There is no one perfect time of day to visit a classic diner or coffee shop in Los Angeles. There is only your perfect time.
Mine falls around 10:45 in the morning, when I’ve likely had nothing more than coffee to start the day and my tastes are wavering between breakfast and lunch. Omelet and pancakes? Patty melt with fries and a salad? Probably some of each.
The moment in L.A.’s diners and coffee shops
I thought a lot about the moments and places in our lives for American diners while writing a review, published in The Times this week, of Max & Helen’s, an ode to these neighborhood institutions conceived by culinary celebrities Phil Rosenthal and Nancy Silverton.
There was plenty to parse: the extravagantly reported-on wait times (which have lessened greatly in six months, unless you show up at noon on a Sunday); the community utility of the everyday diner (which exists to sustain, usually absent the heights of Silverton’s precision-tuned recipes); and the actual quality of the food (the waffle, with its three-day fermented batter, veers into a new category of griddled pastry).
Chef Nancy Silverton, Phil Rosenthal, Lily Rosenthal Royal and Mason Royal at Max & Helen’s in Larchmont.
(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
Making sense of Max & Helen’s for myself meant revisiting the long-standing L.A. diner to which I’m most drawn, Pann’s Restaurant in Westchester.
In dense cities like New York and Chicago, one’s relationship to a diner might hinge on proximity: the block on which you live or work, or once lived or worked, or the place with the decent banana cream pie you scarf down in rebellion after a trip to the dentist. Translated to the realities of Los Angeles (navigated a few years back when Jenn Harris, Stephanie Breijo and I compiled a guide to the city’s best diners), that might mean a short drive. For me, that would be Nick’s Cafe in Chinatown, where I ask for the signature plate of ham steak and eggs, squiggled with salsa always served on the side in squeeze bottles plus a couple extra shots of hot sauce.
Pann’s is worthy of a trek, though, and for visiting friends who aren’t insistent on Gjelina upon arrival, the restaurant is four miles from LAX and lightspeed entry into Southern California culture.
Step inside Pann’s
If you’ve gazed at Pann’s — standing on a triangular patch of land amid the intersections of South La Tijera Boulevard, West Centila Avenue and La Cienega Boulevard since 1958 — but never stopped, let its canary-yellow neon sign and tilted, wildly angled roof finally beckon you inside. The terrazzo floors, flagstone walls and mid-century modern geometries are gleamingly preserved landmarks of L.A.’s nearly vanished Googie architecture style. There’s a great story about Helen Liu Fong, a prominent architect of the 1950s and 1960s who worked with the firm Armet & Davis, which designed Pann’s: She felt like one of the restaurant’s original white-tiled walls was too dull, so she painted some of its squares with red nail polish so they would pop.
The exterior of Pann’s Restaurant, which opened in Westchester in 1958.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Googie is synonymous with post-World War II futurism, an expanding American middle class visualizing the Space Age in present tense, though books like “Orange Roofs, Golden Arches: The Architecture of American Chain Restaurants” by Philip Langdon make the point that the design had practical purposes. Coffee shops and diners were cropping up everywhere. Competition demanded eye-catching enticements, even if the menus traded in the sort of sameness that equated to comfort.
George and Rena Panagopoulos commissioned the space and eventually shortened their name to Poulos. Jim Poulos, their son, continues to run the restaurant.
Only in the most ubiquitous iterations can you find references to the family’s Greek heritage: a “Greek salad” with chickpeas, feta, cucumbers and olives numbering among its ingredients, the sharpness of feta again appearing in the “Greek omelet” filled with spinach and tomatoes.
The interior of Pann’s Restaurant in Westchester.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
What pulls me to Pann’s is a subtler Southern thread running through its menu. Fried chicken over waffles, sure, but also salmon croquettes, macaroni and cheese crowned with crumbled bacon, downy and slightly sweet biscuits, fried catfish easily ordered with a side of grits and collard greens that are occasionally swapped for wonderfully peppery green beans served in tomato sauce with carrots and potatoes.
The restaurant resides at the cusp of Los Angeles’ historically Black neighborhoods of Ladera Heights and Inglewood, and I’m guessing these dishes, among flapjacks and tuna melts and chicken salads, might have been tailored over time to individual tastes among generations of Black customers.
The real caloric nostalgia tripwire for this transplanted Southerner: country-fried steak, spread nearly to its nubbly edges with cream gravy suspending bits of sausage.
And in the way of diners and coffee shops, it’s all soothingly fine — no revelations, no dramatic pronouncements about best this or greatest that. I take a bite out of a patty melt (Swiss cheese subbed for American, zero issues), sink a fork into a soft stack of lemon-scented pancakes, saw into the battered crust of the country-fried steak.
The highest value of diners is their beautiful thereness, but admittedly Pann’s is something more: a place where past and future collide, not in theories of relativity but in curving red booths and in swipes of milky, meaty gravy.
The patty melt at Pann’s Restaurant.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
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