Hermon’s is L.A.’s hottest restaurant in its tiniest neighborhood

When running on all four cylinders, Hermon’s can be your new favorite neighborhood restaurant, regardless of where you actually reside. The dining room — lined with comfy booths and bedecked 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 spiked with yuzu. The tables are crowded with potato fritters barely visible under billowing clouds of cream cheese and Parmesan cheese; big bowls of chicories the color of antique roses; and toothpick-speared cheeseburgers.

The combined effect gives Hermon’s the lived-in feel of a place that’s existed in its community for a lifetime. In reality, it’s been open for about three months. And behind the gloss of the quaint spot is 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 newer restaurants, including Found Oyster, Queen‘s Raw Bar & Grill, Rasarumah and Barra Santos.

Incorporating multiple chefs and styles of cuisine, the group has distilled the pillars of a neighborhood restaurant — warm, relaxed, approachable dining — and packaged them into a formula they’ve successfully replicated in micro-neighborhoods all over the city.

“We think of all of our restaurants as neighborhood restaurants that change based on what the neighborhood already has available,” Weisblatt said in an interview. “A lot of what we are looking for are these charming little pockets of L.A. that are all over because the city is so spread out and they’re often heavily residential and have more limited access to restaurants, especially ones that you could walk to.”

It’s a formula that’s proven so successful, Fox and Weisblatt were nominated together this year for the James Beard Award for outstanding restaurateur.

Guests line up for a chance at one of the 18 bar seats at Hermon’s. Reservations for one of the booths that line the dining room have been difficult to book since opening three months ago.

Both Fox and Weisblatt say they must have driven by the Hermon’s restaurant space hundreds of times over the years. It occupies a tree-shaded street corner in Hermon, a half-square mile area of Montecito Heights flanked by Highland Park to the north and Monterey Hills to the south.

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

• Share via Close extra sharing options

If you drive by in the winter golden hour between 4:30 and 5 p.m., expect to see a line of people waiting for the 18 seats at the bar available for walk-ins. Reservations open two weeks in advance and have been near-impossible to book. After managing to secure three, I learned that sometimes, it’s easier to reserve a table for four, than a table for two.

The chopped chicories salad, from top, the “tiny tinis” and Hermon’s sunlit dining room before service.

Chef and partner D.K. Kolender, whose brother Ari is the head of culinary for all of the Last Word restaurants, delivers a menu that feels familiar, even when it’s not. Crudos veer naturally into salads, followed by some variation on a cheeseburger and fried potatoes, pastas and something sweet and nostalgic for dessert. Fox and Weisblatt originally tapped him to be the chef at Chez Renée, a restaurant that was planned to open in the original Giorgio Baldi space on PCH. But three months shy of its opening, the restaurant burned in the Palisades fire.

The Hermon’s burger is dubbed the Ode to Chez cheeseburger as a not-so-subtle nod to the restaurant that never was. It’s of the no lettuce or tomato variety, with a thick patty drowning in a mixture of its own juices and a soubise onion fondue sharp with white cheddar. A layer of sweet, jammy onions in Bordelaise sauce mimics good French onion soup, while a swipe of Dijon mustard will make your nose tingle. During one visit, a smattering of green peppercorns in the burger‘s condiments evoked a playful take on steak au poivre. A mouth full of green peppercorns on another visit felt like an assault on an excellent burger.

Whatever version arrives at the table, a martini, fashioned to your liking, will help. The bar program led by Eric Alperin, who opened influential craft cocktail bar the Varnish in 2009, is adept at stirring or shaking whatever tipple you’re in the mood for, and boasts a concise list of canonical cocktails with seasonal variations. A recent daiquiri the color of a sunset was kissed with blood orange. The short selection of reasonably priced wines by the glass and bottle isn’t overly fussy, with easy-sipping varietals that will carry your table throughout the meal, regardless of what you order.

The two sheet vongole at Hermon’s in Los Angeles is a slender lasagna filled with whipped ricotta cheese and topped with clams in a cream sauce.

The food adheres to the same something-for-everyone philosophy, with Kolender’s interpretations of familiar dishes leaning playful and decadent. Loaded potato fritters are four, delightfully crisp pieces of potato pavé shoved together to create one large square. The cloud of cream cheese over the top is light as air, weighed down with a heap of Parmesan cheese grated so finely the curls disappear on your tongue.

The garlic bread is presented as a glistening round of spelt schiacciata gushing with butter, garlic and parsley. During one visit, the bread was so dense, the garlic butter never made its way past the top quarter of the bread. On another, it was the garlic bread of your dreams, with a crusty top that collapsed into a soft, garlic butter-soaked center.

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

Despite its name, the two-sheet vongole is a long, single sheet of pasta folded in half and filled with whipped ricotta to create a sort of lasagna on Ozempic. Spooned over the top is a clam and cream sauce with bits of crispy guanciale strewn throughout for an unctuous, salty backbone. The pasta is broiled until big, charred bubbles form across the surface, then it’s showered with grated Parmesan cheese and dressed with crispy breadcrumbs and chile flakes.

Is the name misleading? Yes. Is it more satisfying than tucking into a bowl of actual vongole? Not quite. But it looks fun, and it’s even more fun to eat.

The most successful entree to share may be the whole grilled branzino, served splayed on a platter decorated with Calabrian chile-roasted tomatoes and dollops of toum. The bubbly skin is crisp and smoke-laden from the grill, while the flesh beneath remains supple and yielding. The branzino collars are repurposed as a riff on Buffalo wings, grilled and painted in a glaze that hits all the pleasure centers at once, with a bright, zingy vinegar punch that hums with heat.

Hermon’s neon-lit sign, top, and its Ode to Chez cheeseburger.

There are only two desserts, and if you grew up with a certain chain restaurant in Southern California, one will be instantly familiar. The Hermon’s cookie skillet is a smaller, more sophisticated, Maldon salt-topped version of the BJ’s Restaurant “Pizookie.” The dessert involves a cookie baked in a deep dish pizza pan until the middle is a smidgen past raw and the edges just crisp. Growing up, it was the Mastro’s butter cake for the middle class.

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

With time, Hermon’s could be that restaurant. It makes good on the promise of a neighborhood dining experience, even if that experience is neatly packaged, and if the neighborhood isn’t yours. And in an increasingly fraught world, the need for a place that feels simple and familiar — one that offers the quiet assurance that everyone belongs — becomes not just understandable, but essential.