Max & Helen's Hot Chocolate. Credit: Marisa Lynch

A Food-TV Icon, a Legendary Chef, and a Diner Walk Into Larchmont…

8 Minute read

18 Nov 2025

Paul Feinstein

Journalist

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Phil Rosenthal and Nancy Silverton team up to open Max and Helen’s, a neighborhood diner built on comfort food, community, and the craft behind every plate.

On a short, restaurant-packed stretch of Larchmont Boulevard, Phil Rosenthal is trying to bring back something he thinks Los Angeles is losing. Diners are disappearing. So are the casual, democratic rooms where a neighborhood can linger over coffee that does not cost six dollars, argue about burgers, and feel like it belongs somewhere. His solution is very specific. Name a small diner after his parents, fill it with the dishes that shaped his life, and ask Nancy Silverton to make them taste as good as he remembers.

The idea started far from Hancock Park. Years ago, while filming in Maine, Rosenthal walked into Palace Diner in Biddeford, a narrow restaurant inside a decommissioned railroad dining car. It had fifteen seats at a counter, the kitchen directly behind, and a century-old menu that a pair of Gramercy Tavern alumni had decided to revive and cook properly.

“I was like, wait a minute, why is this,” Rosenthal says. “I am saying to him, this is the best tuna melt I ever had. This the best burger I had. This the best chicken sandwich I have ever had. This is the best pancakes. I tasted everything.”

For him the appeal was not novelty. It was memory, sharpened. “It is comfort food. It is that scene in Ratatouille where you eat the thing and you flash back to childhood when you have the best of that you ever had.” At Palace Diner he realized something else. Diners are sacred in people’s imaginations, but not always in practice. “Everyone has their reference point of their favorite. Everyone. Everyone is an expert in this thing, this burger, this turkey sandwich. You cannot say this is the best, because we have never had that before. You have to prove it.”

Back home in Los Angeles, the absence of diners on his own block started to bother him as much as the memory of that tuna melt. “I also noticed that there is a dearth of diners. There were two on this block when I first moved to L.A. They are gone. Diners are disappearing from America. What else is disappearing? Sense of community that a diner brings, and maybe the goddamn country. We do not have places that we could sit and talk.”

He had already built a kind of personal diner at Go Get Em Tiger, where he shows up most mornings. “I did not know these people. Just slowly over time. Hey, you want to come sit, and then another and then another, over years, and built a community. This is it.” The next logical step was obvious: find a small restaurant space on Larchmont, and turn that feeling into a place of his own.

The question was who should cook.

From Jar to Mozzarella to Max and Helen

Rosenthal and Silverton’s friendship predates the diner by decades. It started at Jar, the Beverly Boulevard restaurant that chef Suzanne Tracht opened with Silverton’s then husband, the late Mark Peel. Rosenthal came in first as a regular, then as an investor, and eventually as the owner who stepped in when the restaurant was in trouble. Around the same time, Silverton was preparing to leave Campanile and test a new idea.

“I had already expressed my interest in opening this restaurant, or this idea of having a mozzarella bar kind of concept,” she says. Tracht invited her to use Jar one night a week. “We called it Mozzarella Mondays, and behind her bar, just kind of similar to what I had done at Campanile with the grilled cheese sandwiches, I started doing a small menu using mozzarella as the star of the dish.”

Rosenthal showed up, loved it, and asked to invest in what would become the Mozza group. “He tells the story that he twisted my arm,” she says. “But the thing is, is that I was obviously looking for investors, and so that was not a hard arm twist. But, you know, he likes to pretend that I would not let him in, and he talked his way in. But really, we were very hungry for investors.”

They became friends through food and business. Years later, when Rosenthal finally found his Larchmont space, the diner idea went to her almost immediately. “I might have told her that right away, when I had the idea,” he says. “She said, I am in, for two reasons. One, she lives in the neighborhood. Two, and she would like a diner.”

Silverton confirms the mix of pragmatism and curiosity. “I was not doing anything. I did not have a project,” she says. “So I think it was the challenge, and I like a challenge, and I felt like it was attainable. It is not that I know anything about the diner cuisine, but I know how to scramble an egg, right? And I know how components of things that he wanted, I knew I could get there, and I knew how to figure out how something should be, even if I had not made it.”

