What to Do in LA if You’re Here for Business (2025)
The very name Los Angeles—the “City of Angels”—is plural for a reason. This place contains multitudes; it is not any one thing or singular set of shared realities, but rather a series of overlapping metaphysical geographies, vast and intimidating and yet surprisingly human, intimate and personal. There’s nowhere else quite like it.
I’ve been traveling to Los Angeles several times a year for the past decade for myriad reasons: to experience the city’s coffee scene as a cofounder at the international coffee publication Sprudge, to report on the city’s food and bar scene as a contributor to LA Times Food, and as an enthusiastic consumer of LA’s uniquely unrivaled cultural smorgasbord. I go there to work and play, alone and with friends and family, for short trips and extended stays. Along the way, there are parts of the city that have begun to feel familiar and comfortable and others that remain baffling and hard to pin down. All of it remains distinctly compelling. Call me Randy Newman if you’d like: I love LA.
In no way does any of this mark me as an expert; Angelenos are rightly wary of outsiders beaming in to make claims on their city. Nothing I can write about LA could ever be definitive, and I apologize in advance for so much of what I’m leaving out, but over the years I’ve learned about places and experiences that help you make the most of your time in the city, however long or short that might be. Below you’ll find a collection of places to stay, play, work, and lose yourself in the bottomless Olympic-size deep-end pool of LA culture.
Los Angeles is more beautiful than you’re prepared for. There’s urban grit here, of course, and freeways and off-ramps and parking lots, but also perfumed hillsides alive with birdsong and flowering citrus trees, hundreds of miles of hiking trails, gorgeous mountains framing the city to the east, flowers everywhere, and the world-famous beaches. Griffith Park offers a glimpse of this beauty, and so do hikes around Moon Canyon in the hills of Mount Washington. But one of my favorite things to do is pull off the main thoroughfares and explore the hills, particularly in the area around the famed Laurel Canyon and Mulholland Drive. Every single visit to Los Angeles involves being staggered by the city’s beauty in some way. Even in downtown, where the streets might not sparkle, you need only look up a story or two to take in the stunning art deco facades of the city’s early 20th-century building boom.
The first rule of where to stay in LA is to ask, “Where am I going to need to be on this trip?” Remember—we want to cut down on car time and cross-city travel so you can enjoy more stuff. Here’s a handful of hotels, each in very different sections of the city, that would make fine base camps for further exploration, plus one hotel so famous and classic I would be remiss not to include its glories on this list.
4141 Santa Monica Blvd., Silver Lake, (323) 486-7225
Located just off Silver Lake junction—where Sunset Boulevard meets Santa Monica Boulevard—this hotel is ideally located if you’ve got stuff happening in Silver Lake, Echo Park, Los Feliz, or East Hollywood. Koreatown and Hollywood proper aren’t far, either, and it’s a short hop across the river for hangs in Highland Park, Atwater Village, and Mount Washington.
Silver Lake Pool & Inn oozes LA to me. A former motor inn turned into a don’t-call-it-hipster, “upwardly mobile young urban adult with expendable income” playhouse, the hotel’s epic second-floor pool, courtyard restaurant, and comfortable desert-motif rooms tick a lot of boxes. You could work by the pool; you could walk to the spiffy new Erewhon location next door for a $20 celebrity smoothie (they are unfortunately very good); you could walk another block up to the original LA location of Intelligentsia Coffee, the first really important modern coffee bar to open in the city. For the truly bold and cheap among us with a particularly high risk tolerance for such things (it me), there’s even street parking to be sussed out in the neighborhood directly above the hotel, which allows you to skip the valet fee. I’ve stayed here several times and will do so again.
1110 S. Broadway, (213) 806-1010
Downtown LA is its own center of orbit, and if you’ve got work events—say, at the LA Convention Center or in the area around LA Live and the Staples Center—it is eminently worth your while to stay close to the area.
This is also advisable because DTLA kind of rules; you will find recommendations for bars and restaurants there a bit later in this guide. The hotel scene here is plentiful, but I really enjoyed a recent stay at the Proper Hotel. The hotel’s interiors were designed by Kelly Wearstler, an A-list designer and best-selling author whose work personifies SoCal in the early 21st century, drawing on the city’s art deco tradition with influences from Morocco, Spain, Mexico, and Portugal. The lobby also features a truly cool ceramic mural from beloved LA local ceramicist Ben Medansky. There’s a rooftop bar and a lovely contemporary restaurant on the main floor, and the guest rooms are plushly appointed, with over-the-top suites if it’s in your budget. The Proper’s location on Broadway is a short walk to the epic DTLA Apple Store, the basketball arena, the convention center, and anything else you’ve got on your neighborhood list.
