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Jon & Vinny's
By 2015, chefs Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo already had a strong Los Angeles reputation to trade on, built through their earlier restaurant Animal — so when they opened a second, more casual concept on Fairfax Avenue that same year, expectations were already high. Jon & Vinny's answered with a red-sauce Italian-American menu built around pizza, pasta, and an all-day format that runs from breakfast straight through dinner. The pizza program sits on a thin, well-charred crust, with the Popeye — a white pie loaded with spinach, garlic, and a fried egg cracked on top — becoming one of the restaurant's most-ordered and most-photographed items. The broader menu's willingness to serve pizza alongside a full breakfast menu and hearty pasta dishes reflects Shook and Dotolo's larger approach: comfort-forward Italian-American food executed with real chef-level technique rather than a straightforward red-sauce nostalgia act. The restaurant quickly became one of the Fairfax corridor's most reliably busy spots, drawing both destination diners chasing Shook and Dotolo's reputation from Animal and neighborhood regulars treating it as a straightforward daily option — a dual identity that's not easy for a single restaurant to hold. Since the Fairfax original, Jon & Vinny's has expanded to additional Los Angeles locations, extending the same all-day, pizza-and-pasta format to more of the city while keeping the chef-driven technique that distinguished it from typical casual Italian-American restaurants when it first opened. Order the Popeye at 10am for breakfast or 10pm for dinner — the kitchen treats neither request as unusual.
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Casa Bianca Pizza Pie
Sam Martorana had a real pizza pedigree by the time he relocated to Los Angeles from Chicago in the mid-1950s — his father ran a grocery business, and Sam himself had worked a stint at Tony's Pizza back home. He and his wife Jennie, along with Sam's brother Joe, opened Casa Bianca in January 1955, shortly after arriving with three young children in tow, and built the restaurant's entire identity around scratch-made, family-recipe pizza rather than any single gimmick. The sausage pizza is the dish most closely identified with the restaurant: sweetly spiced homemade sausage studded with roasted garlic, piled generously with mozzarella over a crust that's been described as chewy yet crisp, thin but substantial enough to carry real developed wheat flavor rather than just functioning as a base for toppings. The restaurant has stayed a genuine family operation for seven decades — Sam and Jennie's son Ned and daughter Andrea joined the business as it grew, and even in the restaurant's later years, Jennie remained involved in kitchen supervision while Sam personally oversaw the sausage production that gives the signature pizza its specific flavor. Seventy years in the same Eagle Rock storefront, run continuously by the same family, with the same made-from-scratch sausage recipe Sam brought west from Chicago in the 1950s, is a rare thing for any Los Angeles restaurant to sustain — long lines and a no-frills dining room have stayed part of the experience the entire time, treated as a feature rather than something to modernize away. Sam still oversees the sausage; that isn't nostalgia marketing, it's simply how the kitchen has always run.
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