You have probably heard of Max & Helen’s, the homage to classic diners opened in Larchmont six months ago by Phil Rosenthal, creator of “Everybody Loves Raymond” and host of “Somebody Feed Phil,” and culinary juggernaut Nancy Silverton. If the algorithms pick up even your slightest interest in L.A. restaurants, you know the early waits for tables reached an absurdist eight hours, and probably that Silverton resequenced the DNA of the breakfast waffle into something more closely resembling yeasted pastry.
An immutable law of L.A. dining: Crowds subside, at least during less popular time slots. Weekday lunch waits these days seem to average about 45 minutes. Double or occasionally triple that on weekends. I’ve also been twice recently when the only lag between me and a seat was the beat a server needed to grab menus and say, “Right this way.”
On a drizzly February morning, two of us landed along the deepest bend of the dining room’s curved counter. Soon I was smearing a whipped blob of butter and maple syrup around a waffle’s bronzed edges, and it was freakishly delicious, honestly the best of my life. The batter, fermented for three days, yields a fine-crumbed crispness and depths of flavor that sway between sweet and savory.
A few weeks later, three of us arrived on a Monday at 6:30 p.m. and were shown right to a plaid upholstered booth set against a wood-paneled wall. We divided a Cobb salad, its classic ingredients arranged in generous piles over iceberg lettuce, and shared several toasty sandwiches: patty melt, tuna melt, a Reuben on rye. We stuck long spoons and wide straws into a thick strawberry milkshake, while our forks shattered the crust on a generous wedge of cherry pie.
At moments like these, when the mood in the air has easy, genuine cheer, I can relish the earnest intent of the place: a steady, there-for-you neighborhood diner.
But I understand, too, why the project has been a magnet for spicy social-media takes and carping about its facsimile of a dying genre of American restaurant culture. Max & Helen’s, named after Rosenthal’s parents, looks like a diner, serves food that lands like diner food, but probably isn’t a diner in the purest societal definition. The whirl of celebrity about Rosenthal and Silverton courts outsize opinions, and Americana diners are not about opinionating.
Diners are about being serviceable, in the literal terms of availability and of adequacy. Diners aren’t baiting first-bite TikTok reaction shots. Our judgments should take a breather while we rest on a diner’s swivel stool. We’re there to feed our nostalgia, our basicness. We order what we want: flapjacks, hot links, Denver omelets, gravy-covered hot plates, no-big-deal cheeseburgers, chocolate malts. The food is designed to be enjoyed just enough. What a relief not to overthink while we catch up with friends, or hand fries to our children, or stare hard into the void at 3 a.m.
In Southern California, we might also frequent diners and Midcentury coffee shops as an act of preservation. Our chrome shrines to Googie architecture, built in the heyday of neon signage and Naugahyde and Formica, have been vanishing for decades: Pann’s in Westchester, Norms in West Hollywood, Foxy’s in Glendale, Bob’s Big Boy Broiler in Downey. The arrival of Max & Helen’s doubles as a reminder to patronize these institutions before more of them disappear.
A restaurant with Silverton’s name attached can’t help but set near-impossible expectations. She is the virtuoso whose crème fraîche brioche tart with wine-poached peaches made cool-headed Julia Child cry tears of joy! Silverton tests recipes until they rise to her perfectionism. Precedent demands that her waffle push iron-griddled cakes into never-before-seen dimensions.
All that said, the diner tenet of not overthinking things serves me well at Max & Helen’s. I’m not partial to cottage cheese or egg salad sandwiches, and I don’t feel the pressure of conversion here. But chili cheese fries, my diner go-to? They’re great — carefully proportioned so some fries stay crackly while others sink into appealing sogginess — without being distractingly great.
This is probably a good place to mention: Rosenthal has been an investor in restaurants (including Silverton’s Mozza empire) for years, but this is his first stint as restaurateur, and we’ve been friends since I moved to Los Angeles in 2018. Mason Royal, his son-in-law, is director of operations, and his daughter, Lily Rosenthal Royal, shapes branding and hospitality as creative director.
I show up unannounced, and if they’re around, we say hi. Then I’m right back to business, pouring syrup over blueberry pancakes, appropriately fluffy-dense in the center and crackly around the edges. The simple “diner breakfast” of two eggs any style (me: soft-scrambled or over-easy with runny yolks), toast and bacon or sausage does its job. I’ll admit preferring the fancier omelet Florentine, its tufts of spinach registering as fresh and balanced with leeks and Parmesan.
Silverton has decades of fame behind the complex and gratifying variations of grilled cheese she once served at Campanile. Her version at Max & Helen’s shrewdly fills the diner assignment: Three micro-thin layers of white and yellow cheddar teeter at the edge of melted, sealed between toast cut into triangles and served alongside a cup of tomato soup ideal for dipping.
A proven burger engineer, she couldn’t help but shift into luxury with her take on a patty melt. She fuses nine ounces of short rib and various cuts of dry-aged beef with floppy petals of caramelized onions and a shellacking of Gruyère. Spicy mayo, the color of Russian dressing, runs down the sides. Do I think “diner” as I pilot this $27 Maserati of a sandwich? No. Am I glad it exists? Yes.
A couple dishes leave me cool. The BLT proves too much bacon may indeed be possible. Meatloaf, served with mashed potatoes and green beans, is slicked with excellent, meaty-rich gravy, but also possesses the uniform texture of pâté when I yearn for craggy, diner-y singe around the edges.
The only outright letdown was a hot turkey open-face with thoroughly dried-out meat.
At that same lunch, a colleague and I were served a waffle that was pale, and missing the flavor alchemy I’d experienced during several other meals. I thought of the extreme microscope this restaurant is under, and how someone who had waited an hour and was trying this hyped dish for the first time could rightly scoff. The waffle must come correct.
On that note: Desserts might be Max & Helen’s most underrated aspect. Tart-sweet cherries in the pie keep you coming back for one more forkful, and then another. Chocolate cake is the essence of childhood birthdays. But here’s a hack: I love the waffle in the evening, a scoop of ice cream ordered separately and tipped on top. While it begins running into rivulets from the heat, I ladle over some of the restaurant’s silken, opaque hot chocolate crowned with billowing marshmallow.
I am not in the habit of concocting do-it-yourself finales in restaurants. But at a neighborhood diner, on a quiet Monday night, in the kind of timeless twilight where I can relax and just be? Surely nobody will have a big opinion one way or the other.
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