The hot bar is one of the easiest places to spend big at Erewhon. | Hilary Pollack When I have friends visiting Los Angeles and I ask where they’d like to eat, of all the incredible restaurants that the city has to offer — old Hollywood steakhouses, elite sushi counters, taco trucks, bustling Korean barbecue spots — there’s one place that always comes up these days: Erewhon. Best known as a wonderland of intriguing specialty products with prices that feel like performance art — $24 coconut yogurt, $75 matcha, $18 bottles of camel milk — the health-focused grocery store opened in LA in 1969. But in 2011, it fell under new ownership that rebranded it as an ultra-premium food destination rather than a hippie-food depot, and in 2022, all hell broke loose when Hailey Bieber’s $21 strawberry smoothie debuted and became an instant phenomenon, bringing national, even global attention to the once-lowkey chain. New Erewhon locations opened one after another in Silver Lake, Culver City, Beverly Hills, Pasadena, West Hollywood, and Studio City, with several more planned for the future. Its reputation is now both aspirational and polarizing; it’s known for its elaborate Tonic Bar beverages (including a never-ending series of celeb collabs), upscale hot bar, high concentration of influencers, and adherence to a particular mushroom-supplement vision of West Coast wellness. Despite becoming more and more omnipresent, the store seems to show no signs of waning interest from the public. I’m consistently fascinated by how many people in LA can afford…
