Lifestyle
Why Mel’s Drive-In in Santa Monica is the perfect final stop on your Route 66 trip
Famous signs along the nearly 2,500 miles of Route 66 include the 66-foot soda bottle at Pops in Oklahoma, the wagging neon tail of Albuquerque’s Dog House and the hand-painted slogans for Snow Cap Drive-In in Arizona. But in L.A., none is so iconic as the giant looming penguin that signifies milkshakes, burgers, oldies playlists and sheer Americana at the end of the road.
Stories, photos and travel recommendations from America’s Mother Road
The Mother Road that stretches from Chicago to the West Coast unofficially ends at the Santa Monica Pier, but at its technical terminus, Mel’s Drive-In declares the “ROUTE ENDS HERE,” inlaid in terrazzo beneath that jumbo tuxedoed penguin. It’s been a beacon for decades, and though the beloved restaurant space recently was listed for sale for $26 million, Mel’s owners hope it remains a diner and destination for generations.
For much of its history, the diner at the end of Route 66 was the 1959-founded Penguin Coffee Shop, a Googie-architecture marvel of angular windows, rock walls and little cartoons of penguins hanging above swivel stools and an open kitchen.
The original penguin sign from the former Penguin Coffee Shop still stands at Mel’s Drive-In in Santa Monica.
As a very young child I remember sliding into the booths with my father, whose office was nearby on Wilshire. Back then, the tall angled ceilings seemed to soar and the breakfast combos looked mountainous.
“It was a Googie kind of restaurant — you know, we don’t have that many of them around anymore,” my dad recalls. “It had an aura of roadside diner about it. … Everybody would see the giant penguin out there. I don’t think Burgess Meredith ever ate there, though.” The joke takes me a beat before landing; my version of Batman’s Penguin will always be Danny DeVito.
“It was a Googie kind of restaurant — you know, we don’t have that many of them around anymore,” the writer’s dad recalls.
We’d visit every month or two, until the Penguin closed its doors in 1991 and transformed into a Western Dental office, which kept the penguin sign but dropped those high ceilings and removed the kitchen along with other hallmarks of its roadside charm. Thankfully, its journey didn’t end there.
The Weiss family, which founded Mel’s Drive-In diner in 1947, had been eyeing the property for years and signed a lease in 2016. Then there was the link to their own history: The prolific Armet & Davis architecture firm designed the Penguin as well as the current home of Mel’s Sherman Oaks.
“When the dentist office went out of business,” said co-owner Colton Weiss, “it seemed like a no-brainer to make it Mel’s and bring it back to the glory days of being a diner.”
What followed were two years of “very expensive” renovations, according to the third-generation Mel’s owner.
Beyond the iconic penguin sign — which obtained “historically or architecturally significant” designation in 2000 — Mel’s pays homage with the large sculptural, custom-made glass globe lights, which replicate the original’s. The Weisses hired garden specialists to review decades-old photos of the Penguin Coffee Shop to determine which varieties of flowers decorated the front of the restaurant, then they replanted them.
Since the building’s reopening in 2018, thousands of guests have ended the journey along Route 66 with a meal in the diner.
“We’re like Route 66 authorities now.”
— Colton Weiss, co-owner of Mel’s Drive-In
While sledgehammering drywall, they uncovered the diner’s original rock wall. Along a hallway near the bathrooms, a small gallery of Penguin Coffee Shop photos offers another glimpse of the predecessor. This location also features a marshmallow-and-chocolate-sauce Penguin Shake in honor of the tuxedoed mascot of the original.
It wasn’t until they were close to signing a deal that they realized it sat along Route 66.
“We’re like Route 66 authorities now,” said Weiss, whose father, Steven Weiss, was largely responsible for the restoration.
Since the building’s reopening in 2018, the owners say thousands of guests have ended their travels with a meal in the diner. They bustle through the doors after the long journey, sometimes bedecked in Route 66 merchandise, and sometimes buying Mel’s own brand of Route 66 merch while there.
Atmosphere and details of Mel’s Drive-In Diner.
