Los Angeles

• California in a Fortnight? - California
• Frankly, my dear, you'll love it - Charleston
• Blown away by the Windy City - Chicago
• Blown away by Chicago - Chicago
• Haunted by Hemingway - Florida
• We have the keys to unlock Florida - Florida
• My Love Match with Las Vegas - Las Vegas
• The town that cloned Europe - Las Vegas
• A Chorus of Angels - Los Angeles
• LA: An actresses guide - Los Angeles
• The Stars Bite Back - Los Angeles
• Hotel of high fashion - Miami
• Miami Spice - Miami
• Alien Town: Roswell - New Mexico
• How the kids went Cajan - New Orleans
• Seta and the City - New York
• Glamour by the sea - Santa Barbara
• Celebrity Hotels - USA
• Escape to Sundance - Utah

LOS ANGELES RESTAURANTS must be full of “resting” actors thinking: “When I make it, I’m going to buy this place so these fine customers can get the food and music they really deserve.”

Restaurants and bars are indeed manned by struggling actors but perhaps rather than planning to reward us, they’re plotting nasty revenge. To pay us back for treating them like bums, they often seem to offer awful food and even worse music.

There are many dire celebrity-owned restaurants in La-La Land but happily some notable exceptions. Los Angeles is the capital of showbiz restaurants, so you get a better calibre of celebrity and, if your timing’s right, you’ll see them in action.

In his joint on Universal Studios City Walk, BB King sings great 12-bar blues. And they serve desserts to die for - perhaps literally.

Take the Fried Peanut Butter & Jelly Sundae. Only in America would they serve giant deep-fried peanut-butter-and-jam sandwiches in batter covered in ice cream and icing sugar.

I passed on the Washbucket Salad, and the Catfish at The Crossroads because catfish are not to be trusted.

Cruise from B.B.’s to Sunset Strip, home to legendary rock dives The Whisky, The Roxy and The Rainbow Room.

The strip is suitably hallucinogenic, with a 30ft beer bottle, a railway carriage halfway up a hill and a Mississippi steamboat bar.

In the middle is a Deep South shack, with rusty corrugated roof. This is the House of Blues, a venue owned by the Blues Brothers. All right, so it’s Dan Ackroyd with Jim Belushi, not John, but at least it’s not that fat bloke from Roseanne in Blues Brothers 2000.

Belushi hangovers

Acts like Macy Gray play and Dan and Jim attend. The best entertainment is the Gospel Sunday Brunch, an eating beano designed for Belushi hangovers, followed by a live gospel set.

Tables are stacked with white chocolate brownies, jambalaya, cheese grits, roast vegetable hash, banana bread pudding with whipped cream and as many peel-and-eat king prawns as you can savage.

The show is Blues Brothers without the car chases. The audience was great. When asked to Jump for Jesus they jumped, which, given the meal they’d just eaten, was pretty game. and she cant talk-a. And she can’t walk-a.” She probably had the hash browns.
“DO WE LOVE JESUS?” screamed the singer. “Yes we do!” yelled the audience. Baptist Julie, who was sitting next to me, went one further.
“I LOVE THAT MAN!” she shrieked. Then the show turned into a gospel song-that-tells-a-story. “So my friend is in the hospital!” lamented the singer. Amen, replied the audience sympathetically.
“A

“But I prayed to the LORD!”
“Oh YEAH!” shrieked Julie.
“Ah’m telling you, I praaaayed to the LORD!” Julie started drumming her feet on the ground in ecstasy.
“AND-SHE-WAS-CURED-BY-THE-LORD!”

Julie went frankly mental and the audience jumped to their feet to pogo. Soon the stage was filled with characters like Reverend “Dynamite Holmes, a maniac with a quiff like Woody Woodpecker. We sang America The Beautiful, waved our napkins in triumph, and then ate more eggs.

Out towards the beach in Santa Monica, Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife Maria Shriver own the Austro /Germanic restaurant Schatzi on Main.

