The Brief

Along a discreet stretch of Hewitt Street, in the Arts District, there’s an unassuming brick facade with a glowing vertical neon sign that says BAR, the downtown skyline visible in the background — like a still from a futuristic sci-fi noir film.

Lynx's moody exterior.

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Step inside and the room opens up — exposed wood beam ceilings, oversized globe pendants, deep crimson slatted walls, banquettes packed with people leaning into each other. It pulls you in before you even take your seat.

This is LYNX, which opened in March and has already earned a Bib Gourmand — Michelin's designation for exceptional food at a reasonable price — from the Michelin Guide for California.

Built backwards

On paper, the menu at LYNX is deceptively casual — pizza and cocktails. Beverage director Brandyn Tepper says it's because the math is simple: good margins on flour, water, and alcohol. But Tepper and his partner Chef Joshua Skenes are attempting something far more intentional. The cocktail program is built around a single-ingredient philosophy, and the pizza, in Skenes' words, is designed "backward — from the bite, from the way it eats."

It's rare in L.A. to find a place with such high aspirations, in such an unassuming location.

The craft — pizza

The pizza at LYNX doesn't hold back. The Napoletana: whole anchovy fillets laid across tomato, glistening and curled at the edges from the heat, two kinds of olives, scattered capers, basil leaves wilting into the crust beneath them.

The mushroom pie, covered with an avalanche of mushrooms and parmesan.

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On the other end of the spectrum, the mushroom pie arrived as an avalanche — paper-thin fungi and Parmesan piled so thick the crust completely disappears. You're handed a slice of lemon to squeeze over it, as if given your own participation trophy. Pizzas run $25 to $29.

Skenes describes the dough as a "thin, shattering exterior that crackles like an eggshell, giving way to a very open, airy, and tender interior at the point of fermentation where the dough reaches maximum aromatic complexity."

The result, in his words, is "a style of pizza that feels weightless yet very satisfying."

Both pizzas are daring, texturally and visually, the kind of thing that pushes the format to a place you hadn't considered. That's what the best food does. It meets you somewhere comfortable, then quietly moves the walls.

The craft — beverage

Whether seated at a banquette or any of the high tops, the bar anchors the room — LYNX is intimate enough that it's always in view. The open kitchen visible in the background, bottles and prep material to the left, and off to the right, a rotovap — a distillation machine that allows Tepper to extract the pure essence of an ingredient, from banana peels to grapefruit.

Lynx aims to extract the pure essence of its cocktail ingredients.

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Take the Paloma. Before it was ever served to a guest, Tepper tested roughly 30 iterations just to get the carbonation right. Too much and the drink turns acidic. Too little and it falls flat.

The Sudachi daiquiri tells a similar story. Sudachi is a small Japanese citrus — tart, floral, intensely aromatic — and Tepper wanted the drink to taste purely of the fruit. No lime, which would overpower it. Just the peel, shaken directly into the rum, strained, then scraped fresh over the top. You sense the acid on your palate, but what you actually taste is Sudachi in full — its aroma, its character. Cocktails are a flat $20 across the board.

Every glass arrives frosted, chilled with liquid nitrogen before the drink goes in. How a drink feels in your hand, Tepper says, matters as much as what's inside it — from the specifically sourced glassware for each cocktail to the temperature itself. It sounds like a flourish, but at LYNX, the details are far from decorative.

Working with a cheat code

Tepper and Skenes have history. The two worked together in San Francisco — first at Saison, Skenes' three-Michelin-star restaurant, and later at Angler, where Tepper served as corporate beverage director.

Working with a chef of that caliber, Tepper says, is a "cheat code", because of the access it provides to his palate, his instincts, his sense of how flavors relate to each other. When Tepper was developing the Shanghai Pistachio, a bourbon-and-pistachio cocktail, a few words from Skenes — bourbon, pistachio, milky oolong, honey — gave him the architecture. The rest was technique.

