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Father's Office
Father's Office has occupied 1018 Montana Avenue in Santa Monica since 1953, but the burger that made it famous is a much more recent addition. From 1986 to 2000, owner Lou Moench built the bar's reputation around serious craft beer and a smoke-free policy years before either was standard practice. Chef Sang Yoon bought the bar in 2000 and, notably, opened a kitchen for the first time in its history — the move that created the Office Burger. The burger itself is built with dry-aged beef, caramelized onions, a blend of Gruyère and Maytag blue cheese, an applewood-smoked bacon compote, and arugula on a soft roll — and it comes with a policy Yoon has never budged on: no substitutions, no swaps, and no ketchup, regardless of who's asking. Esquire has called it one of the best burgers in the world, and the restaurant was featured in a 2007 episode of chef Daniel Boulud's television show, recognition for a kitchen that opened as an afterthought to a beer program. Yoon expanded the concept to a second location inside the Helms Bakery complex in Culver City in April 2008, and for two decades Father's Office was also known as one of the first restaurants in the country to sell wine on tap, maintaining specific serving temperatures for reds and whites the way most bars only bother with beer. A downtown Los Angeles location opened in January 2020 and closed in September 2025, leaving the original Montana Avenue bar and the Culver City location as the restaurant's anchors. That the no-ketchup, no-substitutions rule has survived more than two decades, several menu evolutions, and an expansion beyond Santa Monica says something about how much confidence Yoon has always had in the burger as built — plenty of gastropubs soften their rules as they scale, and Father's Office simply hasn't. Ask for ketchup anyway, if you want to find out how far "no" actually goes.
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Hawkins House of Burgers
Hawkins House of Burgers traces back to 1939, when James Henry Hawkins moved to Los Angeles from Arkansas as part of the Second Great Migration and started what began as a small food stand in Watts. The business grew slowly and organically for decades before expanding into its current standalone building in 1982, and it's remained in the Hawkins family the entire time — current owner Cynthia Hawkins is James Henry's daughter. The menu leans hard into excess rather than restraint: the Leaning Tower of Watts stacks three half-pound patties with a hot link, pastrami, eggs, chili, and bacon into a single order, while the Colossal Burger and Whipper Burger layer pastrami and hot links onto more conventional double- and single-patty builds. This isn't a menu built around a single clean, minimalist burger — it's built around genuine, hand-built excess, thick hand-formed patties piled with whatever the kitchen decides a burger can support. Press attention has followed steadily rather than all at once — Thrillist covered the restaurant in 2021, the Los Angeles Times profiled it in 2019, and NPR featured it in 2015, each treating Hawkins less as a discovery and more as an established fact of Watts that outside media was finally catching up to. That 1939-to-1982 arc — decades as a modest stand before the family ever had a proper building to work out of — is a different origin story than most of the gourmet, chef-driven burger spots that get national press today, and it's part of why the restaurant is so often described as a symbol of resilience for its South Los Angeles neighborhood rather than just a good burger stop. The Leaning Tower of Watts, three patties and two proteins deep, says more about the kitchen's ambitions than any tagline could.
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