Can '20th century restaurants' last in a 21st century world?

Nickel Diner owners Monica May and Kristen Trattner stand in front of original 1940s signage painted on the restaurant's wall

May 27, 2023 7 AM PT

Ed Ruscha marmalade, rooftop dining, a Persian food crawl, weird and wonderful Bar Chelou, a new burger obsession, a “Mexitalian” connection, plus “L.A. mom-friendly soft serve.” I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes.

‘Everything changes’

Two women stand before a wall filled with vintage food advertisements

What do you order for what will likely be your last breakfast at the Nickel Diner, Monica May and Kristen Trattner‘s much-loved downtown restaurant, which will serve its last maple bacon doughnut once the doors are shuttered for good on Sunday? For sure, the maple bacon doughnut. And, as food reporter Stephanie Breijo and deputy food editor Betty Hallock agree after the three of us settle into a corner booth Friday morning inside the dining room full of regulars wanting to say goodbye to one of their favorite L.A. places, we have to get a Nickel Diner pop tart. But strawberry or blueberry lemon? Well, it is our last time, so maybe both.

Betty orders the huevos rancheros after hearing how good the beans are; Stephanie gets chilaquiles, which come dotted with tiny curls of crisp chicharrones; and I ask for the scramble No. 1 — ham, leeks and fontina cheese — which I get with polenta instead of potatoes. Then Stephanie starts talking about how good Nickel Diner’s patty melt is and how much she’s going to miss it. We decide we need to get one for the table too.

We happily start to dig into our breakfast when Trattner looks at our plates of food and says indignantly, “How many times do I have to tell you? You have to get the biscuit!” Soon one of the diner’s multilayered biscuits arrives with a side of strawberry jam. And then, to show how much May and Trattner are on the same wavelength, May also arrives with a biscuit — this time with marmalade that she insists we need to try, in part because it’s delicious but also because it comes from blood oranges that the artist Ed Ruscha grows. When she sees that we already have a biscuit, she shrugs and leaves the second biscuit on the table along with the Ed Ruscha marmalade.

All around us customers are giving hugs to May and Trattner and Nickel Diner’s servers, many of whom have worked at the Main Street spot for years and have become familiar faces. The customers also hug each other because it’s a kind of reunion for many who are part of the L.A. tribe in love with the diner and the tattooed punk-rock aesthetic that came with the place.

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“We’re a 20th century restaurant,” May tells us by way of explanation of why she and Trattner think it’s the right time to close. Would they have stayed open if they had gotten one of their grants renewed to feed their neighbors living in the surrounding SROs or if inflation hadn’t raised their operating costs or if the pandemic hadn’t happened? Maybe.

But they also feel a change in the city. A few blocks away Suehiro Cafe, another 20th century restaurant that has been on Little Tokyo’s 1st Street for decades and may be the closest thing we have to a “Midnight Diner,” is being forced to move to a new location on Main Street, not far from the Nickel Diner. What difference will a move make? When I walked by the space Suehiro will inhabit later this summer I saw a now-hiring sign and noticed that one of the new jobs listed is “barista.”

Old-school Suehiro doesn’t have a barista. Apparently, 21st century Suehiro will have barista-made drinks. If it helps the place stick around for a few more decades, I won’t mind, as long as they still serve the okonomi plate with broiled mackerel and cold tofu. Because as Zen monk and teacher Shunryu Suzuki once told writer David Chadwick after he asked the master to summarize Buddhism “in a nutshell,” the answer came down to two words: “Everything changes.”

That doesn’t mean we have to like the change, but we may have to accept it.

“It’s like a song that’s ending,” Trattner told Breijo for her story on the closing.

Outside the diner, as we say goodbye to May and Trattner, May tries to reassure us as we hold onto our to-go bags filled with leftovers from our morning feast. If the stars align, Nickel Diner will have a new life as a resource for the neighborhood — for now, they’re keeping the space and hope to provide meals for SRO residents and the unhoused ... meals that men and women won’t have to stand in soup kitchen lines to receive. But first, after Sunday, they’re going to take a big rest. And May, at least, has plans to do something she’s been meaning to get to for a long time.

“I’m going to organize my sock drawer.”

