LaMonica Chatman has known about Melody Bar & Grill pretty much her whole life. She grew up close to LAX, and her parents would often take her plane-watching nearby, sometimes popping into Melody for takeout before the ride home: burgers, fries and shakes.
Decades later, Chatman, 56, is still hanging out at Melody. On Sunday, she was enjoying a cocktail on the bar’s runway-facing patio, in sparkling sunlight on Sepulveda Boulevard. Inside the packed main bar behind her, a local Raiders club had taken over to watch the team’s losing battle against the Bills. The Rams were also falling to the Cardinals, and the Chargers were knocking on the door of a jaw-dropping 0-6 record. Bass-heavy jams filled the air during commercial breaks.
For Chatman, Melody is the kind of place where the food is reliable, the drinks are affordable, and the vibe is always right. It’s the anchor of a diverse food scene reflecting the equally jet-setting and local-centric culture of the LAX community at large.
“The best thing about Melody is the camaraderie and the friendliness,” Chatman told me. “It’s our version of ‘Cheers.’”
One of my best friends, a Westside native, first brought me to this bar in 2016. I’ve been sliding in regularly ever since. The scene coalesces around a kitchen that dishes out consistent American bar favorites like burgers, sliders, ribs, wraps and wings. And it’s known for great pours.
This L.A. gem sits at the top of my new guide to the best places to eat and drink within a one-mile perimeter of LAX. It’s one of many reasons the culture of LAX-adjacent dining may be one of the best-kept secrets in town.
A bar for the culture 
The scene at Melody Bar & Grill during a Raiders fan club takeover.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
Open in some form since 1952, Melody has a somewhat spotty history, with many lives. For a while it was a piano bar, then a Mongols biker bar in rougher times, according to the Argonaut. At some point over the last few decades, according to multiple regulars I interviewed, it became popular with Black Angelenos, drawing people from Inglewood, South L.A. and all over the South Bay.
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When the latest owners took over in 2008, they observed the clientele and its dedication and decided to leave Melody Bar & Grill as is. Instead of renaming it or flipping it in the style of Tulum slop for tourists, co-owners Christian Warren and Bobby Hughes did little more than update the Melody menu.
Warren, whose portrait with Hughes hangs in the hallway, said he’d have it no other way. “Maybe sometimes I’m the only white guy there,” he quipped. “We just love the character, and we wanted to make sure we didn’t lose that.”
The bar owner said the proximity to LAX gives Melody its welcoming and diverse atmosphere. “You’ve got travelers, baggage handlers, flight attendants, hotel workers. You’ve got Westchester, Inglewood. It’s just a melting pot, a little something for everybody.”
At the runway viewing point near Sepulveda Boulevard.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
I’ve spent a lot more time in Westchester and around LAX than I’d ever cared to admit.
While many Angelenos rightly view a trip to the airport with dread, I enjoy the privileges of living less than 20 minutes away and also working at an office that’s just south of the 105 Freeway in El Segundo. From our newsroom, L.A. Times employees have an uninterrupted view of the runways gloriously at work, minute by minute.
An estimated 48,000 people have access badges to LAX, according to Los Angeles World Airports. While dining around here over the years, I’ve learned that these folks, along with interrelated government workers, aren’t a very showy bunch. Many participate in the miraculous art of flying and maintaining enormous airplanes, or picking up cargo to take across our greater multi-county region of millions. Some serve in a nearby courthouse or public-safety agency. They’re generally not trying to be “seen” when not on duty.
That sort of adult, as far as I’m concerned, deserves a private libation or two after a successful day.
Shantreial Holland, 55, worked for decades in logistics and began coming to Melody with co-workers back then. “We would come here after work, on Fridays,” said Holland. “But when our culture started coming, then it was the Champagne brunches, and you’d come after church, and it was, like, ‘Oh this is quite different.’ The culture came.”
Keisha Baker is a longtime Melody bar patron. The food is consistent and the service, she said, is “accomodating.”
