Fri 9am to 8:30pm. Sat and Sun 8am to 8:30pm
A brick-walled Tex-Mex place with a big open patio on the Magnolia corner two doors off Lankershim. The menu starts with grilled street corn and Frito pie. Tacos and enchiladas follow. The bar keeps draft beer and frozen margaritas, with a mezcal list beside them. There is cornhole on the patio and the kitchen stays open until closing, which is 2am every night. It took over the building that was Bow & Truss, which shut.
Mon to Sat, noon to 2am. Sun, 9:30am to 2am
The Rojas family has been feeding this corner of Evergreen Avenue since 1942, when the place was called El Tupinamba. It is known for the Hollenbeck burrito, named for the LAPD division up the street, and for Manuel's Special, which weighs about five pounds and is ordered mostly as a dare. The dining area is small, covered in photographs of regulars, and the line outside moves at the pace of a counter, not a sit-down restaurant.
Mon to Thu and Sun, 6am to 7pm. Fri and Sat, 6am to 8pm
An Oaxacan restaurant on Vermont that opens at six in the morning, which puts it ahead of everything else nearby. The mole negro and the tlayudas are what people order, and the menu also runs a full Oaxacan breakfast. Tables, waiters, paper placemats, no wait.
Mon to Thu and Sun, 6am to 9:30pm. Fri and Sat, 6am to 10pm
An indoor-outdoor pizza place in the Topanga Center, behind the post office, with a wood oven, a short wine list and a crate of second-hand records by the counter. It is newer than anything else in the canyon and it is still a walk-in with picnic tables. The 9pm close is the latest anything in Topanga keeps.
Daily, 10am to 9pm
A one-person coffee bar tucked into Far East Plaza in Chinatown, run by Jack Benchakul, a former biochemist who trained as a pastry chef before this. He pulls every cup himself, which sets the pace. The space holds a handful of people at a time.
Roughly 9am to 6pm. The open days have shifted more than once, so check before you go
A family-run Mexican restaurant on lower Lankershim that dates itself to 1946, which makes it older than almost anything else left on the street. Combination plates, a bar, vinyl booths and a dining area that has not been restyled to chase anyone. It sits south of the NoHo Arts District near Toluca Lake, on the stretch of Lankershim people drive rather than walk.
Mon and Tue, 11am to 9pm. Wed to Fri, 11am to 10pm. Sat, 10am to 10pm. Sun, 10am to 9pm
A burger counter on Soledad Canyon that opens at 6:30 in the morning and does not shut until 11pm, midnight on a Friday and Saturday. Burgers, pastrami, breakfast served all day, a gyro on the board. It is the one place near the club that is reliably open both before an afternoon show and after a late one, and the 1,700-odd ratings say the neighborhood treats it as the default.
Sun to Thu, 6:30am to 11pm. Fri and Sat, 6:30am to midnight
A bar on East Seventh in the far corner of the Arts District with a large open-air patio and a bocce court behind it. The kitchen does a griddled burger and little else that needs explaining. It is closed Monday and Tuesday, which catches people out.
Wed 4pm to 10pm. Thu 4pm to midnight. Fri 4pm to 2am. Sat 2pm to 2am. Sun 2pm to 10pm. Closed Monday and Tuesday
A seven-acre sunken garden between the Coliseum and the Natural History Museum, laid out in 1928 with a fountain in the middle and benches around the edge. There are something like twenty thousand rose bushes and in spring the smell carries across the lawn. It is free, it is quiet in the way a walled garden is quiet, and almost nobody on Figueroa knows it is there.
Daily, 8:30am to dusk. Closed January 1 to March 15 for pruning
Set in a narrow brick passage off First Street in Little Tokyo, in a building that was a chop suey house before the war. The list runs long on whiskey and Japanese beer. A patio sits in the alley itself, and food is served until close. It stays open past midnight every night of the week.
Mon to Thu 3pm to midnight. Fri and Sat noon to 1:30am. Sun noon to midnight
The original Father's Office, on Montana since the beer list made it a Santa Monica fixture, where you order at the counter and carry your own drink. The Office Burger is dry-aged beef with blue cheese and arugula and the kitchen will not change it, so do not ask for ketchup. The taps are the other reason people are there.
Monday to Thursday 5pm to 10pm. Friday noon to 11pm. Saturday and Sunday noon to 10pm
Long Beach's independent record store, five thousand square feet of new and used vinyl, CDs, cassettes and a wall of 8-tracks nobody is pretending to need. It moved up to Bixby Knolls on Atlantic Avenue and kept the in-store performances, so there is a decent chance a band is playing on the floor for free when you walk in. Staff will talk to you for as long as you want about the record in your hand.
Sun to Wed, 11am to 7pm. Thu to Sat, 11am to 9pm
A dark bar on North Figueroa at the Cypress Park and Lincoln Heights line, with a pool table, DJs and cheap wells. Happy hour runs the first three hours it is open.
Daily 5pm to 2am, opening at 4pm on Saturdays. Happy hour 5pm to 8pm
The bar runs through a Pacific Electric Red Car trolley built around 1904, parked here in 1925 as the Red Post Cafe and renamed Formosa in 1939. It closed at the end of 2016 and the 1933 Group spent roughly two and a half million dollars putting it back, reopening in June 2019.
Sunday to Wednesday noon to 11pm, Thursday to Saturday noon to midnight
Three generations of the same family have been making ice cream on West Main Street since 1937, from a business the Fosselmans trace to 1919. Everything is made on the premises and the flavor board has taro, lychee and ube on it alongside the butter pecan, which is Alhambra telling you who lives there. Cash only, bills and coins, no cards at all.
Mon to Sat, 10am to 10pm. Sun, 11am to 10pm
A curved counter with nineteen stools and no tables, on the lower level of the Beverly Hills Hotel since 1949. The banana-leaf wallpaper was designed in 1942 and hung here by Don Loper, and the counter and stools are attributed to Paul Williams. Open 7am to 4pm, daily.
Daily 7am to 4pm
A windowless bar on Western with a jukebox, a pool table and drinks priced the way they were twenty years ago. It opened in 1933 and shows up in the opening sequence of Barfly. Beer and well drinks, no cocktail program, no food.
Daily 6pm to 2am
A narrow bar wedged against the side of the Pantages, with an Al Hirschfeld caricature mural running the length of one wall and a jukebox where a sound system would be. There is no kitchen and no cocktail list. The neon sign outside is the one on the postcards and the prices underneath it are dive prices.
Daily, 11am to 2am
A family confectionery on First Street since 1903, now in its fourth generation. The cases hold manju and mochi made that morning and sold by the piece. The shop closed during the wartime incarceration and reopened in the same block afterward.
Daily, 8am to 6pm
A family grocery that started downtown in 1897 and moved to York Boulevard in 1955, which John Nese turned over to bottled soda in the 1990s. Several hundred flavors fill every aisle, most of them small-batch or regional, and there is a sandwich counter at the back.
Mon to Sat 9am to 6pm. Sun 9am to 4pm
A breakfast and lunch counter two doors from the comedy club's host restaurant, run by brothers who state their own rule on the site: no shortcuts, no frozen substitutes. Chilaquiles, machaca, omelettes, tortas, all cooked to order. They opened a second location in Winnetka recently, which is what happens when a counter this small gets a line. It shuts mid-afternoon, so it is a before stop for a matinee and an early dinner is not on the table.
Mon to Fri, 8am to 2pm. Sat and Sun, 8am to 3pm
Carmen and Gilberto Rodriguez bought an existing Pico Boulevard place called El Indio in May 1974 and added Gilbert's name to the sign. Both founders have since died and their nine children own it together. Tortillas are pressed in house and the bar runs on margaritas for people who live within a mile of it.
Monday to Saturday 8am to 9pm. Sunday 8am to 2pm
An all-vinyl shop on Figueroa carrying new and used stock across rock, jazz, soul, hip hop, country, Latin, blues and punk. Small enough to work through in half an hour.
Mon to Sat noon to 7pm. Sun noon to 6pm
A bakery in a plain industrial building on a Venice back street, where you pull a paper ticket at the door and wait for your number to come up in red over the counter. Bread, pastry, smoked fish and sandwiches are all made on site. There is a separate express line for coffee, pastry and a loaf if that is all you want.
Daily, 7am to 4pm
A craft beer and spirits bar with several pool tables, screens for sport and a DJ on weekends, open on Citrus Avenue since March 2025. There is a full kitchen attached, so this is somewhere you can eat as well as drink. On Friday and Saturday it runs to two in the morning, which is later than anything else on the street.
Mon to Wed, 4pm to 11pm. Thu, 4pm to midnight. Fri, 3pm to 2am. Sat, noon to 2am. Sun, noon to 11pm
A seafood place that has sat on the sand where Sunset meets Pacific Coast Highway since 1972, wrapped around an open deck that looks straight down the beach. The dining hall burned in the Palisades Fire and the deck and a back-up kitchen came back in July 2025, so what you get now is lunch, dinner and drinks outside. Order the fried stuff and sit where the water is.
Monday to Thursday and Sunday, 11am to 8pm. Friday and Saturday, 11am to 9pm
Twelve acres stepping down from the Music Center to City Hall, opened in 2012 and renamed in 2023 for the county supervisor who pushed it through. The pink chairs move and the Arthur J. Will fountain is open to anyone who wants to stand in it. It is open from before dawn until 10pm.
Daily, 5:30am to 10pm
The same family has run this on Seventh Street for more than thirty years. A dark bar with a small stage at the back and cold beer. A rockabilly or blues act plays most weekends. It opens at noon and closes at two in the morning every day of the week, which makes it the only thing downtown that is still pouring when a Sixth Street show has let out and everyone else has locked up.
Every day, noon to 2am
A dark steakhouse at the mouth of Santa Monica Canyon, open on West Channel Road since 1949 and marking seventy-five years in business. There is a bar at the front that runs two hours past the kitchen, and it has been a gathering place for the canyon's gay community for decades. Kids are welcome in the dining part, which tells you how unfussy it is.
Wednesday to Sunday, bar from 4:30pm. Bar to midnight Wednesday and Sunday, to 2am Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Kitchen to 9pm, 10pm Friday and Saturday. Closed Monday and Tuesday
A Vietnamese place on Las Tunas Drive that has been in the same strip since the early eighties, where the cha gio are the thing to order before the pho arrives, fried hard and wrapped in lettuce and mint. The bun and the broken rice plates are the other half of the menu. Closed Wednesdays, which catches people out.
Mon and Tue, 10am to 8pm. Closed Wed. Thu to Sun, 10am to 8pm
The liquor license here dates to 1905, which is why the bar can sell sealed bottles to go from a window on Eighth Street. Inside there are gopher lamps, a back patio and a jukebox. It opens at 3pm every day of the year and runs to 2am.
Daily, 3pm to 2am. Happy hour 3pm to 8pm
A breakfast and lunch place sitting directly on the Strand at the foot of Pier Avenue, with a patio facing the sand. You order at the register and carry a number to a table. Pancakes, breakfast quesadillas and burgers, at beach prices rather than oceanfront ones, and it has been feeding the same walk-up trade for decades.
Mon to Thu, 7am to 3pm. Fri to Sun, 7am to 4pm
Sixteen acres of terraced formal garden around a 1928 Tudor Revival pile built for the Doheny family, now owned by the City of Beverly Hills and open as a public park. The grounds are the reason to come: balustrades, reflecting pools, a cypress allée and a view straight down over the basin. You will recognize the exterior from a great many films.
Grounds daily 10am to 6pm, 10am to 5pm in winter, closed Thanksgiving and Christmas
The 1935 observatory on the south face of Mount Hollywood, in copper-domed Art Deco, and it has been free to walk into since the day it opened. Evening telescope viewing is available. A Foucault pendulum stands in the entry, and the terrace takes in the basin from downtown to the ocean. The building runs until 10pm, which is later than almost anything else of this kind in the city.
Tuesday to Friday noon to 10pm, Saturday and Sunday 10am to 10pm, closed Monday
An eight-foot-wide storefront in a building put up for Wells Fargo Bank, one of the oldest multistory buildings in Hollywood. The company roasts its own coffee and there is a short breakfast and lunch menu. Seating is a handful of stools and a bench outside.
Daily 7am to 4pm, kitchen 7:30am to 3pm
Fernando Lopez opened Guelaguetza in 1994 and moved it to this Olympic Boulevard address in 2000, where it became the center of Oaxacan life in Los Angeles. The menu covers seven moles and tlayudas. A bandstand runs live music most nights. The James Beard Foundation named it an America's Classic in 2015, the first traditional Mexican restaurant to get one.
Tue to Thu, 11am to 9pm. Fri and Sat, 9am to 10pm. Sun, 9am to 9pm. Closed Monday
The original Guisados, open on Cesar Chavez since 2010, doing stewed fillings on thick handmade corn tortillas. You order at the counter from a board of about a dozen braises and the sampler plate of six small tacos exists for people who cannot choose. It is bright, loud and fast, with a patio out back, and it has kept the same format while the company added a dozen other addresses.
Daily, 9am to 9pm
The Las Tunas branch of the tea house that started in San Gabriel in 2008 and is the reason honey boba spread across the valley. The tea is brewed in small batches and the boba arrives sitting in honey at the bottom of the cup. There is a short food menu of noodle soups, rice plates and fried snacks, plus shaved ice and soy pudding. Closed Tuesdays and it shuts at half three on Sunday.
Mon, 10:45am to 8pm. Closed Tue. Wed to Sat, 10:45am to 8pm. Sun, 10:45am to 3:30pm
A barbecue counter and bar on Belmont Street, in the building next to the comedy club, doing smoked meats with southern sides in a plain setting that has never pretended otherwise. There is a patio outside and a full bar in. Nothing here needs calling ahead.
Mon to Thu, 11am to 9pm. Fri and Sat, 11am to 10pm. Sun, 11am to 8pm
UCLA's museum at Wilshire and Westwood, free to everyone with no ticket and no reservation. The courtyard at the center is open off the street and people sit in it without going into a gallery at all. Exhibitions turn over often enough that a second visit is not a repeat.
