Do This Tour # 1: A Gay Vegetarian Tour of Los Angeles

I know, the heading sounds funny, but this is a real thing. In case you don’t know this amusing trivial fact about me, my dad was in the military when I was growing up, so I I’ve had the good fortune of traveling all over the United States and Europe and have lived in a bunch of different places. One consequence of this is that I know alot of cities pretty well, so if you’re going to a major metropolitan area, I can probably tell you a few cool places to eat, or to see art, or to get a cupcake, or whatever your thing happens to be. Seriously, this kind of thing happens about once a week, only last week it happened twice. So, I’ve decided to start archiving these tour suggestions right here on Funny Strange in a category called "Do This", so you can print them out and take them with you when you go places. Because you know, no one likes to be wandering around a new city with nothing but a map and a fanny pack full of money. Actually, that might be the first thing to do on a tour called “Get Mugged,” now that I think about it.

"Do This" Tour # 1:  Gay Vegetarians Visit Los Angeles

Here’s some stuff you can do if you’re gay and vegetarian but don’t know your way around Los Angeles, assuming some of the stuff you might want to do includes going to a spa, eating at a restaurant, and dancing your gay head off at a club on Santa Monica Blvd.

This tour was recently road-tested and given a thumbs up by real San Francisco gays.    Assuming you want your first stop after the airport to be a spa, for a good spa experience, I would say it’s Burke Williams all the way.  The massages are, like, $95 for an hour, but the ambiance is totally amazing– cucumber water, a fireplace, and unlimited access to hang out there as long as you want, using the steam room and the sauna with real hot coals (which are authentic as well as being extremely hot– see what I did there?).

There’s a Burke Williams in West Hollywood (people who live and hang out there call it WeHo), and one in Santa Monica. I have only been to the Santa Monica one, which I have found to be quite lovely every time I’ve been.  Here’s the info for the WeHo one:    http://www.burkewilliamsspa.com/home.htm/.   You want the one on Sunset Blvd.

If you have time after the spa, it’s at least worth a few minutes to stop into the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in Sunset Plaza, where you can usually spot a few celebrities.  We’ve seen Lindsay Lohan, Dave Navarro, and Rachel Bilson here recently, and this is where Perez Hilton used to do his blog (he might still go there– I’m not 100% on this).

For a hotel, I will recommend a few around the area of the Beverly Center, which gives you access to WeHo/ Hollywood, and is easy to find from the airport (you just follow La Cienega alllllll the way from the plane to the hotel).  Also, if you stay around there,  you can go to restaurants and clubs and drink, and not have to cab very far.  One good one near there is the Sofitel.  There’s also a Le Meridian over there, or I have some recommendations in Beverly Hills that you might like.  Maybe $300/ night is your average for one of those.  Definitely don’t just book something random in L.A.  Get a recommendation!!!

Re:  food.  Is there a better place to get veggie/ vegan food than LA?   The answer is no, there is not.  Here are just a few good examples:

http://www.realfood.com/
http://www.veganglory.com/

Two other places that I like to eat in West Hollywood (but which are not necessarily vegetarian) are Toast, where they make a great egg scramble frittata thing, and King’s Road, where I personally like the chicken salad.  Both of these places are very "scene-y," meaning they’re the place where you go to lunch if you’re, say, Famke Janssen, Josh Harnett, Scarlett Johanssen, or Mischa Barton.  Expect a fair amount of people staring at each other, trying to determine "is that…..?" and then of course being too cool to actually acknowledge them.  It’s fun, though, if that’s what you’re into.

I’m not even going to try to recommend gay clubs, but I heard my friends had a good time at The Factory.

An important note on traffic in Los Angeles:

The key with LA is that you don’t want to waste all of your time driving around and/ or getting stuck in traffic, so you need to strategically locate your destinations logistically.  Get out a map of LA, and try to plan things around one destination, like Santa Monica or West Hollywood . Do NOT go there thinking “I’m going to totally see the Santa Monica Pier, then I’m going to see my friend in Eagle Rock, THEN we’re going to see someone else in Manhattan Beach.” No, you are not doing that.  Because while these things may LOOK like they’re not that far away from each other on a map, you’re not factoring in the impenetrable wall of traffic that you have to get through in between each of these places. Keep in mind that the freeway system only works the way it’s supposed to in Los Angeles in between 3:14 and 3:16 am on Sundays. Every other time, there are about ten times as many cars as there should be, and the result is this:

Not a joke.  Not an exaggeration.   This is the actual reason why people from the west side don’t go east after, say, 2pm.

That said, If you find that you’re staying on the Westside and someone invites you to do something really fun in, say, North Hollywood, I would recommend AT LEAST checking the SigAlert website, which tells you how fast each freeway is moving.  SigAlerts, by the way, are named after Lloyd C. "Sig" Simon, and you can read more about that here.  It’s also fun to scroll your cursor around the map, just to see where the freeway is going ZERO MILES PER HOUR.   If the little dot is diamond-shaped, it means someone overturned an oil tanker or an entire truckfull of chickens, and that no one within that red diamond is going anywhere for a long, long time.  Try to avoid going that way.   Also, I am a big advocate for taking Sepulveda for eastside- westside access, though Stephan disagrees with me on this point.  Sepulveda never lets ME down, is all I’m saying.

That’s it for "Gay and Vegetarian in Los Angeles."  Feel free to email me recommendations for new tours/ cities.   I’m fairly confident that no matter where you want to go, I can find some cool stuff to do.

• Category: Do This