Forbes | September 2019
Article By John Marian
It took a while for Los Angeles to develop its current reputation as being one of America’s great restaurant towns. In Hollywood’s heyday of the 1940 and 1950s, restaurants were far more famous for their bizarre look—The Brown Derby leaps to mind—and their glittering clientele than for their food. Glamour endured as an attraction in the 1980s when the city went through a copycat French nouvelle cuisine phase, when the term California chic referred as much to what people wore to restaurants as they did to movie openings.