Tuesday to Sunday 11am to 6pm. Closed Monday. Public programs in the evening run later than the galleries
Twenty-three acres of lawn wrapped around asphalt seeps that are still bubbling, with the Lake Pit and its life-size mammoth models at the Wilshire edge. The excavation pits are fenced but visible and people are often working in them. The museum building closed in July 2026 for a two-year rebuild, and the grounds, the Pleistocene Garden and the playground stayed open and free.
Park grounds daily 6am to 10pm. The museum building is closed for renovation until 2028
Hank tapped the first kegs here in 1954 and the bar has sat in the lobby of the Hotel Stillwell on Grand ever since. Red walls and a fish tank, with newspaper clippings on the wall and free popcorn on the bar. Booths in the back are the good seats.
Daily, roughly 11am to 2am. Third-party listings disagree on the opening time, so call ahead for a daytime visit
A family-run Cuban place in a North Redondo strip on Inglewood Avenue, going more than thirty years on the same recipes. Ropa vieja, lechon and plantains, a full bar doing mojitos, and a band on weekend nights that turns the floor into a dance floor. It is busy and loud and nobody is dressed up.
Mon to Sat, 10:30am to 9:30pm. Sun, 10:30am to 9pm
Paul Hennessey opened this on the corner of Pier and Hermosa in 1976 and it is still the anchor of that corner. Dark wood, a long bar, booths, and a kitchen that runs the whole time the bar does. It opens at eight in the morning and closes at two on weekend nights, which is a wider window than anything else on the block.
Mon to Thu, 8am to midnight. Fri to Sun, 8am to 2am
A two-person coffee shop on Walnut, off the Main Street strip, run by Henry and Michelle, who put it plainly on their own site: they have been making coffee together for over ten years and married for four. Espresso, drip, a short list of pastries, a handful of seats. It is the kind of place where the person pulling the shot is the owner, which is not true of anything else within walking distance of the cinema.
Mon to Fri, 7am to 5pm. Sat, 8am to 4pm. Sun, 8am to 3pm
A Filipino American counter on Beverly Boulevard in Historic Filipinotown, open since 2018 and run as a deliberately neighborhood-facing operation. Longganisa and sisig turn up in sandwich form alongside the plates. It shuts at 3pm and is closed Tuesday.
Mon, Wed to Fri 8am to 3pm. Sat and Sun 9am to 3pm. Closed Tuesday
A 1927 building that held a pharmacy upstairs and eight bowling lanes below during Prohibition. The 1933 Group restored it and reopened in 2016, uncovering the bow truss ceiling and a 1930s mural. Lanes go as two-hour booked packages and the bar takes walk-ins.
Bar Mon to Thu 5pm to midnight, Fri 5pm to 2am, Sat noon to 2am, Sun noon to midnight. All ages before 8pm, 21 and over after
A coffee shop on North La Brea with a kitchen doing eggs, toast and bowls until half two. Order at the counter, take a number, sit at a long table or outside. It is full of people working and meeting rather than people passing through, and it is the nearest real coffee to either arena.
Every day, 8am to 3pm. Kitchen stops at 2:30pm
A bar a block off the sand at the foot of Washington Boulevard, open since 1962, with sawdust on the floor and pool tables at the back. The kitchen makes one thing properly, which is a charred cheeseburger on a soft bun. It replaced its street sign in 2023 and kept the same design.
Daily, 8am to 2am. Happy hour 4pm to 8pm
A dark bar on the ground floor of the 1924 Gaylord apartment building, fitted out with portholes and ship's wheels since 1962. The food is chops, steaks and shrimp cocktail on the same menu it has been running for decades. It sat directly across Wilshire from the Ambassador Hotel and picked up that crowd when the Cocoanut Grove was still working.
Daily noon to midnight, until 1am Friday through Sunday
A seafood counter in the same market, run by Gilberto Cetina Jr., serving kanpachi tostadas, smoked marlin tacos and an octopus taco cooked in its own ink. It has a Michelin star and was the Los Angeles Times restaurant of the year, and it is still eight stools and a counter inside a market. Reservations exist for the tables, but you can put your name down and wait, which at lunch is usually twenty minutes.
Tue to Thu and Sun, 11:30am to 9pm. Fri and Sat, 11:30am to 10pm. Closed Mon
Twenty-one acres around a lake, laid out in 1892, with a bridge over the water and the Golden State Freeway cut along one edge. There are pedal boats on weekends, a bandshell, and a steady crowd of people fishing and walking laps. It is the oldest park on this side of the river and it still works as the neighborhood's back yard.
Daily, 6am to 10:30pm
Ivar and Selma close to traffic every Sunday morning for a certified growers market started in 1991 by the city council office as a weekly event for residents. Around 160 California farmers and food producers set up, and buskers work the corners. It is run by Food Access Los Angeles, formerly SEE-LA.
Sundays only, 8am to 1pm, year round, rain or shine
A hundred and twenty-seven years of Los Angeles buried behind a wall on Santa Monica Boulevard, backing directly onto the Paramount lot. Self-guided visits are free and you can walk the lake and the mausoleum on your own. Johnny Ramone and Judy Garland are here. Chris Cornell is too, along with a working funeral business.
Monday to Friday 8:30am to 5pm, Saturday and Sunday 8:30am to 4:30pm. Free to walk in
A diner on Vermont serving since 1969, baking more than thirty pies a day and doing breakfast at any hour. Booths, a counter and a pie case by the door. It runs to 1am most nights and 2am on Friday and Saturday.
Sunday to Thursday 7am to 1am, Friday and Saturday 7am to 2am
A family-run stall in a strip mall on North Atlantic that does Taiwanese breakfast and then shuts at three in the afternoon. The order is fantuan, a sticky rice roll packed with pork floss and a length of fried dough, with salty or sweet soy milk alongside. Radish cake, scallion pancake and sesame bread fill out the rest of a short board. Cash only and closed Wednesdays.
Mon and Tue, 7am to 3pm. Closed Wed. Thu to Sun, 7am to 3pm
A walk-up taco stand on the Coldwater Canyon corner with a covered patio and a window you order at. It opened as the cheap arm of Hugo's on Santa Monica Boulevard and has outlasted plenty of things around it. Open 9am to 9pm every day, which covers breakfast burritos and a late dinner with the same menu board.
Daily, 9am to 9pm
A small dumpling house on Las Tunas whose name is its dish, the hui tou, a pork and cabbage parcel folded into a rectangle and pan-fried flat on one side so the bottom goes brown and crisp. Order them with the wontons in chili oil. Everything is folded by hand at the back and the whole place is plain formica and paper menus.
Daily, 10:30am to 9pm
A bar built in 1941 in the shape of a whiskey barrel, put up by a Universal film technician named Michael Connolly and left to rot for decades before the 1933 Group restored it and reopened it in 2015. The barrel holds the bar itself, with a patio behind it and a bulldog-shaped structure out back that came off the old Bulldog Cafe. Food is burgers and a pretzel, the drinks list is long, and nobody is dressed up. It is one of the last pieces of programmatic architecture in Los Angeles still doing the job it was built for.
Mon to Fri, 4pm to 1:30am. Sat, 1pm to 1:30am. Sun, 11am to 1:30am
Store 111, in the Cahuenga Pass below Universal, with a drive-thru and a dining area. This is the Valley end of the pass rather than the Hollywood side, which matters because the chain has a separate Hollywood store on Sunset.
Sunday to Thursday 10:30am to 1am. Friday and Saturday to 1:30am.
Open in Topanga since 1975, under old sycamores beside the creek. Tables are set on stone terraces with lights strung through the branches, and there is covered seating plus an indoor space for cold nights. The cooking is Californian and seasonal, off local farms and the restaurant's own organic garden.
Lunch Monday to Friday 10am to 2:30pm, dinner from 5:30pm. Weekend brunch 9am to 3pm, dinner from 5:15pm
A walk-up window on the southeast corner of La Brea and Olympic, in what used to be a roast beef stand. The Hong family brought back the hand-drawn doodles on the paper plates when they took the brand over. This address opened in March 2023 and is the second Irv's, not the 1946 original out on Route 66.
Sunday to Thursday 10am to 1am. Friday and Saturday 10am to 2am.
An izakaya on West Carson, in the stretch of Torrance where most of the Japanese restaurants are. Grilled skewers, oysters, hot pots and small plates ordered a few at a time, with shochu and sake to go with them. It opens at five and takes last orders at half nine, and the dining area is loud in the way an izakaya is supposed to be.
Every day, 5pm to 10:30pm, with last orders at 9:30pm
The Trani family have been feeding San Pedro since 1925, when the place opened as a cafe for men working the fish canneries and the docks. It is still an Italian restaurant with white cloths and a bar you can sit at. The waiters have worked there a long time. Dinner only, five nights a week, and it is busy on a Saturday without being hard to get into.
Closed Mon and Tue. Wed to Sun, 5pm to 9pm
A 1929 beach cottage halfway up Pier Avenue holds this coffee house, with a porch, mismatched tables and a case of sandwiches and cakes made in the back. It opens at six in the morning, earlier than anything else on the street. People bring laptops and nobody moves them along.
Every day from 6am. Closing between 3pm and 6pm depending on the day
A record shop on Sixth Street, four doors from the Grand Annex and across from the Warner Grand. JDC started in 1977 as a label putting out disco and italo. Freestyle and hi-energy twelve-inches followed, and the shop still leans that way, though the bins run through every genre on vinyl, CD and cassette. This is the third storefront, after an earlier one on Pacific Avenue and a long run on Pacific Coast Highway in Hermosa Beach. The counter will talk to you about what you are holding if you want that, and leave you alone if you do not.
Tue to Sun, noon to 5pm. Closed Mon
A Taiwanese bakery on South Baldwin where the breads are the point, taro buns and pork floss rolls and milk bread, pulled from the oven through the morning and stacked on trays you walk past with tongs. Coffee and tea are at the register and there are a few tables to sit at. Mooncakes take over the front counter for a few weeks each autumn.
Daily, 8am to 8pm
A Hungarian barber named Joe Jost opened a shop on Anaheim Street in 1924 and started serving beer on the side, and the family has run it on the same block ever since. Beer comes in a heavy glass schooner, and what people order with it is a pickled egg and a Joe's Special, which is a Polish sausage split and stacked on rye with Swiss and pickle. There are pool tables at the back and peanut shells on the floor. Cash and card both work now but the prices still read like an argument against inflation.
Mon to Sat, 10am to 10pm. Sun, 10am to 9pm
A narrow counter tucked into the Malibu Country Mart on Cross Creek, making sandwiches to order out of a case of cold cuts and a stack of bread. The sandwiches are wrapped in paper and eaten on the benches in the courtyard outside. It closes at five, which tells you it is a daytime operation and always has been.
Daily, 9:30am to 5pm
A small bar on the eastern end of Hollywood Boulevard that has run a bikini dance stage since 1982, where the dancers pick their own music off the jukebox and there is no full nudity and no cover most nights. Courtney Love worked here before Hole. It is a beer and well-drink bar, no food.
Wednesday to Sunday 8pm to 2am, closed Monday and Tuesday
A Mexican bar and kitchen on Bellflower Boulevard, loud and painted in Day of the Dead colors, serving cocktails alongside a full menu. Banda plays live every Sunday at eight in the evening. It opens at nine in the morning and runs to midnight, which is a longer day than anything else on the boulevard.
Sun, 9am to midnight. Other days generally 11am to midnight, later at weekends
A bright counter at the Valley Boulevard end of Alhambra that opens at eight and serves Chinese breakfast until half past ten, soy milk and youtiao and radish cake. The dish it is known for is the Shanghai pan-fried pork bao, sheng jian bao, browned flat on the bottom and still full of soup. You order at the register, take a number and sit at a shared table.
Daily, 8am to 9pm. Breakfast menu 7am to 10:30am
Raul Martinez started King Taco out of a converted ice cream truck in East Los Angeles in 1974, and this Cesar Chavez branch keeps the original format: a brightly lit counter with a salsa bar. Carnitas and lengua come by the taco. It is open past midnight every night and until three on weekends, which in this part of town is unusual. Cash moves fast and the line is rarely longer than five minutes.
Mon to Thu and Sun, 8:30am to midnight. Fri and Sat, 8:30am to 3am
A Reseda Boulevard burger stand where the owner's son, a chef who came out of Sushi Roku and Katana, put a sushi counter inside his father's diner. So the menu runs cheeseburgers and onion rings on one side and nigiri cut to order on the other, in the same building, at the same counter. It is the kind of arrangement that only happens in a strip mall, and it is the most-cited place near the Cal State Northridge campus for that reason.
Mon to Thu, 10:30am to 9:45pm. Fri and Sat, 10:30am to 10:15pm. Sun, 10:30am to 9:15pm
The restaurant attached to the bakery that makes the sweet bread, on Sepulveda in south Torrance. Loco moco, saimin, oxtail soup and paper-wrapped rolls to take away, served in a dining area that is always busy and never slow. It runs seven in the morning to nine at night, seven days, which is the widest window of anything in Torrance.
Every day, 7am to 9pm
A seventeen-ton bronze bell given by South Korea in 1976, hung in a painted stone pavilion on the bluff at Angels Gate Park. It looks straight out at the harbor mouth and Catalina on a clear day, and the lawn around it is mostly people walking dogs. The bell itself is rung only five times a year, so do not go expecting to hear it.
Mon to Sat, 9:30am to 5:30pm. Closed Sun
The food court on the upper level of an indoor mall on Western, above an H Mart grocery. Separate counters sell different things and you carry a tray to a shared table, so a group that cannot agree still eats together. Mountain Restaurant inside the same building keeps later hours than the court does.
Food court daily 10am to 8pm. The mall itself closes at 7pm and the H Mart stays open until 9pm.
Rogelio Fonseca and his parents opened this on North Figueroa in 1969 and it has stayed in the family. The outside carries murals by the artist Leo Limon and the inside still has the wood panelling and burgundy booths. The adobada is pork shoulder marinated for more than a week in red chile and paprika.
