El Cid

On our lists of the best romantic restaurants and live music venues in Los Angeles.

The building at 4212 Sunset began in 1925 as the Jail Café, a restaurant with waiters dressed as prisoners and a stone wall styled like a cell block, then became the Gateway Theatre and later the Cabaret Concert Theatre before flamenco dancers Margarita Cordova and Juan Talavera, with her husband Clark Allen, opened El Cid in it on December 7, 1962. The room still runs a flamenco show on weekends alongside a Spanish menu of tapas and a paella built for two, with mussels, clams, calamari, shrimp and chorizo under a lobster tail.