Wine bar food, the official Italian meat of 2024, and…brunch?

When you tilt America on its side, everything rolls down to Los Angeles. LA is where worldwide food trends are birthed (poke bowls, Pinkberry) but also where they go to die—sent down the RVR to their burial at sea, from Vuori-clad supermoms queueing 45 minutes for $30 smoothies to the omnipresent hamachi crudos, mortadella “sandos,” and even (checks notes) a bagel with tomato on top. This is all to say that LA is a town of great inspiration but also one that doesn’t quite know when to stage its own intervention. Below are my thoughts, in no particular order, about how Los Angeles ate in 2024 and what’s to come in the new year—which is where I will begin.

We needn’t discuss the Erewhon smoothie anymore, nor how some of the store’s bottles of water cost as much as a bottle of Veuve. I hope 2025 ushers in a new form of content creation that doesn’t involve pointing at a supermarket SKU, mouth agape, for the thumbnail pic. I predict we’ll move away from jammy, sunny-side-up, less-than-viscous egg eating. In 2025, the pendulum swings back toward eggs over medium, fried hard in oil (hopefully not algae), with a still-oozing yolk that doesn’t run down your sleeve but also a crisp, golden-brown eggy lace in the style of a smashed patty.

And speaking of smash burgers, they were this year’s (and the last four years’) culinary Beanie Babies. Entrepreneurs still look to the humble cheeseburger as a path to financial freedom, but LA eats burgers twice a month, not every day, as we do with our hunks of Bub & Grandma’s bread or endive Caesars. LA’s up-and-coming burger smashers will continue to serve their version of “McDonald’s but, like, better and stuff.” They’ll forever be chasing In-N-Out and the unfortunately branded Burgers Never Say Die as the benchmark for satiation now that my favorite LA burger is no more, with the unfortunate passing of Standing’s Butchery’s own Jered Standing earlier this year. (May he rest in peace.)

Back to hamachi crudo. Every two-bit third space in town needed to throw it on their menu for $27. Almost all of them sliced up fish that could be anything, and that was usually a little too cold on a plate, where Instagrammability trumped flavor, save for a few spots. I’ve found Ètra’s rotating crudos to be thoughtful, unique, correctly seasoned and spiced, and, most importantly, looking like a snack. I mean that in the literal sense—food that looks so good you might actually want to eat it, an attribute some Culver City megalopolises have chosen not to consider. One that comes to mind is their sliced yellowtail in a savory almond milk broken with chive oil, pickled ramps, and red fresno chiles.

Another spot that’s crudo-ing correctly is Stir Crazy, which had a great year, ushering in the rise of tastefully curated wine bars meant to smoke cigarettes outside, queen out inside, and do anything but order and eat an entrée in the presence of hotties. It’s always best to eat eat in the privacy of your own home, I say. That said, their simple fruit-based desserts and plates of random pieces of cheese with whatever wine they feel like pouring were must-orders for me.

Frustration arose when our city’s worst gastronomers failed to understand the point of a wine bar that served some food, just not much of it. But that didn’t stop the bridge-and-tunnelers from making their way down to Melrose for a forkful of celery salad with walnut, goat cheese, and golden raisin, hopefully never to return. Don’t be long if you don’t belong, as they say.

LA is where worldwide food trends are birthed (poke bowls, Pinkberry) but also where they go to die—sent down the RVR to their burial at sea.

These frustrated eaters with slightly smoother food brains rejected LA’s quirked-up esoteric menus to find solace in dining (like it’s your aunt’s birthday) at Houston’s. Modern attitudes toward service, gratuity, and ambience have diners yearning for a simpler time, when one would sit on a chair, or even in a booth, to eat one’s meal, not squat on a plastic stool in a parking lot to eat grilled cabbage for $25. Dining out is expensive, and it’s rarely a sure bet. I love about 30% of the restaurants I try for the first time, so choosing a spinach artichoke dip for dinner is forgivable when you can’t take another iffy bowl of anchovies. Still, I wouldn’t say I like Houston’s more or less than the Cheesecake Factory. Dining at either place is fine with me; I’ve done it, but don’t talk to me like it’s little more than an Islands at the mall that happens to be run with the precision of an F1 pit crew. Eating at Houston’s will never be a loss, but that doesn’t mean it’s a win either.

