Followers of fashion
Los Angeles may be the only city in the world where it’s not unusual to have a serious business meeting by the poolside. While you may not be wearing a bathing suit, you probably won’t be wearing a tie, and there’s a good chance you’ll be sipping fruit juice or a cocktail under the shade of a cabana.
But the city’s ubiquitous palm trees, relentlessly blue skies and casual dress code belie a notoriously elitist culture when it comes to entertainment – the heartbeat of this town.
“The thing about Los Angeles is that it’s very much ruled by what’s new and what’s trendy,” says James G Little, head concierge at The Peninsula Beverly Hills. “Especially because of the element of Hollywood and the entertainment industry, it’s a very fashion-conscious city, so of course, whatever the newest, hottest restaurant is tends to be one of the most difficult tables to get.”
Right now, those hot tables include Thomas Keller’s French bistro-style Bouchon (www.bouchonbistro.com), next to the five-star Montage Beverly Hills; and The Bazaar restaurant (www.thebazaar.com) at the SLS Hotel, also in Beverly Hills. The Bazaar, created by Spanish Chef José Andrés, is that rare LA experience: an “it” restaurant with lavish decor and equally extravagant clientele, where the food – upscale tapas – is consistently excellent. Upscale Mexican restaurant Red O (www.redorestaurant.com) on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood is another hot table right now, though the emphasis here, as at most of the newer sought-after spots on the LA restaurant scene, is on a great bar, ambience and celebrity sightings, rather than the food.
The veterans
In addition to the new spots, there’s an elite old guard of restaurants that have been around for many years but are still at the top of their game, making them equally tough to get into. Mastro’s Steakhouse (www.mastrosrestaurants.com), Spago (www.wolfgangpuck.com) and Mr Chow (www.mrchow.com), all in Beverly Hills, fall into this category, as do Dan Tana’s (www.dantanasrestaurant.com) and Madeo (tel +1 310 859 4903) in West Hollywood.
Mastro’s, an upscale steak house, is a favourite among heavy-hitter business types, as is Italian fine-dining restaurant Madeo. Similarly high-priced – and so popular for impressing clients – is London import Mr Chow, one of only two Chinese restaurants in the city where you’re guaranteed not to escape cheaply.
The other high-priced Chinese table in LA is Wolfgang Puck’s WP24 (tel +1 213 743 8800) on the 24th floor of the new five-star Ritz-Carlton hotel in downtown LA, where you’re as likely to be dining with sportsmen and entertainers from the nearby Staples Center, a major sports and entertainment venue and home to the Lakers basketball team, as you are with local businesspeople.
Other downtown hot spots include Bottega Louie (www.bottegalouie.com), with Italian fare and a good-looking clientele; Church & State (www.churchandstatebistro.com), a popular combination of smart atmosphere, smart crowd and great food; and Mas Malo (tel +1 213 985 4332), an opulent new Mexican restaurant in a 1920s building that stocks more than 300 tequilas and 20 mezcals.
West side story
It’s worth noting that on the city’s West side, which includes Santa Monica and Venice, the cycle of new restaurant openings is much slower, and the most popular dining spots are much less fleeting and fluid than in Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Downtown.
“With the beach community, if these restaurants stick around it’s because they give exceptional service, and they’re not going anywhere,” observes Johnnie Hertlein, chief concierge at JW Marriott Santa Monica Le Merigot.
Boa Steakhouse (www.boasteak.com) in Santa Monica is a favourite with the local business crowd, praised for its impeccable service as much as its prime cuts of rib eye and views over the Pacific Ocean. Gjelina (www.gjelina.com) on fashionable Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice has a noisier, hopping vibe, praised by foodies and in demand among local hipsters with cash to spare.
Other established favourites are Capo (www.caporestaurant.com), an elegant Italian restaurant by the beach with just 13 tables and a very grown-up wine list; and Drago (www.celestinodrago.com), Sicilian cuisine in an old-fashioned setting favoured by top producers and their clients. Katsuya in Brentwood is as good a chance at celebrity-spotting as you’re going to get on the West side (www.sbe.com/katsuya).
All-day dining
In Los Angeles, a big deal is as likely to be done over breakfast as lunch or dinner. And a haunt that might be hopping at breakfast time can be dead by 11am.
For breakfast, some of the busiest deal-making hubs in Los Angeles are in the city’s hotel lobbies – those of the Beverly Wilshire (www.fourseasons.com/beverlywilshire) and the Montage Beverly Hills (www.montagebeverlyhills.com) are popular. And on the city’s West side, the lobby at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, is consistently a hard piece of real estate to get on a weekday morning. Shutters’ Coast restaurant, with its outdoor tables, is also a very popular breakfast spot (www.shuttersonthebeach.com).
For lunch, deal-makers head to The Grill on the Alley (www.thegrill.com) in the heart of Beverly Hills, an old-school entertainment industry favourite where the shifting power structures of Hollywood can be divined from the seating arrangements. Craft (www.craftrestaurant.com), in Century City, is also hard to beat for an up-close-and-personal look at entertainment industry deal-making, with dozens of agents and clients pouring in to the restaurant for lunch every weekday from neighbouring talent agency powerhouse Creative Artists Agency.
Jump the queue
LA is a world-renowned nightclub spot, but be warned: the scene is constantly changing. “What’s hot right now I guarantee you won’t be in six months,” says The Peninsula’s Little. “They really turn the clubs over about every six months here.”
The clubs worth going to in LA are almost always in Hollywood. For the younger crowd, The Colony (www.thecolonyla.com) plays to an early-20s, beach-party crowd, billing itself as “The Hamptons come to Hollywood”. Trousdale (Tel +1 310 274 7500) caters to a more sophisticated crowd of various ages, while Voyeur (www.voyeur7969.com) remains popular with Hollywood headline-makers despite having been trendy for longer than most LA clubs manage.