1044 Tiverton Ave., (310) 340-1234
The Westside is its own cultural epicenter, and I’ve found myself spending more and more time here over the past few years. If you’ve got work needs happening around UCLA, Sawtelle, Beverly Hills, or out toward the beach, staying in this part of town makes sense.
Westwood is sort of a college town within a city, home to UCLA and its many offshoots. This hotel is part of the wider Palisociety group, which is based in California and now has hotels around the country (I recommended their Pike Place Market location in WIRED’s recent Seattle guide). Located inside a historic hotel building from 1939, this Palihotel location is comfortable and stylish, with free Wi-Fi throughout and a soft, inviting design. Approachable, affordable, bathed in West LA light and sunshine, I love this place as a base camp for assorted Westside adventures.
4222 Vineland Ave., North Hollywood, (818) 980-8000
“The Valley” isn’t just one place, either—a collection of unique cities and subcultures that occupy the environs north of LA proper, this is the land of Paul Thomas Anderson films, immortalized in the music of Tom Petty and Frank Zappa. If you’re in the Southlands for events in and around the television and film industry, or to check out the Universal Studios theme park complex, you’ll save time and money by staying close.
The Garland is your Valley adventure home port. This place manages the neat trick of being both hip and eminently utilitarian: You could come here to lounge by the pool, take in the gardens, and hang out at the busy bars and restaurants, or you could use this place as a spot to drop your bags between all the other things you’re in town to do. There’s an impressively beautiful outdoor pool (with a massive fireplace), guided neighborhood tours (the Brady Bunch house is nearby), and ample parking. The whole thing has a Spanish colonial flair with flashes of 1970s tiki. This place gets double points if you happen to be traveling with your family—kids love the Garland.
8221 Sunset Blvd., (323) 656-1010
I don’t know what you’re here in town for, or what qualifies to you, personally, as a business trip. The hotels I’ve recommended so far are all swell, but I’ve included them first and foremost for reasons of practicality and geography. That’s not why you stay at the Chateau. You come here instead for the myth and the history, the infamy and the iconic status of it all: here, where Duke Ellington composed “Swingin’ Suites,” where Stephen Stills wrote “For What It’s Worth” (“stop, hey, what’s that sound”), where Jim Morrison swung from the chandeliers, where Dominic Dunne lived while reporting the OJ Simpson trial for Vanity Fair. God only knows what’s gone on in these elevators, to say nothing of the guest rooms, which are appointed more like apartments and come swathed in spectral haunted metaphysical atmosphere, baked in California sunshine.
You can work here; so much incredible work has happened here! Nicholas Ray and James Dean rehearsed Rebel Without a Cause here! Whatever project it is you’ve got cooking—a novel, a screenplay, a symphony, or just a humble pitch deck—I don’t think there’s a concept in the world that can’t be improved by injecting a little Chateau mystique into its DNA. You will see celebrities; you will find quiet moments to yourself among the ghosts; you will find yourself quietly reflecting to yourself, alone in your room, “Holy shit, I can’t believe I’m really here!” There’s no other hotel in the world that is remotely like it.
LA is freelancer central, and the sort of place where working on your screenplay (or whatever) from the bar or coffee shop has attained a kind of mythical status. The city has plenty to offer in the form of traditional coworking spaces, private clubs, and laptop gardens. Here are some of my favorites.
360 E. 2nd St., 8th floor, (213) 433-2400
The Centrl Office chain of coworking spaces is well-represented across Los Angeles, with locations in Downtown and Marina Del Ray, and two spots in the South Bay city of El Segundo, aka “Silicon Beach” (at least one part of the wider massif known by this moniker). Each location has its own way of leaning into the “creative campus” vibe, offering a variegated array of services from suites and meeting rooms to day offices, drop-in coworking open plan spaces, and virtual office options that allow for mail and package delivery. Centrl Office does what it says on the tin—this is a classic approach to the coworking space model, and sometimes that’s exactly what you need, with supersonic Wi-Fi and printers and kitchens and lounges.
