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Cassell's Hamburgers
"The more things you do, the less chance there is of reaching perfection" — that was Alvin Cassell's operating philosophy when he opened Cassell's Patio on Wilshire Boulevard in 1948, across from the old Bullocks Wilshire department store, before the restaurant later moved to its longtime home on 6th Street near Berendo. It's also why the original restaurant famously refused to serve French fries at all, offering potato salad and chips instead. The burger itself was built around genuine restraint dressed up as simplicity — USDA Prime beef, hand-formed and available in either a third-pound or a full two-thirds-pound size, cooked with none of the sauces or towering toppings that define more maximalist Los Angeles burgers. It was a quality-first, ingredient-driven burger built decades before "gourmet burger" became a restaurant category of its own. Cassell retired in the 1990s and sold the business to Helen Kim, who softened some of the original restraint by adding French fries, turkey burgers, and veggie burgers to the menu. Since 2014, the restaurant has operated under new ownership — hotelier Jingbo Lou, alongside executive chef Christian Page and pastry chef Elia Aboumrad — inside the Hotel Normandie in Koreatown, with an additional Alpine Street location that opened in 2024 after a separate downtown Los Angeles outpost closed in 2023. That the restaurant has survived multiple ownership changes, a relocation, and a temporary downtown closure while keeping its Prime-beef, hand-formed burger largely intact is a rarer outcome than it sounds for a nearly 80-year-old Los Angeles institution. Cassell refused to serve fries at his own restaurant; the current owners do — which is about the full extent of what's actually changed.
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Original Tommy's
Original Tommy's opened on May 15, 1946, at the corner of Beverly and Rampart, founded by Tom Koulax, the son of Greek immigrants. Business was slow at first, but it picked up steadily enough that the property eventually expanded across the intersection to keep up with the crowds — a modest hot dog-and-hamburger stand that grew into one of the defining names in Los Angeles fast food. The chili burger is the entire reason people line up: a griddled patty topped with a distinctive meaty chili, chopped onion, mustard, and tomato, built to be eaten standing at an outdoor counter as much as sitting down. The same chili shows up on hot dogs and over fries, but it's the burger that made the name, and it's stayed the standard against which nearly every other Los Angeles chili burger gets measured. Tommy's began expanding in the 1970s and grew to roughly 30 locations by the mid-2000s; today the chain operates more than 30 stands across California and Nevada, headquartered in Monrovia. That success has bred an entire ecosystem of imitators — a 2019 Los Angeles Times survey found dozens of local burger stands using some variation of "Tommy's" or "Thomas" in their name, hoping to borrow the association. The family has generally let most of that slide, reserving legal pushback specifically for anyone using "original" or "world famous" in their branding. That the founding Beverly and Rampart location still operates largely as it did in the 1940s — order at the window, eat standing up, chili dripping through a paper wrapper — while the brand around it has scaled into a regional chain, is part of what makes Tommy's a distinctly Los Angeles institution rather than just a nostalgic curiosity. Every one of the dozens of copycat "Tommy's" stands scattered across the city is, whether it admits it or not, still chasing what Koulax got right at that one intersection in 1946.
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