Photo: Catherine Dzilenski
Los Angeles is not known as a happy-to-wait town, really — lack of available sidewalk space and an immovable car culture have conspired against the kind of linephilia New York encourages. So locals and not-so-locals like me took note when a new restaurant in the not-exactly-a-restaurant-row neighborhood of Larchmont opened in the fall and quickly developed a reputation for four–, six–, or even eight–hour waits. From morning to evening, Max & Helen’s is a hit.
“It’s the longest wait for a table in L.A., possibly in the city’s history,” The Hollywood Reporter relayed last month. Hostesses at the restaurant confirmed to me that waits have indeed gotten to the eight-hour mark on weekend mornings; for shorter waits, the neighborhood is walkable, and local businesses have been coming by to thank the team for boosting foot traffic. Breakfast at Max & Helen’s is served all day, and the breakfast is good: Ruth Reichl posted last month that the diner serves the best waffle she’s ever had — “worth the wait.” I wanted to judge for myself, so off I went to join the queue.
Let me confirm: The waffle, a yeasted specimen with an earthiness and texture born of a three-day process, is very, very good. Much of the credit for that goes to Nancy Silverton, the doyenne of Los Angeles restaurateurs, whose Mozza and Chi Spacca are local royalty. The rest goes to the diner’s very public face, Phil Rosenthal, the creator of Everybody Loves Raymond. After making a fortune on the sitcom, he devoted himself to his other pleasure, food, starring in a globe-trotting docuseries, Somebody Feed Phil. His aw-shucks demeanor half-conceals a steelier tenacity: Rosenthal created the show in its original iteration as a PBS program, before it moved to Netflix and a wider audience, while quietly investing in a number of L.A. restaurants, like Michelin-starred Providence and the Umami Burger chain. (He’s also an investor in San Sabino in New York.) But this is the first time he himself has led the charge. Max & Helen’s is Rosenthal’s dream and Silverton’s execution. Restaurant investment is a notoriously fickle business, and I wondered whether he was pursuing a new hobby in losing money. “My wife and I support the arts,” he tells me from a booth at Max & Helen’s, “and this is one of my favorite arts.”
The real Max and Helen are Rosenthal’s late parents, familiar to fans of his show, on which they made regular, adorable appearances in their bathrobes. Max and Helen were not exactly gourmets — the only spice in their house was salt, Rosenthal says — though they had a taste for diner staples like fluffy scrambled eggs. Max & Helen’s serves its scramble that way, in their memory. (Max’s tombstone reads, “Did you make the eggs fluffy?” Helen’s replies, “I’m listening to the opera” — she didn’t need to be reminded how he liked them.)
Rosenthal grew up loving diners — New City Diner in Rockland County was his Proustian dinette — and a visit to the Palace Diner in Biddleford, Maine, for an episode of Somebody Feed Phil reignited his passion. That state’s oldest diner, it was taken over by Greg Mitchell and Chad Conley, two young chefs committed to keeping the cuisine while improving the ingredients and techniques. (Mitchell previously cooked at Gramercy Tavern.)
Silverton has known Rosenthal for years — he is an investor in Mozza — and agreed to develop and oversee the menu, despite not knowing much about diner food. “I never made matzo-ball soup in my life,” she says, “and I’m a nice Jewish girl.” Having grown up in Southern California, her references were less diner, more coffee shop, the L.A. equivalent: mid-century places like Tiny Naylor’s, Du-Par’s, and Ships. (Diners served cheeseburgers; coffee shops patty melts: Max & Helen’s serves both.) She spent about a year working out a menu of time-honored, un-updated classics; the menu, and even the ingredients, tend to dead-end around 1970. “There’s no breakfast burrito,” Silverton says. “There’s no avocado toast.” There is meatloaf two ways (cold sandwich; hot plate), grilled cheese, chili, and, of course, matzo-ball soup, based on Helen’s recipe. “Don’t tell my mother, not that you could,” Rosenthal says, “but Nancy made it better.” (Day-to-day, Rosenthal’s son-in-law, Mason Royal, runs the kitchen; his wife, Rosenthal’s daughter, Lily, is the restaurant’s creative director.)
The tuna melt, properly griddled and served without an overabundance of mayonnaise, is in fact very good. (The melted cheese is New School American, a cheffed-up American cheese.) A few diner historians online have carped about the prices, but they generally correspond to the neighborhood and the ingredients. Almost all the ingredients, at least. The patty-melt beef may be dry-aged, but the ice cream in the milkshakes is Thrifty, a SoCal budget scoop since 1940. “We learned you cannot make a proper milkshake — and I tried — with premium ice cream,” Silverton says. She made up the difference in butterfat using half-and-half in place of milk. Diner eating is not for the clear of heart. Rosenthal took one more selfie with fans visiting from Washington, D.C., and I noticed the new glucose-monitor port peeking out from under his shirtsleeve.
The thronged response suggests that Rosenthal is correct that the diner still resonates in L.A. just as it has in New York, where recent years have seen a spate of upscale diner revivals, from Montague Diner and Kellogg’s in Brooklyn all the way to the Phoenicia Diner in the Catskills (now seen on Apple TV as Pip’s on Severance). “It literally was the second kitchen to so many people,” Rosenthal says. Competing with memory and nostalgia can be tough: They tend to play tricks on the mind — one customer complained that his tuna melt was all wrong because it was warm and the cheese melted — but they also offer a wide appeal. On the day I visited, customers seemed to be split between die-hard fans of Somebody Feed Phil, rushing over for selfies and compliments — Rosenthal gamely agreed — and below-the-line industry types, like a director I sat next to at the counter, a 35-year veteran of Los Angeles, who lamented the decline in local shoots as he praised his patty melt to the skies. After the Golden Globes, most of the Only Murders in the Building gang — Steve Martin, Martin Short, Selena Gomez, and the show’s creators — came by for hot dogs and sandwiches, still in black tie. All of Rosenthal’s meetings, he says, now take place at the diner; he was due to meet with a CBS executive there that night. “Spielberg’s been a few times,” he adds. “He sent an assistant for the tuna melt the other day.”
