The best date night in Los Angeles takes place over a linen tablecloth in the Cahuenga Pass with close to 20,000 new friends nearby. Here’s what I’m talking about:

Los Angeles is full of people who think they’ve mastered the fine art of date night (a phrase I’m not even sure I like, by the way). Maybe it’s a show at Dynasty Typewriter. Tea upstairs at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. The Venice canals at dusk before dinner at the Thai place with the string lights on Washington. There’s a double-decker bus “neon cruise” that some couples I know keep raving about.

Those all sound lovely. There’s also something way better.

Yep. When it comes to the “best” date night in Los Angeles, there is exactly one right answer and it has been sitting in a natural amphitheater just west of the 101 since 1922. Readers, have you had supper in your seats in a box at the Hollywood Bowl?

Allow me to set the scene. It’s a Friday evening in August, 75 degrees, after a busy week on phones and screens. The Bowl does not care about your week. The Bowl, now in its 104th season, is only interested in refreshing, uplifting and occasionally overwhelming eighteen thousand people at once, and it will do it to you whether you’re ready or not.

Most people arrive at the Bowl already tired. The traffic on Highland is almost always horrendous. Stacked parking is like Prius prison. Maybe you’ve stopped along the tortuous way for take-out Zankou chicken or a picnic box from Joan’s on Third or Clementine. Maybe you’ve hiked to the cheap seats. You’re having dinner on your knees while the sun goes down. This is still a great night, don’t get me wrong. But you have to work really, really hard for it.

Now the other way.

You arrive with your phone and a person you like (no lugging, no ice melting in a bag within a bag). You stroll to your box. There is a linen tablecloth already on the table. They know your name because you ordered the day before, and within about ninety seconds there is chilled water, there is wine, and the best night of your summer has begun. You are worried about nothing. Someone else is taking care of everything.

Supper In Your Seats is the in-box dining program at Hollywood Bowl Food + Wine, available to Garden and Terrace box holders who order online by 6 p.m. the day before the show. Now in its 11th season, the experience is overseen by Suzanne Goin and Caroline Styne, who have been shaping how Los Angeles eats since 1998. That’s when they opened Lucques in a converted West Hollywood carriage house and ran it, brilliantly, until it closed in 2021.

Goin is a four-time James Beard Foundation winner — Best Chef: California and Best Cookbook in a single evening in 2006, Outstanding Chef in 2016, the Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America in 2017 — with a résumé that runs through Chez Panisse, Campanile, Al Forno and Alain Passard’s Arpège. Styne won the Beard Foundation’s Outstanding Restaurateur in 2018 and runs the front of the house and the entire wine list, which at the Bowl now includes organic, biodynamic, canned and non-alcoholic bottles. Their executive chef at the Bowl, Erik Lopez, oversees three full-service restaurants, three marketplaces and everything delivered to the boxes (Goin likes to point out that he started at one of their restaurants flipping burgers). Behind all of it is Sodexo Live!, which runs food and beverage operations in partnership with the LA Phil. If your duck confit arrives hot to your box at 7:10 p.m. just as you’ve clinked your first toast of the evening, it is because of this vortex of F&B talent.

These nights are not inexpensive. Terrace box seats to see St. Vincent with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and Anoushka Shankar this weekend start around $200. The menu prices align with a night out at a better Los Angeles restaurant: The 101 opens with arugula, stone fruit, Spanish goat cheese, honey and Marcona almonds and ends with ricotta cheesecake with summer strawberries, for $72. The Angeleno ($80) combines fattoush with slow-roasted salmon sayadieh and spiced rice, tahini and preserved lemon; or you could enjoy that duck leg confit with cornbread pudding and glazed Brooks cherries. For $90, The Mulholland Drive gives you Alaskan halibut over crab fideos or a grilled beef tenderloin with potato-Mahón gratin and Calabrian chile-olive salsa. There are family-style feasts for two: piri piri chicken, a Baja seafood spread, a barbecue box that ends with Magpies’ vegan bananas foster soft-serve pie. Or you can order a thirty-piece nigiri box with bluefin toro and kampachi. Menus rotate through the season.

When you’re done, they clear it, box what you didn’t finish, keep it chilled, and reappear at intermission with a bag and that dessert. Then the table folds away and the show is the only thing left–although you still have to wait for the guy stack-parked in front of you to exit at night’s end (and why is the guy in front of you always.

And what a lineup to have left. The remaining season is absurd: Tchaikovsky with fireworks, St. Vincent with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, ZZ Top, Al Green, Herbie Hancock celebrating Miles Davis, two nights of David Byrne, Smooth Summer Jazz, David Newman conducting a tribute to John Williams on the stage that now bears his name, Buddy Guy at 90, Orville Peck making his Bowl debut, Wynton Marsalis marking Coltrane’s centennial, Lucy Dacus, Jon Batiste closing it out, Erykah Badu, Rubén Blades.

Someone will tell you this is a splurge. It is. Someone will mention traffic and stacked parking and the long walk down afterward. All true, all forgettable. What you’ll actually remember is the light going violet over the shell, a glass of something cold that Caroline Styne chose, halibut you didn’t have to carry up a hill, and the moment the sound system opens up and the person across the tablecloth stops talking mid-sentence.

Order by 6 p.m. the day before at hollywoodbowl.com. Get there an hour early. Bring nothing.