The Brief

It’s nighttime in Beverly Hills in the swinging 1960s. As commuters speed by on Santa Monica Boulevard, they probably don’t even notice the squat, windowless building with a single entrance.

But on any given night, Hollywood legends like Frank Sinatra, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, George Raft, Don Rickles, Jack Lemmon, Gregory and Veronique Peck, Kirk Douglas, Sammy Davis Jr., Jimmy Stewart, Anthony Quinn or Henry Fonda may be dining inside, away from the paparazzi, drinking scotch and swapping stories in slick red leather booths, while eating hearty red sauce Italian meals served by discreet waiters in sharp tuxedos.

This was La Dolce Vita, which the LA Time’s Jean McMurphy once called “a neighborhood restaurant for the rich and famous.” A clubby, tiny eatery where reservations were essential — even Sinatra occasionally had to wait. For over five decades, new generations of high-flying insiders would frequent La Dolce Vita, including George Clooney, designer Tom Ford, Tom Hanks, Charlize Theron, editor Graydon Carter, and former presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush.

But during the pandemic, like so many L.A. area restaurants, the lights went out at La Dolce Vita. In 2023, after a three-year closure, it was reopened by international dynamos Marc Rose and Med Abrous of hospitality group Call Mom, who also own L.A. staples The Spare Room and Genghis Cohen.

“The first day Med and I walked in here with the actual keys, I looked at him and was like, ‘Well, it's ours to f— up,’” Rose says.

And true to La Dolce Vita’s A-list atmosphere, the new owners are keeping the restaurant’s secrets they have heard from old-timers to themselves.

“We get a lot,” Rose says. “We tend to want to keep those stories internal and share them with people when the times are right, because that's what it's for. When you build a clubhouse, you kind of want those stories to be here permanently.”

In many ways, Rose and Abrous are a throwback to La Dolce Vita’s original founders. There have been many celebrity mainstays over the years — The Brown Derby, Chasen’s, The Formosa, Perino’s, Romanoff’s, Ma Maison, Musso and Frank — and few are left. But La Dolce Vita survived, perhaps because it served up nostalgia to celebrities who had already become past-their-prime legends themselves and were tired of the rat race — they were looking for a bit of home.

Marc Rose (left) and Med Abrous, the owners of La Dolce Vita.

(

Shelby Moore

)

George Smith and Jimmy Ullo were second and third generation Italians — East coast transplants who had spent decades working in the upscale eatery industry in Los Angeles. According to a 1976 profile by the LA Times Lois Dawn, they met at the popular Italian restaurant Villa Capri, where Smith was a bartender and Ullo was maître d’hotel. When Smith and Ullo decided to start their own Italian restaurant, they went to two Villa Capri regulars, 1930s movie star (and known Mafia associate) George Raft, and old blue eyes himself, Frank Sinatra.

“[They] went to Frank and said, ‘we're going to open our own place,’” Rose says. “So, I think Mr. Sinatra agreed to become an investor and a backer of the place. I think — this isn't written anywhere — it was like, ‘well, I'm going to do it, but I want it to be my clubhouse too.’ And I think that when you see a building … that has no windows, it's an easy place to make your clubhouse and to do things behind closed doors.”

Frank Sinatra in 1968

(

Los Angeles Herald Examiner Photo Collection

/

Los Angeles Public Library

)

La Dolce Vita opened in 1966 at 9785 Santa Monica Blvd. In true Hollywood fashion, the interior was designed by Jerry Wunderlich, an Oscar-nominated set decorator for TV shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and the film The Exorcist. “La Dolce Vita is designed with seeming simplicity. Brick walls, wine bottles, straight, uncluttered lines, a marvelous use of glasses on the back bar,” Lois Dawn wrote in a review. Little did she know- the brick was fake.

“The layout was also something that really had this clubhouse feeling,” Rose says. “It's all booths. There's no loose seating or anything. It was really built for groups in a certain kind of dining, this kind of familial dining that is associated with American Italian restaurants.”

La Dolce Vita's dining room is known for its charm and atmosphere.

(

Shelby Moore

)

La Dolce Vita soon became a Rat-Pack era staple, where the Hoboken, New Jersey-born Sinatra felt right at home. The expansive menu featured entrees with names like “Steak Sinatra” and “Veal Fellini” which was a “marvelous melting combine of eggplant, prosciutto and mozzarella.” The mozzarella was a guest favorite, with tomato sauce as “fresh as a garden.”

