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In-N-Out Burger (Baldwin Park)
In-N-Out Burger's story starts on October 22, 1948, when Harry and Esther Snyder opened a hundred-square-foot stand at the corner of Francisquito and Garvey in Baldwin Park — the first drive-through hamburger stand in California, built around a two-way speaker box that let customers order without leaving their cars. That single innovation reshaped how fast food would be served across the state for decades afterward. The original structure didn't survive; it was demolished when Interstate 10 was routed through the site, and a replacement building that opened nearby in 1954 was itself closed in 2004 and torn down in 2011. Rather than let the site disappear entirely, the company built a working replica of the first store in 2014, close to the original footprint, open a few days a week for burgers cooked in the same style the Snyders served in 1948. The menu at any In-N-Out location has stayed almost defiantly simple for more than seventy-five years — a short, unchanging lineup built around a thin, smash-style griddled patty, American cheese, hand-leafed lettuce, tomato, and the chain's signature spread, with a "secret menu" of off-menu customizations that's become part of the brand's mythology in its own right. The company has remained privately held and family-controlled the entire time, resisting the franchising and rapid national expansion that most fast-food chains of its era eventually took on. Visiting the Baldwin Park replica is as close as it's possible to get to tasting where California's drive-through burger culture actually began — a small, deliberately preserved heritage site standing near the freeway that displaced the original, run by a company that's kept the same recipe and the same family ownership since Harry and Esther first opened the window. Every drive-through burger stand in the state, knowingly or not, is still working in the shadow of that hundred-square-foot start.
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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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