Want to see Los Angeles like the people who actually live there? This week, our travel team interviewed real Los Angeles residents to bring you the best travel and sightseeing tips to experience LA like a true local.
Dining
Los Angeles is a thriving center of haute cuisine and creative food trends. To pick the perfect restaurant like a true Los Angeles resident, try scanning top ten lists online for the hottest new restaurants, asking friends for their suggestions, and then ignoring all that and going to the place with the best parking situation.
Eastsiders recommend the taco place on the corner with a questionable sanitation rating but amazing salsas. Westsiders recommend, “I guess, Sugarfish again?”
Night Life
“Hitting the town?” More like, “That sounds fucking exhausting.” Instead of going out, try going to a friend’s private party for a unique night of conversations with people who work on television shows you have seen, but in obscure jobs that you didn’t know existed.
“Wow Greg, it is so cool that you were the left shoe sound foley on Dancing With The Stars! I can’t wait to hear about how Dorothy Hamill’s pinched nerve changed your technique for sound-painting movements of the big toe.”
Celebrity Sightings
Home to the stars, Los Angeles is full of actors, musicians, and the people who pretend to know them. If you see a celeb in Los Angeles, local etiquette dictates that you pretend you didn’t see them and don’t recognize them, even if you are in the middle of having sex with them.
Practice staying composed and keeping a straight face. That way, if you do fuck actor Tom Hiddleston, you can say something polite such as, “I was stuck on La Cienega for two hours,” or “So what do you do for work?”
Art
Los Angeles is home to over 100 galleries and art museums, showcasing some of the best new visual and experiential art. Our Los Angeles experts recommend That Gallery Where Their Friend Had An Art Show One Time, located at the corner of Sunset and another street.
The Great Outdoors
You can’t see Los Angeles without appreciating its amazing variety of landscapes, from majestic sky-scraping mountains to gorgeous, sun-kissed beaches. Our local experts helped us understand the best time to go to the beach: never. The beach only exists during a global equinox climate abnormality Schrodinger's state in which the weather is perfect, no one is at the beach, and you can find easy parking.
Hiking in LA’s many mountains and trails, on the other hand, is always on the table. Our residents suggest checking the fire maps to make sure your favorite spot isn’t currently on fire.
Disneyland
According to the twenty-eight Los Angeles residents we interviewed for this article, Disneyland is not in LA. They also all want you to know that you cannot go to the beach, go to Disneyland, and see your friends in Pasadena, all in one day.
Getting Around
While traffic is available in other cities, the traffic in Los Angeles comes at a famously larger, more majestic scale. While there is no official traffic guidebook, locals will tell you that traffic across the 405 is available daily for viewing or experiencing at most hours of the day (7 AM-11 AM, 3 PM-8 PM, and after 10 PM on weekends).
If you’d like to experience LA traffic like a local, it is recommended that you make an appointment on the opposite side of town for the morning, early afternoon, late afternoon, or evening. Then, wallow in your regrets and existential dread until you have to get on the road.
If traffic is not for you, it is also possible to design your itinerary around the six waking hours that LA does not have traffic. Travelling during these hours will allow you to cross town at a speed akin to teleportation. Many Los Angelenos shelter for hours at the houses of friends to achieve these speeds, rather than spending time in LA’s leisurely rivers of steel and smog.
Since sheltering may not be an option for you as a tourist, our resident experts suggest that you not travel to Los Angeles at all.
Top Recommended Experiences
When asked what LA experiences they did enjoy, our Los Angeles experts had some amazing recs to share, such as:
- Eating an edible and touching some stingrays at the Long Beach aquarium
- Eating an edible and falling asleep on the lawn at the Getty
- Eating an edible, staying in your apartment with your cat, and catching up on screeners that you said you’d watch but forgot about