Kate Bowman’s Los Angeles: a city best read from the driver’s seat

CITIES · LOS ANGELES

Los Angeles cannot be summarised, which is precisely why it seduces. It hides behind white walls, shows itself in the silhouette of a palm against a hard blue sky, and gives itself up only in motion, when the landscape changes at every light and each neighbourhood seems to carry its own soundtrack.

Kate Bowman knows this better than most. A writer, model and the designer behind the label Kitten, she was born in New York and chose Los Angeles. Her map of the city owes less to landmarks than to atmosphere, a Los Angeles read in the footsteps of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who described California as a state of mind. She reads it the way one reads a novel in motion: from the seat of her Jeep, window down, with the sense that anything might happen.

At the table, the city turns intimate

The first lines of the map are drawn at the table, where a sprawling city suddenly becomes close. At Petit Trois, Ludo Lefebvre’s small brasserie on Highland, the pleasure lies in sitting alone at the counter and watching your plate come together in front of you, without hurry and without performance. Musso & Frank, on Hollywood Boulevard since 1919, explains why some rooms outlast decades: red booths, dark wood, bartenders with sharp wit and an elegance that does not try to be modern. Classic, here, does not mean predictable. It means dependable, like a film you have seen many times and in which you still find a new scene.

Some places work as a soundtrack. The Dresden, in Los Feliz, is Bowman’s idea of the perfect bar for a date: warm, a little theatrical, with a grand piano at the centre of the lounge and an energy that slides between the casual and the cinematic.

When the city asks for a pause, The Trails Café appears in Griffith Park, on Fern Dell Drive, as a small botanical refuge: seasonal drinks made with care, lavender and chocolate scones, picnic tables in the shade of oaks. It does not compete with nature. It converses with it, and readies you for the walk.

On the Silver Lake stretch of Sunset Boulevard, Seco translates a European daydream into Los Angeles terms: light wines, small plates and a terrace that becomes the dining room at the weekend. Bowman describes the scene precisely, a glass of chilled, bright red, an improvised dance floor by the bar and a crowd of locals, surprisingly well dressed, moving as if the night were a shared secret. In Burbank, opposite the Warner Bros. lot, The Smoke House has served the studio world since 1946. It is a steakhouse lined with celebrity portraits, but the ritual is the point: Friday nights for music and dancing, weekday lunches for overhearing, discreetly, the industry gossip that keeps the machine running.

Things to carry home

At the far end of excess, Trashy Lingerie, on La Cienega for half a century, is a pop landmark with a pink façade and a gift for fantasy. Everything is designed in house, and the result balances provocation and humour in a way only this city could produce. It is a Los Angeles that understands performance and enjoys it.

The same sensibility runs through Counterpoint, a record shop and bookshop in a single cultural gesture. Bowman’s suggestion is simple: pick up a milkshake next door and lose an hour among sleeves, spines and rare first editions. There is something very Los Angeles in this pleasure of foraging for images, ideas and sounds under one roof, as if the city wanted to remind you that style is also a matter of repertoire, and repertoire takes time. For smaller indulgences, Larchmont Beauty Center has the charm of a French pharmacy transplanted to Larchmont Boulevard, aisles of skincare, combs and the small impulses that belong to travel.

Memory, illusion and the open road

Griffith Park doubles as an emotional lookout. Bowman’s advice is to drive up at dusk, park near an abandoned bandstand and walk towards the Observatory; from above, the lights of downtown appear beyond the green of the hills and the city seems, for a few minutes, to fit inside a single glance. Hollywood Forever Cemetery offers another kind of view, a walk among legends and headstones that teaches the city’s most refined lesson: memory, too, is spectacle, and even a picnic becomes ritual when the Cinespia screen lights up under the stars.

The Velaslavasay Panorama is an antidote to speed: a 360 degree landscape painted by hand, an immersive escape that takes you out of time without leaving the city. Then there is the night that demands a dress code and imagination. The Magic Castle, the members’ clubhouse of magicians above Hollywood, turns elegance into a game over dinner and a show, and Bowman’s rule of thumb is simple: overdress. New Theater Hollywood, small and restless, stands for a contemporary Los Angeles that lives not on franchises and red carpets but on experiment, text, music and risk. When it wants to be, this city is more punk than polished.

And then comes the tip that ties everything together, almost a manifesto: the best place in the city is the car. In Los Angeles, romance happens in motion, on the surface streets, music loud, windows open, with the certainty that the road is often the destination.

In the end, Kate Bowman’s list is not a directory but a way of looking. Her Los Angeles is a city of small scenes and precise choices, where cool lies not in the obvious but in how one lives. Between a brasserie and a cemetery, a record shop and a tiny theatre, the city does not shout. It suggests, it steers, and by the time you notice, you are already driving through it with the window down.

Details: Petit Trois, North Highland Avenue, Hollywood. Musso & Frank Grill, Hollywood Boulevard. The Dresden, 1760 North Vermont Avenue, Los Feliz. The Trails Café, 2333 Fern Dell Drive, Griffith Park. The Smoke House, 4420 Lakeside Drive, Burbank. The Magic Castle, Hollywood, is a private club: entry is by invitation of a member, and a strict evening dress code applies.

GABRIEL SILVEIRADO, FOR WAYFARER.