Lomita, CA

When people up in the Palos Verdes hills want ramen, a haircut or a hardware run, they often drive down into Lomita. This small, flat Los Angeles County city sits where Torrance, Harbor City and the peninsula meet, and it has spent six decades insisting on being its own place. The feel is a working town with a few layers. Narbonne Avenue is the older main street, slower and more local. The residential blocks between them are a grid of small single-story houses, and on the south side, near Palos Verdes Drive North, the streets tilt upward and a few homes catch a view of the hills. Housing is mostly postwar bungalows and ranch houses, with small apartment buildings, courtyard units and a few mobile home parks mixed in. A steady stream of teardowns has put boxy two-story houses and small townhome projects beside the originals, so a single block can show seventy years of building. Eboshi Ramen Bar on Lomita Boulevard does bowls of ramen in a small strip-mall room, Szechwan Chinese Food on PCH turns out the chile-heavy Sichuan dishes, and The Steak Library covers the sit-down steak dinner. For coffee, most people end up at Offset Coffee Roasters, whose shop sits right where Lomita meets Torrance. Parks here are small. A handful of pocket parks handle playgrounds and ball games, and the Lomita Railroad Museum puts a real steam locomotive in a garden setting. For serious walking, the hillside trails of the peninsula begin up the slope on the peninsula, close enough for an after-work hike. Daily errands stay close. The tradeoff is looks. The commercial strips are dated and a little cluttered, and the housing is uneven from one lot to the next. What Lomita offers instead is a town with easy flat streets, no pretense, and dozens of small independent restaurants, with the green slopes of the peninsula rising right behind it.