Cassell's Hamburgers

3600 W 6th St, Los Angeles, CA

Last updated 8/27/2026

"The more things you do, the less chance there is of reaching perfection" — that was Alvin Cassell's operating philosophy when he opened Cassell's Patio on Wilshire Boulevard in 1948, across from the old Bullocks Wilshire department store, before the restaurant later moved to its longtime home on 6th Street near Berendo. It's also why the original restaurant famously refused to serve French fries at all, offering potato salad and chips instead. The burger itself was built around genuine restraint dressed up as simplicity — USDA Prime beef, hand-formed and available in either a third-pound or a full two-thirds-pound size, cooked with none of the sauces or towering toppings that define more maximalist Los Angeles burgers. It was a quality-first, ingredient-driven burger built decades before "gourmet burger" became a restaurant category of its own. Cassell retired in the 1990s and sold the business to Helen Kim, who softened some of the original restraint by adding French fries, turkey burgers, and veggie burgers to the menu. Since 2014, the restaurant has operated under new ownership — hotelier Jingbo Lou, alongside executive chef Christian Page and pastry chef Elia Aboumrad — inside the Hotel Normandie in Koreatown, with an additional Alpine Street location that opened in 2024 after a separate downtown Los Angeles outpost closed in 2023. That the restaurant has survived multiple ownership changes, a relocation, and a temporary downtown closure while keeping its Prime-beef, hand-formed burger largely intact is a rarer outcome than it sounds for a nearly 80-year-old Los Angeles institution. Cassell refused to serve fries at his own restaurant; the current owners do — which is about the full extent of what's actually changed.

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Top 6 Cheeseburgers in Los Angeles
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