Best of the Beach Dining & Entertainment 2024 Winners
Best Bakery
Beckers Bakery and Deli
If you’ve ever seen a sugar cookie shaped like a surfboard on a party tray, you know where it came from. It’s one of the many items Beckers sells that are instantly identifiable. This bakery has been in downtown Manhattan Beach for three generations. Locals who were gumming oatmeal cookies as toddlers have come back for wedding cakes, anniversary commemorations, and are now buying those cookies for their grandchildren. Their dazzlingly colorful cakes are famous, and when the box of goodness with their logo comes to the table, everyone awaits the beauty that is about to be revealed. You might even hear someone appreciatively say “Becker’s does it better,” a phrase that has been uttered countless times since the place opened in 1942.
1025 Manhattan Ave
Manhattan Beach
No customer service phone
Annie Cummings-Krosschell has been a server at Good Stuff since moving from OshKosh, Wisconsin to Redondo Beach 15 years ago. Photo by Garth Meyer
Best Server
Annie Cummings
Good Stuff
Redondo Beach
Good Stuff server Annie Cummings-Krosschell once told a customer she grew up near Lake Winnebago in Wisconsin. The customer expressed sympathy, thinking she grew up in a Winnebego near a lake in Wisconsin.
It was a minor mix-up in a long-standing run at Good Stuff, where Cummings-Krosschell has served customers in Redondo Beach for 15 years.
“This girl is the complete package, great with the kids, and grown-ups. We’ve got customers who only want to sit in her section,” said Good Stuff founder/Owner Cris Bennett. “Good service is good, but hospitality is a cut above.”
Before Good Stuff, Cummings-Krosschell tended bar in OshKosh, Wisconsin, When her now-husband, Donnie Krosschell, a regular at the bar, said he was going back to Redondo Beach He asked if she wanted to join him.
She said yes, and a month after their arrival, she interviewed at Good Stuff. They were married in 2017.
What makes a good server?
“I think it’s just treating people like you want to be treated when you go out,” Cummings-Krosschell said. “I feel like I’m coming to work every day to hang out with a bunch of friends.”
“I’ve watched kids grow up, a couple of the regular kids, now they work here.”
Some of Cummings-Krosschell’s co-workers have more longevity than her at the Redondo Good Stuff (one of four locations). Server Amy has been on staff 25 years, server Bernie 25 years and manager Jario 20 years
What’s Cummings-Krosschell’s favorite item on the menu?
“Chicken chile huevos rancheros,” she said, after diligent consideration.
1286 The Strand
Hermosa Beach
(310) 374-2334
1617 S. Pacific Coast Hwy #102
Redondo Beach
(310) 316-0262
550 Deep Valley Dr. #151
Rolling Hills
(310) 544-8000
Best Bagel Shop
Manhattan Bread & Bagel
Though this local institution changed hands last year, their popularity with locals is undiminished. Manhattan Bread and Bagel kept all of the staff and is still making a wide variety of bagels that have just the right chew and texture. This is thanks to being boiled before baking rather than steamed, an alternative that saves time but doesn’t produce the same result. That’s the way bagels were made through history, and modern technology has not improved on tradition. If you hadn’t noticed a change in the South Bay’s favorite bagels, that’s fine — that’s just what they had in mind.
1812 N Sepulveda Blvd
Manhattan Beach 90266
(310) 545-7553
Andy & Renee & Hard Rain, which includes John Hoke on drums and bass and Kirk Makin on guitar, Dave Batti on bass, and Marty Rifkin on pedal steel.
Best Original music
Andy and Renee + Hard Rain
The scene was a Holiday Inn bar in Denver, Colorado, circa 1982. An acoustic trio of women singers called Sierra was playing, and Andy Hill’s girlfriend was a big fan. Hill, as he is wont to do, got so into the music so much that he felt like getting on stage and singing with the band.
“When you are 19 or 20, or however old I was, back then it seemed far less offensive to say, ‘Hey, can I get up there and sing with you?’” Hill recalled.