The simple alchemy of Italian cooking flourished in 2024, both on the higher end, thanks to the city’s Funkes and Stellas (Stella West Hollywood, not Silverlake’s Cafe Stella, which used to be an excellent place to do a little line and eat a little arugula, until its operator recently peppered the building with bullets in the haze of a drunken hour), as well as the lower. Italian cooking also thrived in simple sandwiches, often filled with mortadella, the official sliced meat of 2024. Many sandwich sellers learned to tread a novel path to success: procure the best ingredients, arrange them carefully but casually on some good bread, and—most important—resist the urge to “make it your own” by ruining it with some house-fermented Calabrian “garleek” jam or something.

Speaking of high-end Italian, I finally dined at New York’s Torrisi in late November and was pleasantly humbled by how much I liked the food. I’d recommend sitting at the bar for lunch to reduce the chance of a server rapping the menu to you, which could likely ruin one’s appetite. The cooking and decor landed somewhere at the intersection of Noma and Olive Garden.

Fish fillet sandwiches popped off in Echo Park, but I still can’t get myself to spend $17 on one. I’m sure they’re excellent, but for my money, I’ll get some crunchy fried fish and tartar sauce from Fish King in Glendale for five bucks, pop it into a Martin’s Potato Roll that’s been hiding somewhere in my freezer, and throw on a Kraft Singles. Hey, maybe I’ll have three. And speaking of unnecessary things, I’m bearish on Kewpie mayonnaise, which is often too powerful of a brush to paint with.

I’m bullish on pancakes, though. It’s a food I rarely reach for, but I found myself returning to Yang’s Kitchen in Alhambra for its gluten-free mochi pancake many times this year. On a recent trip to upstate New York’s Cafe Mutton, I found a perfect plate of thick crepes with simple maple syrup—no need for gooseberry preserves or whatever. Lastly, a trip to Horses for its newly launched brunch menu found me with a perfect plate of Dutch-leaning pancakes, served, again, with butter and syrup, as the gods intended. If that sounds a bit simple, order a side of caviar to plop up on your forkful, and let’s all bury the “caviar bump” in 2024. (Sorry to the guy with a caviar spoon tattooed on his hand. I hope you do well in your imminent appearance on Guy’s Grocery Games.)

Restaurants adding brunch to their service is often a death knell. But the humming Horses dining room comes alive with bright primary colors in the daylight, giving me hope for the return of a fun place to brunch that isn’t full of hungover goons in PJ pants and the wrong New Balances.

The year 2024, like every year before it, had a bunch of restaurants close and open, the circle of life. Some deserved it, and some got a raw deal, but there’s a sucker born every day with an awful idea, a TikTok account, and a couple hundred thou from their dad. We continue to mourn the loss of these less-than-thought-out restaurant concepts, but only once they’ve posted their Instagram obituary is it time to virtue signal virtually. We’ve only grown worse at welcoming new spots with compassion, and it’s hard not to. We’re all critics; we eat food and have phones. I hope 2025 brings more shame to those who speak objectively about food and restaurants that their brains cannot understand or appreciate. Good help is also growing harder to find, and not just in Los Angeles.

I’m bullish on pancakes.

I’ve tangled with servers from Bangor to Burbank, and many of them speak and operate as if it’s not only their first day on the job but perhaps their first day at any job. As our kitchen’s middle class continues to crumble, the many paths to success in the industry erode to a fork in the road: a TikTok chef patting themself on the back for spinning an onion on a cutting board before slicing it like a boss, or a sous chef at a 500-seater in Vegas that mainly serves proteins covered in gold leaf. It’s enough to make you miss Salt Bae.

I look at Langer’s Deli, an LA staple since 1947, oozing charm and history, often regarded as the greatest pastrami sandwich on earth, threatening to close its doors, pleading with city officials as its neighborhood teeters on the brink of martial law. Wholesale profit margins dilate as nightclub groups snatch up real estate and expand every coastal concept from Dallas to DC—the little guy dies because he’s not buying tuna by the ton.

Restaurant concepts become disposable by design once mega food groups snatch them up. These conglomerates don’t consider a closure a failure but simply an opportunity to shutter for a year, reupholster the banquettes, change the name from one Italian grandma’s to another, and see how bad they can fuck up an octopus dish until its inevitable shuttering next year. So what should you, a food lover, do in 2025? To adapt a line from the song “Ænema” by Tool, which takes its theme from comedian Bill Hicks’s album Arizona Bay, fantasizing about the state of California physically breaking off into the ocean and taking Los Angeles with it: Learn to cook.