CULTURE AND CUISINE IN DTLA
Suitably nourished by lazy days on the beach, luxurious hotel lobbies and lavish organic lunches, it’s time to venture downtown to feast on culture. Dorothy Parker pithily accused LA of being “72 suburbs in search of a city”, but she was right to observe the distinct flavours and dazzling diversity between neighbourhoods, and edgy, effervescent DTLA is a glorious contrast to the salubrious shine of Santa Monica.
Santa Monica, LA’s much-heralded Metro E Line takes you into the heart of DTLA in under an hour, deftly avoiding the notoriously clogged freeways. Downtown LA has hugely upped its cultural and architectural credentials in recent years, with a cluster of Frank Gehry-designed buildings like the
Walt Disney Concert Hall and Liz Diller’s Broad contemporary art museum, and the 32-acre ROW DTLA, a haven of design stores, hip restaurants, artist’s studios in the Arts District, right around the corner from Bestia, a fabulous multi-regional Italian restaurant that is still the city’s most name-droppable booking. In 2016, gallery royalty Hauser & Wirth gave DTLA’s Arts District their seal of approval, opening a gallery in a former flour mill.
Beyond galleries, design stores and hit-restaurants, DTLA also has Broadway. It’s nothing like New York’s Broadway, London’s West End or Melbourne’s East End, but it’s still something. And as a sucker for faded grandeur and Hollywood golden age nostalgia, I find it quite something. Over the past decade the old art deco theatres and skyscrapers have been conserved and restored, notably The Bradbury (which stars in Blade Runner), The Orpheum Theatre and the United Artists Theatre building, now the 182-room Ace Hotel. Grand Central Market on Broadway has been a downtown landmark since 1917, but a new generation of social-media-savvy vendors has pumped fresh blood into this covered market. City workers blithely queue for 45 minutes for the legendary egg sandwiches at Eggslut, while Sticky Rice serves exemplary Thai street food, and Golden Road Brewing washes it all down. DTLA’s regeneration has also seen a steady flow of design-led city hotels. The slick and stylish Hoxton Downtown LA sits a few doors down from the more luxurious Downtown LA Proper Hotel, about a 15-minute walk from Grand Central Market.
STAY Ace Hotel, acehotel.com; Downtown LA Proper Hotel, properhotel.com; Hoxton Downtown LA, thehoxton.com
EAT Bestia, bestiala.com; Eggslut, eggslut.com;
Sticky Rice, eatstickyrice.com.
DRINK Golden Road Brewing, goldenroad.la