11 Favorite Cheap Restaurants in Los Angeles

1. Porto's - This is a fantastic restaurant in Burbank. And I know I don't usually go to the Valley. In fact, I try to avoid it out of principle. But my ex-girlfriend lived near this place and it was great. It's a bakery and restaurant with some Cuban overtones. Essentially, that means they use delicious cheese on the sandwiches and serve those balls of dough-wrapped meat.
   
   The food is great, the desserts are better and it's incredibly underpriced. Also, they get about 50,000 people at lunchtime, but, to their eternal credit, they've figured out a way to brilliantly control the crowd and make you feel like it's organized chaos.
   
2. California Chicken Cafe - When I moved back in September, the first night I was exhausted and needed something to eat. I started walking down the street and realized that I lived about five minutes from a California Chicken Cafe. And at that moment I said to myself, holy crap I'm going to be going here a lot.
   
   CCC is one of the more popular fast, cheap L.A. restaurant chains (there are only five or six of them, and they're always crowded). They make excellent salads (including the Chinese Chicken Salad, which is really just a candy-coated salad) and rotisserie chicken. In fact, they really run things around chicken. So the restaurant really doesn't just have a clever name.
   
3. Daphne's Greek Cafe - Daphne's is getting more popular and these are springing up everywhere, which is a good thing. They're an ethnic food restaurant chain that actually gets the cuisine, such that it both tastes great and remains authentic.(Unlike ones that get it wrong -- see Express, Panda, Bell, Taco or Garden, Olive.)
   
   I've been going to different Daphne's for at least six years now and I've never gotten sick of it. How's that possible? I think of something a friend and former-co-worker of mine, John, said when we went for the first time back in 2002: "There's really no meat like shaved meat."
   
4. In-N-Out Burger - I know this isn't only in L.A., but it is only in this part of the country. And there's a simple reason why everyone's heard of it and every single In-N-Out constantly has a line inside and at the drive-thru. It's incredibly good.
   
   The menu is tiny (just hamburger, cheeseburger, fries, milkshake, soda, milk and coffee). The prices are, at this point, lower than most other fast food places (and half of what Fatburger costs for worse food). And it never, ever misses on being delicious.
   
   It's a good thing they won't expand outside of this part of the country (because they won't use frozen ingredients, they have to stay within a certain radius of their meat processing plant). Because if they did, America's obesity levels would go up again. Guaranteed.
   
5. Souplantation - For years and years, I'd drive by the different Souplantations in town and laugh at how ridiculous that name is. Then, in 2003, I became roommates with my friend JD, who's a vegetarian, and he got a recommendation that Souplantation would be a good place for him to eat. So we went to try it out.
   
   I was shocked to find out what it was. An all-you-can-eat buffet of pre-made and make-your-own salads, soups, pastas, muffins, breads, fruit and dessert. I fell in love with Souplantation, and that love remains strong today.
   
   I also like it for the challenge: Because at the Plantation, you have the potential to eat really healthy or really, really crappy. Do you have salad, a bowl of chicken soup, maybe one muffin, and cantaloupe? Or do you go crazy and dip cheese foccacia bread into the chili, put a brownie in a bowl then put ice cream over the top of it and eat bowls and bowls of macaroni and cheese? It's always a great battle.
   
6. Damon and Pythias - This is a strange little sort-of-Greek-themed sandwich and salad restaurant in Westwood where everything I've tried has been spectacular. (All items have centered around their flank steak, which is really, really good and thus makes everything it touches better. It's like the opposite of Stephan Marbury.)
   
   Anyway, in the above paragraph, I wrote "restaurant" and not "chain" because they tried to open one in Santa Monica, which I was happy about... and ended up shutting it down in like a month. It's location in Westwood almost makes it prohibitively difficult -- unless I'm feeling extremely patient in a quest for parking or I have other stuff to do in Westwood to justify the hassle. Maybe that absence from this place makes my heart grow fonder. Or maybe it's just my love of steak.
   
7. Astro Burger - There are a couple of these in the Hollywood/West Hollywood area, and I've always liked them. They have a strong emphasis on vegetarian options -- pretty much every single possible fake meat is there -- but they do a really good job not making those items taste like, ya know, crap.
   

8. A gorgeous yellow Zankou shirt.

   Zankou Chicken - This is another place that shaves its meat. They also understand the joy of hummus. But, most importantly, their staff wears the most badass yellow shirts ever.
   
9. Z Pizza - L.A. doesn't have its own signature style of pizza like New York or Chicago, but if it did, it would probably be bougie pizza.Which Z Pizza does very well. They were putting things like pine nuts and grilled chicken on (delicious tasting) pizzas way before anyone else around here. They also make the best Margherita/Napoli pizza (that's mozarella, basil, olive oil and tomato) that I've ever had.
   