1370 N. St Andrews Place, (323) 381-5996
Part coworking space, part event venue, the Preserve feels uniquely LA. Truly a campus take on coworking, the facility boasts more than 6,000 trees and plants, a very cool series of indoor/outdoor working spaces, a library, bungalows, studio offices, and meeting rooms, plus an on-site cafe and soundproof phone rooms. Wi-Fi here is 1 GB per second; there’s valet parking and nursing rooms and wellness classes and Corian desks; people run whole companies out of this facility, and also they host weddings. The building, which underwent a multimillion-dollar, award-winning renovation in the late 2010s, was originally designed by Paul Revere Williams, a patron saint of Los Angeles architecture and design whose other works include the iconic LAX spaceship tower and the Beverly Hills Hotel. If you’re looking for a Los Angeles experience for your coworking needs—perhaps with an intent to hunker down for multiple days, so as to truly absorb the entirety of what goes on here—the Preserve is for you.
5971 W. 3rd St., (323) 933-2112
Like the Preserve, the Rita House could only be here, in Los Angeles, but the two spaces couldn’t feel more different. Rita is located inside a 1927 Spanish colonial building originally constructed for prop and costume design for the film studio industry in Hollywood. The building’s unique history goes back to the roots of coworking as a creative pursuit. There are monthly membership options, day rates, and a real focus on content production, with dedicated rooms for self-tape auditions and podcast taping, as well as larger meeting and screening rooms. You’ll find the requisite high-speed Wi-Fi and business center amenities here, but it’s inside a space that feels more like classic Hollywood Boulevard than Sand Hill Road. Every great city has a coworking space that doubles as a people-watching and networking hub, and in LA I think that’s here.
4334 Sunset Blvd., (213) 200-0969
I love working from Los Angeles coffee shops, and Dinosaur is one of my favorites for this particular pursuit. Located on the border between Silver Lake, Los Feliz, and East Hollywood, this place is a creative laptop melee of people whose names you’ve seen in the writers’ credits at the end of various films and television shows—or those who’d like to someday be. The coffee comes from Woodcat Coffee, whose flagship store is over on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park, and the store is bright and full of that good California light. It just feels creative here—get shit done on the front patio, or eavesdrop on the interesting conversations all around you. I visit nearly every time I’m in LA.
How could I pick 10 places to eat in Los Angeles? How could anyone pick 20, or 50, or 101 like they do each year at LA Times Food? That section’s weekly (daily!) reporting on food across LA should be something you start scouting now, in the weeks before your trip, so as to stay hip to the most interesting new stuff happening across the region. For me, these are 10 restaurants I’ve personally visited and enjoyed, running the gamut across price, location, and experience. They aren’t even necessarily my 10 favorite LA restaurants, but they’re all spots I’d gladly go back to, and in a city so thoroughly spoiled for choice, that’s saying something.
2736 W. Sunset Blvd., (213) 913-6850
Avish Naran cracked some heretofore unknown atom when he opened Pijja Palace in 2022. I guess it is an Indian sports bar? But it is also sort of a red sauce Italian joint, a cocktail destination working more or less entirely in its own creative idiom, a really swell place to watch the Lakers lose their way through the dregs of the executive-produced-by-LeBron-James era, and so forth. There’s green chili pickle masala wings and korma curry pizzas and dosa onion rings (a required order) and plenty of beer from near and far to enjoy it all with. Do not miss ordering a cocktail here—this is quietly one of the more inventive cocktail programs in the city, which is saying something, because nothing is really quiet about Pijja Palace. Go here with a big group, or sneak in solo at the bar. I wish it were three times as big, but also I don’t want to change anything about it at all.
320 Sunset Ave., Venice, (310) 314-0320
At some point in the past decade, I developed a heavily optimized preflight routine out of LAX. It involves leaving 1.5 hours earlier for the airport than otherwise required and diverting off into the back avenues of Venice for a stop at Gjusta. It’s a kind of California deli and the younger sibling to the original Gjelina on Abbot-Kinney (now with a location at the Wynn Las Vegas); you’ll find cured seafood, smoked meats, salads, fresh bread, lots of jams and nut butters for takeaway, pastries and coffee, juice, crispy California pizza slices, and much more. There’s a sun-drenched outdoor courtyard situation, bar seating clustered around the La Marzocco espresso machine, and a happy buzz of deli energy, transported into something distinctly modern and SoCal.