Wed to Sat 8am to 5:30pm. Sun 8am to 2:30pm. Closed Monday and Tuesday
A small antojitos kitchen on the same block as the comedy club, built around birria: tacos, quesabirria, consommé, plus burritos and bowls. It takes online reservations and does catering, which for a place this size means the birria is the draw and they know it. Open to 10pm on a weeknight and 11pm Friday and Saturday, which is after the club's set lets out.
Closed Mon. Tue to Thu, 11am to 10pm. Fri, 11am to 11pm. Sat, 10am to 11pm. Sun, 10am to 8pm
A family place on Huntington Drive in El Sereno built around gorditas de maiz made by hand, most often filled with carnitas or chicharron guisado. There are tamales, burritos and aguas frescas alongside, and enough tables that a group does not have to wait.
Mon to Thu 9am to 8pm. Fri to Sun 8am to 8pm
A family bakery on Hoover that has been making Yucatecan food since 1971, and the cochinita pibil is the reason to walk in. You order at the counter from a case of pan dulce and a short hot menu, and there is a handful of tables if you want to sit. Tamales colados come wrapped in banana leaf. Most people leave with a bag of marquesitas as well.
Daily, 8am to 7pm
A panaderia on Whittier Boulevard running since 1952, where most people come for tamales by the dozen rather than for pan dulce. You take a tray and tongs at the door and pay by the piece at the register. At five in the morning there is already a line of people buying for a party later that day.
Mon to Sat, 5am to 7pm. Sun, 5am to 6pm
The Boyle Heights branch of a Mexican bakery started by two friends from Mexico City, on Boyle Avenue just north of First Street. The case holds conchas and tres leches, with pan de muerto in season. The coffee is their own roast. It opens at six in the morning and stays open until ten at night every day, which on this side of the river is unusual.
Mon to Sat, 6am to 10pm. Sun, 7am to 10pm
A full restaurant on Cesar Chavez with a tiled bar and a molcajete that arrives still bubbling. The waiters have worked there for decades. The menu runs long and covers mole, carne asada and seafood, and the margaritas are the reason a lot of tables stay past dessert. L.A. Taco treats it as the neighborhood's occasion restaurant rather than a quick stop.
Mon to Thu and Sun, 9am to 8pm. Fri and Sat, 9am to 9pm
Jacqueline Koster opened this on Franklin in 1969 with crepes and omelettes and Edith Piaf on the stereo, and her daughter Francoise runs the kitchen now. It is a full bistro with a long bar that keeps pouring after the kitchen shuts. The back patio is where people end up.
Daily 5pm to 2am, kitchen until 11pm
A pupuseria on Washington between the Salon Playa block and the freeway, doing the standard revueltas and loroco alongside plates of carne asada. The space is small and plain with a handful of tables. It is the kind of place where the order is taken at the counter and brought out to you.
Daily, 9am to 9pm
A counter-service storefront two blocks off the Third Street Promenade cooking Michoacán and Purépecha food, with corn tortillas pressed in the building. Chips and pickled carrots come with the meal and the aguas frescas change daily. Order the taconazo and they griddle cheese under the adobada or the asada.
Monday to Friday 9am to 9pm. Saturday 10am to 9pm. Sunday 11am to 6pm.
Al Langer opened this counter across from MacArthur Park in 1947 and his son Norm still runs it. The number 19 is pastrami on double-baked rye with coleslaw and Russian dressing. It closes at 4pm, which is the single most important thing to know about it.
Mon to Sat 8am to 4pm. Closed Sunday
A film bookshop that opened in 1938 and has been at this address on the Boulevard since 1955, holding more than 20,000 books and around 6,000 original posters. There are half a million stills in the drawers behind the counter. It is the last bookstore left on a street that once had a row of them.
Monday to Saturday 11am to 6pm, Sunday noon to 6pm
The site started around 1919 as the Bungalow Lodge, burned in 1929, and was rebuilt the next year in brick and stone taken from the old riverbed. That rebuilt building is the store. It sells groceries, sandwiches and coffee to a canyon with nowhere else to buy them.
Reported Monday to Friday 7am to 10pm, not confirmed by the operator
A 2nd Street bar that has been pouring since 1979 and claims a hand in inventing the American sports bar, with the old Rams and Raiders memorabilia still nailed up to prove it. Screens cover the walls and the booths face them. The kitchen does a tri-tip sandwich. It runs to two in the morning Thursday through Saturday and opens at nine on weekends for the early games.
Mon to Wed, 11am to 10:30pm. Thu and Fri, 11am to 2am. Sat, 9am to 2am. Sun, 9am to 10:30pm
The small triangular plaza at the head of Degnan that anchors Leimert Park Village, with a 1930s fountain in the middle and shade trees around it. On Sunday afternoons the drum circle sets up here and has for decades, and on most other days there are vendors and people sitting. The streets off it hold what is left of the village's bookshops and galleries.
Daily, sunrise to sunset
A truck parked in the gas station lot on the southwest corner of La Brea and Venice, with a vertical spit of al pastor turning beside the window. The Martinez family came from Oaxaca and started with one truck; there are fifteen now across greater Los Angeles. This corner is one of the few where the spit runs all day instead of only in the evening.
Sunday to Thursday 10am to 2am. Friday and Saturday 10am to 3:30am.
A storefront lending library across from Mariachi Plaza, started by David Kipen in 2010, where membership is a few dollars and you can also just buy the book. The shelves lean heavily on Los Angeles writing and on Spanish-language fiction. After the city cut branch hours, this place extended its own, which is the kind of detail that tells you what it is for.
Tue to Sun, noon to 6pm. Closed Mon
Warner Ebbink and chef Brandon Boudet opened this in January 2008 in the old La Belle Epoque space on Hillhurst. Ebbink put in a 1930s wooden bar he bought off a saloon in Easton, Pennsylvania, and leaded-glass windows salvaged from a New York building that was coming down. Boudet is from New Orleans and it shows on the menu. Handmade pastas, wood-fired pizzas, brunch on the weekend.
Monday to Thursday 10am to 10pm, Friday 10am to midnight, Saturday 9am to midnight, Sunday 9am to 10pm. Weekend brunch runs 9am to 3pm and there is counter service on weekdays 10am to 4pm.
A 1956 pizzeria on Lankershim with a dark bar at the front, red booths, a thin crispy crust and a neon sign the Valley Relics Museum keeps old menus from. It opens at four in the afternoon and runs to midnight, which is an unusual shape and makes it one of the few places on this street still serving food when a show lets out. Nothing about the interior has been updated to look older than it is, because it does not have to.
Daily, 4pm to midnight
Opened on 4th Street in 2008 and more or less anchored Retro Row's turn from antique shops into a street people eat on. The kitchen does mole in several colors and a tableside guacamole, and the bar is known for a long tequila list. It is next door to the Art Theatre, so half the early tables are people with a ticket. Weekend service starts at ten for brunch.
Mon to Fri, 11:30am to 9pm. Sat and Sun, 10am to 9pm
Bertram Goodhue's 1926 building, with sphinxes on the outside and a tiled pyramid on the roof, joined in 1993 to Norman Pfeiffer's Tom Bradley Wing and its eight-story atrium hung with oversized chandeliers. Free docent tours of the art and architecture run most days and take an hour.
Monday to Thursday 10am to 8pm, Friday and Saturday 9:30am to 5:30pm, Sunday 1pm to 5pm
A hundred and twenty-seven acres on what was Lucky Baldwin's ranch, with his 1885 Queen Anne Cottage still standing by the lake and the descendants of the peacocks he imported from India walking the paths. More than two hundred of them live on the grounds and they are loud. The planting runs by continent, so you can cross from Australia to Madagascar in twenty minutes, and the whole loop takes about ninety.
Daily, 9am to 5pm. Last entry 4:30pm. Closed December 25
Thirty-two acres of open ground on the site of the old River Station rail yard, reopened as a park in 2017 after a long fight over whether it would be warehouses instead. The path along the top of the slope gives a clear line back to the downtown towers. The Metro A Line stops at its north end.
Daily, 8am to 5pm
The last of the great American railway terminals, opened in May 1939 to a Donald and John Parkinson design that blends Spanish Colonial, Mission Revival and Art Deco into something usually called Mission Moderne. The main hall runs about 140 feet by 80, under six bronze Art Deco chandeliers that weigh over 3,000 pounds apiece, with thirty-foot windows and red quarry tile underfoot. There are 254 original-pattern wooden chairs and nobody minds if you sit in one. It stays open from 4am to 1am.
Daily 4am to 1am
A truck that parks on Olympic in the evening selling tacos árabes, the Puebla dish of pork shaved off a vertical spit onto a flour pan árabe with a chipotle sauce. It trades in Mid-City during the day and moves east at night, which is why the location is worth a check before you go. Everything is eaten standing up next to the truck.
Wed, Thu and Sun, 3pm to 10pm. Fri and Sat, 3pm to 11pm. Closed Mon and Tue
A burger stand on Rosecrans that has been here since 1984, under a sign tall enough to read from four blocks away. Cheeseburgers, chili cheese fries and pastrami sandwiches come out in styrofoam containers and the whole thing is built for the car window. It opens at seven in the morning and does not close until two, or three on Friday, which makes it the widest set of hours in this part of Compton.
Mon to Thu, 7am to 2am. Fri, 7am to 3am. Sat and Sun, 7am to 2am
A full Jewish deli on Calabasas Road doing pastrami, matzo ball soup, lox and a breakfast that starts at 8am. It is a counter and tables, bright, with a bakery case and a case of salads, and it is the only place on this stretch that feeds you at eight in the morning. Portions are deli-sized, meaning one sandwich is dinner.
Mon to Thu, 8am to 8pm. Fri and Sat, 8am to 9pm. Sun, 8am to 8pm
A dark British pub on Raymond Avenue with sixty-eight taps and a Belgian list that the owner has been building since the early nineties. Breakfast is served from nine in the morning and the kitchen runs all day. The patio on the side is where most of the noise goes, and the bar itself stays usable at one in the morning.
Daily, 9am to 1:30am
A walk-up burger stand on Arroyo Parkway that opens at five in the morning and serves until midnight, 363 days a year. The breakfast burrito is the thing most people come for and it is sold all day. You order at a window, take a number, and eat at the picnic tables out front. The Walnut Street branch keeps shorter hours, so the Arroyo one is the late stop.
Daily, 5am to midnight. Closed Thanksgiving and Christmas
A family-run Thai restaurant in a Reseda Boulevard strip mall that cooks both northern and southern regional dishes rather than the standard Los Angeles Thai menu, which is why people drive to Northridge for it. Khao soi, sai ua, southern curries, and a long menu with a separate section of the things the family actually eats. The dining area is plain and the food is not.
Mon to Wed, 11am to 10pm. Thu to Sat, 11am to midnight. Sun, 11am to 10pm
A panadería on East Compton Boulevard with trays of pan dulce you pick over yourself with tongs, plus drinks and snacks at the counter. It opens at five in the morning and stays open until ten at night on weekdays, which is an unusually long day for a bakery anywhere. The selection thins out late, so early is better if you care which piece you get.
Mon to Fri, 5am to 10pm. Sat and Sun, 5am to 8pm
An Irish pub in the same building as the cinema, built with the Irish Pub Company of Dublin, whose fittings were made in Ireland, shipped over and assembled here. The bar is a hand-built Victorian piece in a Belfast idiom and the place is named for the Maginn and Connelly families. Pints, whiskey, a short food menu, and a crowd that skews local rather than passing through. It is the easiest conversation in Old Town because you do not have to go outside to get to it.
Mon, 3pm to 8pm. Tue to Thu, 3pm to 9pm. Fri and Sat, noon to 1am. Sun, noon to 10pm
Rudolph Schindler built this for himself in 1921 and 1922 on Kings Road, and it is the house most of Southern California modernism is descended from. It now runs as the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, with contemporary shows installed in the house and its courtyards rather than in a gallery built for the purpose.
Wednesday to Sunday 11am to 6pm, closed Monday and Tuesday
A city park on the seaward side of PCH across from the Pepperdine entrance, sitting on the bluff with ball fields, a jogging loop and trails that drop toward the water. There is a whale watching station on the edge, and from December through April gray whales pass below it. Parking and entry are both free.
Daily, 8am to sunset
The landward end of Malibu Pier, with an indoor dining area and a bar and patio side that serves the same menu. This is the Restaurant, not the Pier Cafe out at the far end, which California State Parks closed in January 2025 for structural repairs and has not reopened.
Sunday to Friday 9am to 8pm. Saturday 9am to 9pm. The operator notes hours may be cut short on rainy days.
A fish market on the inland side of PCH since 1972, owned and run by commercial fishermen, with a counter at one end and a tiered concrete patio looking over the water at the other. You order at the window, carry a tray up the steps and find a bench. There is no table service and no reservations.
Cafe daily 11am to 8pm. Fish market daily 10am to 8:30pm
A triangle of pavement at First and Boyle where mariachis have waited for hire since the 1930s, still in uniform, still negotiating by the hour. A kiosk donated by the state of Jalisco stands in the middle and the Metro entrance is built into the corner. On a weekend afternoon there are usually several groups standing around, and sometimes one of them plays.
Open all hours. Mariachis gather mostly in daylight and on weekend afternoons
Half café and half home furnishings shop on the Riverside and Colfax corner, opened in 1998 by Marie and her son Charles. Organic coffee, cappuccino, herbal tea, fresh orange juice and gelato, served among the furniture and gifts that are also for sale. Soft music and mismatched seating. Nobody hurries you. It shuts at 5pm every day.
Daily, 7am to 5pm
A Peruvian kitchen in a strip mall at Melrose and Vine, working out of a space with the feel of an old lunch counter. Lomo saltado, seafood fried rice and the citrus ceviches are the orders, and the green sauce on the table is hotter than it looks. Mains run around thirteen dollars.
Monday to Thursday 11:30am to 8pm, Friday and Saturday 11:30am to 9:30pm, Sunday 11:30am to 8pm
The other shrimp taco on this stretch of Olympic, two blocks from Mariscos Jalisco and argued about in the same sentence. The tacos dorados come out of the fryer onto a paper plate with cabbage and a thin red salsa, and the tostada de camaron is the order if you want something cold. It is a stand with a counter and a few stools on the sidewalk.
