LA Weekly Picks the Great Los Angeles Walk as a "Best of LA"

The L.A. Weekly's annual Best of L.A. issue comes with a special treat this year: Our very own Great Los Angeles Walk is among this year's picks.

Here's what the LA Weekly (which calls it the "Best Once-A-Year Walk") has to say:

Held on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, Schneider's yearly excursions familiarize locals with urban beauty and obscure landmarks such as Ray Charles' recording studio, encouraging ambulatory exercise in a notoriously car-heavy city. This year, Schneider says, "Our downtown-to-the ocean walk this year (Nov. 17) will spotlight Melrose," starting at 9 a.m. on the front steps of Walt Disney Concert Hall. He tweets his location every mile or so to keep the group together, charges no entry fee and solicits advice from L.A. experts like former L.A. Weekly food writer Jonathan Gold and L.A. Observed's Kevin Roderick. What better way to prepare yourself for a month of holiday bingeing?

How to Find the Best Coffee in Los Angeles

Coffee addicts, pay attention: The LA Weekly has put together the definitive list of L.A.'s best spots to get a cup -- check out the criteria here and the map here.

The Weekly explains:

A few days ago, we listed 10 Places to Get a Damn Good Cup of Coffee. As many of you pointed out (passionately) in our comments, however, there are coffee shops not on the list that also make a great cup. And so, for your handy reference, we mapped L.A.'s best specialty coffee shops. The map includes the spots we highlighted, plus several others that didn't make the list. We made note of the shops that select and roast their own beans (those shops are in all caps), so if you want to drink local, you can.

Check out the original "Top 10 Places to Get a Damn Cup of Coffee" feature here.

Among the top offerings:
1. Espresso Cielo
2. Balconi Coffee Company
3, Coffee Commissary
4. Farmers' Markets
5. Cafecito Organico
​6. Spring for Coffee
7. CoffeeBar
8. Intelligentsia
9. Cognoscenti Coffee
10. Cafe de Leche

A few of our favorite (and soon-to-be favorite) places!

Jonathan Gold's 99 Essential Restaurants Is Back

Grab your forks: L.A.'s Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic is back with his latest list of L.A.'s most important eateries.

Just as you finally made a dent in last year's list, Jonathan Gold's new 99 Essential Restaurants list is out in this week's L.A. Weekly.

If there's any trend to this year's list, it's Gold's acknowledgment that the very definition of what a "restaurant" is has changed:

Some of the most interesting Los Angeles restaurants at the moment are as illusory as light on a screen.

Glazed pork-belly adobo for lunch? Check your Twitter feed. The truck that serves it may be around the corner or it may be two counties away. The cocktailian whose mezcal drinks you crave shifts venues more often than an NBA team on the road. Restlessness has long been a local characteristic, and we were famous for drive-ins, dine-and-dash hash houses and takeout windows long before the advent of tapas trucks and pedal-powered popsicle carts.

The best enchiladas I've ever tasted were made by a woman whose makeshift stand occasionally pops up around the corner from a more established stand whose location I can never quite figure out. The most celebrated young chef in Los Angeles imports his restaurant into a different kitchen every couple of months, like a soufflé-happy hermit crab inhabiting a new shell. At one of the most popular new places in town, your dinner may be prepared one night by one of the most famous chefs in Mexico; the next by a moonlighting lackey from a place you wouldn't eat at with somebody else's mouth.

Check out the full list here.

Taking the Jonathan Gold "Things To Eat In L.A. Before You Die" Challenge

How many of LA Weekly gastroscribe Jonathan Gold's "99 Things to Eat in L.A. Before You Die" have you tried? (Check the full list here.) I counted around 20, including these highlights:

-- Tito's Tacos
-- Langer's hot pastrami
-- Kogi's kalbi taco
-- Casa Bianca's sausage and eggplant pizza
-- Lazy Ox Canteen's Paleron (pot roast) With Kumquats and Cream of Wheat
-- Philippe's French Dip
-- Cole's French Dip
-- Brooklyn Bagel Bakery's hearth-baked bagel
-- Chili John's chili
-- Oki Dog
-- Mozza pizza
-- Nickel Diner's maple bacon donut

In other words, I better get cracking!

We most recently just tried the Lazy Ox's pot roast two weekends ago -- just before the J-Gold list came out. And, of course, my Oki Dog experience was completely inspired by Gold: It was his famed Pico restaurant marathon that inspired our 2007 edition of the Great Los Angeles Walk (including a lunch stop at Oki Dog).

Jonathan Gold Unveils This Year's 99 Essential Restaurants

Pulitzer Prize-winning food scribe Jonathan Gold's annual list of 99 Essential Restaurants has become a highly anticipated document in foodie circles. This year's list has been rocked by the explosion in mobile food trucks, among other things.

Gold writes:

This year especially, an essential L.A. restaurant may not even be a restaurant at all — it may be a tweet telling you which street corner to hang around at, or a cart parked in the same location from the hours of 11 to 2. Clubgoers are used to seeing their favorite band at the Smell one week and at Spaceland the next, but it is a new thing for diners, separating chef from dining room, the exultation of guerrilla cuisine.