“We had a guy do it in a ’67 Chevy, that was on his bucket list: Older guy who did it with his wife, and it was a convertible,” said Weiss. “He did it in summertime, so by the time he showed up he was covered in dust and dirt. He couldn’t be happier to make it to Mel’s and get a burger.”
Another, he said, did the whole route on a bicycle.
The diner offers certificates of completion for those who finish the trek, and devised a burger named for the route. A fish tank at the entrance features a Route 66 theme, as does a mural on a small wall of the parking lot. Two official signs, placed by the city, denote the location’s significance.
“The city knew there’d be renewed interest in a diner being the real ending of Route 66,” Weiss said. “Before, I don’t know anybody who’d want to end their trip at a dentist’s office. Maybe somebody who broke their teeth on the way.”
But the trail’s end could someday see its own end. The property was listed for sale in 2025. Representatives for the building’s management company didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“We’re trying to keep it there as long as possible,” Weiss said. “People really enjoy this location, and it seems like one of the last diners in Santa Monica.” Weiss declined to comment further.
Mel’s assistant manager Yazmin Minguelasays she sees more travelers now because it’s the centennial of Route 66. “But even before that, we still had a lot of visitors.”
She’s worked for Mel’s 22 years, six of which have been spent in the Santa Monica restaurant. Her shifts are full of Westside regulars, celebrities and guests finishing their trip along Route 66.
“Ending on a diner is nostalgia,” my dad mused. “Having a place like Mel’s, which is a substitute for the kind of flea-bitten ptomaine joints that you might get along Route 66, brings back memories to very old people. And very new people ask questions like, ‘Who’s Burgess Meredith?’”
Mel’s Drive-In is open at 1670 Lincoln Blvd., Santa Monica, Sunday to Thursday from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., and Friday and Saturday from 7 a.m. to midnight.
The real spectrum of housing insecurity
Annika McFarlane/Getty Images/Getty Images
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Annika McFarlane/Getty Images/Getty Images
Who counts as homeless in America?
If you ask the Department of Housing and Urban Development, around 750,000 people are homeless in America. If you ask the Department of Education, that number shoots up into the millions. What does this discrepancy tell us? And how do our cultural ideas about homelessness shape who we see as homeless, and who gets help? To find out, Brittany talks with Dr. Margot Kushel, Director at the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, and Dr. Molly Richard, assistant professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of Rhode Island’s College of Health Sciences.
Want more deep dives on cultural taboos? Check out these episodes:
The truth about men on the ‘down low’
Why can’t we be normal about polyamory?
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This episode was produced by Corey Antonio Rose. It was edited by Neena Pathak. We had engineering support from Josephine Nyounai. Our Supervising Producer is Cher Vincent. Our Executive Producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sangweni.
Lifestyle
They just completed all of L.A. Times’ 101 Best California Experiences — and we’ve got questions!
By December of 2023, Paul Preston realized that his girlfriend Susan Huckle was a big fan of road trips and lists. So for Christmas, he gave her L.A. Times’ ”101 Best California Experiences” zine, a traveler’s bucket list highlighting my top destinations throughout my four decades of traveling the state.
The gift, I’m delighted to hear, was a hit.
Preston and Huckle went through it and checked off locations they’d seen already. Then they hit the road.
And now, after two and a half years of roaming the state between work assignments, they’re back to report that they’ve covered all 101 locations on that list. Though the two have also traveled beyond state lines, the quest to cover California “totally informed our lives for the last two or three years,” said Huckle, who sent me a note of thanks after ticking the last box.
After the note arrived, I was eager to call them and learn more. I caught the couple, of course, in the middle of a day trip.
Susan Huckle and Paul Preston set out to visit every spot on the L.A. Times’ 2023 list of “101 Best California Experiences.” Along the way, they got married in Yosemite Valley.
(Nick Wuthrich)
“We’re out exploring,” Preston said. “So you’re getting what we’re about.”
They’re also now married. That happened last July in Yosemite Valley, which, yes, was on the list.
