The Brief

Editor's note: This story first published in February 2020, but much has happened since then, including the closure of some restaurants that were on the original list. This story has been updated and republished.

Sandwiches don't get more basic than cheese and bread, yet a grilled cheese sandwich is much more than the sum of its parts. There's the choice of cheese, of bread, of butter. How much of each item do you use? Do you grill or toast it? For how long? What about condiments? And soups? And sides?

For some of us, grilled cheese is more than a nostalgic childhood staple or a quickie meal — it offers solace. It smoothes out the indignities of a bad workday and soothes the sting of unwelcome news. It's the ultimate comfort food, simple enough to be made by a child and universal enough you can find the ingredients almost anywhere.

It's also a modern Los Angeles classic, made with all kinds of intentions and iterations.

Here are a few of our favorite places to indulge in and around L.A. and the O.C. If we missed your favorite place for a grilled cheese, please let us know and we may include it on our list. (After we go and test it out, of course!)

A build-your-own grilled cheese sandwich at Clementine.

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Shelley Boyle

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Courtesy of Clementine

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Clementine

Long before grilled cheese sammies became a gourmet staple, chef Annie Miler has spent every April celebrating Grilled Cheese Month. Year-round, Clementine has a build-your-own grilled cheese option that allows you to get creative with the types of breads, cheese, proteins and more, starting at $10.25. (Add roasted cherry tomatoes, caramelized onions, sundried tomatoes for $2.75. Add "the works" — lettuce, red onions, pickled jalapenos and mayo — for $1.50.)

The no-frills, classic grilled cheese sandwich at the Apple Pan.

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Anna Gragert

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LAist

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The Apple Pan

The $7.75 grilled cheese at the Apple Pan serves as a reminder not to underestimate the power of basic ingredients. Choose between Swiss or Tillamook cheddar and white, wheat or rye bread. If you don't specify, you'll get melted-to-perfection cheddar on white bread with a side of black olives and crinkle-cut, cinnamon-tinged pickle coins. It's fast, no-frills diner food. Save room for one of the housemade pies (we vote for banana cream).

The grilled cheese sandwich at Esters Wine Shop goes well with a glass of wine.

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Abby Mahler

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Courtesy of Esters

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Esters Wine Shop & Bar

Provolone, Reggiano and Reading cheese are blended with béchamel that oozes out from slices of salted pain de mie baked at Milo + Olive, Esters Wine Shop & Bar's sister spot. The sandwich is paired with cornichons and a spicy red pepper jam. And on first bite, you'll understand why the sandwich costs $18.

The grilled mac 'n' cheese sandwich at The Melt.

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Courtesy of The Melt

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The Melt

The Melt's $7.99 best-seller places muenster, fontina and sharp cheddar between slices of French bread. But you could argue that the $10.49 Mac Daddy grilled cheese — creamy mac 'n' cheese with flawlessly cooked noodles (not too soft, not too al dente), sharp and medium cheddar, smoked bacon and crisp onions — is what makes the Melt stand out. (Vegetarians can order it without bacon.) It's a comfort food collision in the best way. The Melt has multiple locations across California, including in Los Angeles, West Hollywood, Irvine and San Diego.

The Hat

The Hat is best known for its pastrami sandwiches but it also makes a killer grilled cheese. The bread is so crunchy you'll think it was fried in butter. The cheese is as gooey and as American as it gets. Together, they create a simple, nostalgic sammie that costs only $4.99. Staffers are happy to customize it with add-ons and your choice of bread. In a world that can be overwhelming, the Hat makes a classic sandwich, done right. There are multiple locations across the Southland, including Alhambra, Brea, Glendora, Lake Forest, Monterey Park and Pasadena.

The grilled cheese sandwich at Swingers.

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Anna Gragert

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LAist

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Swingers Diner

The Stuffed Grilled Cheese, $15.95, at Swingers houses jack and cheddar cheese, guacamole, sliced tomatoes and grilled onions. Imagine an In-N-Out grilled cheese but bigger, more aggro and with a California diner twist. The creaminess of the mashed avocado is perfect with the sharpness of the cheese while the tomatoes add acidity and the grilled onions bring sweetness. Swingers stays open late and this is an ideal way to fill your stomach after a night out.

A grilled cheese sandwich at the Carving Board.

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JP Cordero

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Courtesy of the Carving Board

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The Carving Board

The $8 grilled cheese at the Carving Board is made with mozzarella and cheddar on grilled pain de mie. Simple yet finger-licking good. There's also a $13 buffalo grilled cheese with grilled chicken, buffalo sauce and mozzarella on that same toasty pain de mie.

A grilled cheese sandwich at Waffle Love.