A sign that says “This is the place, there is no place / quite like this place anywhere near this place" above a door

Way up in the sky

Seventy-three floors up in the rooftop lounge of the tallest building west of the Mississippi, a fishbowl effect sets in when you glance up and spot the bellies of jumbo jets making their way to and from LAX, floating above you like sharks skimming the sea for prey. That was my view at the InterContinental Hotel’s Spire 73 inside the 1,100-foot (counting the spire) Wilshire Grand Center. It’s just one of 49 places the food team — led by assistant food editor Danielle Dorsey — examined for our report on the restaurants and bars with the best city views, ranked by height.

Fantastically weird

Four people wearing aprons stand behind a counter in a restaurant kitchen.

What often happens at restaurants next to theaters or performing arts spaces is an emptying out once curtain time comes. But the other night when I was at Bar Chelou, in the same Spanish Colonial Revival complex as the Pasadena Playhouse, the dining room filled up quickly after the crush of theatergoers took their seats for the new staging of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler‘s “A Little Night Music” — “a musical theater dream come true,” Times theater critic Charles McNulty says of the production. But word has gotten out that there’s more going on at the Playhouse than great theater. In his rave review, Times restaurant critic Bill Addison says Bar Chelou “brings a welcome jolt of eccentricity to local — and really, regional — dining.” Chef Douglas Rankin, who most recently was at Silver Lake’s Bar Restaurant and worked with Ludo Lefebvre at Trois Mec and Petit Trois, brought his Bar Restaurant pastry chef Raymond Morales to Pasadena. “Plenty of us engaged diners still yearn for some individualism, some surprise,” Addison writes. He says Bar Chelou delivers.

Yes, wine goes with haw mok fish curry

Three people seated at a restaurant table, tasting wine

The first time I ate at Anajak Thai after Justin Pichetrungsi started his Thai Taco Tuesday dinners and weekend omakase meals at his family’s Thai restaurant in Sherman Oaks, I noticed the wine bottles ... a lot of wine bottles. As Jordan Michelman writes in his story this week about Anajak Thai’s wine program, you see “bottles stacked on bottles, crowding every spare surface space, taking every inch of unclaimed countertop, packed like sardines between the tables, layered like a phalanx three soldiers deep atop the bar ... a none-too-subtle vinous call to arms.” That’s because in addition to introducing Southern Californians to a new way of thinking about Thai food, Pichetrungsi — with the help of sommelier and “driving force” John Cerasulo and newly appointed wine director Ian Krupp — has made Anajak “one of the premier destinations for drinking wine in Southern California.” The evolution, Michelman writes, happened “the same way people fall in love: first in drips and drabs, and then all at once.”

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Also ...

— Jenn Harris takes us on a Persian food crawl with Shohreh Aghdashloo, the first Iranian actress to earn an Academy Award nomination (for 2003’s “House of Sand and Fog”). She’s currently starring as “a mob boss who isn’t afraid to flirt with Dracula, in the new film ‘Renfield,’ and she’s shooting ‘The Penguin’ alongside Colin Farrell,” Harris writes. And the food? “Have you ever tried ghormeh sabzi?” asks Aghdashloo at Westwood’s Toranj Restaurant. “Let’s get two. With tahdig, of course. Tahdig here, tahdig there, tahdig everywhere.”

— Harris also writes about her newest burger obsession — on an English muffin — inspired by TV’s Alton Brown and courtesy of Food Network viewer-chef Peter Lemos, who just opened Lingua Franca along the L.A. River bike path in Elysian Valley. Plus a great veggie burger at Cassell’s.

— In her weekly report on what’s opening in Los Angeles, Stephanie Breijo talks with Alessandro Zecca and Danielle Duran Zecca, the husband-and-wife team behind the “Mexitalian” Amiga Amore. “I saw just how much was similar — like ricotta and requesón are literally the same things, and how well used the tomato is in both cultures,” chef Duran Zecca told Breijo. “When we went to Rome to visit his uncle, he had the spiciest little green chiles and he’s cutting it with scissors on his pizza, and I was like, ‘Oh, I like that, tío! Let me try!’” Plus, details on the modern Indian restaurant Baar Baar with Bollywood-inspired cocktails, the first L.A. location of “fast-expanding, plant-based restaurant chain” Planta Cocina, chef Steve Benjamin‘s new Espelette in the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, Broad Street Oyster Co.’s new Huntington Beach Pier location, the transformation of Silver Lake’s De Buena Planta into De Buena Planta Garden Club + Mezcaleria, and CVT Soft Serve‘s expansion to grocery stores for home consumption of Joe Nicchi’s ice cream — in a formulation designed to be “L.A.-mom friendly.”

Can ‘20th century restaurants’ survive in a 21st century world?