● Wired 📅 21/05/2026 à 21:47

Tech & Innovation 👤 Jordan Michelman

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In TransitPortlandChicagoSeattleSan FranciscoTwin CitiesDumboSave this storySave this storyThe very name Los Angeles—the “City of Angels”—is plural for a reason. This place contains multitudes; it is not any one thing or singular set of shared realities, but rather a series of overlapping metaphysical geographies, vast and intimidating and yet surprisingly human, intimate and personal. There’s nowhere else quite like it.I’ve been traveling to Los Angeles several times a year for the past decade for myriad reasons: to experience the city’s coffee scene as a cofounder at the international coffee publication Sprudge, to report on the city’s food and bar scene as a contributor to LA Times Food, and as an enthusiastic consumer of LA’s uniquely unrivaled cultural smorgasbord. I go there to work and play, alone and with friends and family, for short trips and extended stays. Along the way, there are parts of the city that have begun to feel familiar and comfortable and others that remain baffling and hard to pin down. All of it remains distinctly compelling. Call me Randy Newman if you’d like: I love LA.In no way does any of this mark me as an expert; Angelenos are rightly wary of outsiders beaming in to make claims on their city. Nothing I can write about LA could ever be definitive, and I apologize in advance for so much of what I’m leaving out, but over the years I’ve learned about places and experiences that help you make the most of your time in the city, however long or short that might be. Below you’ll find a collection of places to stay, play, work, and lose yourself in the bottomless Olympic-size deep-end pool of LA culture.Los Angeles is more beautiful than you’re prepared for. There’s urban grit here, of course, and freeways and off-ramps and parking lots, but also perfumed hillsides alive with birdsong and flowering citrus trees, hundreds of miles of hiking trails, gorgeous mountains framing the city to the east, flowers everywhere, and the world-famous beaches. Griffith Park offers a glimpse of this beauty, and so do hikes around Moon Canyon in the hills of Mount Washington. But one of my favorite things to do is pull off the main thoroughfares and explore the hills, particularly in the area around the famed Laurel Canyon and Mulholland Drive. Every single visit to Los Angeles involves being staggered by the city’s beauty in some way. Even in downtown, where the streets might not sparkle, you need only look up a story or two to take in the stunning art deco facades of the city’s early 20th-century building boom.Jump to SectionAccordionItemContainerButtonWhere to StayWhere to WorkWhere to EatWhere to DrinkExplore a Little MoreWhere to StayThe first rule of where to stay in LA is to ask, “Where am I going to need to be on this trip?” Remember—we want to cut down on car time and cross-city travel so you can enjoy more stuff. Here’s a handful of hotels, each in very different sections of the city, that would make fine base camps for further exploration, plus one hotel so famous and classic I would be remiss not to include its glories on this list.Silver Lake Pool & Inn4141 Santa Monica Blvd., Silver Lake, (323) 486-7225Book NowLocated just off Silver Lake junction—where Sunset Boulevard meets Santa Monica Boulevard—this hotel is ideally located if you’ve got stuff happening in Silver Lake, Echo Park, Los Feliz, or East Hollywood. Koreatown and Hollywood proper aren’t far, either, and it’s a short hop across the river for hangs in Highland Park, Atwater Village, and Mount Washington.Silver Lake Pool & Inn oozes LA to me. A former motor inn turned into a don’t-call-it-hipster, “upwardly mobile young urban adult with expendable income” playhouse, the hotel’s epic second-floor pool, courtyard restaurant, and comfortable desert-motif rooms tick a lot of boxes. You could work by the pool; you could walk to the spiffy new Erewhon location next door for a $20 celebrity smoothie (they are unfortunately very good); you could walk another block up to the original LA location of Intelligentsia Coffee, the first really important modern coffee bar to open in the city. For the truly bold and cheap among us with a particularly high risk tolerance for such things (it me), there’s even street parking to be sussed out in the neighborhood directly above the hotel, which allows you to skip the valet fee. I’ve stayed here several times and will do so again.Photograph: Jordan MichelmanProper Hotel Downtown1110 S. Broadway, (213) 806-1010Book NowDowntown LA is its own center of orbit, and if you’ve got work events—say, at the LA Convention Center or in the area around LA Live and the Staples Center—it is eminently worth your while to stay close to the area.This is also advisable because DTLA kind of rules; you will find recommendations for bars and restaurants there a bit later in this guide. The hotel scene here is plentiful, but I really enjoyed a recent stay at the