The chefs were also glad to whip up anything patrons desired, even if it was off menu. And when Chef Gino Giglio found himself an ingredient down, he improvised. “Film producer Robert Evans wanted rigatoni one night when they were out of ricotta cheese,” The Los Angeles Times reported in 1976, “so they made up a dish with bechamel and parmigiana and now serve it often.”

Beloved, longtime maître d’ Reuben Castro started working at La Dolce Vita in 1974 when he was 21 and became an expert at knowing what his celeb clientele wanted. '[Sinatra] always pasta or steak, nothing else,” he told Piers Morgan of The Mail on Sunday in 2013. “He loved veal Milanese or rigatoni pomodoro, and arugula salad with shaved parmesan ... Red wine, like a Sassicaia, if he was with his wife. But if it was a boys' night then Jack Daniels all the way. It was always Daniels, and always on the rocks.”

Try the veal.

(

Shelby Moore

)

Celebrities like the Reagans, Don Rickles, and Sinatra had their preferred booths, and the telephone was always ready to be whisked to a table for important industry calls. “Frank Sinatra would hold court at booth No. 1 and tip royally, announcing to anybody that the staff at the restaurant was family,” Castro told The Los Angeles Times in 2004. When a kitchen worker’s watch broke, Sinatra gave him a Rolex.

Another time, the Times reported that George Raft “put the keys to his white 1974 Coupe de Ville on the table and told Castro he was too old to drive. ‘It’s over,’ he said.’ I’m giving you my car.’”

Things were perhaps too comfortable at La Dolce Vita. Castro remembered one uncomfortable moment when President Ronald Reagan suffered from gas. “He once stood up and farted very loudly,” Castro told The Mail on Sunday. “I couldn't ignore it, so I stood to attention and said, ’Salute, Mr. Presidente!’ And he laughed so loudly I thought he would fall over!"

But an air of menace occasionally swirled around La Dolce Vita. Sinatra, his daughter Tina (who is a part of the restaurant’s current ownership group) recalled, refused to sit with his back to the door.

“We once had a hoodlum shoot up the outside of the door after an argument over a reservation,” Castro recalled. “Frank heard about it, and a few weeks later he came in and said to me, ‘Don't worry about that guy again, we took care of it.’ I never found out what that meant, but that guy never came back to shoot at my door again!'”

The old timers would patronize La Dolce Vita until their deaths. Some of its mystique and popularity died with them. "Here was a piece of real Hollywood history that was at risk of going away forever. It was criminal," film producer Alessandro Uzielli told Town and Country in 2013.

New owners

In 2003, Uzielli and his producing partners Ben Myron and David Simmer purchased La Dolce Vita. They refurbished it and honored the past by putting plaques up at departed regulars’ favorite booths. All was going well, until the pandemic hit.

That’s where Rose and Abrous stepped in. “Med and I grew up together and we grew up in New York City,” Rose says. “We grew up going to restaurants very much like this… These are the restaurants I've been going to with my dad who was also in the business, which I swore I would never be. And here I am. But these are the restaurants that I remember seeing my dad walk in and tip every single person on the way to the table. And I'm like, ‘how do you even know that that guy's going to be your table?’ And one time he said to me, he goes, ‘I don't, but I guarantee you my bread's going to come out warm.’”

For Rose and Abrous, reviving La Dolce Vita was a no-brainer. “We like to amplify the richness of history, both architecturally design wise and in a city in which we live,” Abrous says. “Our families are here; our kids go to school here. Why not do something kind of small and special? And that does give us all that kind of nostalgic feelings that really sparked our passion for hospitality in the first place.”

The duo worked with designer Victoria Gillet of We Are Dada to enhance the restaurant’s interior. Without changing the clubby layout, they gave it a modern twist — adding stained glass windows depicting cheetahs in empty coves, a cheetah carpet, pearly wood walls, and a revamped bar.

The bar at La Dolce Vita.

(

Shelby Moore

)

“The words sexy and chic came up a lot, which you don't always associate with spaghetti and meatballs, but we felt that they could be because we felt that way when we went into those restaurants,” Rose says.

“We always make the joke that when we first walked into the restaurant, it looked like it was right out of Goodfellas and now it looks like it's in Casino,” Abrous says.

They focus on locally grown produce and have curated a small red sauce menu which includes spaghetti and meatballs, tuna tartare, Caesar salad (made tableside), Veal Parmigiana, Clams Oreganata, and Bucatini al Limone — which can appeal to the health conscious and hearty eaters alike.