Daily, 9am to 5:30pm
Raul Ortega has parked on this stretch of Olympic since 2001 and sells one thing people line up for, the tacos dorados de camaron, fried to order and topped with avocado and a tomato salsa poured over the top. There is a folding table and a wall to lean on. The line is usually ten deep at lunch and takes about as long as it takes to read the menu board.
Daily, 9am to 6pm
A family Lebanese and Armenian restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard since 1982, doing mezze, charcoal kebabs and the soujouk that gets ordered at every second table. Jonathan Gold put it on his 99 Essential Restaurants list when he was at LA Weekly. The setting is plain and the portions are not.
Tuesday to Thursday 11am to 9pm, Friday and Saturday 11am to 10pm, Sunday 11am to 9pm, closed Monday
Chicago deep dish baked to order in a pan, which means about forty minutes from ordering to eating. The shop opened on this stretch of Sunset in 2004 and makes its own masa and sauces. Order when you get there and drink something while it bakes.
Tue 5pm to 10pm. Wed to Sun 11am to 10pm. Closed Monday
A walk-up burger stand on Western at 44th with a window, a few outdoor tables and a menu that runs from a chili cheeseburger to pastrami and breakfast burritos. It opens at nine in the morning and goes to half past eleven at night on weekdays, which makes it the one place near Lico that is still serving when a show ends. Order at the window and wait outside.
Mon to Fri, 9am to 11:30pm. Sat and Sun, 9am to 11pm
A wood-and-brick ale house on Huntington Drive in downtown Arcadia whose back bar was salvaged from a bar over a hundred years old. It serves breakfast from eight in the morning and keeps the kitchen going to close, with burgers and a long tap list in between. Happy hour runs three to six every day. It is the one place within walking distance of Arcadia's main street that is still serving at eleven on a Friday.
Sun to Thu, 8am to 9pm. Fri and Sat, 8am to 11pm
Vinyl nights run during the week at this small Hill Street bar in Chinatown. Sunday is karaoke. Jazz on Tuesdays is a standing fixture. It is dark and cheap, and it stays open until 2am every night.
Mon to Fri 5pm to 2am. Sat and Sun 3pm to 2am
Every Sunday the Fairfax High School parking lot fills with around 250 vendors selling vintage clothing, records, furniture and whatever else turned up that week. Admission is three dollars and the money funds arts programs at the school and productions at the Greenway Court Theatre next door. It takes an hour to walk properly and you can leave with nothing.
Sundays only, 10am to 5pm
The shop that made Retro Row, open on 4th Street since 1986 and still run by the same people. Stock runs from the 1920s to about 2000, a lot of it dead stock that was never worn, and costume departments raid it when they need a period fit. Racks are dense and organized by decade. Looking costs nothing and nobody follows you around.
Mon to Fri, noon to 6:30pm. Sat, 11am to 6:30pm. Sun, noon to 6pm
On the block of South Fairfax the city designated Little Ethiopia, Messob has been serving since 1985 and stays open to 11pm every night. Combination platters come on a single sheet of injera and the vegetarian spread is as substantial as the meat. The dining area is plain and the service is unhurried.
Daily 11am to 11pm
Named for a station on the Mexico City metro and cooking the food of that city, including pambazos, flautas and chilaquiles from nine in the morning. Carnitas run on weekends only, in eight separate cuts including snout, ear, skin and stomach.
Mon to Thu 9am to 9pm. Fri and Sat 9am to 10pm. Sun 9am to 9pm
A small coffee bar on South Main run by a young couple, with a shaded canopy of seats out front and a few tables inside. The drinks lean Mexican, so cafe de olla, horchata, chocolate Mexicano and a dulce de leche latte sit alongside the nitro cold brew. It opens at seven and closes in the early afternoon, which makes it an honest matinee stop and nothing else.
Daily, 7am to 2pm
A Salvadoran place four doors from Salon Playa Las Tunas on the same block of Washington, doing pupusas revueltas, yuca frita and a pollo encebollado. The griddle is visible from the counter and the pupusas come with curtido in a jar on the table. It is a working neighborhood restaurant with a television on, not a project.
Mon to Thu, 8am to 10pm. Fri to Sun, 8am to 11pm
Carmen Miceli and his wife Sylvia opened this in 1949 and it is the oldest Italian restaurant in Hollywood. The waiters sing opera and show tunes between courses, which has been the arrangement since the start rather than a later idea. Pizza and the baked pastas are what to order, under a ceiling hung with chianti bottles customers left behind.
Daily, 11:30am to 9:30pm
Jesucita Mijares started this as a tortilla factory in 1920 and her family still runs it, which makes it the oldest Mexican restaurant in Pasadena. It sits in a low building on Palmetto Drive off Fair Oaks with a walled patio and a cantina at the back. Closed Mondays, open from ten on Sunday.
Closed Mon. Tue to Thu, 11am to 9pm. Fri and Sat, 11am to 10pm. Sun, 10am to 8pm
A small diner on Sunset dating to 1926, with a counter and a handful of tables. Breakfast runs all day and the kitchen closes mid-afternoon.
Daily, 8am to 3pm
A coffee bar on 32nd Street a few doors from the Shrine, in a converted house with a patio out front. Espresso, drip, a short pastry case and a lot of students with laptops. It closes at three in the afternoon and does not open on weekends, which is the whole constraint on using it.
Mon to Fri, 8am to 3pm. Closed Sat and Sun
Next door to the Teragram on Seventh Street, with dark wood, a short beer list and a DJ most nights. It opens late and closes at 2am. On a weeknight it is mostly people who came out of the venue next door.
Mon to Wed 8pm to 2am. Thu and Fri 5pm to 2am. Sat and Sun 8pm to 2am
The only museum in the country given over to modern and contemporary Latin American and Latino art, opened on Alamitos Avenue in 1996 in a building that was a 1920s silent film studio and later a roller rink. Shows run to painting and sculpture alongside photography and video. There is a sculpture garden out the back that you can sit in. Admission is fifteen dollars and free to everyone on Sunday.
Wed to Sun, 11am to 6pm. Closed Mon and Tue
The concrete public stairway Laurel and Hardy hauled a piano up in The Music Box, which won the 1932 Academy Award for short comedy. It is still an ordinary right of way between Vendome and the houses above, and there is a small City park called Laurel and Hardy Park in the triangle at the foot of it with a marble plaque put up in 1992. In June 2024 the City Council voted to name the intersection for the film, so there is a street sign now as well.
Public stairway, open at all times. Park hours are not published.
Open on the same stretch of the Boulevard since 1919, with red-jacketed waiters and bartenders who mix the martini in a small shaker and leave the rest of it beside you in a carafe on ice. The counter and the bar take walk-ins. Sand dabs and the chopped salad are what people who eat here order.
Tuesday to Saturday 5pm to 11pm, Sunday 4pm to 10pm, closed Monday
A small counter on Olympic where Kilak Kim rolls the dough in an open kitchen and the dumplings are folded to order. Frozen ones are sold to take home. A separately run place in Northridge uses almost the same name and a Diamond Bar location has closed, so the address matters here more than the sign does.
10am to 8pm Wednesday through Monday. Closed Tuesdays.
Three small islands in Alamitos Bay laid out in 1903 with Venetian canals, arched footbridges and streets named Toledo and Ravenna. A public walkway runs the whole way round the Rivo Alto Canal, about a mile, flat the entire distance, with boats tied up on one side and back gardens on the other. The city rebuilt the seawall and reopened this stretch in 2015. The fountain at Naples Plaza is where people arrange to meet.
Public walkway, open at all hours. Free. Use it in daylight, because it is unlit in places
A barbecue house at the Naples end of 2nd Street that has been smoking baby backs since 1992, in a dim wood-panelled space with booths and a long bar. The order is a half rack with the sweet sauce, or the beef dip if you want something you can hold. Takeout starts at ten in the morning even though the dining side does not open until noon on weekends. It is the closest thing to a sit-down meal within walking distance of Gaslamp.
Mon to Thu, 4pm to 9pm. Fri, 4pm to 10pm. Sat, noon to 10pm. Sun, noon to 9pm. Takeout from 10am daily
A shack at the county line where PCH runs out of Los Angeles, opened in 1956 as Panorama Pacific and renamed after a contest in 1971 when the Young family took the lease. You line up at one of two counters, fried on one side and steamed shellfish on the other, and eat at picnic tables with motorcycles parked across the lot. It has been in more films than anyone has counted.
March to October: Monday to Thursday 10:30am to 8pm, Friday 10:30am to 9pm, weekends 10am to 8:30pm. October to March it closes an hour earlier each day
Richard Neutra's own house, built in 1932 as the VDL Research House on the east bank of the Silver Lake Reservoir, with a Garden House added at the end of the decade. A fire in 1963 left only the Garden House and the original basement, and Neutra rebuilt the main residence with his son and partner Dion, adding floors and a penthouse solarium on top. Cal Poly Pomona's College of Environmental Design holds it now and opens it to the public on Saturdays.
Saturdays 11am to 3pm, closed the rest of the week
A pizza and pasta place on the corner of Sixth and Centre, directly across from the Grand Annex. Red booths, a counter and pizza by the slice or the whole thing. Get the garlic rolls. It opens at half ten in the morning and runs to half eleven on weekend nights, which makes it both the lunch and the walk-home option on the same street as two stages.
Sun to Thu, 10:30am to 10:30pm. Fri and Sat, 10:30am to 11:30pm
A dive on the east end of Magnolia with pool, craft beer on tap and cocktails that are better than the lighting suggests. It opens at 5pm and runs to 2am every night of the week, which in this part of the Valley is unusual. Regulars sit at the bar, and nobody is here for the décor.
Daily, 5pm to 2am
On the water on the Malibu side of PCH, part of the Nobu Ryokan property, with a bar and lounge alongside the dining area. It was one of the few businesses on its stretch of highway that the Palisades Fire left standing. It shut in January 2025 and has been trading since.
Sunday to Thursday noon to 10pm. Friday and Saturday noon to 11pm. The reservation line only answers 10am to 5pm.
A 1957 Armet and Davis coffee shop with the zigzag roof still standing over the parking lot. Counter seats face the griddle and the booths run along the glass. The city made it Historic-Cultural Monument No. 1090 in 2015, which is what kept the building standing when a fast-food chain bought the land underneath it.
Open 24 hours, seven days.
A regional branch of the Los Angeles Public Library a block off Lankershim, named for Amelia Earhart, who lived in North Hollywood before her last flight. It is a full regional branch rather than a small one, so there is a proper periodicals section, air conditioning and tables you can sit at for an hour without buying anything. Open Sunday afternoons, which very little else here is.
Mon to Thu, 10am to 8pm. Fri and Sat, 9:30am to 5:30pm. Sun, 1pm to 5pm
Sixty-odd acres of grass, old trees and ball fields behind the Lankershim strip, with a bronze Amelia Earhart standing near the Tujunga corner because she lived in North Hollywood in the 1920s. There are picnic tables under the shade and a recreation center building with restrooms. On a hot Valley afternoon the tree cover is the point.
Grounds open daylight hours. Recreation center, Mon to Fri 9am to 9pm, Sat 9am to 5pm, closed Sun
A northern Chinese noodle shop on Figueroa a few doors up from the Nine O, doing hand-pulled noodles, pork and chive dumplings and a beef noodle soup that comes out fast. It runs to eleven at night six days a week, which makes it the latest food anywhere near the Shrine. Plastic trays and paper menus. The line at the register keeps moving.
Mon to Sat, 11am to 11pm. Sun, 11am to 9:30pm
A curved brown building at Colorado and Orange Grove holding a collection that runs from Dutch painting to Degas to South and Southeast Asian sculpture, with a sculpture garden behind it built around a pond. It is small enough to do properly in ninety minutes. Admission is free to everyone on the first Friday of the month from four until seven, and always free for students with ID and anyone eighteen or under.
Mon, noon to 5pm. Closed Tue and Wed. Thu, noon to 5pm. Fri and Sat, noon to 7pm. Sun, noon to 5pm. Last entry 4:15pm, or 6:15pm Fri and Sat
A gelato and crepe counter in a strip on Soledad Canyon, with cases of gelato made on site and savory and sweet crepes off a griddle behind them. It is a fifteen-minute stop rather than a meal, and it opens at nine or ten every day, which covers a daytime show cleanly. Watch Tuesday: it shuts at 2:30pm that one day and keeps normal hours the rest of the week.
Mon, 10am to 7pm. Tue, 10am to 2:30pm. Wed to Fri, 10am to 7pm. Sat, 9am to 6pm. Sun, 9am to 5pm
A certified growers' market that sets up in the dirt lot on Calabasas Road every Saturday morning, year round, 8am to 1pm. Produce, bread, eggs, flowers, prepared food to eat standing up. Parking in the lot is five dollars flat and there is free parking in the dirt. It is the busiest that block gets all week.
Sat, 8am to 1pm. Closed the rest of the week
The county branch library on Main, a modern building with a large reading floor, free wi-fi and a rotating exhibit wall. It is a genuine place to spend forty minutes before a film rather than a fallback, and it is the only free indoor seat in Old Town that does not require buying something. Open until 8pm four nights a week, which is later than most of the street.
Mon to Thu, 9am to 8pm. Fri, 10am to 6pm. Sat, 10am to 5pm. Sun, 1pm to 5pm
Down an alley off Holly Street into a brick space that was the fire department's horse stables in the late 1800s and has been a pub since 1973. Beer and wine only. A small stage in the corner carries local bills most nights. It does not open until six, so it is an after-stop and not a before one.
Daily, 6pm to 2am
The oldest LGBTQ archive in the United States, on West Adams in a building that used to be a fraternity house. The ground floor runs free exhibitions drawn from the collection, which covers roughly a century of material, and the reading area upstairs is open to anyone who asks. Visits are short by design and the staff will tell you what is on the walls.
