There is a trend in mid city LA towards hole in the wall cafes located in vintage 1920s buildings and offering one very expensive specialty. Near Hollywood and Vine, there is a narrow, artisanly elegantly decorated cafe called Pie Hole. There, you can get a $5 coffee ($6 latte) with a slice of one of six GMO free handmade pies with elaborately detailed names. If you want an entire pie, it's about $35. There is nowhere to park, but there is an impressive line of hipsters who have materialized by spontaneous generation. This is perhaps a late end stage in the gentrification game, since the neighborhood was abandoned buildings, prostitutes, and tattoo parlors when I was first visiting LA in the late 1980s. Across the street on Vine is a Trader Joe's, a block south one of the most elaborate Walgreens, and the ever-busy Arclight Cinemas at the revitalized 1950s landmark, the Cineramadome.
Nearer our house, in Larchmont Village, there is a narrow cafe with the trendily meaningless name Go Get Em Tiger, serving 8 kinds of coffee and 8 kinds of tea, at $5-7 per cup, and breakfast comfort foods like A Waffle for $9.50. It is a yeast-raised waffle, thus distinguished from its unmentionable competitors (none, indeed, found locally on Larchmont Boulevard) who skim by with baking soda-raised waffles. For those with a lighter appetite or a smaller budget, there is an artisanally lopsided small cinnamon roll for $6, carefully displayed in no more than pairs or triplets under glass, as if they were vintage collector's shot glasses. Orange juice is not available, and there will be what might be a bemused pause if you ask, but not an actual smirk or gesture, which would be declasse'. Mitigating or perhaps justifying the cost, there are six or seven staff for the four customers.