“We understand that people's palates have changed, the way they eat has changed. Even the way in California versus New York is different- the way people eat. And we paid attention to that,” Rose says. “Of course, there's a veal parm on the menu that is amazing and incredible … but there's also the most beautiful branzino piece of fish that you could eat.”

In the 10 months since it reopened, La Dolce Vita has proved that Angelenos are eager to see their history saved, and to savor the intimacy of a service-forward, secretive spot. It’s also a wonderful place for people watching, where grizzled rock stars sit in a booth next to sunny starlets, and old timers talk to friendly waiters at the bar while serious men in designer suits streak past to their booths. But it doesn’t feel pretentious, but rather like an upscale hole-in-the-wall that happens to be in the middle of Beverly Hills.

“It’s arguably the most famous zip code on the planet,” Abrous says. “And you think about the Rodeos of it all and the tourism and all, and you forget, it's a real neighborhood. There's so much residential up and down the streets here. People have a restaurant to go to where they feel good and they feel safe and they feel- I hate to say it, this sounds like an ad for Olive Garden — like you're at home. It's a special feeling.”

A long-running court battle between California veterans and the Trump administration will continue, as federal officials consider asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a lower court’s order to build more housing for unhoused L.A. veterans.

A federal appeals court on Thursday agreed to temporarily pause the order to construct more than 2,500 new housing units on the Veterans Affairs campus in West L.A.

Mark Rosenbaum, an attorney with Public Counsel representing the plaintiffs, told LAist the delay could spell life or death for unhoused veterans, especially as the region braces for strong El Niño-driven storms.

“These are veterans who risked their lives and suffered both the visible and invisible wounds of war,” Rosenbaum said. “What the government is saying to them is, you're supposed to stay on the street."

VA officials did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment.

Veterans' lawyers in a court filing called a possible appeal to the Supreme Court a “hopeless shot.”

“The government has lost every time they have taken this to court. No court has ruled for them on any of these matters,” Rosenbaum told LAist. “This is part of the administration’s war on its own veterans, and it’s time for that war to come to an end.”

Could long-running case end up at the Supreme Court?

The litigation was initiated in 2023 by L.A. veterans struggling with homelessness. The case has centered on the 400-acre V.A. campus, which U.S. District Judge David O. Carter has ruled should offer more housing to the approximately 2,250 veterans experiencing homelessness in L.A. County.

In 2024, Carter ordered officials to add thousands of temporary and permanent homes, and end leases with UCLA, a private K-12 school and an oil drilling company, which he said did not serve the needs of veterans.

An appeals court last month blocked the federal government’s efforts to halt the housing construction. But veteran advocates knew that federal officials could ask for further delays as the case winds through the courts.

VA officials now have until Dec. 10 to decide whether to appeal their fight to the Supreme Court. Judges with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals told lawyers for the federal government that if they do not decide to appeal by Dec. 10, “the stay will be lifted immediately.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District shortened the application window for specialized academic programs this year, and will no longer accept paper forms.

Applications for the district’s magnet, dual language and affiliated charter schools for the next academic year opened Oct. 1 and are due Nov. 6, 2026.

How does it work?

If you want your child to attend their neighborhood school, enrollment is fairly straightforward. There’s a separate process for the district’s specialized programs called Choices.

There are two windows to apply — on-time and late. The latter consists of all the spaces left after families who applied on time accept their offers.

Here’s the timeline for the 2027-28 school year:

• Sept. 2026: School fairs start.
• Oct. 1, 2026: Choices application opens.
• Nov. 6, 2026:  Deadline to apply online.
• Dec. 1, 2026:  Late applications begin. 
• February 2027: On-time applicant results sent. 
• March 5, 2027: Deadline to accept or decline school offers for on-time applicants. School assignments for late applications follow the processing of on-time applications. Students may be offered a spot through the start of the spring semester. 
• Aug. 12, 2027: The school year begins.

LAUSD will no longer accept paper Choices applications. If families do not have a computer, they can use a smartphone to complete an application. LAUSD will also allow families to use computers at school parent centers.

How to prepare

Every child within LAUSD boundaries is assigned a school — find yours through the district’s “resident school identifier.”

But there are also hundreds of other programs available through the Choices process.

Those include:

• Magnets: Programs on a specific theme, such as science, math, language, advanced studies or art. These programs were originally established to integrate segregated schools and have a unique “points” system to prioritize applications. 
• Dual language or immersion: Students learn in English and in a second language such as Spanish, Mandarin, Korean or Armenian. 
• Affiliated charter schools: District-run schools with more freedom to try different types of teaching or other programs. 

