Los Angeles, CA, USA
Los Angeles tends to get mixed reviews. People say it’s shallow. The traffic is terrible, and don’t even try to walk anywhere. It’s everything that’s wrong with the US, with billionaires living in the hills and homeless people living in tents. It’s a crime-ridden, sprawling, frivolous, ugly city.
But people also say it’s also a beautiful setting for a city, with pristine beaches for swimming and surfing, and mountains for hiking. It’s a laid-back, diverse, multicultural and liberal part of California with great culture, art and food. So we decided to see which side of the fence we’d come down on. And, major spoiler alert: we loved it.
We arrived in LA at the end of our Pacific Coast Highway road trip and decided to throw ourselves in at the deep end by staying at the Hollywood Roosevelt, smack bang in the middle of Hollywood. The hotel was excellent. A pool hand-painted by David Hockney, poolside cabanas where Marilyn Monroe spent her days, and the ballroom where the first Oscars were held. It felt like proper immersion into Hollywood.
Driving through the Hollywood Hills was one of the best things I’ve ever done. With no real destination we put the roof down and drove the winding streets, exploring side roads with the most glamourous names. Palm Canyon Drive, Loma Vista Drive, Lookout Mountain Avenue. Often literal, always cool. We wound around Mulholland Drive in our Camaro, pulling in at each outlook to gaze over downtown LA in one direction and Studio City in the other. At one point we ended up at the Griffith Observatory, parked up and looked out at the Hollywood Sign feeling very much like we were part of a promotional film.
It must be almost impossible to visit LA without becoming slowly fascinated by the film industry. In cafes you genuinely overhear people talking about their screenplay, or what shoot they’ve just been working on. So many have moved to LA to try and ‘make it’, and there’s such a sense of ambition and enthusiasm in the air.
Nicola has always been a fan of the TV show Gilmore Girls, and was keen to visit the Warner Bros Studios where it’s all filmed. We tried to go in the wrong entrance a few times before finding the right bit and climbing aboard a little gold WB-branded buggy for the studio tour. An extraordinary amount of stuff has been filmed at the studios, from Friends to My Fair Lady, to Batman, Ghostbusters and Jurassic Park. The tour was absolutely brilliant, and from the buggy you see so many people running around with clipboards, zipping about in golf buggies, unloading trucks and moving sets about. It makes you realise just how much of an industry it really is.
Speaking of the film industry, Musso and Frank Grill is a Hollywood institution, and has appeared in countless films over the years. We’d booked a table in advance, and dressed in our finest, walked the then minutes from our hotel along Hollywood Boulevard to the restaurant, stopping along the Walk of Fame to point out notable stars.
At Musso and Frank Grill, a low-key recessed entrance opens into a wood panelled room adorned with stained glass lamps, little green leather booths and waiting staff in pressed red jackets. It’s proper old school glamour. As we sat down at the bar, the barman greeted us with “I see you’re sitting in Mick Jagger’s usual seat”. It turns out “the cubby over there was Frank Sinatra’s favourite table”, while “Marilyn Monroe often used that phone booth”. The place is an absolute who’s-who of Hollywood, and I loved it.
We ordered a couple of dry martinis, condensation beading on the glass, accompanied by a little metal shaker with surplus martini that wouldn’t fit. It was so unbelievably good. We ordered some old school food: celery sticks; breaded chicken; crispy fries. The food was great, but the thing that sticks in my mind is the feeling of sipping on a martini on a balmy evening in 1960s Hollywood.
A weird thing happened in Venice. It was a warm day and we were wandering through the canals and had stopped to admire some little wooden houses, when a woman’s voice called from just behind a hedge, asking if we wanted a cool drink. We looked into the garden and there was a woman sitting on the terrace drinking a glass of wine who had overheard us talking about her house. She looked harmless enough so we joined her and her husband for a glass of wine.
We were chatting about LA and Venice and they told us that they were staying in this little Airbnb while visiting a car they had recently purchased. Which sounded unusual. We dug a little, and eventually discovered that they were visiting California from Australia to check in on progress on a £1m+ Porsche that the guy had commissioned from Singer Cars. And, to top it all off, when they visited the factory earlier that day, she had ‘fallen in love’ with the cars, so had just put down a deposit for her own one. It’s a different level of money.
After saying our goodbyes and wishing them luck with their cars, we wandered along Venice Boardwalk, ending up at Santa Monica beach for sunset. And what a sunset it was, dipping into the sea just behind Santa Monica pier, casting long shadows of the lifeguard huts over the golden sand.
The food in LA, if you pick carefully, is among the best I’ve had in the whole world. And a little Taiwanese restaurant in Silver Lake has fast become my favourite. Pine and Crane serves up the best noodles I’ve ever had in my life. They’re soft but with a nice little bite, peanutty and slightly spicy, and have a little acidic tang to them. Since returning to the UK, we’ve tried to recreate these noodles, but fairly unsuccessfully – no idea how they’re making something so delicious out of something so simple.
We’d caught an Uber out to Pine and Crane from our hotel, and needed to find some wifi to book one home. We popped into a nearby bar, Bacari, for ‘one’ drink and to connect to their internet. We sat at the bar and were chatting with the friendly barman who was either new or incompetent. Or both. He kept getting people’s drinks wrong, and because we were chatting he kept passing the faulty drinks to us for free. Long story short, we had far too much to drink, eventually stumbled into an Uber back to our hotel and then decided to have some more drinks in a bowling alley which for some reason was in our hotel.
I think it’s fair to say that, as tourist destinations, Los Angeles has it all. World-class sights, world-class food, beautiful long sandy beaches, and great weather. And it could be complete nonsense, but there’s a palpable sense of something in the air – everyone’s striving for something. Whether it’s fame and fortune, a ridiculous Porsche, film stardom, or even just the best noodles they can possibly cook. I think it makes for a very good city indeed.
