Why Diddy Riese matters.
Diddy Riese is an enduring dessert shop where Westwood Village's UCLA-centered commercial character meets scratch-baked cookies, custom ice cream sandwiches and a value-driven tradition sustained since the early 1980s.
Set along Broxton Avenue near Weyburn Avenue and just steps from Regency Village Theatre, the shop occupies the historic commercial core of Westwood Village immediately south of UCLA, with Wilshire Boulevard defining the district's southern edge, Holmby Hills extending west beyond the campus and the high-rise Wilshire Corridor running east toward Beverly Hills. The narrow storefront concentrates production and service into a compact footprint whose glass frontage places the bakery counter directly against Broxton Avenue's pedestrian activity. Fresh cookies move continuously from the ovens toward the display and assembly counter, making warm baked components central to the encounter with the shop. A roped exterior queue accommodates the lines that have become a familiar Broxton Avenue sight, extending the small operation into the surrounding sidewalk. The result is a remarkably compact dessert shop whose visible baking, fast counter assembly and street-facing queue have made a modest Westwood storefront part of UCLA-area food culture for more than four decades.
What defines Diddy Riese.
Diddy Riese is best known for building an unusually durable Westwood business around inexpensive scratch-baked cookies before adding the custom ice cream sandwich that became its signature product. The shop opened in 1983, taking its unusual name from the founder's grandmother and selling cookies for 25 cents during its early years. Owner Mark Perry maintained an aggressive value strategy as UCLA students and Westwood residents turned the small bakery into a regular neighborhood destination, and a nearby Mrs. Fields failed to displace the lines forming outside the Broxton shop. The custom ice cream sandwich debuted in 1995, placing a scoop between two freshly baked cookies selected independently by the customer and creating the product most closely associated with the business. Perry held the sandwich at its original one-dollar price until 2006, when a 25-cent increase drew coverage from the Los Angeles Times after 23 years of remarkably stable pricing. The business preserved the same underlying concept through later decades, producing cookies and brownies from an original family recipe and developing the capacity to fulfill orders ranging into hundreds of dozens. UCLA alumni culture strengthened that longevity, with generations of students incorporating the shop into routines surrounding classes, finals and basketball games at Pauley Pavilion.
Ten scratch-made cookie varieties currently create the foundation for the dessert counter, spanning chocolate chip, chocolate chip walnut, candy chocolate chip, chocolate white chocolate, double chocolate, oatmeal raisin walnut, peanut butter, sugar cinnamon, white chocolate and white chocolate macadamia. The ice cream sandwich places two of those freshly baked cookies around a scoop of Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream, with twelve ice cream flavors supplying enough variation for markedly different combinations. Choosing separate cookies for the top and bottom expands the contrast further, pairing crisp edges and soft centers with cold ice cream before the cookies fully cool. Brownies carry the same original family-recipe foundation into a denser chocolate preparation, and sundaes shift the frozen component away from the handheld sandwich format. Hawaiian shave ice adds a distinctly different frozen preparation beside the bakery-driven core, broadening the counter without altering the cookies-and-ice-cream combination that has defined Diddy Riese since 1995. The strongest construction remains exceptionally simple: two warm bakery components, one cold center and customer-selected flavors assembled immediately at the counter.
How Diddy Riese fits.
Diddy Riese works as the anchor for a Westwood outing connecting a museum created from an industrialist's private collection, a small cemetery that became closely associated with Hollywood and a Moderne theater returned to live performance through UCLA stewardship.
Begin at Hammer Museum, founded by Occidental Petroleum chairman Armand Hammer and opened to the public in November 1990 in a building designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes beside the company's Westwood headquarters. Occidental financed the museum to house Hammer's Old Master and nineteenth-century European paintings, drawings and extensive holdings connected with Honoré Daumier, but Hammer died three weeks after opening with portions of the complex unfinished. UCLA began negotiations to assume operations in 1992, finalized the partnership in 1994 and subsequently moved the Wight Art Gallery and Grunwald Center collections into the museum, fundamentally expanding the institution beyond Hammer's private holdings. Continue to Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park, whose earliest burials reach the 1880s before formal establishment as Sunset Cemetery in 1905 and renaming as Westwood Memorial Park in 1926. The first mausoleum arrived in 1952, preceding the burial of Marilyn Monroe in 1962 and the cemetery's later concentration of figures including Billy Wilder, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Dean Martin, Natalie Wood, Ray Bradbury and Frank Zappa. Its 2.5-acre scale remains strikingly small beside Los Angeles' larger burial grounds, compressing an unusual concentration of twentieth-century film, music and literary history into a secluded property within Westwood Village. Conclude at UCLA Nimoy Theater, which opened on Christmas Day 1940 as the 500-seat UCLAN, financed by Frances Seymour Fonda and designed by Arthur W. Hawes for film and live performance. Renamed the Crest in the 1950s, it became a first-run cinema before theater designer Joseph Musil remade its interior in 1987 with Art Deco detailing, black-light murals depicting 1930s Hollywood architecture and a fiber-optic ceiling of illuminated stars. UCLA acquired the property in 2018 with support from Susan Bay Nimoy, then rehabilitated it as a performance venue honoring Leonard Nimoy while preserving significant portions of Musil's interior work. The progression moves from Armand Hammer's private collection becoming a UCLA cultural institution through a small cemetery transformed by Hollywood burials and culminates in a 1940 theater carried from cinema through elaborate late-century redesign into a new life under UCLA, tracing Westwood's unusual convergence of university culture, art and entertainment.
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