As we’ve said before, an essential restaurant is one that reflects Los Angeles in a startling and unusual way, that uses fresh local ingredients in a fashion that respects the land in which they were grown, that showcases cooking echoing both foreign-trained chefs’ region of origin and the hypercharged mosaic of the L.A. dining scene. An essential restaurant moves people, inspires them to think about food in a different way, inspires them to think about Southern California as a great agricultural region, a great port, a builder of the shiny symbolism that is a large factor in how the rest of the world thinks of itself. And it’s also a damned good place to eat.

New adds to this year's list include Eagle Rock's Auntie Em's; Downtown's Bottega Louie; Santa Monica's Caché; Downtown's Chaya Downtown; Downtown's Church & State; Downtown's Drago Centro; Venice's Gjelina; the Fairfax district's Golden State; Highland Park's Good Girl Dinette; Santa Monica's Huckleberry; food truck Kogi; Los Feliz's Little Dom's; Hollywood's Loteria Grill; the on-location Ludo Bites; South L.A.'s Mo-Chica; East L.A.'s Moles La Tia; Melrose's Mozza; South El Monte's Pho Minh; Santa Monica's Riva; Highland/Melrose's Street; Brentwood's Tavern; and Downtown's Wurstkuche.

Wow, I just realized that we've sampled most of these spots. So that's why I'm getting fat.

The Return of "Ask Mr. Gold" and More: L.A. Weekly's New Food Blog

L.A. Weekly has launched its new food blog, "Squid Ink," which will include the return of famed food critic Jonathan Gold's Q&A column "Ask Mr. Gold." Also contributing are Gourmet magazine's Margy Rochlin and Friend of Franklin Avenue Jessica Ritz, among others. Check it out here.

Steve & Barry's: What Went Wrong

I've been fascinated by the rapid rise and even faster decline of Steve & Barry's, the discount clothing chain that recently declared bankruptcy for the second time in three months -- and is now shutting down for good.

The chain is liquidating its merchandise, although I didn't find any real bargains during a recent trip to the Burbank location. That's because the liquidators -- sneaky as they are -- have decided to knock 30% off a higher price point than the $8.98 that all Steve & Barry's merchandise had been selling for.

Yep -- $8.98. That may explain why Steve & Barry's collapsed so quickly. The profit margins are either razor-thin, or not there at all, with those kind of prices. It's rumored that Steve & Barry's basically survived off of the shopping malls that provided incentives to the stores in bringing them in.

The chain also expanded too soon and too fast. We wrote about Steve & Barry's arrival to Burbank last year.. but even then it seemed strange that the store could survive on so little.

Now here's your answer: It couldn't. That's a shame -- in these tough economic times, a bargain clothier like Steve & Barry's should thrive. Instead, the store will soon cease to exist.

Here's more from Business Week:

Yet Steve & Barry’s is a retail casualty. Design couldn’t save the day for this chain. Aggressive growth, instead, seemed to be the company’s goal—and perhaps its downfall. It’s bankrupt. While growth is what every business strives for, obviously, when is enough enough? Could Steve & Barry’s still be doing well, if it didn’t push for opening nearly 300 stores — almost ten times the number of stores it had five years ago — in such a relatively short time? If the company had focused more on design and quality at super-low prices, which seemed to be a priority, instead of the number of stores, perhaps it could have found itself in a different position today. One that would offer cash-strapped consumers fun, well-designed clothing at prices they could afford during the toughest of times, and would allow them to profit from the mass desire for cool apparel at bare-bones prices. Now those customers will be shopping at their competitors’ stores instead.

Steve & Barry's stores were also located at the Beverly Connection and in Santa Monica, among other spots.

Best of Los Ang-aaaaaar-les

In possibly the most unusual "Best of LA" roundup ever, the LA Weekly takes a Pirate-themed approach to this year's roundup. And it somehow works.

Highlights include:

:: Best Carpool Tunnel Syndrome, in which the weekly highlights some of L.A.'s biggest freeway crunches:

Tackle the 110 South transition to the 101 East alongside downtown Chinatown at 70 mph and watch your soul itself leap from your body and hide in the back seat. The whole of the Pasadena Freeway northbound out of downtown is inescapably entertaining when the pressures of work and traffic urge your leaden foot to unwisely exceed the posted speed. It is rife with short, deadly “Surprise! Here I am!” on-ramps, rapidly narrowing lanes, and curves sewn tighter than a corpse’s mouth.

The westbound 134 to the southbound 2 has deceptively shallow curves bleeding directly into a steep downhill grade through Eagle Rock, at which point it becomes painfully clear that only two of your car’s four wheels are riding the asphalt. Your speedometer pushes 90 mph by the time the Glendale Freeway appears.

Also worth mentioning and/or blocking out of short-term memory: the utterly hairy 405 North to 101 West hairpin.

