los angeles

Breakfast burritos are one of L.A.’s most iconic foods and you’ll find the hefty, all-day dish offered at taquerias, Aussie-inspired cafes, French bakeries and everywhere in between, with new entrants frequently unseating former favorites. Restaurant critic Jenn Harris adds a new Long Beach cafe to the county lexicon, with a full menu of breakfast burritos wrapped in Chihuahua-style flour tortillas. At Masa y Taza, you can get your burrito stuffed with red pork chorizo; green chicken chorizo; sauteed nopales and bell pepper confit for a vegan take (vegan tortillas are available upon request); or the classic bacon, egg, potatoes and cheese. Tacos and churro French toast round out the food options, while beverages include a selection of aguas frescas made fresh daily, café de olla, a mocha with Mexican chocolate and specials like a mazapán banana latte.

There’s a reason why people like to shop locally during the holidays. You don’t have to worry anxiously about when your gift will arrive — for the kids; it’s always for the kids. It doesn’t have to be like that.

This year, try visiting a local gift shop or a holiday craft fair and pick out a gift in person from a neighbor right here in L.A.

As in past years, many of the items in our Made in L.A. list are small-batch or made-to-order. You’ll find things including unique ceramics, puzzle candles, handmade jewelry and even a life-affirming baseball cap designed by an 11-year-old.

The best holiday gifts aren’t just those that arrive quickly. They also have heart. If you’re searching for the perfect gift, whether it’s the perfect handmade coffee mug or silk-screened tee boasting local pride, check out our list of favorites below.

Editor’s note: If you make a purchase using some of our links, the L.A. Times may be compensated. Prices and availability are subject to change. In some cases, listed websites may use location-based pricing.

When we went looking for the best independent gift shops in Los Angeles, we discovered a Tarot Arts store in South Pasadena, found a fun mix of paper goods — and stickers! — at Paper and Plant Co.’s new location in Highland Park and met three adorable shop cats at Adelaide, a charming flower and gift shop in Altadena, which was forced to close temporarily following the Eaton fire.

We’re fortunate in Los Angeles that holiday shopping doesn’t have to revolve around a crowded mall — or an Amazon delivery.

Shopping local can be fun.

At Little Flower in Pasadena, you can enjoy a meal or savory treat while browsing the shop’s shelves stocked with seasonal goods. At Curious in Hermosa Beach, you can book a haircut at a speakeasy-style barber inside the “pop and pop shop.” Or you might catch an art show at Tim Biskup’s Face Guts in Verdugo Village, right next to his unique lifestyle store, Home Guts.

This holiday season, why not try shopping in your neighborhood? Whether you need something for a teacher or loved one, shopping small helps support businesses that may have had a tough time of late. Many store owners shared that the holidays can make or break their entire year. “The holidays matter a lot to us,” says Ivana Suvak of Goods in Santa Monica. “I think in-person retail matters more than it used to. We’re all online all day, but walking into a shop, touching something, smelling it, discovering something you weren’t looking for and talking to another person … I don’t think that can be replaced.”

Shopping local makes a difference beyond just your gift recipient — it helps your neighbors. “My thought every year is: If you build it, they will come,” says Sonya Gallardo, who owns Highlow Gift Shop in Torrance. “To make the heavy investment, I have to have faith that my customers will remember my shop, and new customers will want to shop small and find me.”

Here’s a list of our favorite gift shops in Los Angeles.

Before it gets topped with seafood, seasonal produce and a medley of sauces, each tostada begins as a blank canvas. Local chefs are the artists, using the tostada as a vehicle to showcase their cultural backgrounds, kitchen expertise and the ingredients they love. Each bite is intentionally crafted to hit certain taste and textural marks: the crispy tostada, buttery seafood, zesty citrus and creamy avocado, plus unexpected elements that take it over the top, like tart grapefruit, piquant pickled onions or earthy salsa macha.

