If you're from LA, or know anything at all about this city, you know that downtown LA is a busy place during the workday crawling with accountants, bankers, and lawyers; but once the sun goes down, the place is a ghost town.

But in recent years, LA's downtown has been going through a bit of a revival with old high-rise buildings being converted into lofts and condos, businesses coming in, and of course, to feed the influx of people, new restaurants opening and old ones coming back to life.

If you've got a whole day free, here's how you can dine downtown from dawn 'til dusk ('til dawn again, if you're so inclined):

• Breakfast - You can't go wrong with the Original Pantry Cafe on Figueroa, that serves breakfast all day, every day. If you can't stomach textbook greasy spoon so early in the morning, there's Pentolino, one of the smaller, newer stars in the Patina universe. A breakfast sandwich and coffee from this little cafe is perfect if you're on the go in the morning.
• Lunch - Grand Central Market is a permanent structure that has been around forever. The Market is filled with the requisite produce vendors that sell fresh fruits and vegetables for dirt cheap, but there are plenty of booths that hawk food. There are Asian foods, but at this Market, stick with the Mexican since you have the rest of the day to explore either Chinatown or Little Tokyo. Mexican pastries, carne asada, carnitas, tortas and tacos, and though I'm not a fan of the stuff in general, flan. If you're really craving Asian for lunch, pop over to Chinatown to any of the enormous restaurants that serve dim sum every day: Empress Pavilion, Ocean Seafood, or CBS.
• Happy hour cocktails - I've already talked about Ciudad, the pan-Latin restaurant from the Too Hot Tamales. They have good deals on a few food items on their Happy Hour menu, but the best deal of all is their Mojito. If Ciudad is a little too trendy, head over to Senor Fish for big food, small money.
• Dinner - Nick and Stef's is a masculine steakhouse, or you can go a little more old-school American at two restaurants in the spirit of the trains that used to breeze through downtown LA: The Pacific Dining Car or Engine Co. 28. If you prefer something even more raw than than a rare steak, get sushi in Little Tokyo.
• Midnight munchies - The Diner at the Standard is on the ground floor. If you're lucky (and pretty), you might get upstairs to the bar, but there's always a cover charge, and that doesn't include the $9 grilled cheese sandwich. Of course, you can always go back to the Original Pantry, too. 

I've always been puzzled by two restaurants next door to each other on Washington Blvd. in Culver City's new downtown. It's not unusual for restaurants to locate in the same area, and even next door to each other - look at mall food courts. But Double Dutch Dinette is right next door to another diner even though there are no other diners in the area, and the area is pretty large.

But my bewilderment only lasted until I actually ate at Double Dutch Dinette because it’s a dinette, not a diner. I always thought a dinette was a table and chairs for under $100 at Ikea, but a dinette is also “a small space usually off a kitchen used for informal dining.” That is a fairly accurate description of Double Dutch Dinette - a small informal little restaurant.

The interior is like a kitschy retro diner. The food, too, is homestyle diner-inspired, but a little more up-scale. Salads dominate the lunch menu – perfect for what I am guessing is an entertainment/studio-heavy clientele (Sony Pictures HQ and studios are all over Culver City). There is everything from simple mixed greens, to classic selections like chef’s and Caesar, to more creative or exotic choices like Beijing chicken and Thai steak. Niçoise, with albacore tuna, red potatoes, and olives chopped and tossed together is my favorite, and the Exotic chicken with apricots, feta cheese and walnuts isn't bad, though I've always wondered what was so exotic about it.

Double Dutch has sandwiches, a few hot entrees, and strictly vegetarian dishes as well, some of them dinette-y like a BLT and turkey meatloaf, and some of them not as dinette-y, like baked polenta and raspberry salmon, which is the most expensive thing on the menu at $13. The dinner menu is almost identical, only a few dollars more expensive for each item.

Double Dutch Dinette
9806 Washington Boulevard
Culver City, CA 90232
(310) 280-0991
www.jenniecooks.com/DDD/

If you live in LA (not "if you are from" LA because I don't know a single person "from" LA), or know anything about this odd city at all, then you know that LA's downtown shuts down into a veritable ghost-town after 5 PM. Or 6 PM if you're an attorney.

So it makes me wonder how restaurants like the Too Hot Tamales' pan-Latin restaurant, Ciudad, do for dinner. We've talked about Ciudad's sister restaurant in Santa Monica, Border Grill. I had lunch at Ciudad the other day for the first time, but I wasn't sure that I'd be willing to drive there for dinner. Having dinner at Ciudad means driving through ridiculous rush hour traffic along the I-10 freeway in the early evening.

The LA Times cooks, starting with the basics of the basic, mirepoix, and glorifies timballo, a dish made of pasta or risotto that is baked into a mold. I think I remember something like this from my chilhood. It was called "spaghetti pie."

Teakettles are put to the test to determine which method is best for boiling water - stove top vs electric. The result? Seems to be a draw.

Dining about La La Land, SIV visits Boneyard Bistro for some barbecue and asks "Really, who wants to eat venison with foie gras in a casual, loud setting?" She gives it two stars (**). Counter-Intelligence heads down to Torrance for a study in washoku at Yuzu, and we get the lowdown on the down lows of Bastide's closing. It was just "too French." I don't know why, but that's funny to me.

In the world of wine, the Times gives us tips on how to spot a bad wine, and SIV highlights a 2004 Blanc Fumé de Pouilly par Didier Dagueneau (say that five times, fast) from the Loire. At $45 a bottle, it's "a relative bargain for a wine of this quality."