Hill was a hockey player from Canada who was playing for the University of Denver. Renee Safier, one of the trio of singers, had come from North Texas and was likewise going to the U of D. As the sidled up to sing together, something magical happened. Their voices wafted up to the rafters, intertwined, as if they’d always been singing together. Appropriately enough, they sang “Night Moves,” by Bob Seger.
Three years and a half a continent to the west, they crossed paths again in Los Angeles, and suddenly found themselves with a gig together, as Andy & Renee.
“We got together, like any other couple of musicians, and said, ‘What do you know? We need to somehow get 24 songs together for tonight,’” Hill said. “And now we have a song list that is eight or nine pages long.”
Ten pages, actually, featuring 520 songs. Nearly a hundred of those songs are original compositions, the lion’s share written by Hill, some by Safier, a few together, with other collaborators. But those other 400 odd songs – yes, they are written by other songwriters, ranging from The Beatles to the Band to Neil Young and Lucinda Williams, with an entire page (over 80 songs) by Bob Dylan – but there place on this list is less about so-called “covers” and more about Andy & Renee and their humble but happy place as a part of what Leonard Cohen called “The Tower of Song.” Dylan, who has published over 600 songs and will probably have written 1,000 when all is said and done, put it best in a speech accepting an award from MusiCares in which he said his songs “didn’t get here by themselves.”
“It’s been a long road and it’s taken a lot of doing,” Dylan said. “These songs of mine, they’re like mystery stories, the kind that Shakespeare saw when he was growing up. I think you could trace what I do back that far. They were on the fringes then, and I think they’re on the fringes now. And they sound like they’ve been on the hard ground.”
Andy and Renee (and their band, not incidentally named after a Dylan phrase, Hard Rain) have been on this same long road. They have become the South Bay’s official songbirds, not only for the songs they have written and performed across four decades, but for the originality of what they have built in this doing – their beloved annual Dylanfest, which this year turns 34; the comfort they provided hundreds of people locked down during the early pandemic as they learned, on the fly, how to live stream (they’ve now done 230); the thousands of gigs, most recently at venues such as The Lighthouse Café, Belle Epoque, Terranea, the Banana Leaf, and the Grand Annex.
What they have built is a community of song. Early in the pandemic, when live music instantly shuttered and they barely knew how to stream much less collect money from it, they were shocked to discover just how much their music meant to so many. Unbidden, people contributed financially, so much that they didn’t even suffer the drop in income that nearly every musician faced.
It was because what they were doing deeply mattered to many people.
“The impact it had on our audience and friends was really special,” Safier said. “And we were really buoyed by that…Like my husband says, we had a lot of deposits in the emotional bank account.”
Many musicians, when they set out on their journey of song, have lights in their eyes. But there is more than one way to be a rock star, and Andy and Renee are local stars of the highest order.
“It’s kind of amazing. Obviously, we are not famous or anything,”Safier said. “But you know, you are only impacting one person at a time, no matter how big your audience is — for them, and for you, that’s all there is, right at that moment. So we are so blessed to have this in our lives.”
Andy Hill and Renee Safier + Hard Rain
17411 Delia Ave.
Torrance
(310) 346-9383
Jazz guitarist Jacques Lesure at The Lighthouse Cafe. Photo by Kevin Cody
Original Live Music/Dance
Best Dance Club
The Lighthouse Café
The Lighthouse is back. Of course, it never really left – the iconic Pier Plaza music club has been in operation since 1940. But as voters attested in awarding the Lighthouse Café Best of the Beach honors as both the best live music venue and dance club, the Lighthouse has gotten its groove back. During the dark days of the pandemic, a new ownership group took over the club, and when the world came back to life, the Lighthouse had a fresh sparkle.
“We did a slight revamp, just kind of updated it,” said Josh Royal, the operating partner of the group now at the helm of the Lighthouse. “But we kept all the history alive.”
