Real Best L.A.
Miracle Mile
Black Dog Coffee
While I will drink corporate coffee if I’m jonesing seriously, it blows on principle. I am a supporter of independent Joe. The best non-corporate caffeine (non-foo-foo division) I know of is dispensed at Bob’s Doughnuts in Farmers Market, but I can’t walk there, and I will murder someone if I can’t get some decent coffee within an hour of waking up. So in my ’hood, the Miracle Mile, Black Dog Coffee is where it’s at. They know me there, and they start putting together a grande cafe mocha with whipped cream as soon as I hit the door. Mmmm. And they help me wake up or sober up the guests on my radio show on Sunday mornings. (The station’s a block away.) I hear the food’s great there, too, but I don’t care. Give me a banana, the Times, and Black Dog Coffee coffee. Now, dammit. Or I will kill you. 5657 Wilshire Blvd., Miracle Mile, (323) 933-1976. blackdogcoffee.com. (Chris Morris)
North Hollywood
Indie Coffee
The Magnolia and Lankershim intersection – NoHo’s unofficial heart – offers a graphic confrontation between hipster coffee and corporate coffee. On the northwestern corner is Jose Alcedo’s Indie Coffee, housed in an open-air tent, sharing a pleasant terrace and pocket park with Pitfire Pizza. At Indie, a 12-ounce cuppa java costs one measly buck. On the southeastern corner of the intersection is yet another Starbucks, where the outdoor tables are a few feet from the traffic. At Starbucks, the 12-ounce “tall” costs the chain’s usual $1.60 – yet that price was missing from the posted menu during a recent visit, so I had to ask. The hands-down winner: Indie Coffee (tea, too). 5211 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, (818) 421-0886. myspace.com/indiecoffee. (DS)
Pico Union
Papa Christos
Greek food in Los Angeles is usually at one end of the spectrum or the other – inauthentic fast food or pretentious and pricey. Papa Christos is one of the rare exceptions, a bustling and cheerful eatery just around the corner from St. Sophia’s Greek Orthodox church. After services, the place is crowded with more Greeks than you knew lived in L.A. – if you want the sights, sounds, and tastes of a real taverna, there’s no better time to go, though you might wait a few minutes for a table. It’s casual and inexpensive but absolutely authentic – in case the crowd of Greek speakers didn’t clue you in, the vast array of imported Hellenic products in the deli section tells you that they go out of their way to get the real thing. Impressively mustachioed owner Chrys Chrys is a constant presence, occasionally offering tastes of olive oil in between greeting longtime customers. Want to try a spread of items? Visit on Thursday night when they offer “My Big Fat Greek Family Style Dinner” – a full meal with wine tasting for $18.95 a person. Prepare to dine early, though – they close at 8 p.m. most evenings. Don’t actually break any plates to compliment the bouzouki player – a tip in his basket works much better and will raise a smile. 2771 W. Pico Blvd., L.A., (323) 737-2970. (RF)
Rancho Park
Laser Blazer
Once upon a time – roughly 1985 to 1996 – laserdisc (LD) was the videophile format of choice – a format that never really gained enough popularity to escape boutique status. Back then, the leading such boutique in Los Angeles was Laser Blazer. Then the DVD came along and essentially blew away both LD and (more slowly) VHS. (Don’t even ask me about Beta.) Laser Blazer finessed the transition perfectly. They still have a good selection – a great selection, compared to any other brick and mortar store I’m aware of – of LDs, even new, factory sealed LDs. But most of the stock is, natch, DVDs (with a pretty substantial Blu-ray section still gaining steam). Laser Blazer seems to get nearly every new title released in the U.S. The new discs – both sale and rental sections – take up most of the space. They also have a discrete side room for used stuff (so-so), and a discrete, discreet side room for those discs that you don’t want to rent if you’re ever likely to be nominated for a Supreme Court post. Or so I’m told: Why would I possibly know anything about that kind of entertainment? 10587 W. Pico Boulevard, West L.A., (310) 475-4788. (AK)
Santa Monica
Twilight Dance Series
