"We see people who are heading to a movie at the Vista or to the bookstore around the corner and pop in and have a slice or two." That's how Jeff Vance, chef and owner of Old Gold Tomato Pies, describes the walking pattern of his regulars. It's a small detail, but it points to something the coverage of Los Feliz's restaurant boom keeps glossing over. The boom has an address, and it isn't the street most people picture when they think of the neighborhood's commercial heart.
Outside write-ups tend to treat "Los Feliz" as one strip having one moment. Walk the actual blocks and the moment is concentrated on Hillhurst Avenue. Vermont Avenue, the street most visitors associate with the neighborhood's village character, has barely changed.
What Actually Landed on Hillhurst
Wilde's opened at 1850 Hillhurst Avenue in late October, in the space that used to hold a Thai restaurant. It's the work of childhood friends Natasha Price, who cooks, and Tatiana Ettensberger, who runs the wine program, with chef de cuisine Sarah Durning leading a whole-hog butchery program in partnership with Peads & Barnetts. The restaurant draws on Price's British family background filtered through a California pantry, and it was swarmed with locals from the moment it opened.
A few doors up the same street, Vandell opened in early December. Park Hospitality partners Michael Francesconi and Matthew Glaser built it with bar-industry veterans Shawn Lickliter and Vay Su, and Francesconi already runs Donna's and Lowboy in Echo Park, so this wasn't a team searching for its first success. He'd lived in Los Feliz for four years before opening there. The bar draws lines for its smoked tomato cocktails and cheddar-topped Wagyu burgers, and it was still pulling crowds months after opening.
Two more names from the same stretch of restaurant press round out the picture, though they sit a few blocks over on Hollywood Boulevard rather than on Hillhurst itself. Old Gold Tomato Pies, Jeff Vance's Sicilian-square pizza shop, opened on the northern side of Hollywood Boulevard the same October that Wilde's opened around the corner. Kismet, the Mediterranean restaurant Sara Kramer opened with Sarah Hymanson back in 2017, sits on Hollywood Boulevard too, with its casual sister spot Kismet Rotisserie next door since 2020. Kramer's read on the new arrivals was straightforward: more neighbors, more energy, no complaints.
Vermont Avenue Is Coasting on What It Already Had
None of the restaurants driving this wave, Wilde's, Vandell, Old Gold, opened on Vermont Avenue. That's worth sitting with, because Vermont is the street most people picture first when they think of Los Feliz's commercial core.
What Vermont has instead is the same lineup it's had for years. The Dresden has anchored the street since 1954, the jazz-and-cocktails lounge that got a cameo in the 1996 film "Swingers" and still books live music in the same room. House of Pies keeps selling pie past midnight a few doors down. Figaro Bistrot spills its sidewalk tables out for fishbowl lattes, and Skylight Books keeps an independent bookstore running mid-block, tree growing up through the middle of the room. Every one of these has been there for years, and none of them is new.
That's not a knock on Vermont. A street that holds onto a 1954 jazz lounge and an independent bookstore for this long is doing something right. But it means the restaurant boom that outside coverage keeps describing as neighborhood-wide is really a Hillhurst Avenue story, with a couple of satellite openings a few blocks away on Hollywood Boulevard. Vermont's contribution to the story this year has mostly been staying exactly as it was.
The Same Street Is Also Arguing With Itself
Hillhurst isn't having an uncomplicated moment, though. The same street that drew lines for Wilde's and Vandell is also where a new Philz Coffee is opening, and that news landed very differently. Philz is a chain out of Northern California, and it's arriving on a stretch of Hillhurst that already has a cluster of coffee shops within a short walk of each other. Rather than generating anything like the reaction Vandell got, the news mostly generated a question locals are still turning over: does this block need another coffee shop, or would something else have served the street better.
The contrast is useful because it shows the boom isn't just about newness for its own sake. A British restaurant from two friends with a specific point of view and a serious cocktail bar from operators with an established track record both read to locals as additions. A coffee chain moving into a block that already has several independent options reads as something closer to duplication. Hillhurst is absorbing both kinds of change at once, and residents are sorting them differently in real time.
The Landmark Neither Street Can Claim
A few blocks east, near where Sunset Boulevard meets Hollywood Boulevard, the Vista Theatre sits outside both arguments entirely. Built in 1923, the single-screen house has been owned by filmmaker Quentin Tarantino since 2021. It reopened in November 2023 after a full renovation, and true to Tarantino's stated intent when he bought it, it screens on film rather than digital, including 70mm prints, rather than running as a standard multiplex.
The Vista doesn't belong to Hillhurst's newer energy or to Vermont's older one. It's the kind of fixture that gives Jeff Vance's comment about customers heading to a movie before grabbing a slice its logic. People move between these streets on foot, and the theater is one of the reasons that pattern holds regardless of which strip is changing faster.
Watch Hillhurst, Not Vermont
If you're trying to read where Los Feliz is actually moving this year, the useful question isn't what's happening in the neighborhood generally. It's what's happening on Hillhurst, because that's where nearly all of the recent restaurant and bar energy has actually landed, alongside the one addition locals are still debating. Vermont Avenue's story this year is that it didn't need to change. Both are legitimate ways for a commercial street to hold its footing, but they're different stories, and folding them into one boom narrative erases the more interesting fact: the neighborhood's two main streets are moving at completely different speeds, and the street getting all the outside attention isn't the one most people would guess.
If you spend time on Hillhurst or Vermont and have your own read on which street is actually changing, Stacey Leahy would enjoy comparing notes. Let's connect.