Huckle, 41, an actress, a host on “L.A. This Week” on Channel 35, a Universal Studios performer and an author, grew up in Santa Maria on California’s Central Coast.
Preston, 56, is also an actor. He leads movie location tours and hosts podcasts, movie trivia nights and special events. He grew up and went to college on the East Coast, so he had fewer California miles under his belt when the couple met in 2020.
Their California 101 travels began in early 2024 with a trip to Paso Robles, where they saw the green slopes along Highway 46, Morro Rock and the elephant seals at Piedras Blancas near Hearst Castle.
“And then,” Preston said, “we just kept going.”
Some of their most satisfying stops, the two agreed, were places they hadn’t heard of, such as Orange Works in the Central Valley town of Strathmore and Angel Island State Park, sometimes known as the Ellis Island of the West. Huckle called Angel Island “a marriage of natural beauty with great, powerful, historic information.”
By early this year, there were only a few destinations left to check.
In April, they did the Indian Canyons and Sunnylands estate near Palm Springs, the Integratron near Joshua Tree and the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture in Riverside. In June, they rafted the South Fork of the American River, along with stops in Old Sacramento and, last of all, Columbia State Historic Park. Then they made their own favorites lists.
Susan Huckle’s top 10:
Yosemite Valley
Badwater Basin
Mammoth Mountain
Angel Island State Park
Cheech Marin Center
Joshua Tree National Park
American River South Fork
The Marshall Store on Tomales Bay
Santa Cruz Island
Sunnylands
Paul Preston’s top 10:
Yosemite Valley
Hollywood Bowl
Griffith Observatory
Catalina
Mammoth Mountain
American River South Fork
Erick Schats’ Bakery in Bishop
Huntington Library and Gardens
Palm Springs Aerial Tramway
Balboa Park, San Diego
Now that they’ve seen so much of the state, I had questions. For one, which spots not on the list would they have included?
Alcatraz, they agreed. Also, as an admirer of redwoods, Preston liked Calaveras Big Trees State Park. As an avid cyclist, Huckle liked the 22-mile Marvin Braude Bike Trail from Torrance to Pacific Palisades.
And was anything on the list a disappointment?
“The Carmel Mission,” Huckle said quickly. “It’s beautiful and the missions are an important part of California history.” But she said the mission’s account of its own history seemed “whitewashed,” saying little about the Native loss and trauma that historians are increasingly recognizing in accounts of the missions.
Said Huckle: “I was like, ‘C’mon guys, nobody really thinks this any more, right?’”
Now that they’re done with the Times’ “101 Best California Experiences,” what what will shape their next trips?
They have a list for that. Huckle picked up an L.A. guide, Danny Jensen’s “Secret Los Angeles,” and the couple plans to start where the book does, with the Triforium, a many-colored sculpture that went up outside City Hall in 1975 (and once featured music).
After that? Maybe the Faces of Elysian Valley, a traffic circle sculpture that Huckle said “looks like Easter Island in the middle of Cypress Park.”
That will leave only about 138 more destinations in the book to cover.
If anybody can do it, it’s these two.
In A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Monica introduces Teddy to David. The seemingly ordinary teddy bear quickly reveals himself to be an intelligent companion capable of conversation and emotional support.
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Warner Bros. Pictures
Back in 2001, Steven Spielberg released an underrated scifi movie named A.I. Artificial Intelligence (yes, the title is a bit redundant). The movie, which loosely borrows from Pinocchio, tells the story of a family who adopts a robotic boy programmed for love, and that robot’s heartbreaking quest to become a real boy.
Much of the technology in A.I. remains elusive. We’re probably not anywhere close to building androids that can convincingly pass as Haley Joel Osment — or Jude Law, for that matter. But some of the AI products imagined in the movie are starting to look surprisingly plausible. Take Teddy, an animatronic teddy bear. Teddy can walk, talk, make decisions, and respond to the needs and emotions of people around him. He’s more than just a toy. He’s an intelligent companion and protector for children.