Cigar night

The first Monday in the month, Arnold hosts a dinner-with-cigars night. I called his restaurant manager Charly Temmel to ask if I could come to one of these dinners to write about it. I was ordered to come down “with some examples of my work”.

Charly was standing outside Schatzi looking angry.

“I wanted to write about the Cigar Night . . .”

“Everybody wants something, don’t they?” snapped Charly.

In short, an offer of hospitality was conspicuous by its absence, but I went anyway.

Schatzi looked like the Black Forest, full of trees and also of rude people.

An eight-dollar glass of wine tasted watered down and the place smelled so strongly of smoke it made me feel queasy.

Meanwhile, Arnold’s bodyguards stared as you ate, in case your carrots were secret poison darts. But the actor was indeed there, sat at a long table like Jesus at The Last Supper, only smug. So if you want to pay $85 (plus tax and tip) to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger fawned over by drunk blondes, Schatzi is the place.

For a healthier evening, spend the night drinking heavily at the Viper Room on Sunset. It’s ideal for both music and cinema fans, since it is a rock club owned by a movie star (Johnny Depp). From the outside, it’s disappointing. A black painted block without even any chalk body outlines. But inside the music’s loud and it’s a good old-fashioned dirty night out.

For slicker atmosphere, the glamorous Continental at 8400 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills is cool. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck invested in this hip, modern bar and restaurant, and while Matt no longer lives in LA, Ben is a regular.

The food is upscale, meaning it involves lobster. We had some upscale crepes, which were excellent, and the more-ish Chicken Continental, which comes with roasted garlic potatoes and red pepper sauce.

The tables are near the bar and can get drowned in a sea of music, but they cheerfully turned it down when I asked and I didn’t care after one of the Continental’s knock-‘em-out caramel apple martinis.

Perfect to stay for a showbiz restaurant trip is the Secret Garden, a comforting Old Hollywood B&B full of soft sofas in a secluded walled garden behind Sunset Boulevard.

The hilarious owner, Raymond has met every major star who ever ate lunch in Tinseltown, being former maitre d” at the legendary Chasens.

“Mr Sinatra liked his Hobo Steak, a double steak packed in rock salt then sauteed in butter at your table and served on buttered toastpoints. VERY cholesterol,” shudders Raymond. “And Mr Reagan liked the Beef Belmont soup with matzo balls. But Miss Taylor was my favourite. When she couldn’t face coming to the restaurant I would drive her dinner to her house, and she’d receive me in her negligee. I served her and Victor Luna chilli, Caesar salad and cheese toast in bed.”

Hollywood insider

Raymond is a well-informed Hollywood insider, helping you settle in a town where other hotels seem to be staffed by the cast of Beverly Hills 90210. He even introduced me to a new LA dining experience, picnicking at the open air concerts up at the Hollywood Bowl. The view are impressive and the air fresh, although Raymond decided the evening was a catastrophe” because he’d forgotten to iron the napkins.

When you can’t face any more fine dining, take a short walk north from the Secret Garden into the foothills of Laurel Canyon. Here you’ll find a hidden pocket of Sixties California at the most rock’n’roll cornershop in Los Angeles - the legendary Laurel Canyon Country Store.

This sun-bleached outpost hasn’t changed since Jim Morrison lived next door - it’s the store “where the creatures meet” in The Doors song Love Street. It has special appeal to British stars, says Tommy the manager: “It started ten years ago when David Bowie came in and asked for a Cadbury’s Flake. So we got some, then they all heard about it. It’s quite funny to see James Bond standing in line!”

So buy one of their superb overstuffed sandwiches, unfurl the LA Times and park in the sun with an eye out for British chocolate fans, not least one old charmer stocking up on KitKats.

Mick Jagger buys his sweets here, presumably to lure those young girlfriends of his. You could call it stalking, but when you’ve spent all that money eating in celebrities” restaurants, it’s only fair that they should occasionally come to you.