I have never had bad food here but have repeatedly ordered dishes including the salmon roe bagel (this is my favorite bagel in LA, and yes, I have had the annoying TikTok ones), the paté baguette sandwich, the excellent pork and beef meatballs, the wonderfully fresh mezze plate, and the turkey club, which makes for wonderful eats on the airplane a few hours later. I buy pickles and jam and house-marinated olives to take home, and sometimes a little sleeve of pastrami lox to snack on in the Delta lounge (but not on the flight itself, that would be rude). Going here for me is imbued with the wistfulness of travel, the longing to return home that smashes into a kind of imagined reality of never leaving this place, as though staying in LA would be as easy as simply nosing my car the opposite direction of LAX, sandwich in hand, sustained for continued exploration.
176 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 385-0880
There is no one Los Angeles—this we’ve established—but there is absolutely only one Wolfgang Puck, America’s original celebrity chef, who built a vision of Southern California cuisine in his own image all the way back in 1982, and nurtures a continued version of it here today in 2026. Named by Giorgio Moroder—no, really—Spago defined a certain era of California excess; you can practically hear the dulcet tones of Steely Dan’s Gaucho as you walk through the front doors. (“Drive west on Sunset to the sea …”)
This is all catnip to a certain sort of nostalgia-addled millennial (it me), but for everyone else, it helps that Spago remains a damn good restaurant in the present day, outside of any throwback factor. The smoked salmon caviar pizza, Puck’s peerless Wiener schnitzel, carefully sourced proteins like quail from California’s Wolfe Ranch Farms—it’s all here, alongside a newly revamped cocktail program and smart wine list. The Beverly Hills Spago remains the crown jewel of the entire international Wolfgang Puck hospitality group, and it’s where you’re most likely to find the chef himself these days, who is cool to see in person.
430 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 620-8463
Elsewhere in the Beverly Hills restaurant scene, you’ll find Marea, where the focus is on Italian coastal cuisine. Zip code be damned (it’s 90210), the lunch prix-fixe options at Marea are a great deal starting at $38, and the restaurant is also capably set up to handle large parties and private dining. Dungeness crab parpadelle, langoustine scampi, and a 40-ounce tomahawk served with bone marrow panzanella await, as does Marea’s vast assorti of classic cocktails and wines. If your business dinner is budgeted for vintage Champagne and Grand Cru Burgundy, Marea is here for you.
2023 E. 1st St., (323) 267-8810
Now for something completely different. Al & Bea’s is a semi-enclosed taco stand in Boyle Heights, on the other side of two freeways and a river from downtown. It has served essentially the same menu since 1966, and it makes what is easily the best bean-and-cheese burrito I’ve ever had in my life. The beans are creamy and molten, cooked in a multiday technique that arrives at an ambrosial texture. The cheese is perfectly melted, the flour tortilla folds it all together, and there’s fresh salsa to push the flavor in green and red directions. Like trying to describe a perfect cheese pizza or a perfect potato latke or a perfect bowl of pho, you can try to describe the alchemy of these things in words or photographs, but you will fail. In a city rightly famous for its surfeit of cuisine from across Mexico, there is only one Al & Bea’s bean-and-cheese burrito.
2118 N. Broadway, (323) 686-4667
We live in a golden era of barbecue in America, where regional styles and inventive chefs have fused a serious devotion to craft with their own culinary traditions and interpretations. Moo’s Craft is located in Lincoln Heights, where the husband-and-wife duo behind the restaurant grew up. It started as a series of backyard pop-ups, then went brick-and-mortar in 2021. They make serious barbecue in a Texas style, influenced by the work of Aaron Franklin but shot through with the flavors of East LA. On your plate, it looks like achingly traditional low-and-slow smoked brisket alongside poblano queso Oaxaca sausage, thick picnic burgers on Bub & Grandma’s buns, and tres leches bread pudding for dessert. Some have called it the best barbecue in California, which in my opinion overlooks the distinctly Californian tri-tip steak tradition up on the Central Coast, but that’s splitting hairs. It’s extraordinary, and if you take your barbecue seriously, I think it’s worth a drive across town, or from just about anywhere, for lunch at Moo’s.
