The Brief

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

For many Pico Union neighbors who keep going to Dino’s Famous Chicken, the marinated chicken is definitely the star of the menu.

Jenaro Aviles, 24, has been going to the restaurant with his grandfather and mom since he was a child and sees it as a neighborhood gem.

“What isn’t there to love about Dino’s?” Aviles said. “It’s family-oriented, it’s a monument to L.A. If you come to L.A., it’s a must.”

At Dino’s Famous Chicken in Pico Union’s Byzantine-Latino Quarter, the restaurant’s story is told through its signature dish — a reminder of a once predominantly Greek neighborhood that has adapted over time to its largely Latino immigrant community.

In 1980, encouraged by his wife Eleni, owner Demetrios Pantazis, an immigrant from Patras, Greece, developed a chicken marinade that combined elements of Mediterranean cooking with the bold, spicy flavors common in Latin cuisine, mirroring the surrounding neighborhood.

“The chicken arrives with this unmistakable orange-red color — the marinade does that. It’s the first thing you notice, and it tells you before you even take a bite that something specific happened here,” said Gab Chabrán, Food and Culture writer at LAist.

The chicken is served over a bed of fries with corn tortillas ready for makeshift tacos. The dish is as Chabrán notes, “undoubtedly Los Angeles,” and helped turn Dino’s into a success in the area.

Dino’s Famous Chicken founder Demetrios Pantazis developed a chicken marinade that blended elements of Greek cooking with the bold, spicy flavors common in Latin cuisine — paving the way for the chicken’s signature flavor.

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Marina Peña

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The LA Local

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If you stop by the restaurant around noon or after 6 p.m., you’ll likely see a line of people eagerly waiting for their meal. The restaurant, which opened as a burger stand in 1968, continues to be operated as a family-run chain.

From the outside, you can tell the restaurant is fast-paced and lively, with customers lining up to order plates of grilled chicken, fries, rice and beans.

The smell of the signature marinade fills the space as workers move quickly behind the counter. They’re working on serving up trays of chicken topped with the chain’s well-known sauce.

Photos lining the walls show Pantazis over the decades, along with architectural renderings of the restaurant when it first opened and articles from Eater LA and the LA Times. The history on the walls is reinforced by the steady stream of customers, from the neighborhood and abroad.

“It’s just generational for us,” Aviles said, who feels like he’s carrying on a family tradition by eating at Dino’s. “No matter how far I go, I’m always going to come down to Dino’s.”

The restaurant at Pico Boulevard and Berendo Street is the flagship and the business has since expanded to five locations across Los Angeles.

After Pantazis died in 2017, his four daughters took over the operations of the chicken empire.

In a Facebook post, Pantazis’s family described Dino’s as his “life, his mission, his glory and his legacy.”

“There was nothing more he loved than to make people happy and to provide his customers with personal service and the best quality food possible,” the family said.

Some neighbors in Pico Union say their proximity is part of what makes it special. William Martinez, 26, describes the restaurant as part of the fabric of his community.

“This place is more of a childhood restaurant that I used to pass by,” Martinez said. “I always get the chicken and the fries. That’s the main thing here.”

That signature chicken dish typically comes in black takeout containers with fries, tortillas, a side of coleslaw and a tangy sauce. The marinade at Dino’s Famous Chicken is tangy, garlicky, and slightly smoky — not too spicy, which makes it easy to keep going back for more.

Aside from locals, the Pico Union spot also draws visitors from out of town. Friends Gabriel Mathenge, Kendall Holmes and Jackson Edwards were visiting from North Carolina and stopped by Dino’s after hearing it was a must-try spot in Los Angeles.

“I really like the flavoring of the chicken and $16 out here in L.A., it’s pretty good,” Mathenge said, who got a plate of their marinated chicken with rice and beans. “It’s a lot of food, overall a good experience.”

Holmes agreed, adding that the meal felt worth the price and that he would go back again.

Edwards said the Latino workers at Dino’s and the relaxed ambience of the place make it feel like L.A.

“It feels historic, like it’s been here for a long time based on the pictures on the walls,” he said. “It feels like a home for a home that I’m not at.”

That sense of history is rooted in the part of Pico Union where Dino’s stands — an area long shaped by a Greek enclave centered around St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral and institutions like Papa Cristo’s, which for decades served as a cultural and community hub.

