#011 - Touring the Western Bagel Factory, Clarifying Skaf's Sushi Preferences, and Buying Out Street Vendors

Plus a zine from 2022, a gelato festival, and finding out that Zoey is from Burbank.

Aug 27, 2025

Hello and welcome back. This week community colleges get spacebucks for robots, demon hunters roam Burbank, we visit the Western Bagel factory on Sepulveda, and then eat way too many garnachas in North Hollywood. All this and more in this week’s edition of IN THE VALLEY WITH JOSH HELLER!

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VALLEY NEWS & GOSSIP

(1) The biggest movie of all time can’t stop talking about us.

I really thought that Labubu would be the main topic of conversation when my kids went back to school in the fall, but Hank tells me he’s over it. Everyone in his class has turned their attention to KPop Demon Hunters (2025) which just became Netflix’s most-watched movie of all time with 230 million views since its June debut.

I watched the first twenty minutes with Hank on his tablet, before he decided to watch one of those home renovation shows. I still need to see the whole thing but I did notice that Zoey, one of the Kpop Demon Hunters is from “Burbank, U.S.A.”

And you know the real ITVWJH-heads are wondering which Burbank pizza spot that’s supposed to be. Tony Gemignani’s? Prime? Big Mama's & Papa's? Dino’s? Or maybe it’s the old Gorilla Pies on Burbank Boulevard that I profiled in 2022?.

(2) Lil Nas X made Valley news last Thursday. He was walking around nude near Vineland & Ventura, then later picked up by the police in the Cahuenga Pass. He was hospitalized and charged with four felonies which he plead not guilty to. He got out this week and said the last few days had been terrifying but “your girl is gonna be ok.”

The rapper-singer-songwriter’s breakout hit Old Town Road became the longest-running number-one song on the Hot 100's chart since it was introduced in 1958. Coincidentally the part of Ventura boulevard that he was zonked out on used to be an old town road.

(3) A few weeks back we talked with Valley Rox, the new all-ages venue and practice space coming to the corner of Tampa & Vanowen. They recently gave a virtual walk-through of the inside of their space. Looks like they’ll be ready to open soon. Check out their website for updates. Hoping this space spawns a generation of tweenage punks and riot grrrls.

(4) San Fernando Valley colleges are getting spacebucks to build robots. NASA’s Minority University Research and Education Project (MUREP) is giving a $50,000 planning prize to Pierce College, Mission College, and Valley College to develop a robotics competition in June 2026.

“This competition is going to be incredible for our students,” said Jennifer Cole, Ph.D., dean of STEM at Valley College. “They’ll team up with peers from across the valley to tackle real engineering challenges while learning directly from NASA and industry experts.”

(5) SFV Mutual Aid and Aetna Street Solidarity are organizing an 818 vendor buyout to support street vendors and jornaleros who are being constantly terrorized by the continued presence of ICE in our neighborhoods. More information about how you can help here.

(6) In 2022 I put together a short hand-made unpublished zine called “Found In The Valley #1”. It has cut-and-pasted clippings I’d discovered in dusty boxes and old records from SFV estate sales. I also included a few timely stories I jotted down. I just fully scanned it and made it available exclusively to *ITVWJH Paid Subscribers*

(7) This weekend, Gelato Festival World Masters comes to Hollywood & Highland, which I didn’t realize is now being called Ovation Hollywood. The event looks like a lot of fun, but I’m going to be at a bar mitzvah. They reached out to me because they read my coverage of Pizza City Fest and said they’re hoping for a similar vibe. This competition which was founded in Firenze in 2010 brings together the best gelato makers in the world. They sent me five containers of top-notch gelato which arrived 10 minutes before I got home on the first day of that heatwave last week. Luckily I safely got those babies into the freezer and have been eating some very delicious gelato all week. For more information about the festival head to their website.

(8) Two weeks ago I mentioned being on a confidential mission with Gab Chabrán to my hometown of North Hollywood. I can tell you now that I was helping him report on the most delicious Cheap Fast Eats that NoHo has to offer. “Helping him report” really means I just kind of showed up and ate a bunch of meals in a row with him. Gab did a great job of capturing the best $10ish bites in historic Lankershim and took me to a few spots I’d never been to before.

There was a feeling in the air, almost like a siren song from afar, signaling somewhere between the giant Minion statue that towers over Universal Studios theme park and the Sepulveda Basin. North Hollywood was calling our name.
Dynamic immigrant communities against the backdrop of remnants of old Hollywood studios culture, the boho NoHo arts district, all juxtaposed with a specific Valley charm.
From loaded street tacos to Lebanese wraps, we found a variety of eateries offering wallet-friendly prices. It's time to dig in.

Here I am at the Guatemaltecan spot Muchá! Comida Chapina on Sherman Way & Beck Avenue with a plate of way too many bomb-ass antojitos.

We popped into Skaf’s on Laurel Canyon & Oxnard to eat kafta, falafel, and a lamb skewer. In ITVWJH #007, I had mentioned that Skaf once told me he only eats at Nobu (not the sushi place next door.) Since I was there, I asked him to clarify his sushi preference. Skaf says it’s “not just Nobu.” He says “no offense to the guys next door, they’re my customers” but when he eats sushi with his wife “she wants to go to all the great sushi places in Studio City.”

In that same issue Valley Haunts told us that the 7-Eleven in the plaza is always playing good music. When I stopped in they were playing “Just Cant’s Get Enough” by Depeche Mode. She says “usually it’s something a little more obscure!” I like that song but I think I need to go back on a more obscure night.

(9) We’ve all been to the iconic cash-only 24-hour Western Bagel Van Nuys retail location on Sepulveda near Rayen at all-hours of the day or night. But last week I got to see the factory behind it.

I’d spoken to the team at Western Bagel when I was writing about the new school bagel craze last December. All of the artisanal bagel-makers I talked to had only positive things to say about “the bagel that won the west.” They’ve been a ubiquitous staple of Los Angeles since 1947. So I was very excited when they offered me and some old friends a tour of their process.

Western Bagel has 10 retail locations. Each one boils and bakes their bagels on-site, but the dough is sent from the factory. The factory itself handles an enormous volume of bagels which they sell in bulk to restaurants, grocery stores, and school districts. It was an impressive operation. They're making 35,000 bagels per hour on state-of-the-art machines. I made this video of the Western Bagel production line set to my new favorite borscht belt banger “Bagel” by Irving Fields.

Western Bagel is still a family business. I got to meet the CEO Steve Ustin whose father founded the company. He unofficially started helping his dad there at 8 years old. Now his son and granddaughter are a part of the team. After the tour they gave each of us a dozen bagels and some containers of schmear. It was the freshest Everything Bagel I’d ever had.