Why I’m opting out of LA’s luxury trend — and it’s not just about the cost

Los Angeles has apparently decided that everything needs an upgrade: The neighborhood coffee shop is now a coffee concept. The gym is a wellness club. The apartment building has become a residence. The motel is boutique. And the taco is artisanal.

Somewhere along the way, a perfectly respectable cheeseburger acquired an aioli and became $24.

I would like to opt out.

Not of nice things; I enjoy nice things. I have an Oura Ring and recently wrote an entire column about my supplement collection. I am hardly storming the gates of Erewhon.

I am, however, becoming increasingly protective of places that are just … places: The coffee shop with chairs designed for sitting rather than photographing. The dive bar where nobody has considered adding adaptogens to the cocktails. The taco stand whose primary brand identity is tacos.

These places are becoming strangely luxurious precisely because they aren’t trying to be.

We got a glimpse of just how much Angelenos care about them when plans emerged to turn the landmark Norms on La Cienega into a Raising Cane’s. The Googie building itself is protected as a historic monument, but the proposal would have replaced the affordable sit-down diner with the national chicken-finger chain when Norms’ lease ended.

Angelenos revolted, and Raising Cane’s ultimately backed away from the plan after community outcry. Apparently there are limits to what we will allow to become chicken fingers. Maybe that’s because preserving a building isn’t necessarily the same thing as preserving a place.

A restaurant isn’t beloved because of its roofline alone; it’s the people behind the counter — the regulars, the menu item you’ve been ordering since 2007, the fact that you can afford to go there often enough for someone to recognize you.

That’s harder to landmark.

Heart’s Coffee Shop in Lake Balboa closed last month after 47 years in business. Owners Yuk and Sue Wong had run it since 1979, building the kind of family diner where customers returned for generations.

Their daughter told reporters that her parents had resisted raising menu prices for 13 years because they worried their regulars wouldn’t be able to keep coming. Eventually, rising costs and other economic pressures made the restaurant unsustainable.

That’s the brutal contradiction: The affordability that makes these places valuable to a neighborhood can also make them increasingly difficult to keep alive.

Los Angeles does need to change: We need housing. Neighborhoods evolve. Restaurants close. New people arrive and build new things. And sometimes an old place manages to evolve without disappearing.

After 64 years in Westchester, Dinah’s Family Restaurant was displaced by development but managed to relocate to Culver City, bringing its famous chicken-bucket sign and commitment to accessible food along with it.

The goal isn’t to preserve Los Angeles in amber; it’s to make sure progress doesn’t sand away what made us care about a neighborhood in the first place. Because, lately, every ordinary business seems one renovation away from emerging with pale wood, tiny plants and a menu containing the word “curated.”

You know the transformation: One day your neighborhood coffee shop sells coffee — then butcher paper appears over the windows. Six months later it reopens with limewash walls, a vaguely Scandinavian name and nowhere to plug in your laptop. The coffee is now $12. (But don’t worry, they have merch.)

When ordinary places become premium experiences, ordinary people gradually get priced out of ordinary life.

Maybe that’s why Angelenos become so fiercely loyal to the survivors: The diner with laminated menus. The neighborhood bar where happy hour is actually happy. The family restaurant where nobody has redesigned the logo since 1997.

We recommend them almost apologetically. “It’s nothing fancy.”

Increasingly, that’s the selling point: Nothing fancy means I don’t need a reservation. Nothing fancy means I can sit with a friend without feeling as though the table needs to achieve a certain revenue-per-square-foot target. Nothing fancy means I belong there even when I’m not having an aspirational day.

Maybe that’s what we’re actually trying to preserve: places that don’t require us to perform.

Sometimes I don’t want an experience; I want lunch.

I want the place where somebody behind the counter recognizes me. A bar where nobody describes the ice. A coffee shop whose primary amenity is coffee. A hamburger that hasn’t undergone a personal rebrand.

There should still be room in Los Angeles for places whose greatest ambition is to be useful, affordable and loved.

Because the character of a city isn’t created only by the shiny new places everyone wants to visit; it’s also created by the ordinary places nobody thinks to photograph until one day they’re gone.

So yes, Los Angeles, build beautiful things. Open restaurants. Build housing. Invent cocktails. Put truffle oil on whatever you need to put truffle oil on.

Just leave us a few places where nothing has been optimized.

And please don’t renovate my taco stand. I like my little plastic chairs on the sidewalk where they belong.

Mary Kay Holmes is a Los Angeles writer covering culture, modern relationships, and the increasingly absurd business of being a person.

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