Type lunch near me in Elysian Valley and the map goes almost blank. The neighbourhood — everyone calls it Frogtown — is a strip of houses and light industry a few blocks wide, wedged between the concrete channel of the Los Angeles River and the freeway, and it has almost no commercial frontage at all. Wax Paper is a small sandwich counter in the middle of it, and its actual value is as much about where it sits as what it sells.
A great sandwich next to a good walk is worth more than a better sandwich in a car park. Ask Karpo how to pair a lunch stop with something worth doing on foot nearby.
The concrete river, explained
The Los Angeles River is a real river encased in concrete, and the reason is a flood. After catastrophic flooding in the 1930s the channel was paved to move water to the ocean as fast as possible, which worked and simultaneously destroyed the river as a landscape. For most of the last century it functioned as drainage infrastructure and a film location rather than a place anyone visited.
The stretch alongside Frogtown is the exception. Here the channel has a soft bottom — the water table was too high to pave — which means vegetation, islands, herons, and water that behaves like a river rather than a drain. It is one of only a few sections that look like something other than a storm drain.
A bike and walking path runs alongside it for several miles, flat, mostly separated from traffic, and largely unknown to people who do not live nearby. In a city that is genuinely difficult to walk in, a continuous car-free path of that length is a significant thing, and it is the reason to come to this neighbourhood at all.
What a good sandwich counter does
The category is easy to do adequately and hard to do well, and the difference is almost always the bread and the ratio. A sandwich shop worth travelling to has bread with a crust that holds up, a filling-to-bread proportion that leaves the bread audible rather than incidental, and something acidic — pickled, dressed or fermented — cutting through the middle.
The other marker is a short board. A counter offering twelve sandwiches is making twelve sandwiches competently; one offering six is usually making six properly, with components prepped that morning rather than held for a week. Six is the better sign.
Order whatever is most vegetable-forward alongside whatever is most meat-heavy if there are two of you. The vegetable sandwich is the honest test at any counter of this kind, because there is no cured meat carrying it, and the good ones are frequently the best thing on the board.
Frogtown as a neighbourhood
It is a genuinely unusual piece of Los Angeles: one long street running parallel to the river, single-storey houses next to workshops and small manufacturers, and almost no through traffic because the geography gives it very few entrances. That isolation is why it stayed working-class and largely Latino for decades while surrounding neighbourhoods changed around it.
Change has arrived over the last decade, along with the usual arguments about it — a handful of studios, a brewery, a couple of restaurants, and rising prices in a neighbourhood whose residents have been there for generations. Anyone visiting should be aware that this is a residential street rather than a destination strip, and behave accordingly.
For a visitor, the practical upshot is that there is very little here: no cluster of shops, no reason to wander aimlessly, and a handful of specific places worth going to. Come with a plan and the neighbourhood is excellent; come expecting a district and it will seem like nothing at all.
How to spend the afternoon
The version that works: get sandwiches, walk or cycle the river path, and continue as far as you feel like before turning back. Heading north the path continues towards Griffith Park and the Glendale Narrows; heading south it runs towards downtown. Either direction is flat and either is better than the drive suggests.
Early morning and the hour before sunset are the two good windows. The path is entirely exposed, the concrete radiates heat, and the middle of a summer afternoon here is genuinely unpleasant. Birdlife along the soft-bottom stretch is also far more active at both ends of the day.
Bicycles are the better tool if you have access to one, because the path is long and the interesting stretches are spread out. On foot, an out-and-back of a couple of miles from the sandwich counter is about the right shape, and the turning point is best chosen by where the light is rather than by distance. There are several access points along the strip, so a walk can be cut short in either direction without doubling back the whole way.
Practical notes
Wax Paper is a small sandwich counter in Elysian Valley — Frogtown — in Los Angeles, on a narrow residential and light-industrial strip beside the soft-bottom stretch of the Los Angeles River. Order a vegetable-forward sandwich alongside a meat one if there are two of you; a short board is a good sign. Pair it with the river path, which is flat, car-free and runs for miles in both directions, and go early in the morning or in the last hour before sunset, since the path is completely exposed. Bring a bicycle if you can. There is no shopping district here, so come with a specific plan and treat the street as residential.
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Ask Karpo first
Some of the best food in this city sits in neighbourhoods with nothing else in them. Ask Karpo what is genuinely worth the drive, what to do while you are out there, and which hour of the day makes it work.
