At 1 p.m. on a warm spring Thursday, a crowd spills onto the sidewalk at Melrose and Western in Los Angeles — long one of the city’s more commercially undesirable intersections, but today an epicenter of cool.
Influencers and the casually affluent, purse dogs in tow, they’re here for jamón serrano y queso arepas, coconut cream pie, and strawberry cheesecake matcha lattes at Chainsaw, the Venezuelan pop-up-turned-bakery and cafe from Karla Subero Pittol that has quickly become one of the most popular — and viral — all-day hangs in Los Angeles.
At the same time, just around the corner, bestie dates unfold over late-afternoon glasses of natural wine at Bar Étoile, where veteran wine geek Jill Bernheimer pours — and a deeply savory cheese tart quietly steals the show.
Steps from there, the design-forward Café Telegrama is filled with chattering groups and quiet solo readers, both inside and out on the extensive, shaded patio away from the bustle of the street — facing across to one of the neighborhood’s collection of cutting-edge art galleries.
Like a California-fied West Chelsea — in the shadow of the Hollywood sign, in case you forget which city you’re in — Melrose Hill, once one of the most unloved and overlooked areas on the trendy east side, has quickly become one of LA’s most compelling micro-neighborhoods, packed with art, fine dining and chic cafes.
More walkable than much of the city famous for not walking, the revival of this corridor — in a former commercial dead zone between East Hollywood, Larchmont Village, Koreatown, and Hollywood — has taken shape through a tightly woven network of owner-operators emboldened to prioritize creativity, design, programming, and community over scale.
It’s a neighborhood model other L.A. developers should be watching in a city where so many gathering places can feel like constructed standalone islands, thriving at the expense of the streetscape.
At the center of this new/old way of imagining SoCal city life are developers Zach Lasry (son of billionaire hedge fund-manager and owner of the Milwaukee Bucks, Marc Lasry) and Josh Tohl, who, through a series of quiet acquisitions and partnerships, assembled the neighborhood as you experience it today — and put Melrose Hill on the map.
“All the buildings were individually owned,” Lasry told The Post. “Almost all of them were owner users, so they ran their businesses and owned the property. Since all were individually owned, a lot of personal conversations and discussions took place — it was very old school.”
Over the course of 2018 and 2019, the pair acquired roughly 15 properties in the neglected area — the district is about 80 percent leased and operational, Lasry said. Instead of demolishing and rebuilding, the developers preserved a rare concentration of 1920s-era commercial buildings, an uncommon move in Los Angeles, giving the area a wonderfully lived-in feel.
Lasry’s interest in the area began before any formal plan took shape. “I was living in Silver Lake at the time,” the actor-turned-place creator recalled. “I’d moved from New York after film school, and I would drive down Melrose all the time. It reminded me of the Bowery before the museums and newer stuff came. There were all these old buildings lined up on one street — that’s so rare in LA. It just seemed like it had the potential for walkability.”
What followed was not a conventional leasing strategy, but something closer to curation.
“It was really just thousands of connections and phone calls and lunches and dinners until there’s a match,” Lasry said, citing a food writer friend who also helped provided insight into up-and-coming chefs.
Rather than targeting established brands, Lasry and Tohl focused on first- and second-time operators. Gallerists and chefs who were often introduced through existing tenants or creative networks.
“We’re trying to solve for the most interesting possible outcome and the most talented people being experimental,” Lasry said. “If there’s just a ton of new ideas, then it’s going to be an attractive place to come.”
The pair’s vision for Melrose Hill draws in part from the book The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.
“She talked about the magic of walking down a street with so much action and energy and creativity — it infuses you,” Lasry related. “You can create a real flow state within a community if you have a diversity of uses and ideas in one place.”
Central to that vision is restraint — and fighting the urge to sell out.
“A lot of up-and-coming neighborhoods will be really fun and experimental for a few years,” Lasry said. “And then once they reach a certain level, that’s when the chains come in, that’s when the whole thing starts to degrade. We don’t ever want that to happen.”