“Something real was lost when Papa Cristo’s closed,” Chabrán said. “That was an explicitly Greek institutional presence — a market, a taverna, a community anchor for the nearby Orthodox congregation.”

But Dino’s, he explained, reflects a different kind of legacy. “Greek culture in that neighborhood didn’t survive by staying Greek in isolation,” Chabrán said. “It survived by becoming part of the neighborhood. The chicken is the document.”

Los Angeles Unified teachers will get paid parental leave for the first time under a tentative agreement the teachers union reached with the district this week.

The new contract with United Teachers Los Angeles includes four weeks of district-paid leave for employees to bond with a new child. The union represents 35,0000 teachers, counselors and other educators in the second-largest school district in the country.

“I cried when I found out about it,” said Erika Jones, secretary-treasurer of the California Teachers Association and an elementary school teacher in LAUSD. “It’s precedent-setting.”

While a handful of teachers unions have gotten paid leave through bargaining over the last several years, like in San Diego, the majority of teachers in the state don’t have access to paid family leave. Jones said teachers have had to plan their pregnancies for summer break, or use their sick and vacation time to cover their time away.

Stephanie Castro, a middle school teacher in Highland Park, said she was still feeling the repercussions of taking unpaid leave when she had her son almost two years ago.

“For teachers to have to feel like they're deciding between spending time with their new child and being able to pay their bills just feels like a terrible situation for humans to be in, at such a very critical, important moment in their lives and their child's lives,” Castro said.

Why many teachers don’t have paid parental leave

Unlike most private sector workers in California who are automatically eligible for paid family leave through the state’s disability insurance program, public sector workers like teachers are not. (The way the SDI program works for private sector employees is that they pay into the program through payroll deductions, and can get 70%-90% of their wages while on leave).

As a result, advocates have been pushing for years for legislation that would grant paid family leave for teachers. Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill in 2019 that would have given teachers at least six weeks of leave, saying it would be too costly. Bills that would have given teachers up to 14 weeks of pregnancy leave also failed to pass the legislature over the last couple of years.

Jones said they’re continuing to fight for AB 65 in this year’s legislative session, which would give educators statewide paid leave — so that it doesn’t have to come down to the bargaining table.

“We're hoping that the state recognizes that this is something that we need to fix within the public education system,” she said. “Four weeks is something, it's not nothing. Is it where we need to be? No ... but it is a huge first step.”

This weekend, an estimated 160,000 people will pour into the USC campus to attend the annual L.A. Times’ Festival of Books.

At the same time in New York City, some 20,000 people will gather at the Javits Convention Center in Hell’s Kitchen for BookCon, a tradition that dates back to 2014—and typically takes place in late spring.

Is this the beginning of a classic bicoastal rivalry? Are there enough authors to go around?

As BookCon marketing manager Fallon Prinzivalli tells it, the event landed on this weekend simply because it was “the closest that we could get” to the traditional late May/early June slot.

She also said tickets for BookCon sold out within hours.

“We knew we had an audience for it,” she told LAist. “But I do think the speed at which we sold out was very surprising, even to us.”

The L.A. Times festival, composed of outdoor and indoor events, was launched in 1996.

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Courtesy Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

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Mattie Schaffer, the driving force behind the L.A. Times’ festival, said she’s not worried.

“I think BookCon is such a different event,” she told LAist. “There's obviously a little bit of crossover in audience and authors, but I think there's enough room for multiple literary events. I kind of see it as a sign of how vibrant the book world is. It's giving opportunity for folks on both coasts to celebrate reading.”

What book lovers can expect  

On top of panels, workshops and the chance to have their books signed by their favorite writers, book lovers in NYC can expect “ immersive, fully built sets,” Prinzivalli said.

“People love a photo opportunity,” she added. “And, obviously, with the rise of TikTok and Instagram prioritizing reels, video content is also really important. So we want to provide those areas for our fans.”

The New York event will also feature book swaps, where readers can find texts with little notes from their former owners. At Indie Alley, they’ll have a chance to check out work by independent authors.

The L.A. Times event will also feature author panels, local booksellers and the chance to learn from the newsroom’s journalists. Outdoor events will be free to the public. Indoor events will require buying tickets.