Proper Hotel. The hotel’s interiors were designed by Kelly Wearstler, an A-list designer and best-selling author whose work personifies SoCal in the early 21st century, drawing on the city’s art deco tradition with influences from Morocco, Spain, Mexico, and Portugal. The lobby also features a truly cool ceramic mural from beloved LA local ceramicist Ben Medansky. There’s a rooftop bar and a lovely contemporary restaurant on the main floor, and the guest rooms are plushly appointed, with over-the-top suites if it’s in your budget. The Proper’s location on Broadway is a short walk to the epic DTLA Apple Store, the basketball arena, the convention center, and anything else you’ve got on your neighborhood list.Palihotel Westwood Village1044 Tiverton Ave., (310) 340-1234Book NowThe Westside is its own cultural epicenter, and I’ve found myself spending more and more time here over the past few years. If you’ve got work needs happening around UCLA, Sawtelle, Beverly Hills, or out toward the beach, staying in this part of town makes sense.Westwood is sort of a college town within a city, home to UCLA and its many offshoots. This hotel is part of the wider Palisociety group, which is based in California and now has hotels around the country (I recommended their Pike Place Market location in WIRED’s recent Seattle guide). Located inside a historic hotel building from 1939, this Palihotel location is comfortable and stylish, with free Wi-Fi throughout and a soft, inviting design. Approachable, affordable, bathed in West LA light and sunshine, I love this place as a base camp for assorted Westside adventures.Photograph: Jordan MichelmanThe Garland4222 Vineland Ave., North Hollywood, (818) 980-8000Book Now“The Valley” isn’t just one place, either—a collection of unique cities and subcultures that occupy the environs north of LA proper, this is the land of Paul Thomas Anderson films, immortalized in the music of Tom Petty and Frank Zappa. If you’re in the Southlands for events in and around the television and film industry, or to check out the Universal Studios theme park complex, you’ll save time and money by staying close.The Garland is your Valley adventure home port. This place manages the neat trick of being both hip and eminently utilitarian: You could come here to lounge by the pool, take in the gardens, and hang out at the busy bars and restaurants, or you could use this place as a spot to drop your bags between all the other things you’re in town to do. There’s an impressively beautiful outdoor pool (with a massive fireplace), guided neighborhood tours (the Brady Bunch house is nearby), and ample parking. The whole thing has a Spanish colonial flair with flashes of 1970s tiki. This place gets double points if you happen to be traveling with your family—kids love the Garland.Photograph: Jordan MichelmanChateau Marmont8221 Sunset Blvd., (323) 656-1010Book NowI don’t know what you’re here in town for, or what qualifies to you, personally, as a business trip. The hotels I’ve recommended so far are all swell, but I’ve included them first and foremost for reasons of practicality and geography. That’s not why you stay at the Chateau. You come here instead for the myth and the history, the infamy and the iconic status of it all: here, where Duke Ellington composed “Swingin’ Suites,” where Stephen Stills wrote “For What It’s Worth” (“stop, hey, what’s that sound”), where Jim Morrison swung from the chandeliers, where Dominic Dunne lived while reporting the OJ Simpson trial for Vanity Fair. God only knows what’s gone on in these elevators, to say nothing of the guest rooms, which are appointed more like apartments and come swathed in spectral haunted metaphysical atmosphere, baked in California sunshine.You can work here; so much incredible work has happened here! Nicholas Ray and James Dean rehearsed Rebel Without a Cause here! Whatever project it is you’ve got cooking—a novel, a screenplay, a symphony, or just a humble pitch deck—I don’t think there’s a concept in the world that can’t be improved by injecting a little Chateau mystique into its DNA. You will see celebrities; you will find quiet moments to yourself among the ghosts; you will find yourself quietly reflecting to yourself, alone in your room, “Holy shit, I can’t believe I’m really here!” There’s no other hotel in the world that is remotely like it.Where to WorkLA is freelancer central, and the sort of place where working on your screenplay (or whatever) from the bar or coffee shop has attained a kind of mythical status. The city has plenty to offer in the form of traditional coworking spaces, private clubs, and laptop gardens. Here are some of my favorites.Centrl Office360 E. 2nd St., 8th floor, (213) 433-2400The Centrl Office chain of coworking spaces is well-represented across Los Angeles, with locations in Downtown and Marina Del Ray, and two spots in the South Bay city of El Segundo, aka “Silicon Beach” (at least one part of the wider massif known by this moniker). Each location has its own way of leaning into