Where do locals actually go in Los Angeles?

York Boulevard in Highland Park is where Los Angeles's 25-to-35 creative class actually lives and works, not where they perform for Instagram. Cafe de Leche opens at 6am and stays quiet until about 10am, when the stroller crowd arrives. The cold brew is strong, the wifi holds around 40-50 Mbps, and nobody cares if you sit for 3 hours on a weekday. Walk north on Figueroa to Highland Park Bowl, a bowling alley built in 1927 that doubles as an Italian restaurant. Locals fill it on Tuesday and Wednesday nights when the weekend tourists are gone. The bar at Highland Park Bowl smells like garlic bread and old wood polish. The wine bars on York between Avenues 50 and 52 pull a neighborhood crowd after 7pm on weeknights. You'll hear more Spanish than English south of Avenue 52. The pupuseria near York and Avenue 51 does $3.50 pupusas that taste like they came out of San Salvador. This stretch hasn't fully gentrified, and rent on a 1-bedroom still sits around $1,800-2,200 per month.

Silver Lake's Sunset Junction, near the intersection of Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevards, feels more residential than it photographs. Intelligentsia Coffee on Sunset is the coworking cliche, and you will get side-eye if you camp past 2 hours on a Saturday. A better bet for deep work is Dinosaur Coffee further east on Sunset, which tends to be quieter and has a shaded patio where the concrete stays cool until about 2pm. Echo Park Lake draws joggers and dog walkers by 7am, but the real local anchor is Guisados on West Sunset. Their braised-meat tacos run about $4.50 each, and the cochinita pibil might be the best single taco on the Eastside. Mohawk Bend, also on Sunset, does $7 craft pints and fills with neighborhood regulars on Monday trivia nights starting at 8pm. If you're staying in Echo Park, the Vons on Alvarado is your grocery anchor, and there's a 24-hour laundromat on Sunset near Rampart.

The Sawtelle corridor between Olympic and Santa Monica Boulevards in West Los Angeles is a 4-block stretch of Japanese and pan-Asian restaurants where Westside locals eat 3-4 nights a week. Tsujita LA on Sawtelle does a tsukemen dipping ramen for around $19 that draws a 30-minute line by 6pm on Fridays. Skip Fridays. Go Tuesday at 5:30pm and walk right in. The broth smells like roasted pork bones, and the noodles have a chew you won't find at trendier ramen spots in the Arts District. Mar Vista's Sunday farmers market on Grand View Boulevard runs 9am to 2pm and is one of the few Los Angeles markets where you still see more locals than content creators. The coffee vendor near the south entrance does a $5 oat cortado worth the walk. Culver City's Washington Boulevard between Centinela and La Cienega has turned into a locals' dinner strip. Hatchet Hall on Washington does Southern-inflected California cooking, and the biscuits with honey butter at $18 deserve at least one visit.

You meet locals in Los Angeles at the neighborhood bar, not the Hollywood nightclub. Cha Cha Lounge on Glendale Boulevard in Silver Lake charges $8-10 for cocktails, plays cumbia on the jukebox, and smells like spilled beer and lime wedges. Verdugo Bar on Verdugo Road in Glassell Park has a big outdoor patio that fills with 30-somethings on Thursday and Friday after 8pm, most of them from within a 2-mile radius. The $6 Tecate-and-shot combo is the local order. In Koreatown, Dan Sung Sa on West 6th Street is a pojangmacha-style bar where you sit on floor cushions and order anju plates of corn cheese and spicy rice cakes for $12-15 each. Inside Dan Sung Sa, the room is dim, the walls covered in handwritten Korean, and the weeknight crowd speaks almost entirely in Korean. K-town is the best Los Angeles neighborhood for a nomad who wants to eat well for under $15 a meal and stay within walking distance of a Metro station. A 1-bedroom near Wilshire/Western runs $1,500-1,900.