Tue, 10am to 5pm. Wed, 11am to 5pm. Thu to Sat, 10am to 5pm. Closed Sun and Mon
Tom Koulax opened this walk-up stand on the corner of Beverly and Rampart on May 15, 1946 and it has not closed since. There is no indoor seating, just a counter you stand at and a chili burger wrapped in paper. It marked eighty years in May 2026 by selling the burger for eighty cents.
Open 24 hours, daily
Six booths and a counter in a narrow storefront on First Street, open since 1956 and the last Japanese restaurant left from the era when Boyle Heights held one of the largest Japanese American populations in the country. The menu is teishoku sets, curry rice and udon, cooked by one person at a time. There is a state historical marker on the building and it is still a neighborhood lunch place rather than a museum.
Mon to Sat, 11:30am to 2pm and 4:30pm to 7:30pm. Closed Sun
A taco counter next to Circus Liquor on Vineland that cooks Mexican and Peruvian at the same time. The lomo saltado taco on a handmade tortilla with a Peruvian green salsa is the one L.A. Taco singled out. There are also burgers, pizzas, wings and chiles rellenos, because the kitchen does not believe in narrowing down. Opens at 5pm, runs to 1am on Friday and Saturday.
Sun to Thu, 5pm to midnight. Fri and Sat, 5pm to 1am
A diner on Pacific Avenue that has been serving since 1940, with a counter, vinyl booths and a menu of eggs and hash that has not been updated to suit anyone. Service is fast because the turnover is fast. It is the closest real breakfast to Cabrillo Beach and it does not pretend to be anything else.
Mon to Fri, 7am to 2pm. Sat and Sun, 7am to 3pm
A cafe on La Cruz just off Sunset, a few steps behind the village center, with a patio and a pastry case. It was one of the buildings that came through the January 2025 fire still standing and it kept serving the neighborhood through the worst of the recovery. Coffee, eggs and sandwiches until five, then it shuts.
Monday to Friday 6:30am to 5pm. Saturday 7am to 5pm. Closed Sunday
Twenty-eight acres on the site of the old Pan-Pacific Auditorium, which burned down in 1989 and left the park behind it. Grass, a walking path, a playground and a recreation center, sunk below street level so the traffic on Beverly disappears. The Holocaust Museum LA sits on the north edge of the same lawn.
Recreation center Mon 9am to 7:30pm, Tue to Fri 9am to 9pm, Sat 9am to 6pm, closed Sunday. Park grounds keep longer daylight hours
George and Rena Panagopoulos opened this in 1958 in a building Eldon Davis and Helen Liu Fong designed, and it is one of the best-preserved Googie coffee shops left in Los Angeles. Boomerang roof and rock planters outside. Neon and a counter with swivel stools inside. Fried chicken, biscuits and eggs, served until three in the afternoon and not a minute later.
Mon to Fri, 7:30am to 3pm. Sat and Sun, 7am to 3pm
The only restaurant in Malibu with its own private cove, with tables set directly on the sand. Bob Morris opened it in 1998 on land his father assembled acre by acre in the fifties. The parking lot is where Jim Rockford kept his trailer in The Rockford Files, and the cove turns up in Gidget and Beach Blanket Bingo.
Daily 8am to 9pm, with some listings running Friday and Saturday to 10pm. Breakfast 8am to 11am. The operator publishes no hours of its own.
A counter on Pico where the dough gets rolled from five in the morning and you order fresh pasta by the plate or by the pound. Paola Da Re and her children run it and the seating is a few tables, so most people take it away. Nothing on the board is expensive and the line at the register moves.
Daily 10am to 9:30pm
Deanna and Geoffrey Martinez had been roasting and wholesaling in Compton since 2012 before they raised close to fifteen thousand dollars on Indiegogo and built out this Alameda Street storefront, which opened in 2018. They buy seasonal coffee from cooperatives and small independent growers and roast it on site. It is a café rather than a tasting exercise, and most of the trade is regulars.
Mon to Fri, 7am to 3pm. Sat and Sun, 8am to 4pm
A Toluca Lake coffee shop that opened in 1960 and has been under the same ownership since 1999. Breakfast, lunch and dinner all day, baked goods made in the building, and a patio. There is a back area called the Green Room where studio people talk business.
Daily 8am to 9pm.
One building on Calabasas Road holding a 10 Speed Coffee bar, a scratch kitchen, a bar and a bicycle shop, which works because the Santa Monica Mountains road rides start and end here. Coffee from six in the morning and food through the afternoon. Dinner service runs Thursday through Saturday. Cyclists in kit share the patio with people who drove, and nobody minds.
Mon to Wed, 6am to 3pm. Thu to Sat, 6am to 9pm. Sun, 6am to 3pm
A pizza counter on Hermosa Avenue that has been cutting slices for more than fifty years. You order at the register, it comes out on paper, and there are a few tables if you want one. It stays open to two in the morning on Friday and Saturday, which makes it the thing you eat on the walk back to the car.
Sun to Thu, noon to midnight. Fri and Sat, noon to 2am
Four floors of cars on Wilshire at Fairfax, behind the red ribbon facade. Under the building is the Vault, a few hundred rare vehicles including prototypes and concepts that never went into production. It is ticketed separately from general admission and cameras are not allowed down there.
Daily 10am to 6pm. Last entry 4:30pm and the last call for the Vault is 5pm.
Opened in 1908 and at the Alameda Street address since 1951, when the original building was taken for the 101 freeway. Sawdust covers the floor. Long lines form at carving stations where you order by shouting your sandwich. The tables are communal. Coffee is still famously cheap.
Daily, 6am to 10pm
Five siblings have run this on Cherry Avenue since 1985, in the part of Long Beach that holds the largest Cambodian population outside Cambodia. The order is kuy teav, the rice noodle soup, built on a pork bone broth with the house sauce on the side. It opens at seven in the morning and shuts at three in the afternoon, because breakfast soup is the point. Closed Mondays.
Tue to Sun, 7am to 3pm. Closed Mon
Founded in 1938 by Fung Chow Chan and Wai Hing Chan, the year new Chinatown was built after the old one was cleared for Union Station. The strawberry whipped cream cake was created after the war by the founder's younger brother and is still the reason most people come in. Almond cookies are sold by the bag at the counter.
Mon to Thu 10am to 4pm. Fri 10am to 5pm. Sat and Sun 10am to 6pm
A Formica counter on California Boulevard that has been grinding its own beef and building the same burger since 1963, with a paper-wrapped patty, iceberg lettuce and Thousand Island. The pies are made in house and sold whole or by the slice. It is cash only and there is an ATM by the door. Caltech is two blocks away, so the counter fills with students and contractors at the same time.
Daily, 8am to 9pm
A walk-up stand at La Brea and Melrose that has been selling chili dogs from the same window since 1939. You order outside, you wait outside, and you eat at one of the tables behind the building. The menu is longer than the building is wide and the signs explaining it have not been redesigned in decades.
Sun to Thu, 9:30am to midnight. Fri and Sat, 9:30am to 2am
El Ranchito, the adobe Pío Pico built beside the San Gabriel River and lived in until 1892, after serving as the last Mexican governor of Alta California. Thirteen acres with a fifteen-room adobe, a beehive bread oven and a dovecote still standing. Admission is free and a ranger will walk you through the house on weekends without an appointment.
Thu to Sun, 9am to 3:30pm. Closed Mon to Wed and on major holidays
One of two Pioneer Chicken locations left in Los Angeles, on Soto at Whittier since about 1982, still selling the fried chicken and gravy the chain was built on after the Echo Park original shut in 2009. The sign is the original sign and the chicken comes in a box with a biscuit. It is counter service with a small seating area and a drive-through.
Daily, 10am to 9pm
A Mediterranean counter on Reseda Boulevard doing shawarma, kabob plates and falafel wraps for the Cal State Northridge crowd, with a grill running in the open and plates that come out fast. Order at the register, sit in a plain dining area, pay student money. It has been the default cheap lunch for the campus long enough that it shows up in every list of what is near CSUN.
Daily, 11am to 9pm
The first Pitfire, opened on this corner in 1997 and still the one the rest were copied from. You order at a counter, they call a number, and personal wood-fired pizzas and pasta come out to a patio and beer garden on the northwest corner of Lankershim and Magnolia. Beer and wine, paper napkins, no host stand. On some evenings there is trivia or a comic or a band in the garden.
Sun to Thu, 11am to 11pm. Fri and Sat, 11am to midnight
A small family-run shack on Western with split logs stacked against the outside wall, feeding a wood fire that cooks every chicken on the menu. You can smell it from a block away. Order at the counter, take a quarter or a half with rice and beans, and eat at one of the few tables inside. It has been doing only this for more than thirty years.
Mon and Wed to Fri, 11am to 7pm. Sat and Sun, 11am to 8pm. Closed Tuesday
A women-owned carnitas counter on Soto below Olympic, selling pork by the pound with tortillas, salsa and nopales to go with it. Most of the trade is people buying a kilo for home on a Saturday morning, and there are a few seats if you want to eat there. It opens at half past eight and is done by five.
Mon to Fri and Sun, 8:30am to 5pm. Sat, 8am to 5pm
The Burbank branch of the Cuban bakery the Porto family started in their Echo Park house in 1960 after leaving Havana. The potato balls and cheese rolls are the reason for the line, and the line moves, because there are a dozen people behind the counter and a numbered ticket system. Coffee, pastries and sandwiches as well. Cash-cheap and nothing here costs much.
Mon to Thu, 6:30am to 7pm. Fri and Sat, 6:30am to 8pm. Sun, 7am to 7pm
One of the few Nicaraguan restaurants in Los Angeles, on Venice Boulevard near Pico-Union. The plate to get is the carne asada nicaragüense with gallo pinto and fried cheese, and there is nacatamal on weekends. The family that runs it says plainly that the point is to keep Nicaraguan cooking going for a generation that grew up here.
Mon to Thu, 8am to 8:45pm. Fri to Sun, 8am to 9:45pm
The bar attached to Pulgarcito on Vermont, open until half past one every night of the week. Beer, micheladas, the game on, and the full Salvadoran menu from the restaurant it shares a wall with, so pupusas and sopa de res arrive at the bar if you want them. It is a neighborhood bar with a Salvadoran crowd and no pretense about what it is.
Daily, noon to 1:30am
A fish market on the Redondo boardwalk since 1953, where you pick what you want out of the ice and they steam or fry it while you wait. You carry the tray to a picnic table on the deck over the water and eat it with plastic forks. Crab, shrimp cocktails and oysters alongside fish and chips. The gulls know exactly what they are doing.
Mon to Thu, 10:30am to 8pm. Fri to Sun, 9:30am to 8pm, with a 9pm close on Saturday
A coffee bar decorated around horror movies and skateboarding, with pinball and arcade cabinets in the back. Rusty and Jade Valore started the company in Upland in 2015 and opened this Citrus Avenue shop in the fall of 2020. Drip, pour-over and espresso are all here alongside the blended drinks named after horror characters that the place is known for, and it stays open until 10pm every night.
Daily, 6am to 10pm
A turquoise diner that opened on Pico in 1958 and has never been redecorated, down to the matching turquoise stools and the red booths. Tarantino shot a scene of True Romance in it and Lords of Dogtown used it too. Breakfast runs all day and the plates are cheap.
Daily, 6:30am to 2pm
The Rainbow opened on the Strip in 1972 inside the former Villa Nova, immediately uphill from the Roxy. Red booths, a pizza menu and a heated patio out front where people stand until closing. Lemmy's barstool is still where it was and there is a statue of him by it.
Monday to Friday 11am to 2am, Saturday and Sunday 3pm to 2am
The giant donut on the roof went up in 1953 and the stand under it has not changed shape since. You order at a walk-up window on the side of the building, there is no seating, and people eat standing next to their cars in the lot. It runs 24 hours a day, which is the whole reason to know about it in a part of Inglewood where almost nothing else does.
Open 24 hours, every day
A German pub on Atlantic Avenue in Bixby Knolls, open since 2016, with more than thirty German and Belgian taps and a covered patio out the back that does most of the seating. Food is schnitzel and sausage with spaetzle, in portions sized for the beer. It fills with neighborhood regulars rather than with anyone who drove across the county for it.
Mon to Thu, 4pm to 10:30pm. Fri and Sat, 11:30am to 11pm. Sun, 11:30am to 10pm
Bob and Laurie Brandt opened this on Sartori in August 2000 and named it for the Pacific Electric Red Cars that used to run through Torrance. House beer, a long bar, pizzas and burgers, and brick walls that were here before the brewery was. It is the one place in Old Torrance where a group can stand at the bar after ten.
Mon to Thu, 11:30am to 9pm. Fri, 11:30am to 10pm. Sat, noon to 10pm. Sun, noon to 8:30pm
Ted Mandekic and Edward Pagliano opened this in 1959 as an Olde English pub and turned it German in 1963. It has been in the Mattis family since. Beer comes in one-liter boots and Mass krugs, servers wear dirndls, and there is live music and a piano on the lower floor. The draw for most people is the biergarten patio upstairs.
Open to 2am every night. Opening is either noon on weekdays and 11am on the weekend, or 11am daily depending on which listing you read. Happy hour is reported Monday to Friday noon to 5pm.
Portholes and rigging turn this Second Street bar into a ship. A small stage books local bands most nights. The address was a newspaper hangout for decades before the current owners took it over and committed to the theme in 2006. Food runs until late.
Daily, 11am to 2am
A 1950s corner bar at Broadway and Redondo with pin-up art on the walls, a pool table and a jukebox. It opens at six in the morning, which tells you who the regulars are, and it is still pouring at two. The taqueria attached to it, Cocorenos, sends food through to the bar so you can eat without leaving your stool.
Daily, 6am to 2am
A coffeehouse on Magnolia a block off Lankershim that sells whole pies and slices, sweet and savory, and runs live music on a small stage most nights of the week with no cover. Opens at 9am, which makes it the default place in the NoHo Arts District to sit for an hour before a curtain. Tables fill with people working and the music starts in the evening without anybody clearing the laptops out.