No one type of school is inherently better than another, and no one metric defines a great school — there are many factors beyond test scores to consider, and we go over some of those here.

By far the most frequent piece of advice we’ve heard is to go on an in-person school tour if possible.

“The very best thing that people can do is go to the school and try to watch the way that educators interact with students, the way that students interact with each other, and the way that families are included or not in the life of a school,” said Jack Schneider, a University of Massachusetts, Amherst, education researcher and parent. “Once you do that, you really get a sense of what kind of place kids are going to school.”

Some schools post tour information online, but you may need to call for details.

LAUSD also hosts fairs, organized by geographic region, where multiple schools table and share information about their programs, through mid-October.

The Justice Department found Thursday that the law school at the University of California, Los Angeles, illegally considered race in admissions.

The announcement follows a similar finding against the university’s medical school and comes as President Donald Trump’s administration ramps up scrutiny of colleges’ processes for selecting students. The administration also has accused the UC Berkeley Law School and the medical school at the University of California, San Diego, of illegally discriminating against white and Asian applicants.

The UCLA School of Law said in a statement that it was committed to making admissions decisions in compliance with all applicable laws.

“Students are admitted through a comprehensive, merit-based review process that considers each applicant’s achievements and experiences,” the statement said. “We are confident in our process.”

Affirmative action in college admissions has been illegal since a 2023 Supreme Court ruling forbade it. The same ruling said colleges could continue to assess how applicants’ backgrounds might speak to broader characteristics, but Trump has accused colleges of using applicants’ personal statements and other proxies to consider race in admissions — which conservatives view as illegal discrimination.

The Justice Department’s investigation found UCLA’s law school discriminated against white and Asian American students by favoring Black and Hispanic applicants in its 2023, 2024 and 2025 incoming classes. Its analysis found the mean LSAT score was lower for admitted Black applicants than for admitted white applicants.

The department also said admissions staff at the law school instructed applicants during recruitment efforts, including one called the “Diversity Admissions Open House,” how to reveal their race in essays.

“Like many of its peer institutions, UCLA Law School runs a two-tiered admissions system whose academic bar for acceptance shifts up or down depending on the color of your skin,” said Harmeet Dhillon, head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, in a news release.

California voters ended affirmative action in college admissions in a 1997 ballot measure. In a brief filed in the Supreme Court case, the UC system said the change led to a precipitous drop in underrepresented minorities, especially at the system’s most selective campuses. The brief said UC went on to implement a range of race-neutral measures to increase diversity.

The Trump administration also has sued over the main UCLA campus’s response to allegations of antisemitic harassment. The administration’s latest finding sets the stage for a voluntary resolution to bring UCLA into compliance with the Justice Department’s legal interpretation or, if none can be reached, potential legal action.

___

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Artist Hedy Torres asked a 20-something student from Cal State Northridge to sit for a portrait nearly a decade ago. Using charcoal on paper, she drew the dark-haired young man in black and white — but she deliberately kept the portrait unfinished.

The idea was that she would complete the piece if her subject, a DACA recipient named Lino de Jesús Pérez Cuevas, ever attained lawful permanent residency.

And now he has.

DACA, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is a program that provides two-year work permits and deportation relief for people who were brought to the U.S. as children. The permits can be renewed, but the program does not grant a pathway to citizenship. 

In late September, Pérez Cuevas — who is now married, a father, a green card holder and an adjunct instructor at his alma mater — sat with Torres once again.

Torres’ project involves interviewing subjects as she sketches them. This year, she invited the public to watch her complete the portrait as she spoke to Pérez Cuevas about what it took for him to get a green card and what that means for his life.

About two dozen people gathered at a community center in West Hollywood’s Plummer Park to see her add details to the piece that speak to the passing of time.

“I just wanted to make people empathetic to what [immigrants] go through during this process,” she said. “You have to be very patient. There is a lot of uncertainty.”

Responding to the potential loss of relief

Pérez Cuevas, who was born in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, was brought to the U.S. by his parents when he was 2.

When Torres drew him in 2017, he was pursuing a master’s degree in kinesiology at Cal State Northridge. That year, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced intentions to rescind DACA, which had enabled him to set goals without the fear of being deported. A 2020 Supreme Court decision allowed the program to continue.

Torres was once undocumented herself, so she understood the 2017 announcement was earth-shattering for the approximately 800,000 people who were then in the program, she said.

The original, unfinished portrait of Lino de Jesús Pérez Cuevas.