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Courtesy of Waffle Love

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Waffle Love

When a waffle meets a grilled cheese, what do you get? A sandwich that delights in texture as much as it does in taste. Stuffed with muenster, provolone and a tart garlic butter, Waffle Love's $8.93 croissant-waffle sandwich brings sweetness to a savory meal. Paired with tomato bisque, $13.85 for the combo, it's a model brunch food for those times when you can't decide whether you want breakfast or lunch.

A grilled cheese sandwich at Cassell's.

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Wonho Frank Lee

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Courtesy of Cassell's

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Cassell's Hamburgers

If you enjoy a diner-style grilled cheese, look no further. Cassell's beautifully buttered $9.50 sandwich is filled with cheddar, Swiss and mozzarella that oozes out from between the bread and turns crisp. Imagine a grilled cheese studded with flecks of Cheez-Its and served with a side of "tomato jam" (i.e. fancy ketchup that may spoil your love for Heinz). Definitely get an order of their Kennebec fries or the sweet potato waffle fries.

Paul Feig is known to center women in films like Bridesmaids, The Heat, A Simple Favor and the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot.

Following that trend, his newest psychological thriller, The Housemaid, stars Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried as co-leads. Sweeney’s character is hired as a live-in housemaid for a wealthy couple in a mansion. She soon finds out that the couple has dark secrets. The movie is an adaptation of Freida McFadden’s novel of the same name.

LAist host Julia Paskin talked with Feig about his latest film and keeping women at the forefront in his movies.

Balancing comedy and thriller in ‘The Housemaid’

The Housemaid is a mystery laden with humor. He says to strike that tonal balance, you have to take the genre seriously.

Paul Feig:  There's some heavy things in this movie. It's pretty dark. But for me, the fun comes from the retribution. You build an audience up. It's a very interesting movie because it has a big twist right in the middle.

And so we kind of set you up in the first hour of the movie and then we pay you off in the second hour. And it's really a brilliantly written book. Freida McFadden did an amazing job just with the structure of it 'cause you really get seduced into this story, and then the rug gets pulled out from under you.

On centering women in his films

Julia Paskin: It used to be so unusual to tell stories that are centered on women characters.  You work with these really funny women.  How do you have these relationships when it seemed like some of your counterparts that are also men in comedy were not forging those same relationships?

Paul Feig:  I guess it's what your sense of humor is and what you're comfortable around. And I was an only child. I was really close to my mom and my nextdoor neighbors were this family of eight kids and six were girls, and they were all kinda my best friends ...  and it was that coupled with seeing how, especially in comedy, women were really treated as props in comedy to be foils to the guys who were funny. And I just didn't like that.

Feig’s tips on dealing with online trolls

In 2016, Paul Feig directed a reboot of the Ghostbusters series starring an all-female-led cast, including Melissa McCarthy and Leslie Jones. After Feig announced the movie and cast on his Twitter page, users criticized the all-female casting choice, calling it a “gimmick.” At one point, the trailer for the film was the most down-voted movie trailer on YouTube.

Feig reflected on his announcement of the movie on Twitter and subsequent backlash to the direction of the movie.

Paul Feig:  The first 24 hours was just pure excitement from all my fans. I went to bed that night, like, ‘This is the greatest thing,’ and got up in the morning …  and then just my feed turned into just absolute hatred and death threats.

Julia Paskin: What do you do in a situation like that? I'm just starting to kind of get a small taste as a broadcaster.

Paul Feig:  You ignore and you mute. You [weren’t] able to mute back then. You had to block somebody. And if you blocked them, it was a badge of honor and they would put the block symbol up and say, ‘Look, he's avoiding us or whatever’ ...

So just mute and don’t respond no matter how terrible it is.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

In describing the massive undertaking it was to compose the score for the latest Avatar installment, Avatar: Fire and Ash, film composer Simon Franglen has some statistics he likes to share.

One is that almost every minute of the three-hour, 17-minute film was scored — three hours and four minutes to be exact. Printed out, that amount of music totaled more than 1,900 pages and had to be transported in two large road cases.

Another favorite stat of Franglen’s is that the epic score, which needed to match the epic scale of the film, required the work of 210 musicians, singers and engineers in Los Angeles.

Bucking the trend of recording overseas

Franglen is from the U.K., but L.A. has been his home for years. Meaning no disrespect to Britain, Franglen still says, “I would rather be here than anywhere else.”

That pride in his adopted home base has extended to his scoring work for Avatar, which Franglen says he and the film’s producers (director James Cameron and Jon Landau, who passed away in 2024) wanted recorded in Los Angeles, despite the fact that a lot of film scoring is increasingly moving abroad.

Franglen scored the second Avatar film, Avatar: The Way of Water, as well, and worked with Cameron previously, along with his mentor, composer James Horner, on the first Avatar and Titanic.

He also has worked as a session musician and producer with artists like Whitney Houston, Barbara Streisand, Miley Cyrus and Celine Dion — he won a Grammy for Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic.

