Du-par’s

The griddle holds the lineage

The pancake batter rests before it meets the griddle. Biff Naylor, Chef at Du-par’s in Los Angeles, keeps that work tied to a diner house built on repetition. His own line runs through Southern California family dining: proprietor of Tiny Naylor's from 1959 to 1999, chief executive at Hershel's Delicatessen from 1987, board member of the California Restaurant Association from 1983, and later owner of Du-par's Restaurants & Bakeries from 2004 to 2018. Pennsylvania State University is the schooling on record, but the discipline here reads less like a diploma than time spent learning how food behaves when a room fills again and again.

At the Farmers Market address, that history matters because Du-par’s has never depended on novelty to explain itself. James Dunn and Edward Parsons founded the original in 1938 as a nine-stall booth beside the market; the house name came from their surnames. Later accounts differ on one founder’s full name, but the origin story stays close to the same bench: generous American plates, made for people who returned because the food stayed recognizable.

Pancakes by the stack, pies by the case

The program is classic diner work, but the hand shows in the small labor that keeps it from feeling anonymous. The house squeezes orange juice, grinds hamburger meat, hand-peels and cuts hash browns, and makes ice cream. Pancakes carry the center of gravity. The batter process is kept within the house and takes hours; the stacks are named plainly, short stack at 3 pancakes, tall stack at 5. Liquid butter and syrup do the rest. No flourish is needed.

The rest of the menu follows the same comfort grammar: pies, patty melt, chicken pot pie, burgers, French toast from house-made brioche, roast turkey, chef salads, and Wednesday Swedish meatballs. The pastry case is not a decorative gesture. Rhubarb, coconut cream, pumpkin, and bread pudding sit in the diner’s rhythm as much as the griddle does. Naylor’s own signature elsewhere, the Deep-fried Monte Cristo sandwich at Tiny Naylor's Drive-In, belongs to that same American casual-dining language: rich, direct, repeated until it becomes house memory.

The room after the counter

The room still carries the Farmers Market diner shape, even after the 2007 renovation removed the counter and added more booths. Vinyl seats, mahogany tables, round window booths, tall-backed two-person booths, black-and-white early photographs, old pie ads, potted plants, and a bakery display give the place its own working archive. The kitchen is part of the room’s experience rather than a hidden engine.

Warm light softens the scale. On busy stretches the sound rises, but the room stays conversational rather than grand. It is a coffee shop in the older Los Angeles sense: a place built for pancakes, pies, a patty melt, and the steady choreography of servers crossing between booths. The concrete detail to hold onto is the tall stack of 5 pancakes at Du-par’s.