I used to main a website called Old L.A. Restaurants on which I reminisced about some of the places in my town where I used to dine. The site is still up but don't bother seeking it out. It's been inactive for several years and sometime in 2025, for reasons you wouldn't care about, I'm going to delete it. Before then though, I'm moving all the listings I wrote — the listings, not the many comments on them — over to this site to preserve them and in the process, I'm doing a few rewrites and updates.
Some of them have already been migrated. The rest will follow. If you want to read any of them, this link will show you the ones that are already over here.
This will only be of interest to certain friends of mine. Hey, Certain Friends of Mine! Remember that great little restaurant I took you to over on Pico Boulevard a block west of Beverly Glen? The little hole-in-the-wall place called The Main Course? You were skeptical at first but one bite of their food — especially if you took my advice and ordered the turkey meatloaf — prompted you to thank me for introducing you to a great, albeit tiny place to eat.
They've closed and they posted this message on their webpage…
Dear Customers! The Main Course restaurant is out of business due to changing circumstances surrounding our lease. We want to thank you for your continued support over the last 37 years! We will miss you!
We'll miss you too, Main Course. I assume "changing circumstances surrounding our lease" means a landlord raising the rent sky-high, which seems to be happening more and more these days. It won't be long before every little, independent merchant will be displaced by a big chain. I wouldn't mind that as much if Applebee's or Outback could make a turkey meatloaf a tenth as good as the one served at the Main Course.
Their statement makes no mention of looking for a new building in which to reopen. In the past, every time a favorite restaurant of mine has shuttered, they've said they will find a place to again flourish…or sometimes, they say they already have a location and are just dickering to nail down the fine points of the contract. I can't recall one that ever actually reappeared, at least in anywhere near its previous form. Sad…but that's just how it is.
Skooby's was a small hot dog stand located under a movie theater marquee on Hollywood Boulevard, directly across from Musso-Frank's Grill, a restaurant that will never go outta businees — I hope. Skooby's served great dogs with a great snap and was kind of a godsend to those of us who like neither the chow nor the lines at Pink's. Skooby's was what Pink's should have been, given its reputation.
The hot dogs were great, especially if you left off enough toppings to be able to taste the meat…though asked once if I preferred Skooby's over my other fave (Carney's, still open), I answered that I preferred the dogs at Carney's and the french fries and lemonade at Skooby's. I also liked the parking better at either Carney's, which may have been the reason Skooby's is no more. I rarely go to anything in that area that doesn't have a parking lot, even for one of the best hot dogs in town.
My second-favorite place to get pizza in Los Angeles abruptly closed the other day, reportedly for good. It was Frankie and Johnnie's, a tiny business about the size of a phone booth located on Little Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills, just west of Rodeo Drive. Frankie and Johnnie's should not be confused with the Johnnie's New York Pizza chain, though it probably was, often.
Frankie and Johnnie's served very fine pies with very thin crusts and if you bought slices as opposed to a whole pie, they'd reheat them in their big oven and come out much crisper. It was very difficult to walk past the place and not stop in for a slice or two. They also served an amazingly wide range of decent pasta dishes — amazing because the whole kitchen there seemed to be about the size of a Honda Civic. I'm going to miss that place.
You're probably wondering what my favorite place is to get pizza in Los Angeles. Once upon a time, it was Damiano's, featured elsewhere on this site. Now, it's Vito's Pizza on La Cienega, a few blocks south of Santa Monica. It's not fancy but the pizza is made expertly and many friends who obsess on "New York Pizza" and somehow believe one cannot find rotten pizza in Manhattan, swear that Vito's is as close as you can get. It is very good and I really hope I never have to say farewell to it on this blog.
Jan's Restaurant was located on Beverly Boulevard just east of La Cienega. It billed itself as "L.A.'s Best Coffee Shop." One wonders how the folks at Astro’s over on Fletcher Drive — owned by the same family and featuring almost the exact same cuisine — felt about that. But Jan's was pretty good. In the seventies, I lived a block from the place and was in there at least twice a week. Breakfasts were as good as any other option I had. For lunch and dinner, it wasn't the greatest but it was several notches above Denny's or Norm's or any other big chain you could name.
I especially liked the Spaghetti Burger, which was not as many assumed a hamburger with spaghetti on it. It was a hamburger with a dish of spaghetti on the side.
Jan's was reasonably priced and had good service. It closed in mid-March after more than fifty years in business. We've lost too many of that kind of eatery.
There used to be a number of Chuck's Steak Houses in Los Angeles and I miss 'em. There are still Chuck's around — the nearest one seems to be in Santa Barbara — but they do not seem to be a chain, exactly. They seem to be independently-owned places opened with the blessing (and perhaps, financial participation) of this guy Chuck.
Chuck was Chuck Rolles, a former All-American basketball player who opened his first restaurant in Hawaii in 1959. The concept was pretty simple. You could get a good steak, a baked potato or rice and a trip to the salad bar for a reasonable price, and you didn't have to get all dressed up. One of the features of a Chuck's Steak House has always been the casual, friendly atmosphere. Another was the self-serve salad bar, which at the time was a relatively new idea. Yet another is or was the simple menu, which at times has fit on the side of a little cask on your table.
Chuck's expanded in many directions with various partnerships and my main recollections are of one in Valley at (I think) Sepulveda and Ventura, and another on Third Street near La Cienega, near where I was then living. It was near a studio called the Record Plant where many rock musicians of the seventies recorded very famous albums. I don’t think I ever went to that Chuck's without seeing someone who was super-famous in the music industry…and if you didn’t recognize them, an obliging waiter would whisper to you something like, "See that guy over by the bar? That’s Phil Spector."