14704 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, (818) 501-4201
Justin Pichentrungsi stepped in to helm his family’s restaurant on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks at the very height of the pandemic, leaving his career as a concept designer working with Disney, Mattel, and Sony Computer Entertainment. A series of multimodal, wine-soaked, outdoor pop-ups dubbed Thai Taco Tuesday became an unlikely hit, drawing food-and-wine hedonists out to the Valley for dry-aged fish tacos, lab tot meatballs, and southern Thai fried chicken with a dollop of Astrea caviar. Five years later, his dining room has undergone a significant expansion, the wine list is exhaustive, and the restaurant has become a fixture on the annual LA Times Food 101 best restaurants list. The music is loud. The vibes are peerless. Order a bottle of something killer; eat as much seafood on the menu as possible; and get the Noodles Supreme, which has stayed blessedly the same across the decades.
1725 Naud St., (323) 545-4880
This is my favorite restaurant in Los Angeles. I don’t think that’s the same as saying it’s the best restaurant in Los Angeles—that’s maybe Holbox, or Kato, or Hayato, or Baroo, or I don’t know—but something about Majordomo has drawn me back in an ongoing series of affection and attention, as a solo diner at their bar, as a two- or three-top with friends inside the dining room, or out on their patio with huge groups. Yes, this restaurant is part of the Momofuku group, but it’s their flagship Los Angeles location, and at some point over the past five years, it feels like they’ve gone troppo out here under the hot skies of SoCal, inventing their own interpretation of what the Momofuku of it all means in the 2020s.
Start with at least two orders of bing bread—if the honey butter and truffle is available when you visit, this is nonnegotiable, and the ricotta, jam, and chili crunch is also extraordinary. Crispy rice is required; one time I had a green Thai curry variation of this dish with fresh seafood that haunts my dreams. The little gem salad is perfect. The boiled chicken and rice is perfect. The wine and cocktails are always impressive—I like to get here early, whatever the occasion, and get a drink in first at the bar before dinner properly starts.
Majordomo in particular excels at large groups, parties, and events, so if you’re in the market for a larger party event as part of your LA business trip, this gets my highest possible recommendation. But I’ll keep finding my way back there alone, or with small groups, for a couple of snacks and a good glass of red wine at the bar, or a crunch bing wrap and a beer.
704 S. Alvarado St., (213) 483-8050
Controversy alert, hot take ahoy: Langer’s is the best Jewish deli in America, better than anything in New York City and second perhaps only to Schwartz’s in Montreal (which is really more of a smoked meat joint) for the best deli on the North American continent. The sandwiches are famous, the matzo ball soup is definitional, the dessert case overfloweth with pies and rice pudding. They make a beautiful egg cream; they make wonderful cheese blintzes; their deli-style beef tongue lunch meat is weepingly delicious.
Many Angelenos have their preferred ideal order at Langer’s, which makes for great deli chatter with locals when you visit. The No. 19 gets all the hype—pastrami, cole slaw, Russian dressing, and Swiss on rye—but for sandwiches I prefer the No. 28, which has pastrami, tongue, corned beef, Swiss, and turkey, with dressing, lettuce, and tomato. But my desert-island Langer’s order is a little more esoteric, developed over a lifetime of visits over the past 20 years: I get the No. 20 pastrami and chopped liver plate, which is served with pickles, rye bread, and a garden of crunchy vegetables as garnish, and then I add a side of Laner’s platonic ideal crinkle-cut fries and a little dish of the Russian dressing on the side for dipping.
When you go, please be aware that Langer’s operates its own free parking lot across the street from its location on the corner of MacArthur Park. The neighborhood around the restaurant can feel a bit intense at times, so take advantage of the convenient and safe free parking option if you’re driving a car.
Multiple locations in Koreatown, Echo Park, and Los Feliz
Ahh, the lure of the late-night taco cart. Many derivations of ad-hoc street meat can be found in every nook and cranny of Los Angeles, and which is the best one, or the closest best one, is a matter of considerable inquiry and opinion across the city. One line of thought says the best taco cart is the one the bartender recommends on your way out the door—proximity, convenience, and deliciousness have a way of amplifying each other. But I’ve never gone wrong with a stop at El Flamin, which has a location at the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Alvarado, which is technically Echo Park but feels more like a crossroads of several neighborhoods at once. They've got the trompo spinning outside the truck; the salsa bar buckets are epic; the California burritos are crunchy and starchy and stuffed to perfection. You should, definitely, eat truck tacos or street tacos while you are in Los Angeles, and this spot has always done me right.
