Koko Lists
Start a new list
Log in
Sign up
← New random battle
Koko Battle
Tap your pick.
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.
VS
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.
Next battle
Full comparison
About Hawkins House of Burgers
About Original Tommy's
Popular Battles
1984 vs. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
1 votes
Friends vs. Curb Your Enthusiasm
1 votes
Ideogram vs. Sora
1 votes
Navy Pier vs. Bishop Museum
1 votes
Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree vs. Skittles
1 votes
George Carlin vs. Oprah Winfrey
1 votes
