Not A Restaurant Town.



Granada Hills is just not a restaurant town, and apparently, I'm not the only one who's come to that conclusion.

It's not a hopeful sign when an entire magazine's restaurant listings don't even allow for the possibility that there might be someplace worth eating in your neighborhood, but that seems to be the position that Valley Magazine has taken. In their recent Restaurant Guide, listings are sectioned off by neighborhood:

Chatsworth/Northridge
Encino/Mission Hills/Tarzana/Valley Glen/Van Nuys
Santa Clarita
Sherman Oaks/Studio City
Burbank/Glendale/Pasadena
North Hollywood/Universal City/Toluca Lake
Agoura Hills/Malibu/Simi Valley/Thousand Oaks/Ventura/Westlake
Woodland Hills/Calabasas/Topanga

Notice anything missing?

The magazine that's supposed to be all about the Valley (but is actually little more than a Jane Boeckman vanity project/Galpin Ford advertorial/ plug for The Horseless Carriage) goes all the way out to Santa Clarita and Ventura with its restaurant listings but completely writes Granada Hills off.

Hey, haven't they ever been to Frosty Queen? And our Jack In The Box is pretty good... and then there's Two For One, which ranked first in the Giga Granada Hills "Best Pizza" poll....

Aw, who am I kidding? We're the town that restaurants forgot. We get excited when something new opens in the neighborhood, and then find ourselves disappointed again and again -- with dusty Veggie Delite, with that blink-and-you-missed-it Korean BBQ place, with underwhelming Pampas. We've got A&W BBQ Seafood, they're pretty good, and if you need a place for a beauty pageant or a Bar Mitzvah there's always the Odyssey, but more often than not, when a GranadaHillsian wants a good restaurant experience, they hightail it out of here.

I wrote an email to Jonathan Gold, the L.A. Weekly's Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic, to ask if he's ever come across anything worthwhile in our forgotten backwater, or if he has any theories as to why the restaurant industry as a whole has forsaken us, but he didn't deem my message worthy of reply. I think that pretty much sums things up.

Comments

  1. Rich AlossiSeptember 29, 2009 at 4:23 PM

    For a town that's relied so long on Odyssey and Two Guys from Italy (gag and double-gag), we really need something fresh in town. Pampas is okay, but underwhelming as you say. A&W is the best Chinese around.

    Old Town Granada Hills would make an amazing "restaurant row" for the North Valley.

    ReplyDelete
  2. L.J. WilliamsonSeptember 29, 2009 at 6:02 PM

    Just had dinner at A&W last night, and I agree with your assessment -- I think it's the best place in town.

    Also agree with your assessment of Two Guys, but our readers, and plenty more on Yelp, say different.

    They're wrong, of course.

    ReplyDelete

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