There is little better to do at 1 a.m. than eat pancakes. One could argue that warm cookies or ice cream are reasonably comparable options, but little else beats breakfast food at odd hours of the night.
For a college town, Westwood is surprisingly devoid of all-day breakfast aside from Denny’s, possibly one of the most guaranteed depressing restaurants on the face of the planet, and Jerry’s Deli, which feels more like the place you take your grandparents to lunch than to indulge in some late-night noshing. What Westwood needs is a funky late-night dining hang-out without dim, yellowed lighting and soggy toast served on giant, plastic, saucer plates.
While not exactly in Westwood, Swingers Diner, between West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, seems to fit the bill. Located on Beverly Boulevard, Swingers stays open from 6:30 a.m. until 4:00 a.m., delving out not only traditional diner comfort foods like mac ‘n’ cheese and chili cheese fries, but also vegan burritos and ahi tuna salads. Who would order an ahi tuna salad at 3 a.m. eludes me, but Angelenos seem to find ways to integrate healthy fare into notoriously unhealthy eating hours.
At first, in my hunt for finding a place to indulge in late-night munching, I felt skeptical about Swingers. How could a place with such a wide breadth of menu options possibly make any one dish more delicious than another? After all, isn’t a place that boasts tofu sautes alongside jerk chicken omelettes bound to lack some quality? Call me a cynic, but the bigger the restaurant’s menu, the more suspicious I become of any one dish tasting especially delicious. Somehow, I visualize restaurants with menus three miles long using the same skillets to fry fish and cook pancakes. That’s just gross.
Yet as I browsed the menu online, debating whether it was worth it to trek out to West Hollywood late on a Friday night, one simple menu item convinced me that maybe this Swinger place knew what it was doing: challah French toast.
Brilliant! Why hadn’t I thought of this sooner? What could possibly be better than inherently doughy, sweet bread battered in egg with a crunchy outer layer covered with powdered sugar and dripping with maple syrup? There was no way I couldn’t go and try it now.
Situated on a busy street corner, Swingers blends into the strip of restaurants dotting Beverly Boulevard. However, visit Swingers in the wee hours of the night, and you can find large groups of young people post-partying, post-clubbing, or post-theater crowded around rickety metal tables, huddled around heat lamps, sharing plates of French fries with ranch dressing.
Entering the diner itself is like walking into a Denny’s from an alternative universe. Sure, giant-backed booths with red vinyl seats line the restaurant’s perimeter, and sure, a countertop where waitresses serve cups of Joe runs through the center of the restaurant, but rather than flickering fluorescent lights casting a yellow pallor over the customers, Swingers is lit by funky red lighting. The walls are not a tepid taupe but are covered with giant pop art prints of blue cows. Perfect Sprinkles-style cupcakes are housed in a glass dessert display case on the countertop and a 1950s jukebox beckons visitors to put in a quarter to play the Cure and the Dresden Dolls rather than the Beach Boys or Elvis.
Swingers’ clientele also does not consist of savory grave-shift workers on a coffee break or truck drivers wolfing down hamburgers, but women in designer jeans and men in trimmed suit jackets. Sure, not everyone’s young and beautiful, but Swingers serves as a kitschy, campy late-night hang-out. Swingers is above the 1950s nostalgia of a Mel’s Diner, but it’s not afraid to exaggerate essential diner decor.
While the workers seemed harried by the large group of friends I brought to try the challah French toast, pushing a few tables together outdoors put us into prime position to watch a group of tattooed teens play with their pug dogs. We obviously weren’t the only ones contributing to a busy Saturday night.
As anticipated, the French toast proved a hot, gooey breakfast treat. While simply prepared, it satiated my breakfast food craving in a fun, funky ambience. Swingers Diner may not be doing anything revolutionary to the culinary world, but when it comes to feeding the appetites of students on Westwood’s late-night weekend time, Swingers does the trick.
If you’ve been guilty of ordering an ahi tuna salad at 3 a.m. at Swingers, e-mail Cohn about possible carpooling at jcohn@media.ucla.edu.