Mon to Wed, 9am to 8:30pm. Thu, 9am to 9pm. Fri and Sat, 8:30am to 9pm. Sun, 9am to 9pm
A stone building on Mulholland that the Savko family turned into a store and grill in 1961, and which has been the gathering point for motorcyclists on this road ever since. You order a burger at the counter and eat it at a long table outside while two hundred bikes come and go. It shuts at five and closes Monday through Thursday, so the window is narrow and real.
Friday 9am to 5pm. Saturday and Sunday 7am to 5pm. Closed Monday to Thursday
A whiskey bar and grill on Bellflower Boulevard with a long back bar, live music on some nights and a weekend brunch that starts at nine in the morning. Happy hour runs from three to six Monday through Thursday. On Friday and Saturday the bar goes to one in the morning, which is the latest close on this street.
Mon to Thu, 3pm to 10pm. Fri, 3pm to 1am. Sat, 9am to 1am. Sun, 9am to 10pm
The newest of the three Rose Park Roasters cafes, on Ocean Boulevard a couple of blocks from the convention center. They roast their own, mostly light and single origin, and the 6am open makes it the earliest coffee downtown. Seating is indoors with a few tables on the sidewalk. The original shop is still going on 4th Street in Rose Park, which is where the name comes from.
Daily, 6am to 5pm
The daytime cafe at the Hollywood Roosevelt, rebranded from the Tropicana Café, open 8am to 3pm. The Tropicana Bar beside it runs 9am to 10pm. The pool it looks onto has a bottom hand-painted by David Hockney, and eating here does not require a pool pass.
Daily 8am to 3pm; the Tropicana Bar runs 9am to 10pm
A neighborhood sports bar directly across Citrus Avenue from the Covina Theater, with twenty-odd screens, a pool table, dart boards and six outdoor tables where dogs are welcome. Karaoke runs Tuesday and Thursday, an open mic lands on the first Wednesday of the month, and a DJ plays Friday and Saturday. It closes at 1:30 in the morning every night of the week, which makes it the last thing still pouring on the block.
Mon to Sat, 11am to 1:30am. Sun, 10am to 1:30am
Around twenty-five years of late service have made this strip-mall restaurant a Thai Town fixture. Crispy morning glory salad and the pork with Chinese broccoli are what regulars order. It runs until quarter to eleven every night.
Monday to Friday 4pm to 10:45pm, Saturday and Sunday 2pm to 10:45pm
A Thai kitchen on Magnolia in Valley Village that takes the cooking seriously and the presentation lightly. It splits the day, lunch until 3:30pm and dinner from 5pm, which is worth knowing before you walk over. The Infatuation has called it one of the most overlooked Thai places in the Valley. There is a small bar and wine by the glass.
Daily, noon to 3:30pm and 5pm to 9:30pm
A small shop on Westwood Boulevard that has been making Persian-style bastani since the 1980s. The saffron and pistachio is the one to get, pressed between two wafers if you ask for it that way. Cucumber and date sit on the same board, which tells you the register.
Sunday to Thursday 11am to 10pm. Friday and Saturday 11am to 11pm
Old trees shade a triangle of lawn in the West Adams historic district, ringed by Victorian houses that survived the freeway. There are benches, a path and not much else. It is the nearest patch of green between the Shrine and Adams Boulevard.
Daily, sunrise to sunset
Ducks and strips of char siu hang in the front window and a man with a cleaver takes them down and chops them to order over rice. The dining area behind is plain tile and laminate and the rice plates come out within a few minutes of ordering. It opens at nine in the morning, which almost nothing else in San Gabriel does.
Daily, 9am to 9pm
James Brown took over the old John T's Tavern space and opened this as a brewpub in November 1999, and it has been the default Sixth Street bar since. A long wooden bar, booths down one side, house beer on tap and a full kitchen going as late as the bar. Televisions are on and the volume is the volume of a working bar rather than a sports hall.
Sun to Wed, noon to 10pm. Thu, noon to 10:30pm. Fri and Sat, noon to 11:30pm
A Salvadoran kitchen on Vermont just below Washington that stays open until 2am on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, which is rare on this stretch. The plates are large and cheap and the pupusas keep coming out of the kitchen well past midnight. On a weekday it shuts at ten, so the late version of this stop only exists on a weekend.
Mon to Thu, 8am to 10pm. Fri to Sun, 8am to 2am
A Thai Town storefront that has been serving since the late 1970s and has poured coffee since the eighties, though the boat noodles are why anyone comes. The bowl arrives with beef, tendon and tripe in a dark broth with pork rinds on top. Order two, they are small.
Monday and Tuesday 10:30am to 7pm, Thursday 10:30am to 7pm, Friday to Sunday 10:30am to 9pm, closed Wednesday
A very small place on Valley Boulevard with a handful of tables that has been doing one dish since 1982, poached chicken over rice cooked in the fat, with ginger-scallion, garlic-chili and dark soy on the side. Order the dark meat for two dollars more. The rest of the board is Macanese and Malaysian cooking and the baked seafood casserole is the other thing regulars order. Closed Sundays.
Mon to Sat, 11am to 9pm. Closed Sun
Thirty-nine lanes on Fourth Street, open until 2am every night of the year. Walk-in games run about six or seven dollars at night with five-dollar shoe rental, and there are pool tables, pinball, a bar and a kitchen behind the lanes. The free lot under the building is tight but it is free.
Mon to Thu, 1pm to 2am. Fri to Sun, noon to 2am
A free public park on the spit between Rainbow Harbor and the main channel, with lawn, sand and the Lions Lighthouse at the end of it. The lighthouse went up in 2000 as a Lions Club project for sight charities and is not a working navigation light. From the point you can see the Queen Mary across the water and the whole downtown skyline behind you. It is flat, paved and takes about twenty minutes to walk end to end.
Park, daily 8am to 6pm. The lighthouse path, sunrise to sunset. Free
A 2.2 mile path of dirt and pavement around the Silver Lake and Ivanhoe basins, with a three-acre meadow on the east side that has been open to the public since 2011. The path is not gated. Dogs are fine on the loop and not on the meadow.
Path open and ungated. The dog park at the south end runs 6am to 10pm
A coffee house one block up from the Warner Grand, with murals by San Pedro painters covering the walls and a player or two on a Friday. It opens at half six in the morning on weekdays, which is earlier than anything else downtown. Order at the counter and take a table or the bench out front.
Mon to Thu, 6:30am to 4pm. Fri to Sun, 7am to 6pm
Barbecue at the south end of Main, with twenty-four craft taps and a rule the operator states outright: meat is smoked fresh daily, and when it runs out they are out. Brisket, ribs, tri-tip, sides, served on trays. Going early is not a preference here, it is the whole strategy, which fits an afternoon screening better than an evening one.
Mon to Wed, 11am to 9pm. Thu to Sat, 11am to 10pm. Sun, 9am to 9pm
Billy Shire's family opened Soap Plant in 1971 selling handmade soap and their own ceramics, and it has grown into 6,500 square feet of books, toys and things nobody else stocks. La Luz de Jesus, the gallery upstairs, opened in 1986 and is where the lowbrow art movement got its footing. Openings are the first Friday of the month.
Daily. Check the shop's own page for current opening and closing times
A bakery on Yale Avenue that dates itself to 1916 and has been the Claremont Village's morning counter ever since, with bread, pastry, a short breakfast and lunch menu and coffee to take out onto the sidewalk. The line at eight in the morning is students and faculty in roughly equal measure. It shuts early, at one on Monday and two on Sunday.
Mon, 6:30am to 1pm. Tue, 6:30am to 4pm. Wed to Fri, 6:30am to 6pm. Sat, 7am to 6pm. Sun, 8am to 2pm
A small counter on Eighth Street opened in 2016 by Teodoro Rodriguez Diaz and Jennifer Feltham, cooking the flour-tortilla style of northern Sonora rather than the corn-based food most of LA serves. Tortillas are pressed in house and the chivichangas come out of the fryer. There are a few stools and a lot of takeout.
Daily, 11am to 10pm
Sophy Khut has been cooking on this stretch of Pacific Coast Highway for more than twenty years, and the menu runs long enough that regulars order by pointing. What she is known for is the beef jerky, flank steak oven dried and then fried, which arrives in thick pieces with a dipping sauce. The place also serves Thai, which is how a lot of Cambodian kitchens in Long Beach survived. There is a stage and a dance floor used on weekends.
Daily, 10am to 9pm
An independent coffee and tea bar on Flower Street, a block off the boulevard, pouring espresso alongside Japanese teas and a matcha list that goes further than most. It opens at seven on weekdays and eight at weekends and keeps going into the evening, which very few cafés around here do. The seating is limited and most people are working or waiting for a to-go cup.
Mon to Fri, 7am to 7:30pm. Sat, 8am to 6pm. Sun, 8am to 7:30pm
The oldest museum in Los Angeles, built into the hillside above Arroyo Seco and now run by the Autry. Admission is free and it opens one day a week while the building is still being rehabilitated, so the gallery space on view is small.
Saturdays only, 10am to 4pm. Free
A working bike shop with repair and rentals that also runs a coffee counter and a beer garden, sitting directly on the Los Angeles River bike path in Frogtown. You can rent a bike, ride the river path and come back for a beer.
Mon to Wed 9am to 6pm. Thu to Sun 9am to 9pm
Pierre Koenig's 1960 glass box cantilevered off a ridge above the Sunset Strip, and the subject of the Julius Shulman photograph of two women sitting in a lit corner over the whole grid at night. The Stahl family still owns it and still runs the visits themselves, which is why the rules are so particular.
Reservation-only timed tours released in roughly half-month tranches, afternoon and evening
An open-air courtyard built out of repurposed shipping containers at Bellflower Boulevard and Oak Street, with eight independent counters around a shared seating yard. Tacos Arandas, Un Rinconcito Argentino and Panda Sal's handle most of the food, Off Duty pours beer and wine, and Pana's Café and Brown Cup Boba open at seven in the morning. Leashed dogs are welcome and there is no minimum spend to sit down.
Mon and Tue, 7am to 9pm. Wed, Thu and Sun, 7am to 10pm. Fri and Sat, 7am to 11pm
An independent bookstore that opened on Sunset in November 2008, with new and used stock and a cafe at the back that pours coffee, beer and wine. The 9pm close is unusual for a bookshop and makes it usable on the way to a show.
Daily, 9am to 9pm
Two sisters from Japan opened Suehiro in Little Tokyo in 1972 and ran it on First Street for fifty years until an eviction in 2023 pushed it to Main Street. Same family, same curry, in a bigger space. It serves until 1am on weeknights and 3am on Friday and Saturday.
Mon to Thu 11:30am to 1am. Fri 11:30am to 3am. Sat 8am to 3am. Sun 8am to 1am
Open every hour of every day, in the converted Sizzler on Western. The order is sul long tang, an ox bone broth you season yourself at the table, or galbi jjim, short ribs braised in a cast iron pan and finished with cheese at the table if you ask. It is bright, loud and fast, and at four in the morning it is still full.
Open 24 hours, daily
Part bakery, part café, with most of the seating outdoors under umbrellas at the Lankershim corner. Bread and pastry are made on site and the savory side runs to egg dishes, toasts and grain bowls. It is ordered at the counter. The NoHo branch is the Valley outpost of a Venice operation that has been going since the early 2010s.
Daily, 7am to 3pm
A Gujarati farsan counter on a side street off Pioneer Boulevard in Artesia's Little India, where the snacks and the sweets are made on the premises every day. You order at the glass case and eat at tables in the back. Dhokla and khandvi sit on one side. Pani puri is there too. Barfi and jalebi fill the other. It is vegetarian throughout and the bill is small.
Tue to Thu and Sun, 11am to 9pm. Fri and Sat, 11am to 9:30pm. Closed Mon
A corner diner on the ground floor of the 1967 Beverly Laurel, red vinyl booths and loud music until three in the morning. It shut in the spring of 2020 and reopened that November under Stephanie Wilson, who had worked there since 2011, first as a server and then as general manager.
8am to 3am, seven days.
A family has run this corner stand at Sunset and Lucile since 1981. Its own menu leads with chilaquiles, which tells you what the morning crowd is there for, and the rest is fish and shrimp tacos, wet burritos and menudo. It is a painted walk-up with seating out back.
Monday to Saturday 7am to 9pm, Sunday 7am to 4pm.
A walk-up counter on Glendale Boulevard that opens at 6am and sells until the food runs out, usually by mid-afternoon. Cash only. The chorizo and potato breakfast burrito is what Anthony Bourdain ate here for The Layover, and a second counter opened on Eagle Rock Boulevard in 2025.
Daily 6am to 3pm, or until they sell out
A cash-only stand on the Olympic taco row, one door east of Don Quixote, doing beef and goat birria on handmade tortillas with consommé on the side. The goat is the reason to come and the consommé is rich enough to drink on its own. There is no seating worth the name, so people eat standing at the counter or in the car.
Mon and Wed to Sun, 8:30am to 4:30pm. Closed Tue
A twelve-foot hot dog you order through, designed by Milton J. Black and commissioned in 1939 by the dance act Veloz and Yolanda. The 1933 Group restored it and reopened in July 2022 on a lot that held a studio once used by the Doors. Closed Monday and Tuesday.
Wednesday and Thursday 3pm to 10pm, Friday and Saturday noon to 10pm, Sunday noon to 9pm, closed Monday and Tuesday
Open since 1959 and run by the same family, in a late-sixties interior nobody has renovated. Two hundred pounds of turkey go into the oven every morning, and the turkey dinner and the turkey sandwich are what people come for. Breakfast runs until 11:45am on weekdays and until 2pm on Saturday and Sunday.
Daily 8am to 2pm and 4pm to 9pm. Closed between two and four.
Open on Los Feliz Boulevard since 1922 and run by the same family the entire time, which makes it one of the oldest restaurants in the city on its original site. Lawrence Frank and Walter Van de Kamp built it before they started Lawry's. Prime rib and Yorkshire pudding, and a bar that does a 2pm happy hour.
