Taix

Anahid Nersessian people-watches at Taix in the most recent installment of I Come Here Often, from LARB Quarterly no. 47, “Security.”

By Anahid NersessianDecember 19, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Food & Drink

This essay, from the ongoing print column I Come Here Often, is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 47: Security. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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NOT EVERYBODY KNOWS your name at Taix French Restaurant, but on any given night, a lot of people will know your face. Taix is one of those places—Los Angeles has many—where whenever someone walks in the door, the whole room turns to look. The gazes are frank and not terribly friendly and they come at you from all sides: from the octogenarian patrons eating tourte de volaille; the young families with toddlers sunk into the rolling chairs; the group of women in baggy, block-print dresses, jealously guarding the corner booth for a birthday party; your friends; and your friends’ friends. If they don’t know you, they go back to their food, but if they do recognize you, there’s a flurry: Who else is coming? Should we move to a bigger table? A baseball game plays from two televisions wedged against the ceiling.

The Taix family immigrated to L.A. from France around 1870. In 1912, Marius Taix Sr. built the Champ d’Or, a hotel in Downtown, and in 1927 his son, Marius Jr., opened Les Frères Taix on the premises. Diners were served family style, at long tables; a private booth set you back a quarter extra. The present location—at 1911 Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park—has stood since 1962. The old Taix location is now a parking garage across from the Metropolitan Detention Center, the site of vigils in response to the ICE raids. As for the “new” Taix, it is constantly under threat. The building was sold in 2019 to a real estate developer for $12 million. It’s slated to be torn down and replaced with a six-story apartment complex—maybe with a remainder of the restaurant on the ground floor, maybe not.

The food at Taix is heavy on meat, but at a recent dinner with Harmony Holiday and Nikita Gale, I got my usual order of French lentil salad and persuaded Harmony to do the same. Wednesdays the soup is lentil, so Elaine Kahn and I like to meet there on a Wednesday. Sometimes I’ll order the macaroni and cheese, billed as an appetizer but hearty, with spinach on the side, and a vodka martini if I’m dining with Hedi El Kholti. Rosie Stockton is lately partial to an espresso martini. We split some mac and cheese last Friday before heading over to Taix’s event space, the Champagne Room, for a reading hosted by Ruby Zuckerman and Evan Laffer. En route, we ran into Hedi and Paul Gellman, fresh from a play at the New Theater Hollywood; Hannah Tishkoff was at the bar. After the reading, I said hello to Sammy Loren and Mamie Green, Zara Schuster and Moses Mascuch. Joseph Mosconi was there—he had come from another reading, organized by Sophie Appel at David Horvitz’s 7th Ave. Garden.

Earlier that week, at lunch with Marta Fontolan, Rosie teased me for being the only person who walks in L.A. “I only walk to Taix,” I said, truthfully. This past Wednesday, I took my nine-year-old daughter there for the first time. We were meeting a friend of hers and her mom at five, too early to stick around for Cyrus Dunham’s going-away party at eight. She asked if we could walk and how long it would take. “Half an hour.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“I go there a lot.”