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.

2:00 PM · Kaiju

After

Idle Hour

Long walk · 0.7 mi · 15 min walk; 2 min ride - North Hollywood

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.