the “creative campus” vibe, offering a variegated array of services from suites and meeting rooms to day offices, drop-in coworking open plan spaces, and virtual office options that allow for mail and package delivery. Centrl Office does what it says on the tin—this is a classic approach to the coworking space model, and sometimes that’s exactly what you need, with supersonic Wi-Fi and printers and kitchens and lounges.The Preserve1370 N. St Andrews Place, (323) 381-5996Part coworking space, part event venue, the Preserve feels uniquely LA. Truly a campus take on coworking, the facility boasts more than 6,000 trees and plants, a very cool series of indoor/outdoor working spaces, a library, bungalows, studio offices, and meeting rooms, plus an on-site cafe and soundproof phone rooms. Wi-Fi here is 1 GB per second; there’s valet parking and nursing rooms and wellness classes and Corian desks; people run whole companies out of this facility, and also they host weddings. The building, which underwent a multimillion-dollar, award-winning renovation in the late 2010s, was originally designed by Paul Revere Williams, a patron saint of Los Angeles architecture and design whose other works include the iconic LAX spaceship tower and the Beverly Hills Hotel. If you’re looking for a Los Angeles experience for your coworking needs—perhaps with an intent to hunker down for multiple days, so as to truly absorb the entirety of what goes on here—the Preserve is for you.Rita House5971 W. 3rd St., (323) 933-2112Like the Preserve, the Rita House could only be here, in Los Angeles, but the two spaces couldn’t feel more different. Rita is located inside a 1927 Spanish colonial building originally constructed for prop and costume design for the film studio industry in Hollywood. The building’s unique history goes back to the roots of coworking as a creative pursuit. There are monthly membership options, day rates, and a real focus on content production, with dedicated rooms for self-tape auditions and podcast taping, as well as larger meeting and screening rooms. You’ll find the requisite high-speed Wi-Fi and business center amenities here, but it’s inside a space that feels more like classic Hollywood Boulevard than Sand Hill Road. Every great city has a coworking space that doubles as a people-watching and networking hub, and in LA I think that’s here.Dinosaur Coffee4334 Sunset Blvd., (213) 200-0969I love working from Los Angeles coffee shops, and Dinosaur is one of my favorites for this particular pursuit. Located on the border between Silver Lake, Los Feliz, and East Hollywood, this place is a creative laptop melee of people whose names you’ve seen in the writers’ credits at the end of various films and television shows—or those who’d like to someday be. The coffee comes from Woodcat Coffee, whose flagship store is over on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park, and the store is bright and full of that good California light. It just feels creative here—get shit done on the front patio, or eavesdrop on the interesting conversations all around you. I visit nearly every time I’m in LA.Where to EatHow could I pick 10 places to eat in Los Angeles? How could anyone pick 20, or 50, or 101 like they do each year at LA Times Food? That section’s weekly (daily!) reporting on food across LA should be something you start scouting now, in the weeks before your trip, so as to stay hip to the most interesting new stuff happening across the region. For me, these are 10 restaurants I’ve personally visited and enjoyed, running the gamut across price, location, and experience. They aren’t even necessarily my 10 favorite LA restaurants, but they’re all spots I’d gladly go back to, and in a city so thoroughly spoiled for choice, that’s saying something.Pijja PalaceReserve Now on DoorDash2736 W. Sunset Blvd., (213) 913-6850Avish Naran cracked some heretofore unknown atom when he opened Pijja Palace in 2022. I guess it is an Indian sports bar? But it is also sort of a red sauce Italian joint, a cocktail destination working more or less entirely in its own creative idiom, a really swell place to watch the Lakers lose their way through the dregs of the executive-produced-by-LeBron-James era, and so forth. There’s green chili pickle masala wings and korma curry pizzas and dosa onion rings (a required order) and plenty of beer from near and far to enjoy it all with. Do not miss ordering a cocktail here—this is quietly one of the more inventive cocktail programs in the city, which is saying something, because nothing is really quiet about Pijja Palace. Go here with a big group, or sneak in solo at the bar. I wish it were three times as big, but also I don’t want to change anything about it at all.Photograph: Jordan MichelmanGjusta320 Sunset Ave., Venice, (310) 314-0320At some point in the past decade, I developed a heavily optimized preflight routine out of LAX. It involves leaving 1.5 hours earlier for the airport than otherwise required and diverting off into the back avenues of Venice for