![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/5b092c4f2ae7413496de19a7c1f4736bb7-Waffle-3--1-.rsquare.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Catherine Dzilenski\n <\/p>\n
Los Angeles is not known as a happy-to-wait town, really \u2014 lack of available sidewalk space and an immovable car culture have conspired against the kind of linephilia New York encourages. So locals and not-so-locals like me took note when a new restaurant in the not-exactly-a-restaurant-row neighborhood of Larchmont opened in the fall and quickly developed a reputation for four\u2013, six\u2013, or even eight\u2013hour waits. From morning to evening, Max & Helen\u2019s<\/a> is a hit.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the longest wait for a table in L.A., possibly in the city\u2019s history,\u201d The Hollywood Reporter relayed<\/a> last month. Hostesses at the restaurant confirmed to me that waits have indeed gotten to the eight-hour mark on weekend mornings; for shorter waits, the neighborhood is walkable, and local businesses have been coming by to thank the team for boosting foot traffic. Breakfast at Max & Helen\u2019s is served all day, and the breakfast is good: Ruth Reichl posted last month<\/a> that the diner serves the best waffle she\u2019s ever had \u2014 \u201cworth the wait.\u201d I wanted to judge for myself, so off I went to join the queue.<\/p>\n Let me confirm: The waffle, a yeasted specimen with an earthiness and texture born of a three-day process, is very, very good. Much of the credit for that goes to Nancy Silverton, the doyenne of Los Angeles restaurateurs, whose Mozza<\/a> and Chi Spacca<\/a> are local royalty. The rest goes to the diner\u2019s very public face, Phil Rosenthal, the creator of Everybody Loves Raymond. After making a fortune on the sitcom, he devoted himself to his other pleasure, food, starring in a globe-trotting docuseries, Somebody Feed Phil<\/a>. His aw-shucks demeanor half-conceals a steelier tenacity: Rosenthal created the show in its original iteration as a PBS program, before it moved to Netflix and a wider audience, while quietly investing in a number of L.A. restaurants, like Michelin-starred Providence<\/a> and the Umami Burger<\/a> chain. (He\u2019s also an investor in San Sabino<\/a> in New York.) But this is the first time he himself has led the charge. Max & Helen\u2019s is Rosenthal\u2019s dream and Silverton\u2019s execution. Restaurant investment is a notoriously fickle business, and I wondered whether he was pursuing a new hobby in losing money. \u201cMy wife and I support the arts,\u201d he tells me from a booth at Max & Helen\u2019s, \u201cand this is one of my favorite arts.\u201d<\/p>\n The real Max and Helen are Rosenthal\u2019s late parents, familiar to fans of his show, on which they made regular, adorable appearances in their bathrobes. Max and Helen were not exactly gourmets \u2014 the only spice in their house was salt, Rosenthal says \u2014 though they had a taste for diner staples like fluffy scrambled eggs. Max & Helen\u2019s serves its scramble that way, in their memory. (Max\u2019s tombstone reads, \u201cDid you make the eggs fluffy?\u201d Helen\u2019s replies, \u201cI\u2019m listening to the opera\u201d \u2014 she didn\u2019t need to be reminded how he liked them.)<\/p>\n Rosenthal grew up loving diners \u2014 New City Diner<\/a> in Rockland County was his Proustian dinette \u2014 and a visit to the Palace Diner<\/a> in Biddleford, Maine, for an episode of Somebody Feed Phil reignited his passion. That state\u2019s oldest diner, it was taken over by Greg Mitchell and Chad Conley, two young chefs committed to keeping the cuisine while improving the ingredients and techniques. (Mitchell previously cooked at Gramercy Tavern<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Silverton has known Rosenthal for years \u2014 he is an investor in Mozza \u2014 and agreed to develop and oversee the menu, despite not knowing much about diner food. \u201cI never made matzo-ball soup in my life,\u201d she says, \u201cand I\u2019m a nice Jewish girl.\u201d Having grown up in Southern California, her references were less diner, more coffee shop, the L.A. equivalent: mid-century places like Tiny Naylor\u2019s<\/a>, Du-Par\u2019s<\/a>, and Ships<\/a>. (Diners served cheeseburgers; coffee shops patty melts: Max & Helen\u2019s serves both.) She spent about a year working out a menu of time-honored, un-updated classics; the menu, and even the ingredients, tend to dead-end around 1970. \u201cThere\u2019s no breakfast burrito,\u201d Silverton says. \u201cThere\u2019s no avocado toast.\u201d There is meatloaf two ways (cold sandwich; hot plate), grilled cheese, chili, and, of course, matzo-ball soup, based on Helen\u2019s recipe. \u201cDon\u2019t tell my mother, not that you could,\u201d Rosenthal says, \u201cbut Nancy made it better.\u201d (Day-to-day, Rosenthal\u2019s son-in-law, Mason Royal, runs the kitchen; his wife, Rosenthal\u2019s daughter, Lily, is the restaurant\u2019s creative director.)<\/p>\n The tuna melt, properly griddled and served without an overabundance of mayonnaise, is in fact very good. (The melted cheese is New School American<\/a>, a cheffed-up American cheese.) A few diner historians online have carped about the prices, but they generally correspond to the neighborhood and the ingredients. Almost all the ingredients, at least. The patty-melt beef may be dry-aged, but the ice cream in the milkshakes is Thrifty<\/a>, a SoCal budget scoop since 1940. \u201cWe learned you cannot make a proper milkshake \u2014 and I tried \u2014 with premium ice cream,\u201d Silverton says. She made up the difference in butterfat using half-and-half in place of milk. Diner eating is not for the clear of heart. Rosenthal took one more selfie with fans visiting from Washington, D.C., and I noticed the new glucose-monitor port peeking out from under his shirtsleeve.<\/p>\n The thronged response suggests that Rosenthal is correct that the diner still resonates in L.A. just as it has in New York, where recent years have seen a spate of upscale diner revivals, from Montague Diner<\/a> and Kellogg\u2019s<\/a> in Brooklyn all the way to the Phoenicia Diner<\/a> in the Catskills (now seen on Apple TV as Pip\u2019s<\/a> on Severance). \u201cIt literally was the second kitchen to so many people,\u201d Rosenthal says. Competing with memory and nostalgia can be tough: They tend to play tricks on the mind \u2014 one customer complained that his tuna melt was all wrong because it was warm and the cheese melted \u2014 but they also offer a wide appeal. On the day I visited, customers seemed to be split between die-hard fans of Somebody Feed Phil, rushing over for selfies and compliments \u2014 Rosenthal gamely agreed \u2014 and below-the-line industry types, like a director I sat next to at the counter, a 35-year veteran of Los Angeles, who lamented the decline in local shoots as he praised his patty melt to the skies. After the Golden Globes, most of the Only Murders in the Building gang \u2014 Steve Martin, Martin Short, Selena Gomez, and the show\u2019s creators \u2014 came by for hot dogs and sandwiches, still in black tie. All of Rosenthal\u2019s meetings, he says, now take place at the diner; he was due to meet with a CBS executive there that night. \u201cSpielberg\u2019s been a few times,\u201d he adds. \u201cHe sent an assistant for the tuna melt the other day.\u201d<\/p>\n EAT LIKE THE EXPERTS.<\/p>\n Sign up for the Grub Street newsletter.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n