“This year, we're really leaning into podcasts and audio books,” Schaffer said. “As people continue to listen more and more to books and podcasts on their phones, we're trying to meet them where they are.”

It’s not known how many authors were invited to both events, but despite a lack of public competitiveness between organizers, some authors have had to make a choice. And an LAist review of each guest list revealed little overlap among the scores of panelists, save for about half a dozen writers.

Julia Whelan’s Coachella   

Julia Whelan is one of the few panelists at both events—a renowned author, screenwriter, actor and audiobook narrator.

Book festivals are her Coachella, she said. “You can just go meander from rockstar to rockstar to rockstar.”

Whelan—whose debut novel, “My Oxford Year,” is now a movie on Netflix—will start her weekend at USC with an 11 a.m. panel titled “Masters of the Mic: The Narrators Defining the Sound of Modern Storytelling.”

After that, she’ll take a red eye flight to New York, where she’ll be part of a panel titled “Narrating Blockbuster Events.”

Whelan—the recipient of Spotify’s 2025 Narrator of the Year Award (meaning she was the most listened-to narrator globally) and many other prizes— is also the founder of Audiobrary, an audio publisher that aims to ensure artists are properly compensated in the industry.

She’s not looking forward to bouncing from one coast to another, she told LAist. But she is excited for the panels.

“I just can't say no to being able to preach the gospel of audiobooks in front of very keen and excited readers and listeners,” she said.

Which is why the two simultaneous events don’t phase her; the more opportunities to celebrate books and the institutions that serve them, the better. Before and after the festivals, she’ll crisscross the country to speak at various libraries.

“ I have a little soft spot” for the L.A. Times Festival of Books, Julia Whelan (left) said. First-time readers lined up to have her sign her work there in 2018.

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Courtesy Julia Whelan

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Whelan, who earned a bachelor’s degree at Middlebury College in Vermont, said she “graduated with a certain idea about what constituted ‘good literature,’ with a capital L.”

Narrating audiobooks “very quickly de-snobbed me,” she added. “Suddenly, I was reading books across all categories and genres that I would've never picked up on my own as I would walk through a bookstore with my nose in the air.”

Now, Whelan said, she reads everything. “I'm interested in every type of storytelling.”

 If left to her own devices at a bookstore—or festival—she said, “I will always find myself in romance, because that's just my happy place. But I love historical fiction. I love historical nonfiction. (I like a lot of dad literature.) . . . I will truly pick up anything.”

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to declare housing insecurity a public health crisis and to develop a policy that gives residents in unincorporated areas priority access to some affordable housing built in their neighborhoods.

The crisis declaration is not an official emergency declaration and does not trigger any emergency powers. But according to Supervisor Hilda Solis, the resolution directs county agencies to get on the same page.

"Unstable housing is not just an economic issue. It is a driver of chronic illness, trauma, family instability and preventable health disparities," Solis said.

The motion instructs the county’s Department of Homeless Services and Housing, the Los Angeles County Development Authority and other departments to develop coordinated plans to preserve existing affordable housing units, keep people in their homes and prioritize the health impacts of housing instability.

Supervisors also approved a separate motion directing departments leaders to develop a local preference policy for L.A. County-funded housing in unincorporated areas.

When county funding is used to build affordable housing in communities like East Los Angeles, Willowbrook or Altadena, residents of those neighborhoods would get priority access to them.

According to the motion, 59% of renters in unincorporated areas spend more than a third of their income on rent.

Housing insecurity

The county uses the term “housing insecure” to describe anyone lacking stable, safe and affordable housing.

That means unhoused Angelenos, as well as tenants who spend more than half of their income on rent, people living in overcrowded or substandard housing conditions, and those at risk for eviction or displacement.

Various studies show that housing instability contributes to chronic disease, emergency room visits and premature death.

The county's Department of Homeless Services and Housing, which launched this year, grew directly out of the Housing for Health program, a health-centered homelessness program formerly within the Department of Health Services.

Budget concerns

The supervisors voted 4-0 Tuesday to approve both motions. Supervisor Kathryn Barger was absent for the vote because she attended the funeral of an L.A. County sheriff's deputy.

Officials warned of major federal cuts coming to Medi-Cal, CalFresh and other services because of the Trump administration’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” signed into law last year.