a stop at Gjusta. It’s a kind of California deli and the younger sibling to the original Gjelina on Abbot-Kinney (now with a location at the Wynn Las Vegas); you’ll find cured seafood, smoked meats, salads, fresh bread, lots of jams and nut butters for takeaway, pastries and coffee, juice, crispy California pizza slices, and much more. There’s a sun-drenched outdoor courtyard situation, bar seating clustered around the La Marzocco espresso machine, and a happy buzz of deli energy, transported into something distinctly modern and SoCal.I have never had bad food here but have repeatedly ordered dishes including the salmon roe bagel (this is my favorite bagel in LA, and yes, I have had the annoying TikTok ones), the paté baguette sandwich, the excellent pork and beef meatballs, the wonderfully fresh mezze plate, and the turkey club, which makes for wonderful eats on the airplane a few hours later. I buy pickles and jam and house-marinated olives to take home, and sometimes a little sleeve of pastrami lox to snack on in the Delta lounge (but not on the flight itself, that would be rude). Going here for me is imbued with the wistfulness of travel, the longing to return home that smashes into a kind of imagined reality of never leaving this place, as though staying in LA would be as easy as simply nosing my car the opposite direction of LAX, sandwich in hand, sustained for continued exploration.SpagoReserve Now on DoorDash176 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 385-0880There is no one Los Angeles—this we’ve established—but there is absolutely only one Wolfgang Puck, America’s original celebrity chef, who built a vision of Southern California cuisine in his own image all the way back in 1982, and nurtures a continued version of it here today in 2026. Named by Giorgio Moroder—no, really—Spago defined a certain era of California excess; you can practically hear the dulcet tones of Steely Dan’s Gaucho as you walk through the front doors. (“Drive west on Sunset to the sea …”)This is all catnip to a certain sort of nostalgia-addled millennial (it me), but for everyone else, it helps that Spago remains a damn good restaurant in the present day, outside of any throwback factor. The smoked salmon caviar pizza, Puck’s peerless Wiener schnitzel, carefully sourced proteins like quail from California’s Wolfe Ranch Farms—it’s all here, alongside a newly revamped cocktail program and smart wine list. The Beverly Hills Spago remains the crown jewel of the entire international Wolfgang Puck hospitality group, and it’s where you’re most likely to find the chef himself these days, who is cool to see in person.MareaReserve Now on DoorDash430 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 620-8463Elsewhere in the Beverly Hills restaurant scene, you’ll find Marea, where the focus is on Italian coastal cuisine. Zip code be damned (it’s 90210), the lunch prix-fixe options at Marea are a great deal starting at $38, and the restaurant is also capably set up to handle large parties and private dining. Dungeness crab parpadelle, langoustine scampi, and a 40-ounce tomahawk served with bone marrow panzanella await, as does Marea’s vast assorti of classic cocktails and wines. If your business dinner is budgeted for vintage Champagne and Grand Cru Burgundy, Marea is here for you.Photograph: Jordan MichelmanAl & Bea’s2023 E. 1st St., (323) 267-8810Now for something completely different. Al & Bea’s is a semi-enclosed taco stand in Boyle Heights, on the other side of two freeways and a river from downtown. It has served essentially the same menu since 1966, and it makes what is easily the best bean-and-cheese burrito I’ve ever had in my life. The beans are creamy and molten, cooked in a multiday technique that arrives at an ambrosial texture. The cheese is perfectly melted, the flour tortilla folds it all together, and there’s fresh salsa to push the flavor in green and red directions. Like trying to describe a perfect cheese pizza or a perfect potato latke or a perfect bowl of pho, you can try to describe the alchemy of these things in words or photographs, but you will fail. In a city rightly famous for its surfeit of cuisine from across Mexico, there is only one Al & Bea’s bean-and-cheese burrito.Moo’s Craft2118 N. Broadway, (323) 686-4667We live in a golden era of barbecue in America, where regional styles and inventive chefs have fused a serious devotion to craft with their own culinary traditions and interpretations. Moo’s Craft is located in Lincoln Heights, where the husband-and-wife duo behind the restaurant grew up. It started as a series of backyard pop-ups, then went brick-and-mortar in 2021. They make serious barbecue in a Texas style, influenced by the work of Aaron Franklin but shot through with the flavors of East LA. On your plate, it looks like achingly traditional low-and-slow smoked brisket alongside poblano queso Oaxaca sausage, thick picnic burgers on Bub & Grandma’s buns, and tres leches bread pudding fo

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