Los Angeles, slowly

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Los Angeles rewards patience the way few American cities do. The famous landmarks — the Hollywood sign, the Walk of Fame, the pier at Santa Monica — are mostly fine, occasionally great, and almost never the reason a visit ends up being memorable. The city’s real character lives in its neighborhoods, which means a good first trip should pick two or three of them and resist the urge to see everything.

Where to base yourself

Most visitors land at LAX and book a hotel near it. This is a mistake. The airport corridor has nothing to recommend it after sunset, and the $50 cab to anywhere worth visiting adds up quickly across a four-day trip.

Three areas worth considering instead:

Koreatown. Central, dense, walkable in a way most of LA isn’t. Good food at every price point, a Metro stop, and a 20-minute drive to either downtown or the west side outside rush hour.
Highland Park. On the eastside, lower-key, full of small bookstores and coffee shops. The Gold Line connects you to downtown without driving.
Culver City. Quietly the most pleasant part of the west side. Walkable downtown, decent transit, near the beach without the beach prices.

Avoid Hollywood itself unless you have specific business there. The hotels are overpriced and the streets, after dark, are not pleasant.

Eating

The cliché about LA food — that there is no scene, only neighborhoods — is roughly true and the best reason to visit. A reasonable spread for a long weekend:

A breakfast burrito from a hole-in-the-wall in Boyle Heights or East LA. Look for places with the salsa bar in front and the menu only in Spanish. The breakfast burrito at most coffee shops is not the same thing.
Korean barbecue in Koreatown, ideally on a weeknight to avoid the wait. The all-you-can-eat places are fine; the à la carte places are better and not much more expensive once you stop ordering things you don’t want.
A sit-down Mexican meal in the city. Mariscos for lunch on a hot day, a birria spot for dinner. Skip the chain Mexican near the beach.
Dim sum in the San Gabriel Valley. Drive east on a Saturday morning, get there by 10 a.m., expect to wait, and don’t order anything that comes out of a freezer.

If you eat one fancy meal, make it lunch. Dinner reservations in LA mean either booking three weeks out or eating at 5:30 p.m.

Getting around

Renting a car is the obvious move and the wrong one for most short trips. A car becomes a liability the moment you want to drink, and parking in Hollywood, downtown, or anywhere on the west side is its own minor career.

Strategy that works for most visitors:

Take a cab or rideshare from the airport.
Use rideshare for everything inside a 5-mile radius of where you’re staying.
Rent a car for one day if you want to drive Mulholland or get to the San Gabriel Valley.

The Metro is real and useful — the Gold Line in particular — but the network is incomplete, and most visitors don’t have the patience to plan around it.

When to go

October and early November are the best weeks of the year: warm days, cool evenings, no smoke, no rain. February through April is the second-best window. Summer is hotter than people remember and the air is worse; winter is fine but the days are short.

Avoid the week between Christmas and New Year unless you specifically want to see what LA looks like nearly empty, which is a real, if niche, experience.

A short list of unglamorous favorites

The reading room at the Central Library downtown. Free, quiet, open past 6 p.m. on weekdays.
The Huntington Gardens in San Marino. Pay the entry fee, skip the art, walk straight to the Chinese garden, find a bench.
Grand Central Market before noon. After noon it becomes a tourist pen.
The hike up to the Wisdom Tree above Burbank. Steep, short, no shade, great at sunrise.
Any neighborhood farmers market on a Sunday. Hollywood’s is the most famous; the one in Atwater Village is better.