Why Restaurant Row matters.
Restaurant Row is a storied enclave where Mid-City West's commercial character meets the concentration of destination dining that turned La Cienega Boulevard into one of twentieth-century Los Angeles's most famous culinary corridors.
Positioned between Beverly Grove, Beverly Hills, and West Hollywood, the neighborhood occupies a north-south corridor centered on La Cienega Boulevard, where the street crosses Wilshire and Beverly boulevards before climbing toward the Sunset Strip. Broad roadway dimensions, deep commercial parcels and a succession of freestanding restaurant buildings created an unusually theatrical streetscape built to capture motorists moving between western Los Angeles and Hollywood. La Cienega Boulevard supplies the primary encounter as restaurant façades, porte-cochères, signs and setback entrances unfold sequentially along a corridor conceived around automobile arrival. Short east-west streets create a secondary spatial pattern, repeatedly exposing the boulevard through side approaches and placing its larger commercial buildings against lower residential districts on either side. The result is a neighborhood whose physical form preserves the automobile-era conditions that allowed dining itself to become a destination industry along a single Los Angeles thoroughfare.
What defines Restaurant Row.
Restaurant Row is best known for the extraordinary concentration of restaurants that developed along La Cienega Boulevard after Lawrence Frank and Walter Van de Kamp opened Lawry's The Prime Rib in 1938. Frank had already helped create the Van de Kamp bakery business and Tam O'Shanter before selecting a La Cienega property amid mustard fields for a restaurant centered on prime rib, priced at $1.25 at opening. Sheldon McHenry followed with Tail o' the Cock, and Ollie Hammond's Steak House arrived the following year, accelerating a clustering effect that transformed the boulevard during the 1940s. Webster's, House of Murphy, Paul Cummins Gay 90s and Sarnez expanded the concentration, joined by Stear's for Steaks and Richlor's under Frank and Van de Kamp. Richlor's occupied a building Frank erected in 1941 and took its name from his children Richard and Lorraine, giving the founders a second substantial foothold along the corridor. Smith Bros. Fish Shanty joined the street in 1950 and eventually became famous for a whale-mouth entrance covered in blue mosaic tile, turning roadside architecture into part of the restaurant's public persona. The Restaurant Row Association promoted the concentration collectively as La Cienega became a dining destination extending beyond any single establishment. Art Wynne of Lawry's secured Beverly Hills approval during the 1960s for directional Restaurant Row signs flanking Wilshire Boulevard, formalizing a name already associated with the street for decades. By the middle of the 1950s, the corridor had reached such commercial intensity that thousands of diners were arriving nightly, making La Cienega a defining concentration of postwar restaurant culture in Los Angeles.
The corridor entered a different culinary chapter as its original generation of large themed establishments began disappearing and ambitious new operators occupied the boulevard. L'Ermitage and L'Orangerie extended the dining concentration north toward Santa Monica Boulevard during the 1970s, strengthening La Cienega's association with formal French cooking. By 1986, 35 establishments lined the Row and as many as 6,000 meals were being served there on a busy Saturday night, even after several earlier institutions had closed. Restaurateur Rich Melman subsequently brought Ed Debevic's to a former Mediterranean-themed property, using an exaggerated 1950s diner concept inside a building with roots extending to the early 1940s. Nobu Matsuhisa opened Matsuhisa on La Cienega in 1987 after working in Peru, where Japanese techniques had intersected with ingredients unavailable in his native cuisine. His Los Angeles cooking incorporated chile, garlic, olive oil, butter and caviar into preparations rooted in sushi and sashimi, creating the foundation for an international restaurant career that later carried the Nobu name across the world. The shift from sprawling postwar dining rooms toward chef-driven restaurants changed the commercial scale of the Row without severing its longstanding role as a place where new restaurant concepts gained unusually high visibility. La Cienega moved through successive culinary eras, from midcentury steak houses and themed dining rooms to French haute cuisine and Matsuhisa's Japanese-Peruvian cooking, with reinvention functioning as a defining feature of the corridor for more than half a century.
How Restaurant Row fits.
Restaurant Row works as the anchor for an outing connecting an Art Deco movie palace, an automobile museum housed inside a radically altered department store and an independent institution whose origins joined food with handmade art.
Begin at Saban Theatre, opened in 1930 as the Fox Wilshire and designed by S. Charles Lee during the opening phase of a career that eventually encompassed hundreds of theaters. Fox West Coast Theatres commissioned the 2,500-seat building as a black, silver and coral Art Deco composition combining its auditorium with commercial, office and residential space, and the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers inaugurated the screen on opening night. Its unusually wide proscenium later accommodated long engagements of widescreen films, including The Sound of Music in 1965; conversion to stage use followed in 1980, Temple Shalom for the Arts acquired the property in 2005 and the Saban name arrived in 2009. Continue to Petersen Automotive Museum, founded by magazine publisher Robert E. Petersen and Margie Petersen in 1994 to examine the automobile's place in American culture. The museum eventually occupied a 1962 department store building by Welton Becket, then underwent a $90 million reconstruction completed in 2015 by Kohn Pedersen Fox, whose exterior intervention wrapped the structure in sweeping stainless-steel ribbons over a red shell. More than 150 vehicles occupy 25 rotating exhibitions inside, giving the institution a particularly fitting position in a city whose twentieth-century growth became inseparable from automobile transportation and design. Conclude at Craft Contemporary, whose institutional history began when painter Edith Robinson Wyle opened The Egg and the Eye in 1965 inside a 1930 neo-Georgian building by Gilbert Stanley Underwood. Wyle combined a restaurant devoted to omelets with exhibitions of handmade objects, and the inaugural display brought together Native Alaskan sculpture, J. B. Blunk wood sculpture and works by Beatrice Wood and Harrison Mcintosh. The enterprise became the Craft & Folk Art Museum in 1973, launched the International Festival of Masks in 1976, received a Hodgetts & Fung building renovation completed in 1995 and adopted the Craft Contemporary name in 2018. The progression moves from Lee's interwar movie palace through a museum devoted to Los Angeles automobile culture and culminates at Wyle's fusion of food and handmade art, connecting entertainment, mobility and independent cultural production around Restaurant Row.
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