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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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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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