(

Courtesy

/

Hedy Torres

)

That year, Torres was also a student at CSUN, working toward a master’s in fine art.

She recalled recently that she wanted people to see DACA recipients as people, not numbers. And so, for her master's project, she proposed creating portraits of DACA beneficiaries.

The portraits would be rooted in interviews conducted as she drew her subjects. Leaving them unfinished, she said, would symbolize the precarity of the moment.

The pieces would have enough detail for viewers to see the subjects’ faces clearly, particularly their eyes and expressions. Other elements, including their bodies and clothing, would be more of an initial sketch.

The university greenlit her project and gave her a grant to pursue it. There was just one problem: Torres had to convince reticent DACA recipients to share their stories.

Building trust 

When Torres first messaged Pérez Cuevas about the project, he ignored her for two weeks, he said. But because they had a mutual friend, he eventually agreed to meet with her.

“I was trying to see whether this person was just an academic trying to complete a project for her own benefit, or whether she really cared about the community,” he told LAist.

They met at a coffee shop. Pérez Cuevas learned about the artist’s journey from the Mexican state of Colima and everything she’d lived through since.

Before 2015, for example, an undocumented person in California could not get a driver’s license. When she was undocumented, Torres was stopped by police and had her car impounded. She said she had to cobble together thousands of dollars to get her car back from a tow yard.

Pérez Cuevas could relate. He had experienced the same thing.

He decided to trust her.

After she drew him, Pérez Cuevas helped Torres connect with more DACA recipients at the university. She drew four other portraits, which were also left unfinished.

These works were acquired by the university, with the agreement that Torres would be able to borrow and complete them when — and if — her subjects attained lawful permanent residency.

Community members watch Artist Hedy Torres update the portrait at Plummer Park in West Hollywood.

(

Julia Barajas

/

LAist

)

‘A sense of freedom’  

As she worked on the portrait, Torres added soft lines rendered in charcoal to the image of Pérez Cuevas’ face, along with a robust mustache. And she continued the interview.

“What did you imagine your life would be like when you were young?” Torres asked.

Thinking back to high school, Pérez Cuevas said he realized then that not having a social security number barred him from decent-paying work.

“I didn't really understand what I was doing with my life,” he said, adding that he used to not think higher education was for him even while he was at CSUN. “My state of mind was really dark back then.”

He credited a college counselor with helping him navigate school. He earned his degree in 2017.

Pérez Cuevas said he has intimate knowledge of what it’s like to live with constant uncertainty: not knowing how he would pay for college because he did not qualify for federal financial aid; not being able to travel outside the country; and waiting anxiously for federal officials to make decisions on immigration laws that could transform his life.

“I can't stress enough how difficult it is psychologically to wait because it's something that can revolutionize your life,” he said. “You're betting your whole life on this approval and just that suspense of waiting, waiting, waiting, living with that anxiety.”

Torres completed her portrait of Pérez Cuevas in September 2026. Four other portraits remain unfinished.

(

Julia Barajas

/

LAist

)

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services continues to process renewal requests for existing DACA recipients, but the agency is no longer approving first-time applications.

Under the second Trump administration, DACA recipients are also experiencing significant delays with renewals. Some have lost their jobs. Recipients have been deported. According to the agency, the median processing time for DACA renewals was one month in 2023. Currently, it’s taking seven months to process most cases.

Pérez Cuevas said he was able to adjust his immigration status after marrying a U.S. citizen and consulting with an attorney. His lawyer helped him secure a document that allowed noncitizens to travel abroad and seek legal re-entry.

“Did getting permanent residency give you a sense of freedom, a freedom you probably didn't have when you were under DACA?” Torres asked him.

“Absolutely,” Pérez Cuevas said. “The biggest freedom was psychological freedom. You have this weight that you've been carrying all these years that finally just gets thrown off your shoulders.”

One of the things he feared most was long-term separation from his parents, he said.

When his mother and father migrated to the U.S., they did not see their own parents — his grandparents — for 40 years, Pérez Cuevas added. After his parents moved back to Mexico during the pandemic, he feared they would also go decades without seeing each other.

But having a green card enables him to travel and see his family.

Pérez Cuevas told Torres that, paradoxically, the threat of losing DACA made him “weirdly ambitious."

He said he doubled down on his studies and took on every internship he could. He figured that if the U.S. decided to deport him, he’d still have his education and work experience.

“Even on the days where I didn't necessarily have the greatest energy or the greatest state of mind, I showed up for myself,” Pérez Cuevas said.