But before Melrose Hill became a destination, it required people who were truly willing to take a risk.
“When we met Zach and Josh, we were working out of a cloud kitchen in Koreatown and running out of money,” said Noah Holton-Raphael of Ggiata, a popular sandwich deli now boasting six locations across Los Angeles. “We were 23 years old and burning through our savings.”
Holton-Raphael and crew opened their first shop in Melrose Hill in 2021. To truly integrate with the area, what they built was intentionally communal. “We poured everything we had into making our Melrose shop a hub for the neighborhood,” Holton-Raphael told The Post. “The best delis from back home [on the East coast] were gathering places for the community.”
Five years later, the growth has not erased what came before. “We still see many of the same faces every day,” he said. “Our regulars from 2021 are our regulars in 2026.”
Today, Ggiata is surrounded by all of the restaurants and galleries that followed suit. “The new restaurant wave in the neighborhood has been a rising tide for us,” he said. “Everyone has their own lane.”
And there are many lanes to swim in here, from award-winning Kuya Lord, one of LA’s best Filipino restaurants, to Little Fish, which draws in crowds for their perfectly parceled abalone cabbage rolls and vibes.
Across the way, chefs at Corridor 109 — one of Los Angeles’ most exciting new tasting menus from Michelin-starred Sushi Noz alum, chef Brian Baik — is now open for service, just steps from a newly opened Goop Kitchen by wellness magnate Gwyneth Paltrow.
The area’s reputation for art began on the early side, too, when the Los Angeles outpost of David Zwirner, one of the most globally significant contemporary art galleries, known for representing artists such as Gerhard Richter, Yayoi Kusama, and Kerry James Marshall, set down roots on Western Avenue.
“David opening the gallery in the neighborhood was a huge risk on his end, and it took a lot of courage,” Lasry said. “I think it might have been the turning point for everything.”
The gallery brought with it not just collectors, but a signal that this was a place worth paying attention to. That Melrose Hill could be a destination for art. For gallerists that followed suit — like Emma Fernberger of Fernberger gallery, the appeal of Melrose Hill was immediate.
“Coming from New York, I was drawn to the idea of being in a place that contained a high concentration of galleries,” Fernberger told The Post. “I loved the concept of being able to walk around a neighborhood in Los Angeles and see a bunch of shows in one outing. I’m learning that that is a very New York sensibility.”
Her program reflects that New York sensibility and artists circle — focusing on creatives that the Los Angeles market may be less familiar with.
“I’ve concentrated on showing artists who haven’t shown in Los Angeles before,” she said, including Nik Gelormino, Alina Perkins, Phil Davis, Vicky Colombet, and Anne Wehrley Bjork. “I see my role here more as importing talent.”
For many of the business owners here, Melrose Hill worked because other neighborhoods didn’t.
“We looked for a long time on Larchmont Boulevard,” Bar Etoile’s Jill Bernheimer told The Post. “The cost per square foot was extremely high, even in the pandemic. The spaces were generally quite long and narrow, inhospitable to getting enough seats to make a business model work. And at the time there were some zoning restrictions that made it difficult to get even a beer and wine license.”
In Tohl and Lasry’s Melrose Hill, Bernheimer found something different.
“We saw a space we fell in love with, with rent we could afford and a supportive landlord who heard our vision,” she said.
And more are falling in love, too — coming soon is a new tasting menu Thai concept from Wedchayan “Deau” Arpapornnopparat of Holy Basil, alongside additional projects including one from Los Angeles restaurant darling Tyler Wells of Betsy, and a soon-to-come movie theater. The developers wouldn’t allow details on the record, but called the signing of a lease “very exciting.”
Now, for Lasry and Tohl, the challenge now is preservation. Not of just their buildings but of the intent behind the growth of the neighborhood.
“If we can focus on it always being a place where really exciting things always seem to be happening,” Lasry said, “then it kind of feeds itself.”