Charles Bukowski, Humphrey Bogart, every character in every James Ellroy novel, and now, you! Join the ranks of LA’s storied imbibers by slugging one down at one of the city’s many, many outstanding drinking establishments. Some of these places are bars only; some of them are restaurants with over-the-top drinks programs too good not to include. Pick your poison and choose your own adventure.
225 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 860-6666
The setup was almost too perfect: New York City’s storied Dante (open since 1915, roundly considered one of the best bars in America) would open its first location outside lower Manhattan, perched atop the Maybourne Hotel in Beverly Hills. I’m a frequent flier at the MacDougal Street location in NYC and was as curious as anyone else about how, exactly, Dante would transfer its distinct melange of NYC leather-jacket cool and Italian spezzatura to the hills of Beverly.
Well, they did it by leaning into another kind of cool. This bar has, like, a no-hyperbole ophthalmologically eye-popping view of West Los Angeles that dominates the entire space and never fails to stagger me upon entry. The ceiling is a concerto of Italianate frescos, like something out of a dreamed-for Venetian aperitivo cavi. The big blue booths are sumptuous. The people watching is as delicious as the little Bianca pizzas with whipped ricotta and honey. And then there are the drinks, which hew close to the Dante formula back east with occasional surprises, executed at an appropriately Dante level: the perfect Dante Garibaldi (with “fluffy” orange juice), the battalion of negroni and martini variations (including a wildly good porn star martini riff, in case you get down like that), and of course the grasshopper, the long-lost, perhaps overlooked New Orleans cocktail classic once relegated to the realm of mid-century dinner party excess, then resurrected for the Instagram era by intrepid bars over the past decade. The Grasshopper at Dante has a special kind of power; once I watched a whole tray of them make their way through the dining room, then overheard both tables to the left and right of me stop their servers to order a dozen more. It is the stuff of magic.
777 S. Alameda St., Building 1, Suite 114, (213) 797-5706
It is cheeky and annoying of me to list Kato, which is surely on the very short list of the best restaurants in Los Angeles, as a destination for the Where to Drink portion of this guide. Please, please, if you enjoy fine dining and are able to include that as part of how you travel, make a reservation at Kato when you’re in Los Angeles. It’s just that you will drink so enormously well here—really just phenomenally well, across a pantheon of drinkways, from wine to cocktails to sake and nonalcoholic beverages—that it sort of makes sense to include it as a drinks destination in its own right.
Bill Addison wrote the piece on nonalcoholic drinks at Kato, and the astonishing wine list has become a subject of obsession among LA wine geeks. But it is the cocktails here that are the stickiest thing to me. Once, on a dining room visit at a two-top, the bar team at Kato wheeled over a bar cart next to me and proceeded to make what was absolutely the best old-fashioned cocktail I’ve ever had, and one of the five best cocktails of any variety I’ve ever tasted in my life. Kato is a Taiwanese restaurant, and this old-fashioned was built on Kavalan whisky, which hails from the mountains outside Taipei, along with Angostura bitters, unrefined Taiwan black sugar syrup, and ice from Japan. All of the drinks there are like this, but this particular drink achieved a level of apothecary apotheosis that has rarely been equaled in my lifetime, and I’ve really tried a lot of good drinks. You should go here.
818 E. 3rd St., (213) 915-4674
Dante’s status as a successful NYC cocktail transplant in Los Angeles was presaged by Death & Co, which opened in the LA Arts District in late 2019—a retrospectively hilarious time in which the great pandemic stared us all down, little to our knowledge. The Death & Co. SoCal experience is more or less exactly what you want: LA noir as fuck, dark and deco within an inch of its life, and jumpin’ with big-city, high-production-value energy. It is the cocktail equivalent of a James Cameron film: Every visit to a Dead & Co bar features original moments, echoes of classics, and exciting surprises, and like Terminator 2, the whole experience is meant to last about an hour and a half. Drink one drink that sounds bonkers and different and one drink that sounds kinda like what you normally would drink, and consider going before dinner, not after—I especially love this bar at around 6:30 pm, right when the night feels most full of possibility.
