Photos by Chris Delmas, Anadolu, Carlin Stiehl, Justin Sullivan, Eric Thayer, and Frazer Harrison via Getty Images.
THE STYLIST AT Great Clips in Northridge had such a “bad attitude” that the usually unflappable Sen. Alex Padilla described his 2018 visit as “what I can genuinely call a terrible experience.”
When a cockroach surfaced in his former apartment building for the second time in 2015, City Controller Kenneth Mejia posted a photo of it on Yelp. (“Sooo big.”)
District Attorney Nathan Hochman raved about the “great massages” at the it girl-approved Spencer’s spa in West Hollywood last year, while former congresswoman and gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter penned a 500-word jeremiad against Massage Heights in Newport Beach.
“Btw, after I posted this, Bill called up and left me a message saying that I had slandered his business and tauntingly asking ‘What are you, a lawyer?’” Porter wrote on Yelp in 2017. “Yes, in fact, I am — one that did not get a massage she paid for.”
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Many Los Angeles elected officials, it turns out, love to leave online reviews. We compiled an interactive map of their ratings by trawling public databases for their emails, then using a publicly available program to identify their Yelp and Google Maps accounts.
Their critiques of local businesses are as varied as their leadership styles. Some officials, like County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, give straight-laced, universally positive write-ups. (Her miniature poodle Winston “gets excited as soon as he sets foot inside the door” at the Healthy Spot pet store in Hancock Park, per her 2025 review.) Horvath also likes to shout out individual employees by name for their good work.
Others opted for humor.
“Oh my Phô-kin good jesus!” Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez declared at the now-defunct Pho Thai Town in East Hollywood in 2015. “I've been to a lot of Vietnamese restaurants, ate a lot of delicious Phô, loved some, hated other, etc etc etc. This place beats them all!” (Per his reviews, the council member prizes authenticity in his restaurant cuisine, be it Thai, Chinese or Mexican food.)
We gave each politician the opportunity to share whether they had changed their mind about any business they reviewed. None took us up on the offer. These reviews do not reflect the opinions of L.A. Material, nor have their claims been independently vetted.
Is there another data story I should tackle? Contact me at [email protected] or tomo.213 on Signal.
