Why All Time matters.
All Time is an intimate neighborhood restaurant where Los Feliz's independent Hillhurst Avenue culture meets Ashley Bernee's hospitality, a market-driven kitchen and an indoor-outdoor property shaped around gardens, communal dining and all-day service.
Set along Hillhurst Avenue near Franklin Avenue and just steps from Los Feliz Branch Library, the restaurant occupies a compact commercial stretch below Griffith Park, with neighborhood storefronts lining the avenue and residential streets climbing east toward the foothills. Blonde wood tables, art-directed shelving and a long communal table give the original dining room a domestic scale, with a street-facing window opening the interior toward the sidewalk. An adjoining patio extends beneath mature planting into a collection of protected dining pockets, supplemented by a deck, open-air greenhouse and garden bar. Low lighting shifts those interconnected areas after sunset, tightening the visual field around tables as the planted perimeter separates them from surrounding buildings. The result is a deeply personal collection of rooms and gardens whose small scale, layered planting and sheltered tables make the property feel embedded within its residential surroundings.
What defines All Time.
All Time is best known for Tyler Wells and Ashley Bernee opening a Los Feliz restaurant in 2018 that evolved from a daytime café into a full breakfast, lunch and dinner operation centered on market-driven cooking and deeply personal hospitality. Wells entered the project after co-founding Handsome Coffee Roasters, the influential Arts District company acquired by Blue Bottle Coffee in 2014, bringing a professional coffee background into his first standalone restaurant. The pair took over the former Twenty40 space, retained its employees and reopened quickly with Wells running coffee, chef Jake Cohen leading the opening kitchen and Bernee overseeing drinks. Wells built the original blonde tables himself and opened the previously concealed patio toward the sidewalk, beginning a physical evolution that continued after the restaurant's first years. Dinner subsequently became a major part of the operation, broadening the food from daytime eggs, bread, salads and sandwiches into seasonal roasts, ragùs, whole fish and large-format meat preparations. Bernee developed a handwritten wine list emphasizing small growers and producers with direct agricultural involvement, including California makers such as Scar of the Sea, La Onda and Wavy Wines. A deck and outdoor bar expanded the garden, and a filigreed greenhouse created a secluded dining area beneath the planting. The neighboring wood-paneled room became another extension of the property, eventually developing into Grandpa, a retail shop that opens for wine, food, vinyl and chess on Thursday evenings. The Wellses published The Cook Book of All Time through HarperCollins in 2024, translating fifty restaurant recipes, essays and practical cooking instruction into their first cookbook. Ownership later changed after Tyler and Ashley separated, with Ashley taking control of All Time and Tyler moving forward with his Altadena restaurant. All Time continues under Bernee with daily breakfast, lunch and dinner, an in-house baking program, seasonal menus, a garden bar, private dining and a wine club, extending a small Hillhurst café into a multifaceted neighborhood restaurant.
Seasonality governs the kitchen by allowing peak produce to determine the supporting structure around fish, meat, grains and bread as ingredients move through the year. Vegetables arrive with enough prominence to function as structural parts of a plate, carrying acidity, sweetness, bitterness or char into richer central ingredients. A whole roasted fish demonstrates that principle particularly clearly, since its size creates a communal centerpiece and its clean flesh leaves room for seasonal vegetables, herbs, citrus and cooking juices to shape successive bites. Crisp rice changes the texture beneath fish by creating a browned, brittle surface capable of absorbing those juices after cooking, joining soft flesh to a firmer grain base. The Big Steak Event applies the same ingredient-first logic at greater richness, placing a substantial cut of beef at the center of a shared table and letting vegetables, sauces and starches distribute its fat across the meal. Ashley's lamb ragù moves concentration into slow cooking, breaking meat down into a sauce whose richness adheres to starch and carries seasoning through the complete preparation. Salads provide the counterweight through raw or lightly cooked produce, assertive dressing and changing market ingredients, keeping freshness central even beside heavier roasts. Bread performs another connective role since the restaurant bakes its loaves, burger buns, pastries and sweets in house, giving the kitchen control over the starch accompanying both daytime and dinner food. The changing menu preserves this structure across seasons: produce establishes the direction, direct cooking concentrates the principal ingredient, and bread, rice or another starch receives the juices and sauces generated around it. All Time builds its food around that recurring relationship, letting seasonal ingredients determine how richness, acidity, char and texture are distributed across plates designed for straightforward communal eating.
How All Time fits.
All Time works as the meal anchor for a Los Feliz route connecting an unusual concrete bridge, Frank Lloyd Wright's first Los Angeles commission and the hilltop observatory that became one of the city's great public science institutions.
Begin at Shakespeare Bridge, completed in 1926 across a ravine carrying Franklin Avenue through the Franklin Hills. J.C. Wright designed the reinforced-concrete structure with Gothic-inspired towers, pointed openings and decorative elements that give the compact crossing a theatrical profile unusual among Los Angeles road bridges. The city designated it a Historic-Cultural Monument in 1974, preserving a piece of infrastructure whose ornamental treatment turned an ordinary neighborhood crossing into a recognizable work of civic design. Earthquake damage later prompted substantial reconstruction, with the bridge rebuilt to modern structural requirements while retaining its historic appearance. Continue to Hollyhock House, commissioned by oil heiress and theatre producer Aline Barnsdall as the centerpiece of an arts complex on Olive Hill. Frank Lloyd Wright constructed the residence between 1919 and 1921 as his first Los Angeles commission, developing a regional architectural direction distinct from his Midwestern Prairie work. Barnsdall's favorite flower appears in stylized art stone, furniture, textiles and art glass throughout the house. The commission also brought Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra into contact with Los Angeles, linking the property to architects who subsequently became central figures in Southern California Modernism. Barnsdall donated the house and surrounding acreage to Los Angeles in 1927, and UNESCO inscribed Hollyhock House in 2019 as part of The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, making it Los Angeles' first World Heritage Site. Conclude at Griffith Observatory, whose 1935 opening fulfilled Griffith J. Griffith's plan for a public astronomy institution accessible to the people of Los Angeles. Architects John C. Austin and Frederick M. Ashley designed the building in a combination of Art Deco and Greek influences, positioning its domes and terraces high on the southern slope of Mount Hollywood. Griffith's bequest funded an observatory, exhibit hall and planetarium conceived around public access to astronomical science. Telescopes placed celestial observation directly into that civic mission as the elevated site simultaneously opened immense views across the Los Angeles basin. The progression moves from decorative neighborhood infrastructure through Wright's pivotal experiment on Olive Hill and culminates above Los Feliz at Griffith Observatory, where architecture, astronomy and the surrounding city occupy the same extraordinary hilltop setting.
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