1966 Hillhurst Ave., (323) 922-1002
This bar in Los Feliz has only been open for around a year, but its cofounder, cocktailer Shawn Lickliter, has been a mainstay in LA’s cocktail scene for the past decade, helming the drinks program at Manzke Hospitality Group and pushing hard on the rare vintage spirits genre. At Vandell they’ve kept this dream alive; here you can order a Negroni made with 1970s Campari (back when it was made with beetle shells) and 1980s gin, or a vintage Manhattan built around bourbon distilled back when Gerald R. Ford was president. But there’s also fresh seasonal cocktails here with a market flair—meyer lemon, banana, smoked tomatoes—and a top-down approach to hospitality that makes Vandell an easy-to-root-for new favorite on the LA drinks scene. Want to impress the extremely online, in-the-know craft cocktailer at your favorite bar back home? Go here on your trip to LA.
417 W. 8th St., (213) 614-8001
Downtown Los Angeles is home to its fair share of dive bars, boozers, and assorted dens of iniquity—the sort of joint where Dudley Smith might have pumped a source for information, or where Bukowski could have drank between six and 12 blended scotches in the course of a single afternoon. The Golden Gopher remains a great tribute to the LA drinking culture of yesteryear, but it’s been subtly updated in recent years under new ownership. You’re less likely to wander into the middle of a drug deal in the bathroom now; you’re more likely to drink some tasty microbeers at the bar, bum a smoke from a fellow traveler on the half-covered patio, or take advantage of the extremely reasonably priced happy hour specials. They cleaned it up but left a fine layer of grime, if that makes sense. I mean this as a compliment: I love this bar, and go nearly any time I find myself downtown. You should too.
1805 Sunset Blvd., (213) 484-6079
I wrote about this bar for the LA Times in January 2023, when it was at its very high point of feeling like the city’s “it bar” of the moment. A few years later, Prado has settled into something more like a permanent identity, which revolves around friendly and sociable wine by the glass, a sneakily great selection of craft beer (with a focus on Belgian imports), and one of the best natural wine lists in the city. You’ll drink great at Prado, but there’s something bigger going on here beyond all that. The entire place is an art project—the wobbly disco bar, the ceramic tile entryway, the art installation viewports and handmade furniture—and the life beings who patronize this place inhabit some kind of modern Los Angeles interpretation of the artistic way of life. This is a long way of saying the people-watching here is bar-none supremo unimpeachable, and you might even get drawn into a conversation or two yourself (or maybe a chess match). There are a million and one bars in the city of Los Angeles, and yet, there is only Prado.
632 N. Western Ave., (323) 380-5040
There you are, with a mixed group of coworkers, some of whom you barely know, others whom you know too well. The lot of you are looking for a comfortable and fun bar in Los Angeles in which you might drink (but not too much), eat (but stuff to share, not too fussy), and hang out in an atmosphere that feels appropriately LA. I think this is sort of the perfect bar for that. Etoile comes from Jill Bernheimer, who since 2009 has run the enormously influential natural-focused wine shop Domaine LA (which sadly went on hiatus in late 2025). I’ve learned a great deal about wine by shopping with Jill and her team, and the fun continues at Bar Etoile, which sits squarely in the middle of the presently very popular Melrose Hill neighborhood. All the wine here is smart and thoughtful, and the food is just right too—an American take on Comté tart made with Pleasant Ridge Reserve from Wisconsin, a whole rotisserie chicken with whey caramel cabbage, a plate of lobster rillettes or scallop crudo calling out for wine. Your team is now happy, and you look brilliant for having suggested such a brilliant destination. Lucky you.
3457 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 385-7275
Now we’re really into the dregs. LA does high-end great; LA does mid-range well; but LA especially shines once you get into the down-and-dirty serious drinking dens of rightful infamy earned many decades ago. The Bounty is one such place: Mad Men filmed there, Sir Winston Churchill drank there, Dragnet creator Jack Webb was a regular, and Sirhan Sirhan tanked up inside before shooting Bobby Kennedy across the street. I don’t know what else I need to say.
