The Cafe at Cookbook

Everyone has their version of a candy store. And if organic tomatoes, tinned fish, and biodynamic wines are your thing, that’s Cookbook. This white bungalow in Larchmont Village is the boutique grocery store’s third and largest location, and it’s riddled with pricey booby traps for millennial foodies.

The best thing about this food shop, though (and the main reason we’d spend over $20 here) is the attached cafe where you can have a lovely al fresco lunch. The menu is curated by the Jon & Vinny folks, but apart from a few pasta dishes, it doesn’t scream Italian—in fact, it reads more like a fancier version of the sandwich-salad-soup combos you’d eat with your mom at a Nordstrom cafe. But we won’t downplay that the food here is very good, like the buttered cheese toastie filled with caramelized leeks and the beautiful treviso and apple salad that belongs on the cover of a Chez Panisse cookbook. You’ll probably feel like a walking LA cliché sipping turmeric tonics and $14 chicken broth in the sunshine, but Cookbook is as good a place as any to momentarily live that lifestyle.