The paper misses the hairiest of them all, however: The 101 North transfer to the 5 North. Newcomers miss it altogether, due to a lack of signage on the 110 (save for the one mention on the 110 courtesy guerilla artist Richard Ankrom). But even if you know it's coming, the transfer is just one lane -- which means it's perpetually jammed, all the way downtown.

Novices simply wait in line... but if you're smart, you know to speed along in lane No. 2 through the first two tunnels. But you gotta get over by the time you hit the third tunnel and see the flashing light indicating the sharp off-ramp curve... and so far, I've never missed it yet. But if that's not dangerous enough, that sharp left-hand curve onto the 5 (where FINALLY the off-ramp turns into two lanes) is enough to add to the stress. Truly not a freeway transition for the faint of heart.

More LA Weekly "Best of" entries include:

Best City Staircase To Heaven:

"The Clinton Street steps (at Glendale Blvd., just north of Bellvue Ave.) are really the Charlie Brown Christmas tree of public staircases. Yet they have beauty too, rising step by step to the corner of Clinton and Belmont streets, where, once you’re finished gasping and wheezing, you can see the panorama of Echo Park Lake, the ridge line behind it and, on a rare winter’s day, snowcapped mountains."

Best Landlocked Treasure: Atwater Village, where

"Epicurean delights abound — Cuban treats at Baracoa Cuba, Mexican and Salvadoran nosh at tiny Tacos Villa Corona and booming El Buen Gusto, Vietnamese food at Indochine, vegetarian Indian at India Sweets & Spices, and old-fashioned steaks and martinis at the legendary Tam O’Shanter, a note-perfect, 84-year-old Mildred Pierce–style family chophouse that was once the de facto studio commissary for the old Disney lot (signed drawings by Uncle Walt adorn the walls)."

But Where Has The Rum Gone: Famed tiki bar Tiki-Ti, which I didn't realize was opened in 1961 by a Filipino immigrant named Ray Buhen. Writes the Weekly:

"Tiki-Ti is still going strong in its original location — twelve barstools and a handful of dark, cozy tables, nestled in a lot between KCET’s studios and El Chavo on Sunset Boulevard. Today, Ray’s son and grandson, Mike and Mike Jr., keep alive the traditional recipes, most of which are hardly authentic to the South Seas but were invented right here in Los Angeles (many by Ray Buhen himself). Those passionate about tiki culture as well as those who simply appreciate the Buhens’ dedication to craft have been coming in regularly for years; one die-hard, a chatty character called Rasta Jeff, even has a drink named after him."

The Giant Doughnuts of Los Angeles: Those huge donuts still seen all over town? They're all remnants of the old Big Donut Drive-In chain. The Weekly fills us in:

"The original of the chain, 24-hour Kindle’s Giant Donut on South Normandie Avenue at West Century Boulevard, built in 1950, brings in its share of sketchy insomniacs. But Randy’s Donuts in Inglewood, the most familiar landmark of the six, has the best doughnuts at midnight. The jelly doughnuts contain denture-annihilating seeds, the glaze slays, and the devil’s food cake tastes like heaven instead of hell. It has pleasantly horrible coffee and mascot Randy, although one corner of the drive-through roof has fallen victim to too many tall-profile vehicles over the years."

Best Mall for Actual Rats: Even the Beverly Center's regular shoppers harbor a love/hate relationship with the behemoth monstrosity, an utter eyesore from the outside. But I'd never heard of the mall's rat problems until the Weekly wrote this:

"More vintage luxury liner than modern cruise ship, the Beverly has led a past as colorful as her clientele. In her younger years, the Center fell victim to rodents, an event mall historians refer to as The Great Rat Invasion of 1987. Forced from their homes by booming construction in the nearby Hollywood Hills, hordes of brown tree rats slipped in through open service entrances and escalator gangways. At night they danced about on the Bev’s empty decks, dining on leftovers from the food court. Eventually, exterminators were brought in and the rats jumped ship; exactly how many remains unknown. Toy coffins stuffed with candy rodents went out to the media in celebration."

Best Pirated Loot Spots: We've written many times of our run-ins with the pirated DVD sellers in Santee Alley (who always scurry when I approach -- do I look like a narc?). The Weekly fills us in on exactly where to buy the illegal small-screen booty:

Santee Alley (between Olympic Boulevard and 12th Street in the Fashion District), MacArthur Park (Alvarado Street and Wilshire Boulevard), MTA Rail Lines (all over L.A. County)

Best Way to Reclaim the Airwaves: No pirate-themed issue would be complete without a mention of local pirate radio. Unfortunately, L.A.'s early-to-mid-90s reign as a hotbed of pirate activity as waned, as no one has come along to carry on the work of famed stations KBLT or Pirate Cat Radio. The Weekly ignores those two, for some reason, but does mention some new ones -- including an outlet from a famous source:

"Los Angeles has at least six (four east of the L.A. River) free-radio stations being run by individuals and/or collectives. One of those freedom fighters is Zacarias de la Rocha, ex–Rage Against the Machine rhyme spitter, who, according to 2005 FCC records, was sent a warning letter to his home."