Today, a slew of technology companies are developing AI companions that sort of resemble Teddy. The most intelligent AI chatbots still live on digital screens, but a wave of startups is giving them bodies — creating dolls, action figures, and robots that can serve as companions for kids.
What happens when kids grow up with AI?
AI is already a part of childhood. Recommendation algorithms curate what many kids watch and listen to. Chatbots stand ready to answer questions like, “Are monsters real?” or “Why is the sky blue?” They can help with homework, tell bedtime stories, or even feel like a friend. And companies are racing to embed AI into toys, nurseries, classrooms, and eventually robots that live alongside families.
In a new book, Human Raised: Nurturing Connection, Curiosity & Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI, author Dana Suskind grapples with what the rising tide of artificial intelligence means for raising kids. On the one hand, she acknowledges that the technology offers promise as, for example, a productivity enhancer and time saver for parents, a monitoring and research tool that can give parents and scientists valuable data on child development, and an interactive tutor that might help some kids learn.
But Suskind worries about what happens if AI begins replacing the kinds of human interactions that young brains evolved to learn from.
In fact, Suskind says, her original, working title for the book was, “The Trojan Teddy Bear,” a warning that AI companions may seem cute and cuddly — but they carry hidden risks for child development. She ultimately went with Human Raised because she wanted to emphasize the positive — and irreplaceable — role that parents, teachers, and caregivers play in molding young ones.
“If we want children to be able to continue to connect with each other and with other human beings, to be able to think critically, to be able to navigate the human world, we’re gonna need to make sure that kids have a distinctly human-raised early childhood,” Suskind says.
Suskind is a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she directs a program aimed at giving kids hearing with cochlear implants. After she began doing this incredible work — literally helping children hear — she noticed that some kids who had the procedure went on to understand spoken language and talk with relative ease, while others had a much harder time. Hearing alone wasn’t enough. And that led her to dive into neuroscience and social science to understand why.
The brain development of young kids, Suskind learned, is heavily influenced by the back-and-forth interactions they have with their parents and caregivers during the first several years of their life. And she grew concerned that there is a big population of kids who aren’t getting the enriching communication their brains need. And so she founded the TMW Initiative, a research center that helps parents create the kinds of brain-enriching environments that children need to reach their full potential. (You can read more about Suskind’s biography and previous work in a Planet Money newsletter from 2022).
Why Dana Suskind is sounding the alarm
With the explosion of AI, Suskind has grown alarmed by a rush to introduce an unprecedented technology into kids’ lives without careful reflection and rigorous scientific study about its effects on young minds. She is especially concerned about AI companions and other systems that interact socially with children, which she fears many people will use to substitute for the human interactions that children need most.
Since the dawn of civilization, humans have used technology to make raising children a little easier. In Human Raised, Suskind traces that history back to prehistoric times, when mothers used woven slings to carry infants while they worked. Over the centuries, new technologies — like television and tablets — have eased the burdens of caregiving or helped keep children occupied. Many of these technologies have also been greeted with fears that they would rot kids’ brains.
But Suskind argues AI may mark a fundamental shift. Interacting with a chatbot or intelligent teddy bear is more than just a kid glued to a television or an iPad watching Sesame Street or Paw Patrol. AI systems carry on conversations that can feel strikingly human. They respond to kids’ questions, emotions, and fears. They create a kind of synthetic social relationship — one that, Suskind argues, may shape developing minds in ways that, until recently, only humans could.
Suskind cites the research of renowned University of Washington developmental psychologist Patricia K. Kuhl. Kuhl proposed what’s known as the “social gate” hypothesis — the idea that children’s brains are biologically primed to learn through social interaction. Studies have shown, for example, that babies learn language much better from a live person than from a screen. Neuroscientists and psychologists suggest that’s because social interactions engage the brain in ways passive media does not. The sing-song way adults naturally speak to babies, smiles and other facial expressions, gentle touch, eye contact, and back-and-forth exchanges all appear to help open that social gate and facilitate learning and healthy brain development.