To be clear, it’s a dump—but an eminently charming, elementally essential one all the same. Drinks are cheap in a late-20th-century kind of way, and the food is allegedly good, though I’ve never partaken. This is the kind of place where you might skull a nice cold longneck of something cheap and domestic, or else enjoy a Cutty Sark and rocks like Grandpa used to drink. It is positively alive with history and spectral energy, a truly tangible piece of Los Angeles drinking history with vortex-like qualities. There is nowhere else I’d rather spend an hour in this, my one beautiful too-short life. (Sometimes I only need 45 minutes.)
6245 Hollywood Blvd., (323) 462-5890
At the Frolic Room, you’ll find wild conspiracies, drunken meltdowns, relationships collapsing and rekindling in real time, the mad and the beautiful and the important and the meaningless, all of it aglow in the neon and halogen among the eternal stars of the Walk of Fame. A lot of dive bars in LA claim “Bukowski drank here,” but the Frolic Room has a shrine to the man; it sits opposite of the bar’s original Al Hirschfield mural, which was painted in 1963 and ought to be made a protected city monument. You come here for a beer and a shot, or an NA beer and a soda water, but most of all you come here to be here and to participate in the unbroken history of this place that dates back to 1930. It’s so LA, they filmed LA Confidential here. Go once, go a hundred times, and keep your ears open for the tall tales being told all around you.
In a lot of ways the most “local” thing you can do while you’re in LA is go for a nice hike, to the point where it’s become something of a trope—the trails around Runyon Canyon and Griffith Observatory are sort of a hiking-cum-fashion show scene, and the sort of place where you might conceivably see a celebrity (which Angelenos care about even less than New Yorkers). But it’s popular for a reason; like I told you at the top of this story, Los Angeles is incredibly, unfathomably beautiful, and actually getting out into the hills is a pretty profound way to experience it.
My favorite ever hiking experience in Los Angeles was actually out around Mount Washington, specifically near the Moon Canyon nature park up in the tangle of city streets and trails near Mount Washington Elementary School. There’s even more scenic hiking available out near the coast, including the famed Point Dume Cove Trail all the way out in Malibu, where they filmed Planet of the Apes, and the epic 5-mile Malibu Canyon hike up to where they filmed M*A*S*H. A good hike feels elementally LA in the best way, and if you can fit it on a business trip, you’ll be glad you did.
221 S. Grand Ave., (213) 232-6200
LA is a major museum hub, and if you like to take in a little culture as part of your extra day of business travel, you’ll dig checking out the options at LACMA, the Getty Museum, and the Barnsdall Art Park, which is home to arguably the greatest example of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mayan Revival architecture style, Hollyhock House. But my favorite museum in the city is The Broad, whose approach to contemporary art feels both approachable and astonishing and whose permanent collection of artwork is beyond impressive. Here you’ll find pieces by Takashi Murakami, Basquiat, Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Yayoi Kusama, plus a heavy-hitter rotation of traveling exhibits and installations. I attended a particularly moving and effective Keith Haring exhibit at the Broad in 2024, which functioned as a kind of immersive interpretation of the early-’80s New York arts and culture scene, complete with full-scale original Haring works and a variety of multimedia installation elements including mix tapes, local TV broadcasts from the era, nightclub flyers, and promotional ephemera. You’ll find a Damien Hirst formaldehyde lamb and the David Hammons “African-American Flag,” and as with any great art museum, the gift shop rules.
Los Angeles attracts every kind of writer, performer, comedian, and improvisational artist from around the world, so it should come as no surprise that the city is a major hub of stand-up comedy and fringe theater. I am convinced that this is one of the funnest, coolest things to do here, and a lot of the best stuff clusters around places like Dynasty Typewriter in Koreatown and The Elysian in Frogtown. Check shows before you trip, and just go if this sounds like fun, even if you’ve never heard of half of what’s playing.
The city that built the movies is unsurprisingly home to a thriving arthouse cinema scene, and this is another very fun and deeply LA thing to do while you’re in town. Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema is a bastion of 35-mm film print, and its programming and theatergoer experience are both nationally notable. Meanwhile, over at Vidiots in Eagle Rock, the vibe is a little bit more ’80s movie-rental joint—it's even got a version of one of those onsite. In the theater at Vidiots, they screen a little bit of everything; upcoming screenings as of press time include Chicken Run, Rear Window, Stop Making Sense, and the greatest Disney film ever made, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? This being LA, the directors, cast, and crew of the films in question are sometimes in attendance—follow the excellent Vidiots Instagram for fun from afar, and look up what’s playing when you’re in town.
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