Brisket, Booze and Burgers

Not far from Go’s Mart, in yet another strip mall, stands Brent’s, a 35-year-old restaurant with a cheesy faux stained-glass facade. David Sax, the author of “Save the Deli,” has called Brent’s “the surprise heavyweight” of Jewish delicatessens in Los Angeles, and he’s right. The hungry screenwriters can have the glare of Canter’s, and Larry King his banquette at Nate n’ Al, but you’ve got to go to the Valley for corned beef and whitefish salad this good, and for made-from-scratch kishke, an old-world delicacy that the owner Ron Peskin all but rescued from West Coast extinction. All that cured meat will make you thirsty, so head next door to the Stovepiper, a timeworn cocktail lounge with the cool, dark interior of an off-Strip casino and a sign out front advertising “the best drinks in the Valley” (a claim I was unable to verify, though not for lack of trying).

Then there is the matter of the hamburger, that most sacred of Southern California foods. All due respect to the Apple Pan — the venerable burger-slinging lunch counter in West Los Angeles — those seeking a quintessential SoCal burger experience would do well to head to the Valley enclave of Chatsworth and install themselves on one of the outdoor counter stools at the Munch Box. This yellow, hutch-like building, dating from the 1950s, produces a near-perfect, classically Los Angeles burger: small patty, soft bun warmed on the griddle, hickory-flavored sauce, butcher-paper wrapping.

Cultural Diversity

The Valley is not the cultural desert that many Angelenos make it out to be. In 2011 it got its own soaring, glass-walled 1,700-seat performing arts center, in Northridge, which has recently hosted shows by the Los Angeles Ballet, the San Francisco Jazz Collective, and Savion Glover, among other notable acts. Wooing bigger marquee artists away from the downtown Walt Disney Concert Hall will take time, but every David needs a Goliath.

For a quieter, more modest cultural fix, try the museum and chapel at the San Fernando Rey de España Mission, one of the most impeccably preserved sites from California’s Spanish colonial era. Though it occupies a wedge of land in Mission Hills hemmed in on all sides by freeways, it offers a profoundly serene experience. Stroll through the arcaded walkways and statuary-dotted courtyards and explore the painstakingly restored adobe buildings, which include a still-active mission church with a gilded altarpiece from the 17th century. On the day I was there, I was the only visitor, a circumstance that afforded me an unexpectedly moving moment of solitude before the grave of longtime Valley-dweller Bob Hope, who is interred in his own little memorial garden at the mission’s edge.