Curious where Los Angeles' in-the-know crowd is eating and drinking? It's easy to spot lines out the door, but some underlying trends are harder to see.
We took a data-driven look at the question, using Yelp and SafeGraph, a dataset of commercial points of interest and their visitor patterns, to deduce which local businesses have been in the limelight this month.
To find out who made the list, we first looked at Los Angeles businesses on Yelp by category and counted how many reviews each received. Rather than compare them based on number of reviews alone, we calculated a percentage increase in reviews over the past month, and tracked businesses that consistently increased their volume of reviews to identify statistically significant outliers compared to past performance. Then we analyzed foot traffic data from SafeGraph to validate the trends.
Read on to see which spots are extra cool, right now.
My Lai
Whether or not you've been hearing buzz about Mar Vista's My Lai, the Vietnamese spot, which offers salads and sandwiches, is a hot topic according to Yelp review data.
While businesses categorized as "Salad" on Yelp saw a median 1.3% increase in new reviews over the past month, My Lai appeared on Yelp relatively recently. Many new businesses struggle to gain reviews, but it has seen a surge of interest.
Open at 12222 Venice Blvd. since February 2020, My Lai features fast-casual modern Vietnamese dishes like chicken and garlic rice, pork egg roll vermicelli salad and tofu bites. View the menu here.
My Lai is open from 11 a.m.–10 p.m. daily.
Easy Street Burgers
Melrose's Easy Street Burgers is also making waves. Open since February 2020 at 1000 N. Western Ave., the restaurant, which offers burgers and more, is relatively new to Yelp, but has seen a surge of new reviews, while all businesses tagged "Burgers" on Yelp saw an increase of 1.7% for new reviews in the past month. Moreover, on a month-to-month basis Easy Street Burgers' review count increased by more than 360%.
There's more than one hot spot trending in Los Angeles' burger category: By The Way Burger has seen a 237.5% increase in reviews.
Easy Street Burgers offers beef and Beyond Meat vegan burgers, as well as french fries. Check out the full menu. Over the past month, it's maintained a sterling five-star rating among Yelpers.
Verse
Toluca Lake's Verse is the city's buzziest traditional American spot by the numbers.
The supper club, music venue and traditional American spot, which has been open at 4212 Lankershim Blvd. since December 2019, increased its new review count by 75% over the past month, an outlier when compared to the median new review count of 1.2% for the Yelp category "American (Traditional)."
Verse offers duck breast, pork chop and New York strip loin. See what else is on the menu.
Verse is open from 6–11 p.m. on Wednesday-Saturday. (It's closed on Monday, Tuesday and Sunday.)
This story was created automatically using local business data, then reviewed and augmented by an editor. Click here for more about what we're doing. Got thoughts? Go here to share your feedback.
