Over the last six months I visited La Sandia, Natalee Thai, Cafe Mango Six, and the new Fresh Brothers Pizza in West Hollywood. These are my stories.

Sweet sticky rice with mango at Natalee Thai

Okay, I know not everybody just gets “stuck” over the hill. People also go there on purpose. I suppose one has to venture out to Los Angeles proper at some point in time, otherwise what’s the point of living here? You might as well pick an affordable mansion in Ohio.

Besides, very nice people live in places only accessible via the 405 or Sepulveda, or even PCH. If it’s your turn to go visit them and you’d like a tasty meeting place, or if indeed you had a meeting that ended at 4:30 and there’s no way in hell you’re getting on the freeway at that time, then here are some places I’ve visited and eaten in those parts over the last six months. Forgive me for the lack of detail in some places, but trust me that everything I ate at all of these places was delicious, otherwise I wouldn’t be recommending them.

La Sandia at Santa Monica Place
395 Santa Monica Place, 305 N
Santa Monica, CA 90401
Tel. 310.393.3300

Sandia is Spanish for watermelon, and the watermelon agua fresca and its alcoholic counterpart are two of La Sandia’s featured drinks. The beverage pictured above is the Latin Light margarita, made with tequila, natural juices, and something called nectreese sugar which helps sweeten the taste and keep the drink under 150 calories. I don’t care what’s in it. It tastes great.

That’s how I felt about the rest of the Latin Light menu, which I and several fellow MomsLA bloggers had gathered to sample.  We started with shrimp flatbreads and mushroom taco platters  which disappeared in a hurry.

The main courses came out on neat arrangements of meats and beans and rices with lettuce leaves to wrap them in. I’m going to speak for everyone there that night and say the flatbread steak was the favorite, not because they all said it, but because that’s the platter that was devoured the fastest and the one we requested an encore from. It is not picture below because we ate it that fast.

What IS pictured below is Ben Affleck. See? 

Ben was the primary reason that each one of us took a turn casually strolling to the back of the restaurant to use the ladies’ room. Instead of getting all up in his face, tourist style, I simply hid behind this shrubbery to snap a discreet photo.

To top off the evening – as if that wasn’t enough – we each got served a cone of freshly made churros with chocolate sauce, effectively negating the benefit of keeping our dinner menus at low calorie levels, but hey, we were there to do a job, dammit, and we were gonna to it right. The churros? I recommend.

La Sandia also has a children’s menu that also features Latin Light entrees. Each meal has an entree, a beverage, and a scoop of ice cream for only $5.95. The choices are presented on a placemat decorated with 6 Lotería cards from the traditional Mexican game of chance. One of them is, of course, the watermelon.

Natalee Thai
10101 Venice Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90230
(310) 202-7003

This dish is on fire.

Here is where my memory gets fuzzy. I just studied the menu and tried to match some dish names to these photos and my memory but I can’t. So here is the best record of what I ingested the night I drove all the way to Venice (east Venice, but still) to join my MomsLA pals at Natalee Thai:

Mine was the one on the left. I have no idea what was in it or what it was called, because I told the bartender to make his specialty. I always say that if I can’t decide what kind of drink I want, and usually they just blink at me without knowing what to say, but this guy perked right up and got to work. Verdict: tasty.

I don’t know what’s happening up there either, except that it’s fried and there’s a delicious sauce on the side. What could go wrong? I don’t remember what these dishes below are, either, but again, YUM.

This (above) is Thai iced tea with a smoothie floating on top. Delicious. The vibe at Natalee Thai was energetic and the staff were all lovely. Plus they have great matchboxes. Don’t you grab boxes of matches at a restaurant if there’s a bowl sitting on the hostess desk, even if you don’t smoke?

Cafe Mango Six
8428 W 3rd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90048
323-966-5866

I only have this one photo of the food I ate at Cafe Mango Six because a) I didn’t eat that much there, and b) the food was not the best thing about my visit there. The best thing was the chance to meet up with some wonderful friends who live on the other side of the hill. Cafe Mango Six is on third street right down the street from the Beverly Center. Parking is miserable so you just circle the block(s) and pray for a street spot to open up, which magically happened to me when I went. This cafe serves lighter fare including the boba smoothies that are their specialty. Pictured above is a mango shave ice just like you’d get at the mall in Honolulu. It really was melt-in-your-mouth delicious.

See? I liked it! (photo by Tee Burgess)

But the second best thing about that day at Mango Six was the discussion about peanut butter cookies (theirs was nothing to write home about) when a food writer divulged her favorite recipe and it was so simple it blew everyone’s minds so I decided to make it one morning and it really was so good and easy that I wrote about it on my other blog and slapped it up on Pinterest and almost 700 re-pins later it is the second most-visited post on that 9-year-old website. (The most-visited one is my simple explanation of what Twitter meant to me in 2009. I peaked a while ago, folks.) All because I fought through an hour and a half of the worst LA traffic to get to that cafe.

Fresh Brothers Pizza
8613 Santa Monica Blvd
West Hollywood, CA 90069 ‎