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
Keisha Baker, who works in El Segundo, noted that a lot of the area surrounding LAX is rapidly changing. She lamented, for example, that the historic Proud Bird on the eastern edge of the airport, once a relatively upscale dining destination for her family while growing up, now has a food court concept. Which isn’t bad, but isn’t what it was.
Not at Melody. Its regulars know a good spot when they see it.
“They’re accommodating. The one-word answer for the service is ‘accommodating,’” said Baker, 47, on the Melody patio Sunday as we both watched crowds at the overhyped In-N-Out across the street. “The food is consistent. The drinks are reasonably priced. And it’s comfortable. It’s local.”
The taquera serving LAX since 2000
It’s taken years of living and working near the airport to develop what I’d call an affection for it. While reporting my LAX-adjacent dining guide, I’ve come to realize that actually, maybe, I am in love with the culinary and cultural orbit of LAX. I don’t have to get anywhere near the frightening loop of World Way to steep myself in it.
Mariela Roberts, 62, is owner and operator of Mariella’s Tacos, a popular lonchera on West 102nd Street.
(Calvin B. Alagot / Los Angeles Times)
It’s the sixth-busiest airport in the country, the subject of a onetime network television series (“LAX,” 2004-05) and has inspired several songs, including one by an old indie favorite, Conor Oberst. (It starts, unironically: “I’ll pick you up / Just tell me when you land / It’s raining in L.A. / And everyone’s gone mad …”)
It’s a place where even hanging in the vicinity can feel like you can see the whole world and the whole world can see you. It’s cosmopolitan, but at the same time deeply homey.
Mariela Roberts (one “I,” she explains; her daughter is the Mariella namesake) is proprietor of one of the hottest spots to eat in the immediate vicinity of LAX: the Mariella’s Tacos lonchera on a bleak-seeming block of West 102nd Street.
Late one night, as the clock pushed past midnight, I pulled into the darkened block lined with industrial warehouses. In the middle sits Mariella’s Tacos, twinkling brightly like a carnival ride. It’s a full-service lonchera that’s known to the LAX crowd as the best taco spot that’s close to the airport.
The writer listens to Mariela Roberts explain her taco gobernador.
(Calvin B. Alagot / Los Angeles Times)
As always, it’s all in the tortillas. Mariella’s offers them handmade with most dishes. I went for a mulita de carne asada with the crumbly, charred feel of a fresh tortilla, just as you might find in Tijuana. I also had a Sinaola-style taco gobernador of grilled shrimp.
Several echoes of the borderlands mark the menu at Mariella’s, which is as extensive as that of a full-on cantina and grill. Her team offers birria by the taco, plate or as quesabirria, as well as carne asada fries, California burritos and straight-up Tijuana-style asada and al pastor tacos. There are also alambres, hot dogs, salchipapas, tacos dorados and Salvadoran-style chicken tamales.
“People come for our fresh tortillas, our salsas. There are few places that make the cucumbers like we do,” Roberts said. “I have pilots, flight attendants, logistics [workers] and foreigners who want tacos and heard about us.”
She’s a native of Culiacán, Sinaloa, who began serving on this block three decades ago. “Right over there,” Roberts said, pointing to a metal gate to one of the industrial businesses and warehouses that line the block.
The story started with this newspaper, in fact. She worked early mornings as a driver at an L.A. Times distribution center on the block. Around 1996, she and her mother, right at this spot, began selling coffee and champurrado for the delivery workers. In time, they started making tamales, then tacos. By the year 2000, she set up a grill on the street, then got her first truck in 2005.
The regulars have been loyal ever since. “The pilots tell me they look out the window to see if I’m here,” Roberts laughed.
I looked over my plate of tacos, to the flight path just south of us, and yep, I could picture it. The magic of Los Angeles doesn’t begin once you make it to Santa Monica or Hollywood. It might just start right here, on an unknown block of 102nd Street that sits a few hundred feet away from Runway 25R.