110 Second Street, Hermosa Beach CA 90254, ph. 310/376-2355, for delivery or take-out call 310/301-7074 (add 10% for to go orders)
To see the entire menu, get a map and directions, and the weather report in Hermosa, check out The Spot Web Site.
The Spot has been around forever; it touts itself as the oldest vegetarian restaurant in Los Angeles. Just a block from the very pleasant beaches of Hermosa, in a small but house-like/diner-in-a-small-town atmosphere, The Spot conjures up the kicked-back beachhead L.A. stereotype, but in a good way. The front of The Spot is a little, skylit room, and the back, (which I recommend) is a greenhouse that serves as a skylit patio, thoroughly handmade and featuring astroturf and outdoor furniture. Good lighting for a date, or in case you run into someone you haven't seen in years.
The food here is very basic but skillfully cooked. All of the grains and legumes or organic, and they try to use mostly organic produce. We recommend the Inflation Busters, any of which can include a soup or salad for an extra $2.25: Dear John ($4.95) includes pintos, rice and savory sauce, my favorite, the Dear Bubba ($6.50) includes rice, plack or pinto beans, greens (collard or mustard), Savory Sauce and cornbread and salsa. There won't be room for the soup or salad. All of the inflation busters are similar combinations for around $6.
The Savory sauce is a white-type gravy that complements the entire meal nicely, but is not low in fat (ie don't drown everything in it). The tasty beans are rounded out nicely with a little chili powder and other spices that add no heat but lots of taste, and the cornbread is very light and cakey (read: it also is not low in fat, but totally worth it, and they serve it in HUGE hunks). The collards are slightly oiled, but they are the best collard greens along with those from Langano Restaurant (Ethiopian) that you will ever taste. Not even a hint of bitterness. (And they have lots of good stuff in them, so eat them).
Other excitement includes the Spot Burger ($5.50), served with Almond rice, but we think the Guacamole burger ($5.95) is worth the few extra pennies as it is slathered with a ton of the the stuff. The burgers are HUGE, not little bocas served on behemoth buns, but homemade and good for when you're starving. The burritos are similarly of the Gigantor species, bursting with variations of tofu, cheese, beans, and rice for about $7.00.
If you are on a diet or watching your fat intake and fear the savory sauce and cornbread, you can try Steamers, which are basically steamed vegetables with baked tofu over rice, and are for some reason in the $9.00 range. But they also have a nice selection of salads, like the Vegetarian ($5.95) with lettuce, carrots, broccoli, veggies, sprouts and sunflower seeds, and for a dollar extra, tofu and cheese. Always feel free to order and exclude ingredients (people forget you can do that!). Also, the soups are fat free.
There are fancier dishes, like Mushroom Walnut Loaf, Baked Eggplant and Linguini, but we've never bothered with them. The Spot does what we like best about good vegetarian food: they keep it simple, but are skilled enough to inject lots of flavor and creativity into the food.
Oh, yeah, we've had dessert. I have to say that the carob cookies were not worth having, so skip them...but the peach cobbler was delicious, albeit not a fat-fest kind of dessert - a nice dessert following lunch, however.
The Spot also sells a cookbook featuring many of their recipes for $20.00. If you don't live nearby and you want that cornbread again, it's worth the cash.