Daily 11am to 9pm. Happy hour Mon to Fri 2pm to 5pm
A Tam's on North Alameda, part of the Southern California chain Kostas Vovos started in 1971 and his grandson Spiro runs now. The Compton signs carry more weight than the burgers alone would explain: Kendrick Lamar rapped about hanging out at Tam's, and a Tam's #21 sign stood on the Super Bowl LVI halftime stage. This one opens at six in the morning and closes at ten at night.
Daily, 6am to 10pm
Daniel Alonso came from Puebla and has been selling Tijuana-style tacos for eighteen years, and this East Compton Boulevard shop is the first of his. The asada goes over mesquite and comes on handmade corn tortillas with guacamole and a salsa de molcajete. It stays open to eleven most nights and to midnight on Friday and Saturday.
Mon to Thu, 10am to 11pm. Fri and Sat, 9am to midnight. Sun, 9am to 11pm
A tonkotsu counter on Arroyo Parkway just south of Colorado that stays open until two in the morning from Thursday to Saturday and midnight the rest of the week. You order at a tablet, pick a bowl and a spice level, and it arrives fast. There is outdoor seating and free parking near enough that nobody circles. It is the one place near the Civic that is reliably still serving food when a show lets out.
Mon to Wed, 11am to midnight. Thu to Sat, 11am to 2am. Sun, 11am to midnight
Thirty-five years in the back corner of the Malibu Country Mart, away from the parking lot. Grilled octopus, taramasalata, whole branzino and lamb, indoors and on a large patio. Zane and Elisa Koss have now run it through the Woolsey Fire, the pandemic and the Palisades Fire; it closed in January 2025 while PCH was shut and reopened remodeled.
Three sources disagree. The landlord lists noon to 9pm daily; other listings open at 11:30am and run to 11pm on Friday and Saturday. Call (310) 317-9667 before you plan around a closing time.
A plain Thai restaurant in a strip on Victory Boulevard with a long menu, low prices and a big vegetarian section. It opens at 11am and runs to 9:30pm, which in this stretch of the Valley is a wider window than almost anything else. Closed Wednesday. Service is quick and the dining area is small.
Mon, Tue, Thu and Sun, 11am to 9:30pm. Fri and Sat, 11am to 10pm. Closed Wed
A metal bar on West 4th that serves New York style pies and slices until last call. The stereo is loud and the playlist is the kind of thing the staff actually own on vinyl, and there is a pinball and arcade corner off to one side. It is 21 and over all day, so the noon open is for adults killing an afternoon rather than for families. Slices keep coming after the kitchen shuts, which is the part that matters when a bill runs long.
Sun to Thu, noon to 11pm. Fri and Sat, noon to midnight. Kitchen closes an hour before the bar, slices until last call
A smash burger counter that opened in March 2026 in the building that used to be The Alley, the recording studio where Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, Fleetwood Mac, Etta James and the Red Hot Chili Peppers all cut tracks. The owners kept the name and the history is on the walls. Burgers and fries during the week. Brunch on weekends. Closed Monday and Tuesday.
Wed and Thu, 4pm to 10pm. Fri and Sat, 11:30am to 10pm. Sun, 11:30am to 9pm. Closed Mon and Tue
A wooden shack on Pico that has been serving since 1947, with twenty-six stools around a U-shaped counter and no tables at all. You wait standing behind whoever is eating, then take the stool when it opens. The hickory burger and the pie have both been on the menu since the first day, and the bill arrives handwritten.
Sunday to Thursday 11am to 11pm. Friday and Saturday 11am to midnight
A counter pizzeria on the theater's block where the whole idea is that you pick the toppings and they hand-toss it for you. The dough uses imported Italian flour and the cheese is Grande, which is a more serious sourcing decision than the build-your-own format suggests. There are salads, wings and craft beer alongside, and a patio out front if the inside is full.
Daily, 11am to 9pm
A dark space off Oberlin Avenue built around Belgian beer, with the abbey ales and lambics on a board and a burger that the regulars order without looking. The bar runs down one side and there is a patio out front. Friday and Saturday run to eleven, which in Claremont counts as late.
Mon to Wed, 11am to 9:30pm. Thu, 11am to 10pm. Fri, 11am to 11pm. Sat, 10am to 11pm. Sun, 10am to 9:30pm
The site of a February 1967 demonstration against a police raid on a gay bar, more than two years before Stonewall. It is Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument 939 and became California Historical Landmark 1063 in 2022, the first state landmark recognizing California's LGBTQ history. It trades today as a neighborhood bar and restaurant at Sunset Junction.
Weekdays 4pm to 2am. Weekends from 2pm
A dark bar on the ground floor of the BroadLind Hotel on Linden, a block and a half off Broadway. The list is long on American whiskey and the house drink is an Old Fashioned made without ceremony. Seating is benches and a few tables, and the volume stays low enough to talk. It opens at five and runs to two every night of the week, which is rare in downtown Long Beach.
Daily, 5pm to 2am
A secondhand and antiquarian bookstore four doors up from the theater, trading on Citrus Avenue since 1981 and now run by Brad and Jen Johnson under the Johnson Rare Books & Archives name. Roughly thirty thousand titles are shelved here, running from ordinary used paperbacks to genuinely rare material. It keeps short hours and is open only Thursday through Saturday, so the visit has to be planned around the shop rather than the show.
Thu and Fri, 11am to 6pm. Sat, 11am to 5pm. Closed Sunday to Wednesday
Eli and Edythe Broad's collection in a perforated concrete shell on Grand Avenue, open since 2015. General admission is free, and the third floor holds the postwar and contemporary work the collection is known for. Thursday through Saturday it stays open until 8pm.
Tue and Wed 11am to 5pm. Thu and Fri 11am to 8pm. Sat 10am to 8pm. Sun 10am to 6pm. Closed Monday
Culver City's oldest bar, opened in 1947, and small enough that its own regulars call it the world's smallest honky-tonk. There is live country, roots and blues most nights with no cover. The stage is a corner of the floor.
Daily, 2pm to 2am
A café in a 1947 corner building a block up from the water near Point Fermin, with a counter, a pastry case and tables out front. Café de olla, breakfast burritos and quesadillas, and a crowd of people who have walked down from the surrounding streets. It runs seven in the morning to seven at night, every day, which is an unusually long day for this end of San Pedro.
Every day, 7am to 7pm
Five acres of Valencia orange trees along Nordhoff Street, planted in the early 1940s when this was farmland and kept when the campus was built around them. Carved paths run through the rows and students use it for picnics. Volunteers pick the fruit for the campus food pantry, more than 153,000 pounds of it since 2009, and biologists use the grove to study bee populations. It is the last working piece of the agricultural Valley on this side of the 405.
Open daylight hours, no gate and no admission
A lounge on Vermont that has kept its 1950s fittings and books live players five nights a week. Marty and Elayne held the residency here for nearly forty years until Marty Roberts died in January 2022, and the music kept going. The bar is long and you can sit at it without ordering dinner.
Wednesday and Thursday 5pm to midnight, Friday and Saturday 5pm to 1am, Sunday 5pm to 10pm, closed Monday and Tuesday
The oldest restaurant and bar in Santa Monica, on Main Street since 1934 and the first place to open on that street. Ron Schur has owned it since the first day of 1989; he bought it after a waitress would not give him the salad dressing recipe. The bar has not been changed since 1946, the Christmas lights stay up all year, and the phone number ends in 1934.
Daily from 5pm until close, which listings put at 11pm Monday to Thursday, 12:30am Friday and Saturday and 10pm Sunday. Happy hour 5pm to 7pm at the bar and the front patio.
Charles and Henry Greene designed this in 1908 for David and Mary Gamble of Procter & Gamble, and it is the American Arts and Crafts house everything else gets measured against: joinery left visible, sleeping porches, art glass in the front door. The Gambles' family deeded it to the City of Pasadena in 1966 and it is now a National Historic Landmark run by the Gamble House Conservancy. The exterior and gardens are free to walk around whenever the site is open.
Open Tuesday and Thursday to Sunday, 10am to 4pm, closed Monday and Wednesday
A Sunset Boulevard bar that puts out free tacos, popcorn and peanuts when the kitchen feels like it, and runs a beer and whiskey shot for nine dollars. Karaoke on Mondays. The noon open is the earliest on this stretch.
Daily, noon to 2am
The original location, on the corner of Valley and Garfield since 1951, with the neon sign and a walk-up window. Order the world famous pastrami dip and expect a pile of meat that needs two hands and a stack of napkins. Chili cheese fries come in a portion sized for a table. It is open until one in the morning every night of the week.
Daily, 10am to 1am
One of the largest and oldest used bookstores in Southern California, on the Cahuenga and Chandler corner, with more than 150,000 books and a leaning toward literature and the arts. Everything is secondhand. There is free parking, air conditioning that matters in August, and two cats who will sit on whatever you are reading. Closed Sunday and Monday.
Tue to Sat, 11am to 7pm. Closed Sun and Mon
Two floors of new and used books inside a former bank on Spring Street, with the old vault still in place upstairs. It opened downtown in 2005 and moved into this building in 2011. The 11pm close on most nights is unusual for a bookshop anywhere.
Mon and Tue 11am to 8pm. Wed to Sun 10am to 11pm
A café on Harvard Avenue with a patio under the trees, coffee, sandwiches and soup, and enough students working at the tables that nobody will mind if you sit for an hour. Vegan and gluten-free options are on the board rather than an afterthought. It closes at twenty past four, which is not a typo and is the one thing that decides whether this stop works.
Daily, 8am to 4:20pm
An 1844 adobe on Calabasas Road that Basque rancher Miguel Leonis remodelled into a Monterey-style two-story house in the 1870s, now kept as a working ranch with longhorn cattle, sheep, goats and a blacksmith shop in the yard. It was declared Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 1, the first thing the city ever designated, and the campaign to save it in 1962 is what produced the designation system. The Plummer House, moved here from Hollywood, sits on the same lot and serves as the visitor center.
Sat, 10am to 4pm. Sun, 1pm to 4pm. Closed Monday to Friday
A Broadway coffeehouse lined floor to ceiling with second-hand books, mismatched armchairs and people who have clearly been in the same seat for three hours. It runs from six in the morning to eleven at night every day, which is a longer day than any cafe in Long Beach keeps. There is beer and wine as well as coffee, plus sandwiches and cake. Nobody will move you along.
Daily, 6am to 11pm
A Japanese bakery three doors from the cinema, run under the Okayama Kobo name, where the dough is made with Hokkaido flour and no preservatives and everything is baked on site each morning. The counter is curry breads, melon pan, cream buns, a short list of sandwiches and coffee, and most of it is gone by early afternoon. You order at the case, you eat at a small table or you carry it out. It closes at 2:30pm, so it is a matinee stop and nothing else.
Tue to Sun, 8am to 2:30pm. Closed Mon
The oldest bar in Bellflower, trading on the boulevard since 1934, with shuffleboard and darts and a michelada it is named for locally. It is a dive in the plain sense of the word and does not dress itself up. It opens at four in the afternoon and runs to two in the morning.
Daily, 4pm to 2am
A small café on the same block of Lankershim as the theater, open 8am to 8pm seven days. They make crepes to order, savory and sweet, along with French omelettes, baklava and sandwiches, and the coffee runs to the flavored end of the spectrum. Plain filter is on the board too. It is counter order, then sit.
Mon to Fri, 7am to 8pm. Sat and Sun, 8am to 8pm
A two-floor bar on Market Street with screens on every wall and a kitchen. A DJ comes on later. It opens at three in the afternoon and serves until one most nights and two on a Friday, which in downtown Inglewood is unusual. It exists because of the stadiums up the road and it makes no secret of that.
Mon to Thu, 3pm to 1am. Fri, 3pm to 2am. Sat, 3pm to midnight. Sun, 3pm to 1am
A corner market on Bronson with a coffee counter and a short kitchen menu, plus a wine and beer selection you can drink in or carry out. The breakfast burrito is the order in the morning and there are nightly specials after that. Tables are indoors and on the sidewalk.
Daily, 8am to 9pm
The old Cornell general store and post office on Mulholland, now a restaurant the Runyon family has run for three generations. The bar inside was salvaged out of a Virginia City saloon. Outside there is a take-out window and a scatter of tables under the oaks, which is the part you can walk up to without booking anything.
Thursday 4pm to 9pm. Friday noon to 9pm. Saturday 9:30am to 9pm. Sunday 9:30am to 7pm. Closed Monday to Wednesday
An open-air market at Third and Fairfax since 1934, built out of the stalls farmers set up on a vacant dairy field and never taken down. You eat standing or at a shared table under the green awnings, from whichever counter you want, and Bob's Coffee and Doughnuts opens at 8am for the people who arrive before anything else does. Parking on site is free for the first hour.
Mon to Fri, 9am to 9pm. Sat, 9am to 8pm. Sun, 10am to 7pm
Red leather booths, dark wood panelling and oil paintings, all left from when this was The Windsor. The Korean owners took it over and kept the interior intact, so the fried chicken and the spicy seafood stew arrive in a 1940s steakhouse setting. Television shoots here constantly, which is why it looks familiar.
Monday to Saturday 4pm to 2am. Closed Sunday
A pub on 2nd Street with a long draft list and a short menu of wings, burgers and loaded fries. It sits right in the middle of the Arts Colony, a few doors from The Glass House, so the crowd before and after a show is mostly people going to or coming from one. Order at the bar, sit where you like, nobody rushes you out.
Tue to Thu, noon to 9pm. Fri and Sat, noon to 10pm. Sun, noon to 5pm. Closed Mondays
This dark Los Feliz Boulevard bar pours strong and puts out free popcorn. The jukebox is digital. Cash only, and the on-site ATM charges for the privilege. A Thai kitchen operates out of the back.
Daily, noon to 2am
Harold Sparks opened this on Centinela in 1983 and it has been Inglewood's breakfast table since. Chicken and waffles, salmon croquettes and grits come out of a small kitchen onto a short counter and a handful of booths. There is usually a wait on a Sunday and it turns over quickly.
Mon to Fri, 8am to 2pm. Sat and Sun, 8am to 3pm
A bar at 1455 Sunset that opened in 1940 and spent decades as an LAPD hangout before a group of entertainers bought it in 2001. The storefront had been a furrier and taxidermy shop in the late 1920s. Cheap drinks, pool tables and a DJ most nights.