The best part? The seafood tostada comes ready to eat as-is, requiring no more than a dash of salsa or a squeeze of lime to complete the chef’s vision. It’s not unlike a meticulously prepared tasting menu course, except these chefs are handing over tostadas at taco trucks, food halls, raw bars and everywhere in between.

Seafood tostadas originated in coastal regions across Mexico, but in L.A., the dish pulls global influence, including a tostada topped with tuna carpaccio and cachucha pepper aioli at a Central American restaurant in Venice; salmon and chicatana ant mayo at a modern Mexican haunt in the Arts District; and scallops and wasabi aioli that merge Baja California and Japanese flavors at a Frogtown favorite.

For a refreshing bite on a hot day, or anytime really, here are 20 of the best seafood tostadas to try in L.A.

— Danielle Dorsey

Thank You Coffee’s Kabocha Squash Latte, or KSL, has garnered a cult fandom over the years. The gourmet, Asian-inspired take on the pumpkin-spice originator is made with fresh squash and house-made syrup, and it will return to the Chinatown and Anaheim locations in early November. Until then, and finding a home in the newly opened Chinatown space, are two new seasonal lattes. The cozy apple latte (pictured) is fragrant, comforting and available through November, made with a house syrup involving cold-pressed apple juice, green tea, sour plum powder, ginger, cardamom and more. It’s topped with a dash of even more sour plum powder, which gives the effect of tart green apples on the nose and tongue. The sweet corn latte, inspired by cornbread, is a sweet-savory mix of brown butter, malted milk powder, annatto seed and beyond, and can be found through October.

The surge in soccer fans this summer was bad for some businesses in Los Angeles.

World Cup host cities had lofty economic expectations for the summer tournament. But the city’s hotels only got a 1% bump in occupancy, according to a report published this week by Hospitality Education and Research Organization, a project of the Hotel Assn. of Los Angeles.

Seventy-two percent of surveyed hotels said the tournament hurt their 2026 finances, and 48% called the impact “extremely negative.” Just 2% said it met projections.

Downtown occupancy reached 66% in June, down from 71% a year earlier, the report says. Room nights fell between 10% and 12%.

Ahead of World Cup tournaments, FIFA holds large blocks of rooms. But FIFA canceled or released up to 70% of the hotel room blocks it had reserved in host cities, including Los Angeles.

“We understood that we were maybe going to be disappointed with attendance going into the World Cup simply by the volume of cancellations that came out of the room block agreement,” said Jackie Filla, president and CEO of the Hotel Assn. of Los Angeles.

The disappointing turnout led to staff reductions. Of the hotels surveyed 82% reduced seasonal staff and more than six in 10 reported reducing employee shifts, scheduled hours, or permanent staff.

Hotels did raise prices, with the average daily rate hitting $228, the highest of any comparable L.A. event in three years. But occupancy was 71%, well below the 83% recorded during Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.

The survey drew 58 responses from 210 hotels, and the analysis was done by travel-data firm Rove using CoStar and AirDNA data. International visitors were also scarce, with Los Angeles welcoming 700,000 international arrivals in June and July — roughly 80,000 visitors below 2024 levels for the same period, the report says.

“We particularly didn’t see a lot of foreign visitors and that’s something that was disappointing,” Filla said. “Foreign visitors do spend three times the amount of money as the average domestic traveler.”

Short-term rentals, meanwhile, gained. Their demand rose 23% and revenue 21% versus July 2024, while hotel revenue fell 3.3%. Airbnb, the tournament’s official fan accommodation, offered new hosts $750 incentives.

The city is currently weighing a temporary proposal to ease its short-term rental rules through the end of 2028 to accommodate tourists. “That will really, truly undercut the business of hotels,” Filla added. “We saw some of that with the World Cup.”

The worry is carrying over to the Olympic Games, set to be hosted in Los Angeles in 2028. Six in 10 surveyed hoteliers expect an Olympic rental surge to hurt their bookings and rates, the report says.

The World Cup “gave us false hope to recover from a negative year,” one Los Angeles hotelier said, according to the report. “I also feel [the] same thing will probably happen for [the] Super Bowl and Olympics.”