And what a history the Lighthouse has. It began as Verpilate’s restaurant in 1934, then was converted into a Tiki-themed bar and renamed The Lighthouse in 1940 (the name was intended to attract local longshore laborers and merchant seamen). On a fateful day in 1949, then-owner John Levine gave a double-bass jazz player named Howard Rumsey the go-ahead to host a recurring jam session on Sundays. It was a big hit from the get-go. Rumsey became the club’s manager and the Lighthouse became a key cog in the famous West Coast Jazz scene. The greatest musicians of that era – Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Chet Baker, Art Pepper, and Max Roach, just to name a few – all played the Lighthouse. This era kept its groove going for 20 years, but when rock music began to dominate in the 70s, Hermosa Beach’s own jazz age faded away.
These days, the Lighthouse is striking the perfect balance. The Sunday jazz brunches are back, as is a Monday night jazz jam. But there’s all kinds of music, ranging from folk to rock to dance deejays, with a strong emphasis on original local music. The Lighthouse is a big musical tent, big enough to also encompass a Wednesday South Bay musician’s jam, ‘80s tribute bands and happy hour with legendary local folk rockers Andy & Renee, followed by late night salsa dancing.
“We kind of offer something for everyone,” Royal said. “Any night of the week, there is something going on. We have deejays Friday and Saturday nights, after the bands perform, so we’ve got the best of both worlds on that, and then we book a lot of daytime shows on Saturdays and Sundays, which are big hit with locals just because there are some people who don’t like to be out late at night.”
Of course, the Lighthouse Café also came to renewed fame for the scenes featuring Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, and John Legend in the “La La Land” blockbuster musical movie. This literally put the club on the tourism map. But whether you come for the jazz or the late night dance scene, there one quality about the Lighthouse that somehow gives the place its enduring draw– the room itself, where the ghosts of jazz legends commingle in a space that has hosted thousands of special musical nights.
“They are definitely there,” Royal said. “I mean, you can feel it right when you walk in. It’s a special feeling. You know, the stage is set up really well, the layout is nice for live music, and it’s just got that historical feeling. People just walk in and recognize it, anyone, even tourists, like, ‘Oh, wow. This is a really unique place.”
The Lighthouse Café will celebrate its 75th year as a live music club on July 14 with jazz brunch featuring a special performance by Lia Booth and Jacques Lesure.
The Lighthouse Cafe
30 Pier Ave.
Hermosa Beach
(310) 376-9833
Calvin Baily works the decks at Baja Sharkeez Hermosa Beach, March 2022. Photo by Benjamin Stefannidies
Best D.J.
Calvin Bailey
Calvin Bailey’s first paid D.J. job was his high school prom.
Now he works a minimum two nights per week, a maximum of four or five, with a day job in marketing and social media for Baja Sharkeez, whose offices are on Pier Plaza.
With a business administration degree/music concentration from Drexel University in Philadelphia, Bailey, 28, grew up in central New Jersey and came out west for a college internship with an electronic record label in Santa Monica.
He notes a distinct difference between his Philadelphia city D.J.ing near Drexel – hip-hop mainly – compared to the South Bay.
“It’s pretty diverse (here), every age and demographic and race, I try to cater to everyone,” he said.
He keeps an ear on the radio to find new songs.
At work spinning, Bailey likes to do “live mash-ups,” which means playing the vocal of one song over the instrumentation of another, in real-time, using Serato D.J. software and a beat pad.
“It’s definitely changed my mixing style a lot and gotten a great reaction, so I’ll definitely keep that going,” he said.
Some songs, though, he plays as-is.
“Good classics you almost want to leave those alone,” Bailey said. “I think when I first moved out here I may have overdone (mixing those).”
He names Tower 12 on Hermosa’s Pier Plaza as the South Bay spot with the most age range. He works there two to three nights a week, including most Fridays.
He names the biggest dance floor in the South Bay as American Junkie with its east wing and west wing.
Wherever he works, he applies his principles.
“More than half of the entire job is being able to read a room,” Bailey said. “What makes a good night out is hearing the stuff you kind of forgot about.”