But even with his membership in the small club of Grammy winners, Franglen is more likely to bring up that he’s been a member of the American Federation of Musicians Local 47, the local professional musicians union, for more than three decades.

Recording the Avatar: Fire and Ash theme in Los Angeles was important to everyone on the production, Franglen says, as was bucking recent trends of scaling back film scores or using more electronic scoring than live orchestras.

“The Hollywood film score is something that we've all grown up with,” Franglen says. And it was important to him and the producers to keep the recording of the score in L.A. (the first and second Avatar scores were recorded here, as well) “because we are very much a part of not just the music community but the film community of L.A., which has been having a tough time recently, as we all know.”

“ I'm very proud of being able to keep the work here,” Franglen says. “And I think the quality of the work is shown in the score itself, which I'm exceedingly proud of.”

Avatar: Fire and Ash’s end-credits song, “Dream As One,” sung by Miley Cyrus and which Franglen co-wrote with Cyrus, Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, recently was nominated for a Golden Globe. And the score for Avatar: The Way of Water earned Franglen a 2023 World Soundtrack Award.

How work for musicians in LA has declined and the ripple effects

When Franglen first came to L.A. as a session musician, he says there were seven full-time orchestras working every day. When he was working on pop records, Franglen says, the top guitarists would need to be booked three months in advance because they were so busy.

Today, Franglen says, there’s less and less work because of productions moving overseas.

The latest annual report from Film LA, the official film office for the LA region, found the number of scripted projects filmed in L.A. declined 14 percent from 2023 to 2024.

And while California expanded its Film & TV Tax Credit Program this year to help encourage productions to stay here, its effects aren’t yet known.

“The problem is [...] if you're going to film in Europe, then maybe you don't record the score in L.A.,” Franglen says. “ And eventually what happens is that if I want to hire the finest guitarist in the world, I know that he'll be available. I can probably ask him, ‘Would you be available this week or next?’ And he will say yes.”

While that can be wonderful in many ways, Franglen says, it also means less opportunities overall, including for musicians with less experience who might get a chance at a bigger gig if all the top musicians were as busy as they used to be.

“I'm seeing a lot of the faces that I know from when I was a session musician in my orchestra," Franglen says. "That's great. I'm very, very pleased to see them. But it also means that the turnover has not been as extensive as what one would've expected, and that turnover is important.”

More new players coming in, Franglen says, helps ensure that recording work for movies like Avatar — and smaller scale films too — can stay in Los Angeles for years to come.

This year, as South Gate librarian Stephanie Lien reviewed new picture books for the LA County Library’s shelves, she found a story that reflected her own childhood.

Little Bird Laila is the story of a young girl with a big job — translating between the English in her everyday life and the Chinese her parents speak.

“ I know every kid who may be like a first-generation immigrant who has parents who don't speak English that well — they've done the same thing,” Lien said. “I know I did it as a kid.”

In California, an estimated 1.8 million children are part of a family where at least one parent has difficulty speaking English. The experience of kids translating for their family members is called "language brokering.” It can feel burdensome but also build empathy.

“ You get annoyed,” Lien said. “But … [I realized] they need help, just like I do.”

And it turns out, this wasn’t the only SoCal-created picture book on the subject this year. Manhattan Beach author Maritere Rodriguez Bellas and local publisher Lil’ Libros created the bilingual Tío Ricky Doesn't Speak English. (Thanks to MiJa Books co-founder Stephanie Moran Reed for the heads up!)

"Little Bird Laila" and "Tío Ricky Doesn't Speak English"

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Erin Hauer and Ross Brenneman

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LAist

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LAist sat down with both authors to understand how they brought these stories to life and what they hope families find between the pages.

These excerpts are from separate interviews with Maritere Rodriguez Bellas and Kelly Yang.

Author Kelly Yang.

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Jessica Sample

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Author Maritere Rodriguez Bellas.

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Fletcher Wold Photography

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LAist: What compelled you to become an author?

Bellas:  Over three decades ago, when I was raising my kids, there was really very little information or education about bilingual parenting.

I grew up with Spanish and English, and then I went to school and I learned a third language, French. While doing that, I met people from all kinds of cultures, and I realized what a gift it was to be able to communicate in all these languages and learn about all these cultures.

Yang: I have been writing for many, many years — pretty much since I was a little kid — but wasn't really sure if I could do it as a profession. I would go to the library, and I would look at the back of books, and I didn't really see anyone who looked like me, so I didn't really know if this was a possibility for someone like me. I loved telling stories. I come from an immigrant background, and my parents and I moved here [from Tianjin, China] when I was 6 years old. Stories were really big in our family, as a way to keep ourselves motivated and paint a brighter future for our lives.

Where did the idea of your book come from? 