While artificial intelligence is no match for human educators and caregivers, Suskind argues, it is capable of opening the social gate in young children in ways that previous technologies could not. That makes AI a potentially extraordinary educational tool — but also a potentially dangerous one.
Companies design AI systems with their own goals, which could include maximizing your kids’ engagement, keeping their attention, collecting data, and making money. They don’t have the same priorities as parents. And while those systems may imitate human interaction, Suskind argues they cannot recreate everything that makes human relationships developmentally valuable.
“Eye contact, shared laughter, patient answers to ‘why’ questions activate ancient neural circuits designed for connection,” Suskind writes. “These exchanges provide a form of nourishment no algorithm, however sophisticated, can match.”
Human relationships are also messy and filled with emotions. Parents misunderstand their children. Kids get frustrated. Families argue, reconnect, and then smooth things over. Suskind argues that those imperfect interactions — and “the productive struggle” they create — are how children learn resilience, emotional regulation, flexibility, and how to navigate real relationships.
Unlike most humans, AI systems can be endlessly engaging, infinitely patient, and relentlessly affirming. Interactions with them often feel frictionless. Suskind worries giving young kids considerable exposure to them may make them less prepared for the messy, unpredictable nature of real human relationships.
AI as junk food for the young mind
Suskind compares AI relationships to ultra-processed food. “ If all you eat is fruit snacks, which is a synthetic version of fruit, when you actually eat the real fruit, you’re gonna be like, “Hmm, it’s not quite as sweet,” she says.
AI could eventually be programmed to try and mimic real parents and caregivers even more closely. But Suskind argues that the problem isn’t simply that today’s AI falls short of human relationships. It’s that AI represents a fundamentally new kind of social experience for children — one that already raises concerns based on what we know about child development and whose long-term effects remain deeply uncertain.
Suskind uses an analogy from the 19th century, when a German chemist named Justus von Liebig created one of the first infant formulas, hoping to replicate the nourishment of human milk. But when a French physician tested the formula on four newborns, all of them died within days, and the episode sparked a fierce controversy.
The lesson, Suskind suggests, is that we should be cautious about engineering substitutes for something as biologically, emotionally, and socially complex as human caregiving before we understand how those substitutes shape children’s development.
Given so much uncertainty about this rapidly evolving technology and its potential effects on kids, Suskind spends a lot of the book offering parents a practical guide for safely navigating child-rearing in the age of AI. She emphasizes that it’s especially important to shield kids from AI during their first years of life.
“Older children and adults encounter AI with already-built neural scaffolding, but young children are still wiring the very circuits that shape future learning and relationships,” she writes. “Introducing AI during this sensitive period presents a fundamentally different challenge with greater potential for harm.”
Suskind is open to the idea of using AI to enhance education for some kids — but only as a tool that enhances, rather than replaces, humans. She argues that human caregivers are the best way to cultivate what she calls “the Human Edge,” a set of social, emotional, and cognitive skills like “critical thinking, interpersonal connection, genuine creativity, empathy, and resilience.”
But, like time-crunched parents who rely on screens to buy themselves some time today, there may be growing temptations to outsource parts of child-rearing to AI, especially considering the fact that childcare is incredibly expensive. Suskind worries that, over time, a fully human-raised childhood could become a kind of luxury good — much the way fresh, healthy food often is today. Families with the time and resources would provide rich human interaction to their kids. Everyone else might increasingly rely on cheaper, more convenient AI substitutes.
And children raised largely by AI might not only lag socially, emotionally, and cognitively, but, ironically, they could also be less prepared for an AI-driven economy.
Suskind points to a recent essay by the University of Chicago economist Alex Imas. Imas argues that as AI automates more cognitive work, human jobs may be increasingly concentrated in what he calls “the relational sector” — occupations where humans are valued for qualities that make them distinctly human, from education to health care to hospitality, the arts, and therapy.
If that’s true, then the traits children develop through a human-raised childhood won’t just matter for their social lives. They may also become an economic advantage. In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, the most valuable skills may be the ones that are the most deeply human.
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