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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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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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