The zero-proof ambition

LYNX is also quietly building toward something less common: a zero-proof menu that matches the ambition of the cocktail list. Of the 12 drinks on the menu, 10 already have non-alcoholic counterparts — not juice and ginger, but technique-driven alternatives made with the same rotovap behind the bar. The goal isn't to replicate the alcoholic versions. It's the same philosophy applied differently: find the purest expression of an ingredient, and build from there.

Understated celebration

When LYNX earned its Michelin Guide mention earlier this year, the staff celebrated. Tepper celebrated too, but his framing of it is grounded. "There are literal lives at stake," he says — people on paychecks, livelihoods depending on the bar's ability to execute every service. The Michelin mention is good for morale. But if a bartender's car breaks down, Tepper's calling the Uber. The mention, in that light, isn't a goal. It's what happens when you show up and do the work at a certain standard, every service, regardless of who's watching.

Longer wait times for graffiti removal and streetlight repair. Fewer police officers per shift. Completely eliminating school crossing guards.

Those are just some of the service cuts the city of South Gate made earlier this year as it stared down a $9.4 million annual budget deficit and a looming fiscal emergency.

But none of that was enough to convince South Gate voters to approve an 8% utility user tax that would have been tacked onto a wide range of utility bills, including electricity, water, cable and phone service. Now, the city is gearing up for more cuts, including closing sports fields and the city pool for the winter months.

South Gate’s utility tax was just one of the many ways Southern California cities asked their residents to give them more money via local tax initiatives this November, with proposed taxes on everything from hotel stays to cannabis businesses.

And those early results suggest South Gate is an outlier: Of the 32 total local tax measures on the ballot in Los Angeles and Orange counties, all but six appear poised to pass, according to early results. (There are still several more days of vote counting to come.)

Eleven transient occupancy tax measures, which tax overnight stays in hotels or short-term rentals, passed in cities from Burbank to Los Alamitos. Most cities sought to increase their existing hotel taxes by anywhere from 1 to 5 percentage points, while Lynwood residents voted to establish a hotel tax for the first time.

Business-related taxes, such as taxes on business licenses or on certain businesses, also mostly passed, as did most parcel taxes in cities including Pasadena and Culver City.

But sales taxes saw more mixed results. Cudahy, San Gabriel, Orange, Santa Ana and Los Angeles all approved sales tax measures, while voters in Diamond Bar, Hermosa Beach and San Clemente all voted down their local sales tax proposals.

Most of those sales taxes focused on maintaining basic city services in communities facing big budget deficits, driven by the rising costs of insurance, maintenance and infrastructure projects, and employee pensions, among other factors. But in San Clemente, the proposed 1% sales tax would have specifically funded sand replenishment and other beach projects, along with wildfire prevention work. That measure appeared to be headed for failure, with just 36% of voters in support as of Wednesday afternoon.

Voters in San Marino approved an extension of their utility tax, and increased it from 5% to 6%. Last year, the tax provided almost $2.2 million in revenue.

City officials in South Gate had hoped for a similar boon, and projected the utility tax would bring in an estimated $10.4 million per year in general fund revenue, while raising total utility costs by about $39 per month for a typical household.

Leading up to the election, the city of South Gate pointed to other neighboring cities that have their own utility taxes, including Downey, Lakewood and Norwalk, where the tax mostly hovers around 5%. “South Gate is the exception, not the rule,” noted one city presentation that pointed to these other taxes in a bid to coax voters to go along.

Voters weren’t convinced. “I’m extremely frustrated that you now want to do electricity, water, sewer, cable, cell phone, gas. ... That hurts us. You’re passing that on to us and that is absolutely not acceptable,” said one resident at a City Council meeting on the measure earlier this year.

LAist has reached out to the city of South Gate about what’s next for the city.

The city of West Hollywood has approved an ordinance to create a domestic partnership registry for people in polyamorous relationships.

The domestic partnership registry extends certain legal protections for people in the city, including visitation rights to hospitals and jails in West Hollywood and some tenant protections. The registry doesn’t replace the state’s marriage or the state’s domestic partnership laws.

