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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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Pizzeria Mozza
Few new pizza restaurants arrive with as much built-in attention as Pizzeria Mozza did in 2006 — a partnership between chef Nancy Silverton, one of Los Angeles's most respected bakers, and restaurateurs Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich, two of the biggest names in American Italian restaurant hospitality at the time. Highland Avenue, and pizza specifically, was a curious choice for that kind of star power, and the restaurant has spent the better part of two decades justifying it. The crust is the whole argument for Mozza's specific style: a chewy, blistered, notably thin dough with real developed wheat flavor, built to hold up under toppings without turning soggy or collapsing under its own weight. The fennel sausage pizza with panna and scallions has become something close to the restaurant's signature order, though the constantly rotating antipasti and daily specials keep regulars coming back for more than just the pizza. The restaurant has held a place in the Michelin Guide's Los Angeles coverage, recognition for a kitchen that treats pizza with the same technical seriousness Silverton's baking career was already known for before Mozza ever opened. That pedigree — a James Beard Award-winning baker partnering with restaurateurs who'd already built a national Italian-restaurant reputation — is part of why Mozza never had to build a following from scratch the way most independent pizzerias do, but it's the crust itself, refined and consistent for nearly twenty years now, that's kept the restaurant relevant long after the initial buzz of the opening faded. Twenty years on, the wait for a table is still proof the crust was never just coasting on the names attached to it.
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