Welcome to Los Angeles. The first thing you should know is that it kind of sucks shit here. Most of the guys you will encounter are desperate to be actors, even though the best gig they can get is appearing on Elimidate. Most of the girls are vacant Paris Hilton clones.

There are ways around the hellishness, though. You just need to find the pockets of cool. That’s what this guide is for. We’ll offer you some booze options and some restaurants and some cultural stuff too. Unlike Vice’s NYC guide, which is basically a booze cruise where you use your feet instead of a boat, the LA guide is all about tiny little dots of utopia in the midst of Hades.

That’s because LA is spread out like crazy. It isn’t like New York, where a ten-minute cab ride can get you basically anywhere worth going, or like your little hometown, where you can walk from the only cool bar to the only cool restaurant in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. When you come to LA, you are going to be driving a lot. That will really fuck with your buzz, so forget about going on a serious bender here unless you are into drunk driving—which we cannot, in good conscience, condone (whatever). Just make a home base at your hotel (more on those later), and strike out from there.

The best way to tackle LA is neighborhood by neighborhood, so let’s start by breaking those down for you…THE LA HOOD GUIDE