L.A.’s Legendary Restaurants: Celebrating the Famous Places Where Hollywood Ate, Drank, and Played

L.A.’s Legendary Restaurants: Celebrating the Famous Places Where Hollywood Ate, Drank, and Played
George Geary Foreword by Barbara Fairchild
October 2016
336
Hundreds of photos and ephemera
California
9781595800893
8½ x 11
Hardcover

L.A.’s Legendary Restaurants is an illustrated history of dozens of landmark eateries from throughout the City of Angels. From such classics as Musso & Frank and The Brown Derby in the 1920s to the see-and-be-seen crowds at Chasen’s, Romanoffs, and Ciro’s in the mid-20th century to the dawn of California cuisine at Ma Maison and Spago Sunset in the 1970s and ‘80s, L.A.’s Legendary Restaurants celebrates the famous locations where Hollywood ate, drank, and played.

Author George Geary leads you into the glamorous restaurants inhabited by the stars through a lively narrative filled with colorful anecdotes and illustrated with vintage photographs, historic menus, and timeless ephemera. Over 100 iconic recipes for entrees, appetizers, desserts, and vintage drinks are included, and all are updated for today’s cook and kitchen.

While many people have heard the story of Elizabeth Taylor requesting that Chasen’s famous chili be flown to her on the set of Cleopatra in Rome, L.A.’s Legendary Restaurants will offer facts and trivia that aren’t as well known to the general public, such as Bob Hope’s favorite place to enjoy a hot fudge sundae after the Academy Awards, the restaurant where part of a table was sawed off to accommodate a pregnant Lana Turner, and the pharmacy where composer Harold Arlen wrote “Over the Rainbow” for The Wizard of Oz.

But L.A.’s Legendary Restaurants contains much more than the fancy, high-priced restaurants favored by the Hollywood cognoscenti. The glamour of the golden age of drive-ins, drugstores, nightclubs, and hotels are also honored. What book on L.A. restaurants would be complete without tales of ice cream sundaes at C.C. Brown’s, cafeteria-style meals at Clifton’s, a late-night breakfast at Ben Frank’s, or a mai tai at Don the Beachcomber?

Most of the locations in L.A.’s Legendary Restaurants no longer exist, but thanks to George Geary, the memories are still with us. And with Geary’s updated recipes, we can still enjoy many of the same iconic dishes that kept customers coming back to their favorite haunts week after week. L.A.’s Legendary Restaurants will have you longing for the days when going out for a meal was truly a special event.