Best date EVER: summer nights on the pier, dancing outside at free concerts by Toots & the Maytals or Michelle Shocked or Gerry & the Pacemakers or whomever Amoeba (who organized the Thursday night series this summer) picks. Hold hands, drink beer, go on the carousel. It’s all wholesome and shit. Santa Monica Pier. twilightdance.org. (RS)
Sherman Oaks
Casa Vega
A family-owned bar-restaurant open since 1958, this lively local hangout has three things going for it: 1) cheap (if watery) margaritas, 2) a cool, inviting interior with agreeable ladies usually present, and 3) next-door proximity to the infamous AA meeting at Radford Hall. I got sober at good ole Rad, as did many another eminent L.A. drunkard, and all of us had “If you don’t like it here, they’re still serving over at Casa Vega,” dinned into our ears by the gnarled-yet-sympathetic hardcases resident there. CV is a fun place, scene of pleasant associations I can only barely remember through the fog of booze. I seem to have sensually vivid yet materially vague recollections dating from this period involving a Ventura Boulevard pub crawl, a woman’s soft inner thigh, and legging it down Laurel Canyon ahead of a clueless husband. Casa Vega figures into this, but I can’t think how and the memory wasn’t pleasant enough for me to take up drinking again. 13301 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, (818) 788-4868. casavega.com. (RG)
Silver Lake
Intelligentsia Coffee and Tea
Intelligentsia’s first California location presents the coffeehouse experience at its most genteel: by-the-cup brewing for freshness that challenges the limits of human experience, a custom-built espresso machine, and a heroic import agreement with Delilah’s and Bread Bar to make sure the sweets on sale are supporting other local businesses. The patio is a sanctuary that gracefully smooths away the heat and the honking on Sunset, and the continental-zen interior could capture a customer forever if fresh copies of the Financial Times were delivered daily. 3922 W. Sunset Blvd., L.A., (323) 663-6173. intelligentsiacoffee.com. (CZ)
Skid Row
Drifter’s Meeting
As this campaign season demonstrates, there’s never any shortage of Americans willing to lecture the less well-heeled on the character flaws that made them so. Thankfully, most of the evangel that government and society owe nothing to their human components gets preached on cable news, thus making it easier to ignore than ever. In 2006, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found there were too few beds for the area’s homeless population, so, in a Solomonically boneheaded decision, repealed the city ordinance against camping in the street in the neighborhood after dark, encouraging nightmarish squalor and crime to flourish as a barely perceptible alternative to doing nothing. Actual proximity to the actually destitute is left to the police, pinched-nose charity, the occasional caterwauling Christian, desperate idiots trying to score crack after 2 a.m., and Alcoholics Anonymous. Apart from the mad, the sick, the castoff and the luckless, a giant chunk of the estimated 80,000+ homeless people crowded into a few verminous blocks of Central City East abutting the Artist District are addicts of one kind or other. I’m one such – a longterm drunkard who, by late 2002, was gobbling prescription meds like Darvocet and Xanax to counteract shakes brought on by a decade of heroic boozing. This particular brand of misery is burned onto many of the faces I see slung curbside along the Nickel: the knowledge that medication fails to dull awareness. It’s already after dark as I cut down Gladys Avenue to the grubby basketball court at Sixth where the Drifter’s Meeting is held every evening at 7:30. Rows of folding chairs are laid out and a stout prosperous-looking fellow is at the podium, telling of his woes. Booze and cocaine laid him low, he says, leaving him $600,000 in debt. Mention of this outlandish sum causes barely a ripple among the seared and hopeless men scattered around me, but nothing else even comes close to denting their self-absorption. We sit together, as the meeting drags on and more repentant bourgie fuckups come before the mic for their ritual expatiation, as the very poor perform their ritual office of making the better-off feel better about themselves. A thin flicker of empathy kindles and we huddle around it to stay warm. (Ron Garmon)
Published: 09/24/2008
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