Daily, 5pm to 2am
Red leather booths and tufted vinyl across the street from the Warner Bros lot, in a building that went up as the Red Coach Inn. The restaurant opened in 1946 at Pass and Riverside with forty-six seats and moved here in 1949. The interior has not been redone since.
Monday to Thursday 11:30am to 10:30pm. Friday and Saturday to 11pm. Sunday brunch 10am to 2pm and dinner 3:30pm to 9pm.
A saloon-fronted barbecue place on Vanowen running a double-barrel smoker in the back alley, which is why the block smells the way it does. Brisket, ribs and sausage sold by weight, served on trays with white bread and pickles. It is the closest real food to the Mayflower Club and the only thing within walking distance of it worth crossing the road for.
Closed Mon. Tue to Thu, 11am to 8:30pm. Fri, 11am to 9pm. Sat, noon to 9pm. Sun, noon to 8pm
Oak panelling and brass bar fittings put in when Andrew Silber opened this as a British pub in 1989. It passed to Martin and Susan O'Sullivan in 2020, closed for a stretch, and came back in late 2024 under new owners as a gastropub with the fittings left alone. Fish and chips is still the order and the bar is still where to sit.
Closed Mon and Tue. Wed to Fri, 4pm to 9pm. Sat, noon to 9pm. Sun, 11am to 8pm
A small storefront on Fifth Street in the arts district that serves the same menu from nine in the morning until nine at night. Eggs and bacon in the morning, then steak and fries, lamb and shrimp later, on paper menus in a narrow dining area. It is the one place downtown that will feed you at four in the afternoon, which is when a lot of people need feeding.
Mon to Sat, 9am to 9pm. Sun, 9am to 2:45pm
A working brewery on West Manchester with long tables in front of the tanks and a roll-up door onto the parking lot. It is a place you walk into and order a beer at the bar, with food trucks rather than a kitchen. Weekend closing runs to eleven, which is late by Inglewood standards.
Mon, 3pm to 8pm. Tue to Thu, 3pm to 10pm. Fri and Sat, noon to 11pm. Sun, noon to 9pm
Ray Buhen, a Filipino immigrant who tended bar at Don the Beachcomber, opened this twelve-seat bar in 1961 in what had been his father-in-law's violin repair shop. His son and grandson, both named Mike, are the only two people who work there. It is closed more days than it is open.
Wednesday to Saturday evenings. Posted closing times vary between midnight and 2am, so check before you count on it
A window on Washington Place that has been selling the same hard-shell taco since 1959, with unmelted cheddar over shredded beef. L.A. Taco's own write-up calls it a Los Angeles roadside legend and singles out the dark, smoky red sauce. You order outside and eat at a picnic table.
Daily, 11am to 8pm
A horseshoe bar under a ceiling papered in paper shamrocks, each one carrying a regular's name, some of them decades old. Tom Bergin opened the business in 1936 and it ran near-continuously at this Fairfax address until 2018, then reopened under new owners in December 2019 with the interior and the shamrocks intact. It is a landmarked building and the bar runs to 1am every night.
Mon to Sat, 4pm to 1am. Sun, 1pm to 1am
The oldest tiki bar still standing in Los Angeles, opened on Victory Boulevard in 1958 by brothers Edwin and Ace Libby, who had worked at a Polynesian restaurant on Sepulveda and wanted their own. Dark, low, carved wood, a rock waterfall behind the bar and a rum list that takes itself more seriously than the decor suggests. It stayed open through the decades when nobody cared about tiki rather than reopening in the revival.
Mon to Thu, 4pm to 1am. Fri, 4pm to 2am. Sat, 2pm to 2am. Sun, 2pm to 1am
Family owned in upper Topanga village, counter service for organic breakfast and lunch with a market attached selling food and homewares. Juices, smoothies, lattes and wraps. The owners have said they want to add evening service, which they have not done yet.
Daily 8am to 3pm, though one listing says 4:30pm. Call (310) 455-9888 if the last hour matters.
A family bakery that has been on El Prado in Old Torrance since 1984, occupying a row of storefronts it expanded into one at a time. Glass cases of cakes, pastries, cookies and a sandwich counter at the back. You take a number, and on a Saturday morning the number matters.
Mon to Fri, 7am to 6pm. Sat, 7am to 5pm. Sun, 8am to 3pm
The ground-floor apartment Bugsy Siegel lived in, inside the 1929 Art Deco Sunset Tower. It runs as a restaurant and bar with a dress code enforced at the door and a standing rule against phones and photographs. Sunday dinner is for hotel guests only.
Dinner nightly, hours not confirmed by the operator
A small free museum on the USC campus, founded in 1939, with a permanent holding of Dutch and Flemish paintings and a changing program of contemporary shows. Two galleries, no ticket, and it takes half an hour unless something holds you. It keeps the university calendar, so it shuts for holidays and through the summer.
Tue to Fri, noon to 5pm. Sat, noon to 4pm. Closed Sun and Mon. Shut for university holidays and in summer
Two aircraft hangars at Van Nuys Airport filled with the San Fernando Valley's own wreckage: original neon from restaurants that closed decades ago, the Palomino Club sign, yearbooks, menus, western clothing, vintage BMX bikes and a playable arcade. Tommy Gelinas started collecting in 2013 and moved into the hangars in November 2018. Weekends only, and admission is ten dollars.
Sat and Sun, 10am to 3pm. Closed Mon to Fri
What survives of Abbot Kinney's 1905 canal scheme, six blocks of water with footbridges and narrow walkways between back gardens. There is nothing to buy and no gate. Ducks, kayaks and people's vegetable beds are most of what you see.
Open at all hours. The walkways are unlit in places, so it is a daylight stop in practice
A beer bar on Verdugo Road with twenty-two taps, more than fifty bottles and a large back patio that takes most of the crowd. Open to 2am every night and from noon on weekends.
Mon to Fri 5pm to 2am. Sat and Sun noon to 2am. Happy hour weekdays 6pm to 8pm and weekends 3pm to 7pm
The oldest library building the Los Angeles Public Library owns, put up in 1913 with Carnegie money and still a working branch. It sits on the edge of a small park with a reading area under high windows and a local history shelf. Anyone can walk in, sit down and stay, which is worth knowing on a hot afternoon in this part of the city.
Mon and Wed, 10am to 8pm. Tue and Thu, noon to 8pm. Fri and Sat, 9:30am to 5:30pm. Closed Sun
Garlic chicken with black beans, rice and plantains, served fast in a dining area with the lights up. The garlic sauce is the reason people have been coming to this La Cienega address for decades and the plate still costs less than twenty dollars. Walk in, get seated, eat, leave.
Sun to Thu, 11am to 10pm. Fri and Sat, 11am to 11pm
An Italian restaurant that has been on this corner of Victory Boulevard since 1964, doing pizza, pasta and veal in a dining area with red sauce on the table and booths along the wall. It opens at 11:30am six days a week and runs to 10pm, later on Friday and Saturday. Sunday it does not open until 4pm. The place also does catering, which is how it has stayed alive.
Mon to Thu, 11:30am to 10pm. Fri and Sat, 11:30am to 11pm. Sun, 4pm to 10pm
Ten and a half acres on a hill above the Harbor Freeway, built on a former oil field and opened in 2008 as the first new park in this part of the city in a century. There are oak plantings and a stream running through a meadow, and the skyline view from the top is the clearest in downtown. A playground and a soccer field sit at the lower end.
Daily, sunrise to sunset. Listings vary between an 8pm close and dusk, so treat it as daylight only
A 1923 single-screen theater at the fork of Sunset and Hollywood, bought by Quentin Tarantino in 2021 and reopened in November 2023 after a restoration. It projects film only, 35mm and 70mm, with no digital. A twenty-seat second screen was added in 2024.
Daily, roughly 11am to 11pm depending on the day's program. Sunday runs 10am to midnight, Monday and Thursday close at 10pm
Charles Vitello opened this on Tujunga Avenue in 1964 selling sandwiches on bread he baked himself, and it grew into the Italian restaurant Studio City treats as its own. New owners took over in 2005 and added a cocktail lounge upstairs where jazz and cabaret acts play. Downstairs is still red sauce, veal and a waiter who has worked there a long time.
Mon to Wed, noon to 9pm. Thu to Sat, noon to 10pm. Sun, noon to 9pm
Adam Clark Vroman opened this in 1894 and it has been on Colorado Boulevard ever since, now across two floors with a newsstand, a stationery counter and a café upstairs. Author events run most weeks and they are free to walk into. It is five minutes from the Pasadena Playhouse stage door, which makes it the default place to kill forty minutes in the Playhouse District.
Mon to Sat, 10am to 9pm. Sun, 10am to 7pm
Brouwerij West shut its brewing operation and this opened in the same 26,000 square foot wartime warehouse on February 1, 2026, with the old staff and managers rehired. Picnic tables inside, a lawn outside, beer from Southern California breweries plus cider and kombucha for anyone not drinking. Bands play it, so check what is on before you count on quiet.
Closed Mon and Tue. Wed, 4pm to 10pm. Thu and Fri, 4pm to 11pm. Sat, noon to 11pm. Sun, noon to 10pm
Family-owned in Topanga village since 2000, small and hung with art. Sandwiches made to order, soups and quiche made in the building, bread delivered daily, meat without antibiotics and organic produce where they can get it. There are gluten-free options and a free lot.
Monday to Friday 7am to 3pm. Saturday and Sunday 8am to 3pm.
Seven acres of city park below the Hollywood Hills on the grounds of a 1907 estate, with a Japanese garden, a community garden and a trail that climbs into Runyon Canyon from the back. It is free and almost nobody is in it on a weekday.
Daily, 6:30am to 8pm. Free
Seventeen sculptures an Italian tile setter named Sabato Rodia built alone in his back yard on 107th Street between 1921 and 1954, out of steel rod, mortar, broken bottles and tile he picked up on the job. The tallest is nearly a hundred feet. The towers stand behind a fence you can see through from the sidewalk at any hour, and the arts center next door runs guided tours on a short weekly schedule. It is a State Historic Park and a National Historic Landmark.
Grounds and arts center, Wed to Sun. Guided tours Thu and Fri, 11am to 3pm, closed 12:30pm to 1:30pm, last tour at 3pm. Visible from 107th Street at any hour
A counter-and-booths diner that has been on Main Street long enough that the interior is the reason half the people are there. Eggs, hash browns, pancakes, patty melts, coffee that keeps coming. There is no website and no online ordering. It opens at 6am and it is done at 1:30pm, which makes it a breakfast and early lunch stop, and on a weekend morning there is a line on the sidewalk that moves.
Daily, 6am to 1:30pm
The hilltop ranch of William S. Hart, a stage actor who did not start making films until he was around fifty and then became one of the biggest Western stars of the silent era. He left the property to the public. The grounds are open all day and free, there is a barnyard with animals partway up, and his mansion at the top reopened to visitors in April 2026 after being shut. It is a real walk uphill and worth the time if you have an hour.
Park daily, 8am to 8pm. Barnyard Tue to Sun, 9am to 2pm. Museum Wed to Fri, noon to 3pm, and Sat and Sun, 11am to 4pm, guided tour only
A small bar on Second Street with the largest Japanese whisky selection in the city and a highball program to match. It is a neighborhood bar first, with regulars at the counter on a Tuesday. Open until 2am every night.
Mon to Thu 5pm to 2am. Fri 4pm to 2am. Sat and Sun 2pm to 2am
A barbecue counter on Slauson that has been smoking ribs and hot links for South Los Angeles since 1975, with sauce hot enough that the mild is a real choice. You order through a window into a small waiting area and most of the trade is takeout. The sandwiches are heavy and the rib tips come by the pound.
Mon to Thu and Sun, 11am to 9pm. Fri and Sat, 11am to 10pm
Opened on Third Street in 2008, in the years when the Arts District had almost nothing else. You order sausages at a counter at the front and carry the number to a long communal table in the back under exposed brick. The beer list runs to Belgian and German taps.
Sun to Thu 11:30am to midnight. Fri and Sat 11:30am to 1am
Two brothers from Oaxaca who cooked in Lebanese restaurants put both cuisines on one short menu, so a plate of hummus sits next to a tlayuda and the kebab comes wrapped in a handmade tortilla. It is a small storefront on Forest Avenue with a handful of tables and an order-at-the-counter setup. The name is Zapotec for thank you.
Tue to Sat, 11:30am to 7pm. Closed Sun and Mon
Opened on Broadway in 1977 under the old Bing Wong Hotel, in a space that had been a diner. The slippery shrimp is what everyone orders and the portions are built for sharing. It is a two-part dining space with paper menus and fast service.
Sun to Thu 11:30am to 8:30pm. Fri and Sat 11:30am to 9:30pm
Socorro Herrera and her husband Jaime turned an eight-by-ten-foot shoeshine stand into this on April 1, 1976, cooking the Merida recipes she grew up with. It won a James Beard America's Classics award in 2005. Cochinita pibil is the order; there are also vaporcitos and Yucatan tamales. Socorro died in December 2024 and her daughters Dora and Margie run it now.
Monday to Saturday 11am to 5:30pm. Closed Sunday. The Pasadena location on South Fair Oaks runs to 6:30pm and is about five times the size.
A sushi bar on the Old Town strip with a long sake list and kushiyaki off the grill as well as the usual rolls and sashimi. It splits the day, noon to 2:30pm and then from 5pm, running to 10:30pm on weeknights and 11pm on Friday and Saturday. You can sit at the bar without booking. Valet and street parking.
Mon to Thu, noon to 2:30pm and 5pm to 10:30pm. Fri and Sat, noon to 2:30pm and 5pm to 11pm. Sun, noon to 2:30pm and 4:30pm to 10pm
The Iskenderian family opened their first Los Angeles branch here at Sunset and Normandie in 1984, twenty-two years after the original in Beirut. Rotisserie chicken, shawarma and the garlic sauce the place is known for, ordered at a counter in a mini-mall. It runs to midnight every night.
Daily, 10am to midnight