10. Diddy Rease - This is one of the most fascinating dessert places ever. It's in Westwood, it always has a line out the door, and there's a reason: Their cookies are so cheap that most of the conversations in said line focus on how they could possibly be turning a profit.
    
    At Diddy Rease, for $1.50, you get to pick two cookies and a flavor of ice cream and they make you an ice cream sandwich on the spot. The cookies themselves are three for a dollar... and that's an increase from when I moved to L.A. and they were four for a dollar.
    
11. The Counter - The Counter is a really cool idea -- it's a totally customizable burger place. You go in, they give you a little clipboard and you can pick everything for your burger. This ranges from traditional stuff (lettuce, tomato, thousand island) to very, very un-traditional stuff (onion strings, plum sauce, cranberries, a soy ginger glaze).

Funniest Short Job Descriptions Ever (Don't write in your CV)

                                        My Job Is To…      

                                                              

1. Read things that don’t matter, then write papers saying they do matter, for points that don’t matter, in order to get a job doing something totally unrelated: Student
2. Take numbers on pieces of paper, rearrange them and put them on different pieces of paper: Tax Accountant
3. Explain big words to sales people and then cower before customers while trying to convince them that the sales people really didn’t say what the customers understood: Customer Solutions Engineer
4. Learn laws created ages ago so that I can tell engineers why I’m smarter than they are while complaining how it’s a travesty that they get paid more: Physics major
5. Show you innovative ways to burn money in the spirit of patriotism: Fireworks Stand Manager
6. Help people lie consistently to their bosses: Business Intelligence Consultant
7. Teach your kids enough to complain but not enough to make a difference: College Teacher
8. Pass poisonous gas on command: Research Assistant in solid state ammonia storage
9. Make people who are already filthy rich somewhat richer by duping poor people into buying stuff they don’t need: Corporate Software Engineer
10. Find as many synonyms for “explosion” as possible: Novelist for Teenage Boys
11. Supervise the guys and gals who try to protect the good people from the bad, only to be hated by the good people AND the bad: Police Sergeant
12. Make corporate propaganda feel like folksy truthisms: TV Ad Director
13. Manage waste recycling, promotion & sales: Antiques Dealer
14. Arrive after the battle and bayonet all the wounded: Auditor
15. Sell gas: Energy and Telecom Business Analyst
16. Tell forty year-old men it’s okay to behave like fourteen year-old school girls: Printing Press Production Coordinator
17. Provide arcane information on a need-to-know basis: Chief Accountant
18. Shepherd clients through the process of setting their products on fire: Consumer Products Tester
19. Manage urban renewal and pest control: B-52 Bomber pilot
20. Persuade kids that it’s really fun being wet, cold and scared out of their minds: Sailing Instructor
21. Draw up plans for something that will not be built according to those plans: Civil Engineer, Transportation Design
22. Teach kids to be evil…or so they say: Video Game Creator
23. Ensure that stupid people stay in the gene pool: Lifeguard
24. Spend most of the day looking out the window: Pilot
25. Wear a tuxedo and smash metal plates into each other: Musician
26. Go to strange people’s houses and take their money: Pizza Delivery Boy
27. Sell gluttony: Cinema Concession Stand Attendant
28. Tell people that they can’t spend money they thought they had: Government Analyst
29. Take pictures of the unlucky and the stupid: X-ray Technician
30. Profit from the misfortunes of others: Cops and Courts Reporter
31. Take a simple two-way promise and turn it into several complicated one-way promises which neither side can understand or hope to fulfill: Lawyer
32. Bring a little rain into the lives of flood victims: Government Debt Collector
33. Have people spend far more than they estimated: Building Inspector
34. Make sure nothing ever happens: IT Security
35. Move things from one tube to another: Microbiologist
36. Try not to kill the baby: Housewife
37. Misinterpret the universe: Astronomer
38. Be a human napkin: Stay-at-home mom of three
39. Run away and call the police: Security Guard
40. Copy and paste the Internet: Student

                              The Top 10

1. Help people hate each other: Divorce Lawyer (Scott Adams’ favorite)
2. Stand on a field and get yelled at for hours: Baseball Umpire
3. Talk in other people’s sleep: College Professor
4. Call people who know what they’re doing and ask them what they’re doing: Incident Manager
5. Show people how beautiful the Earth would be without them: Mountain Landscape Photographer/Climber
6. Make people feel bad about their work: Quality Assurance Tester
7. Repeatedly fix what you repeatedly break: IT Director
8. Clean up an animal that makes more money then me in a year: Assistant Horse Trainer
9. Write words that no one wants to read: Technical Writer
10. Make food that is as healthy before it goes in your body as when it comes back out: Fast Food Employee