Yang: [Little Bird Laila]  mirrors my own childhood experience. To this day, I am the one dealing with pretty much all of the property tax filings — anything that has to do with English, even though my parents actually do speak English. But this is just kind of an inherited job that I'm unfortunately tenured for now.

 As a kid, it was very aggravating. I didn't want to have to do all these other things. When we grow up with parents who really need our help, we don't really have a choice.

I learned that there were things that were pretty powerful about it too. Everyone kind of depended on me. I also got to translate things in my own favor. So for example, when I would go to teacher-parent conferences — and obviously I had a lot of grammar mistakes and spelling mistakes when I was a kid — I would just tell my mom, ‘Kelly is doing an amazing job.’

I learned that there were, you know, two sides of the coin. Yes, there's a lot of work. It can be a big pain, but there were also benefits too.

Bellas:  In 2017, I was asked to write my first children's book.   I did not intend my career to end up as a children's book author, but I wrote that book, and while I was writing it, I kept thinking, ‘This is the book that my kids didn't have when they were growing up.’

I truly believe having raised multicultural kids, the more we expose children to different cultures and different languages, the better adults they're going to be in their future — compassionate, empathetic, respectful. And those are the virtues that I wanna ... show and I want parents to go after when they're raising their little pequeñitos.

Fast forward to 2022, when Bellas reached out to local bilingual book publisher Patty Rodriguez (Lil’ Libros) with a few ideas for children’s books. 

Bellas:  One of the ideas was a boy that had to translate for his grandmother, and she called me on the phone right away, and she’s like, ‘This spoke to me because that was me.’

The little boy in Tío Ricky Doesn't Speak English is Puerto Rican, and throughout the story, there are little hints at his identity. For example, he plays dominoes with his uncle and there’s a bag of plantain chips on the table. Why were those details important to include? 

Bellas:  I wanted my Puerto Rican culture to be highlighted. It's important to me. My kids didn't have that. They spent every summer for, I don't know, 12 years in a row in Ponce, Puerto Rico. So they grew up with the flavors and the smells and the noise and all that from our culture. But they didn't have it once we were back home. I couldn't read them a book where they could actually see themselves.

I also want to share with children from all cultures. I want them to learn about my little island wherever they are.

At one point in Little Bird Laila, the girl realizes she can teach her parents English, even though she hasn’t quite perfected the language herself. Why did you include this uncertainty? 

Yang: I just wanna be real to the authentic experience of someone who is still learning. And there is a lot of self-doubt, right? You're a learner, but you're still able to teach other people even though you are a learner. And I wanted to honor that — that people felt that they could, that they had permission, that they could do it. Because I definitely wasn't perfect at speaking or writing or reading or any of it, but ... there were things I could still give.

What do you hope families take away from your book? 

Yang: The central theme for all my books is to hope that people feel seen and that they find the humor and the heart in the story because there's a lot of funny moments and there's a lot of deeply emotional moments too. We really need to cherish those moments. Whatever we can do to spend time together as a family, right?

It's OK to open up and share that we don't have all the answers or we don't know all of the skills. There are tons of things I tell my kids like, I don't know. I don't know how to navigate that app. Right? Or whatever it is. There's lots of things I don't know, and it's OK to share that, and it's OK to be vulnerable together, and it's OK to learn together.

Bellas: The idea was always that the child, when he or she reads the book, would think, ‘Oh, it's really not a chore to translate. It's really an act of kindness and love and I'm proud to be bilingual.’

FBI deputy director Dan Bongino said Wednesday he plans to step down from the bureau in January.

In a statement posted on X, Bongino thanked President Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel "for the opportunity to serve with purpose."

Bongino was an unusual pick for the No. 2 post at the FBI, a critical job overseeing the bureau's day-to-day affairs traditionally held by a career agent. Neither Bongino nor his boss, Patel, had any previous experience at the FBI.

Bongino did have previous law enforcement experience, as a police officer and later as a Secret Service agent, as well as a long history of vocal support for Trump.

Bongino made his name over the past decade as a pro-Trump, far-right podcaster who pushed conspiracy theories, including some involving the FBI. He had been critical of the bureau, embracing the narrative that it had been "weaponized" against conservatives and even calling its agents "thugs."

His tenure at the bureau was at times tumultuous, including a clash with Justice Department leadership over the administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

But it also involved the arrest earlier this month of the man authorities say is responsible for placing two pipe bombs near the Democratic and Republican committee headquarters, hours before the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In an unusual arrangement, Bongino has had a co-deputy director since this summer when the Trump administration tapped Andrew Bailey, a former attorney general of Missouri, to serve alongside Bongino in the No. 2 job.

President Trump praised Bongino in brief remarks to reporters before he announced he was stepping down."Dan did a great job," Trump said. "I think he wants to go back to his show."
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