There was another hook. Despite all the dishes she has created and all the Italian food that now defines her public image, Silverton has her own diner memories. At Ships, a long-gone Los Angeles coffee shop, she fixated on a patty melt called the Ship Shape Burger. “They ground their meat, that is one thing. And it was well seasoned, and it was very juicy, so it had a lot of fat, so that when you bit into it, it just dripped all over you. Very buttery rye bread, the secret sauce, the griddled onion, and that patty melt has always stayed. If you want to ask me what is [my] Ratatouille moment, that is [my] Ratatouille. That patty melt.”

Defining What a Diner Should Be

Once they had a space, the real negotiation began. What belongs in a diner in 2025, and what does not. Rosenthal had a non-negotiable list: burger, patty melt, hot open turkey sandwich on white bread with gravy and mashed potatoes, meatloaf plate, meatloaf sandwich, breakfast all day, matzo ball soup, egg salad, tuna salad, chocolate pudding, coffee cake.

“He says of the burger…” When Silverton suggested that her patty melt might be so good that they would not need one, he flatly refused. “I tried the patty melt, best one I ever had. And I said, Nancy, this the best patty melt I ever had. [But] we still need a burger.”

That burger will not be generic. Rosenthal calls it the best he has ever had, a patty Silverton already serves at events and on weekends at Chi Spacca. The rest of the menu follows the same pattern: strict diner canon, upgraded technique and sourcing.

Silverton was adamant that she would not simply drop Mozza food into a room with swivel stools. “There is not going to be any breakfast burritos. There is not going to be any avocado toast,” she says. “A lot of people are opening what they are calling diners, but then they are feeding it with all sorts of contemporary. I do not know. Have you seen the menu?”

The hot dog—named after Rosenthal’s dog Murray—is built around a Wagyu frank with snap, sautéed onions, sauerkraut, spicy brown mustard, and jalapeños. “It is a really, really good bite,” Silverton says.

Her Reuben uses very good rye and equally serious pastrami. “These are the home fries, which are great,” she says. “They have leeks and onions and like crème fraîche.” The chef’s salad stays classic but tightens its flaws. “The salad itself has a lot of sliced cucumber in it, so when you go through the stuff on top, at least your salad is not just salad. It has pepper jack cheese. It has steamed broccoli because I really love steamed broccoli in my salad.”

Some dishes come from research and repetition. Some come from memory. All of the technical descriptors stay directly in Silverton’s voice.

As for the space itself, Rosenthal tapped hospitality designing veteran Matt Winter of M. Winter Design, whose previous work in Los Angeles includes RVR, Gjusta, Fia, and many others.

Max, Helen, and a Very Democratic Cup of Coffee

For Rosenthal, the project is as emotional as it is culinary. The name of the diner, Max and Helen’s, is a tribute to his parents and to the diners they loved in Rockland County. Helen’s matzo ball soup will be on the menu. So will Max’s fluffy eggs, the very soft scramble he requested for most of his life.

“In fact, on his tombstone, it says, are my eggs fluffy,” Rosenthal says. “That was the first tribute from my brother and I. And then I thought, oh, why not have a place where there is fluffy eggs all the time.”

He is just as serious about the coffee. On a block where a basic drink often starts at six dollars, he wants the cheapest cup around. “One of the goals is to have the cheapest coffee on the block,” he says. “I think we are going to try to keep it under three bucks. If you want your latte, go to one of the seven other places on the block. This is a diner. It is not fancy.”

Silverton sees it more dryly. “Look, Larchmont is doing quite well without us,” she says. “I guess there is always a need. If something is good, then we say there is a need.”

Max and Helen’s is not trying to elevate the diner. It is trying to reclaim what the diner has always been at its best: a place where people sit across from each other, share something familiar, and talk. Rosenthal has built his career on the belief that most things in life feel more manageable over a good meal, and that a simple table can soften disagreements, spark connection, and turn strangers into something closer to neighbors.

If the diner succeeds, it will not be because it reinvents anything. It will be because it gives Larchmont a room where the conversations flow as easily as the coffee, and where the food is good enough to keep people coming back to keep talking.

18 Nov 2025