What to Order at the Airliner, Lincoln Heights' 100-Year-Old Bar

Chef Vinh Nguyen and Gary Wang's revived North Broadway bar now runs to mentaiko spaghetti and hojicha tres leches.

The Airliner, the bar at 2419 North Broadway in Lincoln Heights, is sending out mentaiko spaghetti and hojicha tres leches. The room is 100 years old and has been run since 2023 by chef Vinh Nguyen and Gary Wang, who varnished the counter, reupholstered the booths and rebuilt the menu, Eater LA reported in a September 3, 2026 dining report by Kat Thompson.

If your Airliner is the one you stopped at before a show — the backyard, the cigarettes, whatever your cousin got thrown out for — the backyard is the tell. It's a patio now, with string lights and heat lamps, per Thompson's account.

The risk here wasn't the cooking. It was that a room whose appeal was being unmanaged would come back managed, in swanky wallpaper, and lose the people who made it worth reopening.

The curved bar didn't change. That's the continuity doing the work.

The calendar backs it up: jazz nights and sports watch parties are still on the books, the outlet reported. A bar that keeps its show schedule is still a bar, whatever the kitchen is doing.

What I'd order, going off the dishes as described: whipped ricotta with chile crisp for the table, which arrives with garlic, roasted chiles and tostada discs to scoop it onto. Then the vegan Shanghai triple onion noodles — thin noodles in dark soy with roasted onion oil and a shower of crispy shallots — which is the one I'd put money on. The mentaiko spaghetti, pollock roe in a brown butter sauce, is where I'd send a table of four instead of a second starter, and I'd hold a seat for the black sesame and brown butter rice crispy treat.

Two comparisons, both from the same shelf at Eater LA: Men & Beasts in Echo Park, where Cathy Chaplin filed on August 27, 2026 on chef Alex Falco's vegan Chinese cooking, and Mala Class in Highland Park, the casual spot Rebecca Roland covered on September 1, 2026 for its chile-spiked dan dan noodles. The first buys you the argument that a meatless noodle plate on a bar menu isn't a consolation prize any more. The second puts the Airliner on a northeast Los Angeles run where the kitchens worth the drive keep turning up in rooms with no tablecloths.

The objection stands on its own. A dive works precisely because nobody's optimizing it, and the day the booths get reupholstered the room starts sorting people by whether they're ordering food. Thompson, who writes that she's been going for more than a decade, describes the old yard as a place that "once felt like a frat house strictly used for bumming cigarettes," and she lands on the side of the grown-up version. So do I, with the caveat that a happy hour menu is a promise a bar has to keep for about three years before anyone believes it.

The site is barairliner.com and the number is (323) 987-0444. The show schedule runs through the bar's Instagram.

Source: la.eater.com, retrieved September 6, 2026.