Hot dogs and natural wine: a night at Astro Burger and Stir Crazy
TUNA and blackberry tartare.
By Myles George-Ghobrial and Levi Wagner
Welcome back to the third installment of Two Foods, in which Levi and I attempt two Los Angeles restaurants in a single outing and, against reasonable odds, live to write about it. This week’s assignment: Stir Crazy. The former Melrose Avenue coffee shop spent nearly 30 years as an unofficial writers’ room for this city’s screenwriters, its underemployed, and its unemployable and has since been reborn as an intimate, wine-focused restaurant with a hyper-seasonal menu of small and large plates drawing on the global flavors that have shaped Los Angeles’ own culinary traditions. If you’ve lived in this part of town long enough, you know exactly what that transformation means. If you haven’t: it means someone loved this place enough to save it.
So, we did the only sensible thing two grown men could do before going to a wine bar. We went to Astro Burger first.
The opening act
ONION DIP served with potato chips.
Astro Burger sits at 5601 Melrose Ave., at Gower Street, across from the Paramount lot, like a chaperone who gave up on the party years ago and has never once regretted it. There’s a drive-through. There’s a menu that reads like it was assembled by committee in 1978 and then, wisely, never touched again. There are burgers, hot dogs, and—as a small concession to the neighborhood’s evolving spiritual needs—a genuinely sincere vegetarian section that, as far as we can tell, no one has ever ordered from.
We each had two hot dogs. I’d love to say we deliberated. We did not. They arrived hot, snapped cleanly on the first bite, and were dressed in the unbothered confidence of a kitchen that has made this exact thing a hundred thousand times and sees no reason to reconsider its choices now. Astro Burger deserves its own column, and it will get one. For now: if you want a great burger, or a great hot dog, this is where you stop looking. No pretense, no reinvention—just a place that decided a long time ago what it does well and has spent every day since doing it.
We drank a couple of Modelos in the parking lot, which is as close as Astro Burger comes to a wine list, and pointed the car west.
Approaching the wine bar with curiosity
Some history for anyone new to the neighborhood: The original Stir Crazy, which opened in 1994 (and may have started life a few doors west before landing at its later address), belonged to the same man for decades and was a genuine fixture of the block. In 2022, Harley Wertheimer, a music industry veteran, approached him about taking over the lease; the owner was ready to retire and said yes. Wertheimer brought on Macklin Casnoff, a veteran of the food industry, and Mackenzie Hoffman, both of whom had been working together up the street at the wine shop Domaine LA. Together the three of them rebuilt the place from the studs up, keeping only the name as a nod to what came before.
CELERY AND WALNUT salad as a perfect palate cleanser.
The dining room at Stir Crazy is roughly 500 square feet, and the Los Angeles Times put it on its 101 Best Restaurants list in 2024 and 2025. All of it made us curious to see what they’d done with it.
Wine bars in this city can be a lot; the genre specimen is wall to wall with people dressed like a Revolve algorithm made flesh, splitting a $22 plate of anchovies and more interested in being seen than in the food in front of them. Stir Crazy wasn’t that, or at least not on the night we came through. The room—6903 Melrose Ave., at Orange Drive—was full of couples spanning every imaginable age bracket, several of whom seemed to be genuinely enjoying each other’s company, which in this city might be the rarest thing on the menu. The staff was warm without performing warmth at us. Nobody asked what we were celebrating. The vibes, to use the technical term, were good.
Levi and I are not wine people. We are, generously, wine adjacent. We told our server as much, and the server took it as an invitation rather than a red flag, walking us through the list with the patience of someone explaining a black hole to a golden retriever. We landed on a bottle of white. I could not tell you the grape. I can tell you that by the second glass, whatever hesitation we’d carried in the door had quietly dissolved.
The food, which is the point
We opened with leek toast and an onion dip served with potato chips, and this is where any remaining doubt gave way entirely. The dip is the platonic ideal of the thing your aunt makes from a packet—except someone with real technique took the idea seriously—and the chips exist purely as a delivery mechanism, which is exactly the right role for them. The toast is generous, sweetened by slow-cooked leek. It shatters a little on first bite, which only adds to the fun of eating it. Some of the best things are a little inconvenient.
Then came the tuna and blackberry tartare, which sounds like a dare and eats like a small revelation. The fish was clean and cool, cut with real care, and the blackberries, rather than reading as a stunt, did the job citrus usually does: sweet and tart at once, bleeding just slightly into the plate beneath it. It was, for both of us, the dish of the night. The celery and walnut salad that followed was light and bright, the kind of course that exists to reset a palate, and, in our case, to make room for what came next.
We closed with a German-style sausage and a potato salad, both wellmade and exactly what the moment called for. After two courses of finesse, this is the dish that makes sure you leave full—the menu’s answer to Astro Burger, in its own way. There’s real craft in knowing how to close a meal like that.
Meeting the management
Between courses, we got to talk with two of the three partners, and I’ll say this plainly: they were a pleasure to sit with. They didn’t oversell. They pointed us toward a couple of dishes and then had the good sense to step back and let us wander the list ourselves. That restraint tells you as much about the place as anything that came out of the kitchen—this is a room built by people who trust what they made.
We’ll be back to work through the rest of the menu, ideally on a night when the sidewalk tables are open and the room does the spilling-out-onto-Melrose thing everyone keeps telling us about.
Two hot dogs, one bottle of white, and five small plates later, we called it a night. The old Stir Crazy gave this block nearly thirty years of history, and the new one has picked up that thread with real care as a genuinely good restaurant that clearly understands the memory it’s stepping into. That’s about the best outcome a room like this could hope for. That, too, is a solid food.
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Category: People
