PRICE:
Frommer's Highly Recommended

It's rare to find a restaurant that feels comfortably familiar yet cutting-edge trendy at the same time -- and also happens to be one of L.A.'s few late-night eateries. Kate Mantilini fits the bill perfectly. One of the first to bring meatloaf back into fashion, Kate's offers a huge menu of upscale truck-stop favorites such as \"white\" chili (made with chicken, white beans, and Jack cheese); grilled steaks, chicken, and fish; a few token pastas; and just about anything you might crave. At 2am, nothing quite beats a steaming bowl of lentil-vegetable soup and some garlic-cheese toast, unless your taste runs to fresh oysters, a candy bar-ice-cream pie, and a dry martini -- yep, Kate's has it all. The huge mural of the Hagler-Hearns boxing match that dominates the stark, open interior provides the only clue to the namesake's identity: Mantilini was an early female boxing promoter in the late 1940s.

Copyright: Excerpted from Frommer's Los Angeles 2008, (c) 2008, Wiley Publishing, Inc.

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