Hermon's is LA's hottest restaurant in its smallest neighborhood

When things are in full swing, Hermon's can become your new favorite neighborhood restaurant, regardless of where you actually live. The dining room—lined with comfortable booths and adorned with grandmillennial art—is a spectrum of stroller pushers, youthful friend groups, and silver-haired romantics. Servers make their way through the crowd, carrying trays of pint-sized martinis called “tiny tinis” and salt-rimmed margaritas with yuzu. The tables are crammed with potato pancakes, barely visible beneath billowing clouds of cream cheese and Parmesan; large bowls of chicory the color of antique roses; and cheeseburgers skewered with toothpicks.

The combined effect gives Hermon's the lived-in feel of a place that has existed in its community for a lifetime. In reality, it has been open for about three months. And behind the glamor of the quaint location lies Last Word Hospitality, one of the most ambitious restaurant groups in Los Angeles. Founders Holly Fox and Adam Weisblatt are behind some of the city's most acclaimed new restaurants, including Found Oyster, Queen's Raw Bar & Grill, Rasarumah and Barra Santos.

Drawing on multiple chefs and cuisine styles, the group distilled the pillars of a neighborhood restaurant—warm, relaxed, and approachable food—and packaged them into a formula that they have successfully implemented in micro-neighborhoods across the city.

“We view all of our restaurants as neighborhood restaurants that change based on what the neighborhood already offers,” Weisblatt said in an interview. “We're especially looking for these charming little areas of LA that are everywhere because the city is so sprawling and they're often mostly residential and have more limited access to restaurants, especially those within walking distance.”

This formula has proven so successful that Fox and Weisblatt were jointly nominated for the James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurateur this year.

Both Fox and Weisblatt say they must have driven past the Hermon's restaurant hundreds of times over the years. It is located on a tree-shaded street corner in Hermon, a half-acre area of ​​Montecito Heights flanked by Highland Park to the north and the Monterey Hills to the south.

The two remember standing in the church's former banquet hall, where Hermon's neighborhood council used to meet. They pitched the idea of ​​converting the space into a restaurant to the city council, demonstrating where the U-shaped bar would be in the middle, the kitchen in the back and the booths that would line the dining room.

If you drive by during the golden hour of winter between 4:30 p.m. and 5 p.m., expect to see a line of people waiting for the 18 bar seats available for walk-ins. Reservations are available two weeks in advance and booking was nearly impossible. After I managed to reserve three, I realized that sometimes it's easier to reserve a table for four than a table for two.

Chef and partner DK Kolender, whose brother Ari is the culinary director of all Last Word restaurants, delivers a menu that feels familiar, even if it isn't. Crudos and of course in salads, followed by a variation of a cheeseburger and fried potatoes, pasta and something sweet and nostalgic for dessert. Fox and Weisblatt originally hired him as executive chef at Chez Renée, a restaurant that was slated to open in the original Giorgio Baldi space at PCH. But three months before it opened, the restaurant burned down in the Palisades Fire.

The Hermon's burger is called the “Ode to Chez Cheeseburger,” a not-so-subtle nod to the restaurant that never was. It's a variety without lettuce or tomatoes, with a thick patty drowned in a mixture of its own juices and a soubise onion fondue with sharp white cheddar. A layer of sweet, jammy onions in Bordelaise sauce mimics a good French onion soup, while a touch of Dijon mustard makes your nose tingle. On one visit, a few green peppercorns in the burger container evoked a playful take on steak au poivre. A mouth full of green peppercorns felt like an attack on an excellent burger on another visit.

Whatever version comes to the table, a martini made to your liking will help. The bar program, led by Eric Alperin, who opened the influential craft cocktail bar The Varnish in 2009, is adept at stirring or shaking whatever tipple you fancy, offering a concise list of canonical cocktails with seasonal variations. A fresh daiquiri the color of a sunset was kissed with blood orange. The short selection of well-priced wines by the glass and bottle is not overly fussy, with easy-drinking varietals that will accompany your table throughout the meal, regardless of what you order.

The food follows the same philosophy of something for everyone, with Kolender's takes on familiar dishes seeming playful and decadent. The stuffed potato pancakes are four wonderfully crispy pieces of mashed potato that are pushed together to form a large square. The cream cheese cloud on top is airy and weighted with a mound of grated Parmesan cheese, grated so finely that the curls disappear on the tongue.

The garlic bread is presented as a glistening round of spelled schiacciata dotted with butter, garlic and parsley. On one visit, the bread was so dense that the garlic butter never reached the top quarter of the bread. On the other hand, it was the garlic bread of your dreams, with a crispy top that collapsed into a soft, garlic butter-soaked center.

Instead of the requisite Caesar salad, Kolender offers chicory dressed in an anchovy and black garlic vinaigrette that veers between sweet and savory.

Despite its name, the two-leaf vongole is a long, single sheet of pasta folded in half and filled with whipped ricotta to make a type of lasagne on ozempic. A mussel cream sauce is spooned over the top and sprinkled with crispy pieces of guanciale to create a creamy, salty base. The dough is grilled until large, charred bubbles form on the surface, then it's brushed with grated Parmesan cheese and topped with crispy breadcrumbs and chili flakes.

Is the name misleading? Yes. Is it more satisfying than eating a bowl of real Vongole? Not quite. But it looks fun and is even more fun to eat.

The most successful main course may be the whole grilled branzino, served on a platter decorated with roasted Calabrian chili tomatoes and dollops of toum. The bubbly skin is crispy and smoky from the grill, while the flesh underneath remains supple and yielding. Repurposed as a kind of buffalo wings, the branzino collars are grilled and painted with a glaze that hits every pleasure center at once, with a bright, tangy vinegar punch that hums with heat.

There are only two desserts, and if you grew up eating a particular restaurant chain in Southern California, one will be immediately familiar. Hermon's Biscuit Pan is a smaller, more sophisticated, Maldon salt-topped version of BJ's Restaurant Pizookie. The dessert consists of a cookie that is baked in a deep pizza pan until the center is still slightly raw and the edges are just crispy. When I was growing up, it was Mastro's butter cake for the middle class.

I've heard more than a handful of people compare Hermon's to Houston's, Hillstone Restaurant Group's best-known and most successful restaurant and arguably the ultimate, albeit upscale, neighborhood restaurant. It is a place based on consistency and the promise of giving you the same experience you had last time and the 10 times before.

In time, Hermon's could be that restaurant. It delivers on the promise of a neighborhood dining experience, even if that experience is neatly packaged and the neighborhood doesn't belong to you. And in an increasingly tense world, the need for a place that feels simple and familiar – one that offers the quiet assurance that everyone belongs – becomes not only understandable, but essential.