Hipsters, in-line skaters, surfers, artists, performers, and slackers mill about the boardwalk and intermittently gentrified and patchy streets of Venice Beach. Interior Santa Monica is mostly a bedroom suburb, worth investigating if only to visit the excellent Santa Monica Museum of Art, which presents rotating contemporary exhibits and to check out Highways Performance Space, long associated with the outrageous Tim Miller, is one of the country's top venues for against-the-grain dance, theater, performance art, and comedy, much of it queer-produced. One highlight is architect Frank Gehry's Edgemar Center for the Arts, a stark geometric complex of cafes, shops, galleries, and courtyards. Along Main Street, from about Pico Boulevard south to Marine Street (at the Venice border), you'll find a quirky and inviting assortment of galleries, shops, restaurants, and coffeehouses. Head south to near the Venice border, and you'll reach one of L.A's best neighborhoods for walking, Ocean Park. And along Montana Avenue, from about 7th to 20th streets, you'll find great, mostly reasonably priced boutiques, cafes, and coffeehouses. It's home to the wonderful Santa Monica Farmers Market on Wednesday and Saturday mornings, as well as the swanky new Santa Monica Place shopping and retail center (anchored by Nordstrom and Bloomingdales). The 3rd Street Promenade, a busy pedestrian mall south of Wilshire Boulevard, is worth checking out. Near the beach, downtown Santa Monica abounds with lively dining and retail. A fun bit of trivia: Historic Route 66 officially ends its 2,450-mile meander from Chicago right by the pier, at Lincoln and Olympic boulevards. There's an aquarium, carousel, arcade, and the Pacific Park Amusement Park, too. Despite the crowds and occasionally schlocky amusements, Santa Monica's pier and oceanfront make for a good stroll. The Santa Monica Pier and the small stretch of Broadway a few blocks east are lined with arcades, gift shops, and colorful-if touristy-diversions. And with the influx in recent years of stellar restaurants and design-driven hotels, Santa Monica has steadily become a favorite gay getaway for couples, beachgoers, and those wanting a more relaxed Los Angeles vacation. This is still a quite welcoming, liberal community, though, and with a longstanding feminist scene, too. Gay residents are still most definitely a presence in Santa Monica, but with nowhere near the presence they have in West Hollywood, Silver Lake, and some other parts of Los Angeles. With encroaching gentrification and police crackdowns, the area lost much of its vogue among queers by the '60s. Just off the beach a huge gay bar, the Tropical Village, drew everybody from navy men to closeted celebrities to resident authors Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender. Today, you'd never know that this primarily straight, white, and professional area was an early bastion of gay society, a land of bathhouses, cruising, and nude sunbathing. Additionally, they are both passionate about the environment and lead the culinary industry with eco-friendly policies in their restaurants, food trucks, and catering branches.From the '30s until the '50s, the section of Santa Monica just south of where Wilshire Boulevard hits Pacific Coast Highway was known as Queer Alley. Susan serves on the board of the Scleroderma Research Foundation, the L.A. Mary Sue has served as a fundraiser, board member, and advocate of Share Our Strength and also serves on the Board of Trustees for the James Beard Foundation. They joined a handful of progressive colleagues to found two important organizations: Women Chefs & Restaurateurs, an organization promoting women’s education and advancement in the restaurant industry, and Chefs Collaborative whose mission is to inspire, educate, and celebrate chefs and food professionals building a better food system. Both competed in different seasons of Bravo’s Top Chef Masters, each winning money for their selected charities. Between them, they have co-authored six cookbooks and together starred in nearly 400 episodes of the Food Network’s Too Hot Tamales television series. Together they received the Julia Child Award and Los Angeles Times’ annual Gold Award. BBQ Mexicana is the latest addition to Susan and Mary Sue’s restaurant empire, and later this year they’ll return to Santa Monica with Socalo, a new all-day California canteen and Mexican pub. Widely recognized as ambassadors of modern Mexican cuisine, the duo are co-chefs and co-owners of Border Grill restaurants in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. They teamed up more than 35 years ago to open City Café and CITY Restaurant in Los Angeles. Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger are award-winning chefs, cookbook authors, television personalities, entrepreneurs, and pioneers of world cuisine.
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