The down-low on Hollywood nightclubs is this: you definitely don’t want to turn up without a reservation, especially if you’re entertaining clients. Club doormen in LA are notoriously fickle, and getting past the velvet rope can be nigh-on impossible unless you look like a supermodel.
“It always comes down to bottle service and advance reservations,” says Little. “You walk up to a club in Los Angeles and there’s two lines: a line of people waiting to get in, and a line that moves much quicker, that goes straight in the club – and those are the people that have advance reservations and guaranteed bottle service.”
Making a reservation at a club on your own can be tough, with many listed numbers connecting you only to a message listing the establishment’s hours. Some clubs will list specific names to call for reservations on their websites. But many don’t.
LA is also a very promoter-driven city, meaning that a particular party promoter can make an otherwise sleepy and obscure location the hot spot on a given night.
How to get around all this? It may sound obvious, but your hotel concierge is often the best way in. “I have four or five promoters’ cell [phone numbers] in my pocket, and literally they jump from club to club depending on the night,” says The Peninsula’s Little. “I can contact one of the promoters and, regardless of what night of the week it is, they will definitely be somewhere reputable; they have a certain reputation for putting on good nights.”
But promoters can still be trumped, he adds. “If I know the owner, and call them to say I have a really good group that wants to come in tonight, then regardless of who the promoter is, the owner will take care of it.”
Finding a fixer
The world’s top musicians rarely bypass Los Angeles when it comes to touring, and the city has some of the best venues for shows, big and small. Whether it’s a rock band, a symphony or a world-renowned bossa nova singer, a little inside knowledge can go a long way towards securing a hard-to-get ticket to The Greek Theatre, Pantages Theatre, the Hollywood Bowl or the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
The same goes for sports fixtures. Tickets for the Lakers can be hard to get any time of the year, and especially during the play-offs. Like most things in LA, though, play-off tickets can be had for a price, and there’s always a middleman ready to help out.
“If you ask me about a concert, a play or a sports game, I’ll go to Kevin at Top Notch [Ticket Service] (www.topnotchtixx.com),” says Le Merigot’s Hertlein. “ He’s guest-service, customer-oriented and will get you exactly what you ask for.”
At a price, of course. “The value of access in Los Angeles can be quite an interesting thing,” says Hertlein. “Whether it’s a cocktail or a concert ticket, LA has a considerable mark-up because people in this city have the money and they will spend it if they have to – or if they can write it off as a business expense.”
Red-carpet treatment
The busiest times for Los Angeles are the major film, television and music awards nights, and so it’s always worth checking the calendar in advance. The Oscars, the Golden Globes, the Grammys, the MTV Awards and the Emmys are among the marquee events, when getting a room or table anywhere at short notice will be a headache.
On the upside, “A lot of people don’t realise they can get tickets to red-carpet awards shows, like the People’s Choice [Awards] and the MTV Awards, and we can help them with that,” says Brigid Finley, head of PR at the Ritz-Cartlon’s, which opened in April 2010 and is Downtown LA’s only five-star hotel. Located right next to the Staples Center, the hotel is regularly visited by sports and showbiz stars, as well as international politicos. n
Securing a table In LA, if you’re in a happening restaurant, there’s never any shortage of atmosphere and great people-watching – and, more often than not, a celebrity or three. But getting a table at one of these venues is not an easy task. Other than the concierge at your hotel, one way to get a difficult table at short notice is to walk in, preferably outside peak times, and offer the hostess or maître d’ a gratuity. “The secret a lot of people don’t know is that even the very best restaurants – the best ones – set aside tables for walk-ins,” says Le Merigot’s Hertlein. “A restaurant might have 50 tables, but they’ll only take reservations for 48. So if you have the flexibility to walk in and get a drink at the bar, most times you can get a table within 20 to 40 minutes.” If your trip is planned well ahead, then you might try the conventional route: book as far ahead as possible. While this might not be an option for many business travellers, advance bookings of more than two weeks, and preferably four, greatly improve your chances – even without connections or advance tipping. Location, location, location More than perhaps any other major metropolis, the city of Los Angeles is a sprawling collection of multiple districts spread over a huge land area, without an obvious single business district. And while it does have a “downtown” area, there’s a good chance your meetings could be two hours’ travel away. As a first-time business traveller to LA, the most useful way to think about the city is in terms of four key business districts: Beverly Hills, and its adjacent districts of Century City and Hollywood; ocean-side Santa Monica and Venice, otherwise known as the West side; the Downtown district; and the San Fernando Valley. Known simply as The Valley by locals, the latter is a huge area that incorporates more than half the land mass of Los Angeles, includes the cities of Burbank, Glendale and Calabasas, and is home to Universal Studios and Warner Bros. Because of the huge distances between LA’s key business and entertainment locations, and the notorious LA traffic, the smartest way to plan your trip is to schedule as many of your meetings on any given day close to each other – and, of course, choose a hotel nearby.Getting around
Taxis in LA are not a smart option for travellers, even those with time to spare. They are not only in scant supply, but the distances are so huge that you can end up paying crazy prices for single trips. Public transport is even worse.
This leaves business travellers with two options: a hire car with a navigator, or a car with a driver. Unless you already know the geography of Los Angeles very well and are comfortable driving in the US, the “town car” is the better option, as many addresses in LA are identical apart from the city or zip code. If you go to the wrong one, you can find yourself on the right street and at the right number but 50kms away from where you want to be. Parking is also bewildering for the newcomer – and expensive. A town car with a driver starts at US$94 per hour, and can usually be organised by your hotel and billed to your room.