“It's a landmark ordinance and really puts and continues to elevate West Hollywood as a city that is here to support queer people and queer families as they evolve in their needs,” said Chelsea Byers, a West Hollywood City Council member. “I think that's a real joy that we can bring to people — that they can live in a greater sense of being seen and understood.”

In 1985, the city became the first city in the nation to create a similar domestic partnership registry for same-sex couples. Similar to that registry, people outside the city can also register.

“This new law not only gives polyamorous unions legal recognition, it also gives people permission to imagine a future together and to plan their lives openly,” said Christina Fialho, president and founder of Rewrite the BiLine, an advocacy group for bisexual people and nonnuclear families, who advocated for the ordinance.

Several cities in Massachusetts have also passed multipartner domestic partnership laws.

How it works

To file, people in a multi-partner relationship will submit a form in person that will be provided by the City Clerk’s office — all members of the relationship will have to provide identification to the clerk. (The ordinance also offers an option by mail, if the signatures are notarized).

Among the sweeping victories by Democrats on Tuesday were wins in several congressional districts that Republicans had redrawn explicitly to boost their party ahead of the midterms.

Republicans were bracing for some losses this election cycle, so last year President Donald Trump urged his party to take the extraordinary step of engaging in mid-decade redistricting efforts.

As of Tuesday night, many of those efforts had failed.

That included in Florida, where multiple Democrats — Kathy Castor, Pia Dandiya and Jared Moskowitz — won in redrawn districts, according to race calls by the Associated Press.

In North Carolina, Democratic Rep. Don Davis held on to his 1st District seat, even though Republicans in the state redrew it to be more competitive for the GOP. Trump would have won the redrawn 1st by nearly 12 percentage points, according to the Downballot.

Trump would have won by even more in Alabama's redrawn 2nd Congressional District, which Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures held on to, according to the AP race call.

Republicans in Alabama redid the state's congressional map after the U.S. Supreme Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act earlier this year.

And in Texas, which was the first state to redistrict at Trump's urging, a few of the redrawn districts had gone to Democrats.

Republicans redrew their maps with the expectation that the coalition of voters Trump won over in 2024 would support them this cycle. In Texas, Republicans were banking on gains made with Latino voters in new maps.

But many of those voters shifted their support to Democrats this year.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Nationwide election results came at a relentless pace Tuesday night, each more of a Democratic upset than the last. But you may not have known if you were attending the California Republican Party's election night event in Garden Grove.

In the dimly lit Hyatt ballroom where gubernatorial longshot Steve Hilton and his supporters gathered, the news channels were off, the music was turned up and “Don’t Stop Believin’” blasted throughout.

Minutes after the polls closed at 8 p.m., the Associated Press called the governor’s race for Democratic favorite Xavier Becerra.

Around the room, the occasional person glanced at their phone to sneak a peek at the growing GOP carnage. More of the crowd instead looked at each other or toward the empty stage, where a lectern stood in front of a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset.

Not long after, Hilton took the stage to concede the race — which had always been heavily favored against him in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1.

“Maybe this isn’t the best year to be running for office as a Republican,” Hilton told his supporters, alluding to the election results that would soon lead the Democratic Party to win so big in the House and the Senate that many dubbed it a blue tsunami. “We see what’s going on around the country.”

Hilton knew the odds were long. He’d tried a number of tactics to win over California, including a suggestive advertisement suggesting voters should “Just Try” voting for him. He’d done his best to separate himself from President Donald Trump, who backed his campaign. He also attacked Becerra for staying largely out of the limelight since making it out on top of a chaotic primary.

None of Hilton’s appeals made a significant mark on the result, which trailed at around 36% of the vote as of Wednesday afternoon.

Standing outside the ballroom, Matt Shupe, a spokesperson for the California GOP, conceded it was challenging terrain for Republicans this year across the country — and always in California.

“It’s pretty typical that the party that's not in power gains some seats, so I think that was pretty expected for the most part,” he said. “We'll plan on bringing the fight more intensely than ever in 2028.”

By 9:30 p.m., people were headed to their cars to go home.