The Record Plant burned down one night and I have a feeling that contributed to Chuck's exit from that area. But maybe the Chuck's people just decided to give up on Los Angeles because that's what they did. I liked the food there tremendously, especially the rice that came with your steak. You could substitute a baked potato for a few bucks more but the rice was so good, most people learned not to. Folks I dined with were always trying to figure out what they did to the rice to make it so good but the servers would just tell you, "It's a secret." A woman I dined with there once claimed the rice had been cooked, then stir-fried in sesame oil. I have no idea if that's so.
Chuck's spawned numerous imitators in the seventies. I went to at least three steak places that tried to replicate Chuck's down to the nth degree…and they usually managed to get everything right except for that rice. None of them caught on. Only Chuck's was Chuck's and I wish we still had one in town.
For those of you who don't know Los Angeles: La Cienega Boulevard is located on the Eastern-most side of what could barely be called Beverly Hills. And on La Cienega, there used to be a stretch of several blocks known as Restaurant Row — one great place to eat after another. Most of those restaurants are long gone. I think the only one that remains that has any smidgen of history is Lawry's, famous for its prime rib, elegant service and corresponding prices. And even Lawry's moved a couple of times on Restaurant Row.
One dining spot there I really miss is Ollie Hammond's Steak House, which was roughly across the street from where Lawry's is now situated. It was a great place to get a real meal at any hour of the day. When it was still there and open for biz, it was a few doors down from where Lawry's used to be. It takes guts for a restaurant to sell prime rib that close to Lawry's. Imagine trying to open a competing theme park next door to Disneyland.
Ollie Hammond's had a much more diverse menu than Lawry's and it was not only open 24 hours but it had a full menu at any hour except when its breakfast menu displaced it for a few hours each morn. Usually if you go into a restaurant at 3 AM, your choices are slim. The guy in the kitchen at that hour knows how to make sandwiches, eggs, hamburgers and not much else. If there is anything else, he's probably reheating something cooked by the day or evening chef(s).
This was not the case at Ollie Hammond's. At 3 AM there, you had a wide range of freshly-prepared options, sometimes even including a baked potato. Try getting a baked potato at any other restaurant in the middle of the night. I liked the steaks there. I liked the soup du jour which always seemed to be a tasty tomato concoction with ground beef and pasta noodles that people informally but not inaccurately called "spaghetti soup." On Sunday until about 2 PM, they served a corned beef hash that still has folks salivating.
The other thing I remember about Ollie Hammond's is that they had a waiter who was a dead ringer for actor Bill Bixby. This was not just my opinion. Everyone mentioned it and he once told my date and me that some patrons refused to believe he was not that guy researching a role or picking up a few bucks between series or something of the sort. He said that Bill Bixby had come by a few times and gotten very spooked by the resemblance. I always wondered if anyone who wrote on any of the many shows in which Mr. Bixby starred ever thought to whip up an "evil twin" episode or something of the sort and to hire this waiter to play whichever role Bixby wasn't playing at the moment. You'd have sworn they did it Patty Duke-style with a split-screen.
I don't recall exactly when Ollie Hammond's closed. On an old blog of mine, I said that it had burned down but I'm now questioning where I heard that. An online search doesn't yield any such information except from sites that seem to have read or quoted what I wrote. Maybe someone reading this who has access to one of those online newspaper archives can see what they can find out about it.
I do remember that a few years later, a new restaurant was announced for the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Doheny — not that far away — and it was said that it would emulate Ollie Hammond's with a similar menu and 24 hour service. It was called Kate Mantilini but then it didn't offer either and while it was a decent place to dine, I'm still feeling a little disappointment, more so after it closed in June of 2014. It was there for 27 years but then the landlord raised the rent too much (in the opinion of Kate Mantilini's owners) and I think that space may still be vacant.
All that remains of Ollie Hammond's are a few bits of memorabilia like this very, very old menu…
Click above to see the thing larger
And this postcard…
Click above to make it a little bigger on your screen
And here we have some unassembled matchbook covers, one from when Ollie Hammond's had three locations in town. The one on Wilshire would have been near the Ambassador Hotel. The one at Third and Fairfax would have been very convenient to me and I might be there right now having a steak or that great hash. As I guess I've made pretty clear, I really liked the place.
It was sad when they turned the last outpost of Woody's Smorgasburger, down on Sepulveda just South of LAX, into an International House of Pancakes. Lo, how the mighty have fallen. In the sixties, there were Woody's all over California, including a wonderful one in Westwood Village, a block or three from U.C.L.A., where I could often be found between (and once in a while, even during) classes. Woody's was the first chain I know of where you could get a hamburger and then carry it over to a little self-service counter stocked with ketchup, mustard, onions, pickles, salsa, barbecue sauce, etc., and do whatever you wanted to it. Today, there are chains aplenty that offer this but at the time, it was something rather special.
Woody's burgers were pretty darn good too, with a nice barbecue flavor…and every Woody's also had a "make your own sundae" bar: You could get an empty dish at the counter, fill it full of soft-serve vanilla ice cream, then slather it in a diverse selection of syrups and sprinkles and crushed nuts and such. My old comic club buddies and I would practically have a contest to see how much sundae we could get in one dish, building structurally-unsafe vertical arrays, then trying to walk them back to the table and devour the top stories before it all collapsed.
One of the guys once asked if he was allowed to put the toppings from the sundae bar on his burger or vice-versa. When they told him yes, he began speculating on what hot fudge or whipped cream would do to a hamburger, and whether the maraschino cherries would blend with the mustard or if he should leave the mustard off. Each visit to Woody's, he'd say, "Next time, I'm going to try it," but he never worked up the courage. Or wanted to spoil a good smorgasburger.
