There is a booth at Little Toni's on Lankershim in North Hollywood that has become, against all logic, one of the hottest reservations in Los Angeles. No celebrity chef. No Michelin star. Just red checkered tablecloths, Italian food, and the seat where Inde Navarrette's character Nikki went full unhinged in the most talked-about scene from Obsession. People are waiting over an hour on a Sunday night just to sit in it.
If you haven't seen Obsession yet, here's what you need to know. Curry Barker, a 26-year-old YouTube comedian turned horror director, made a supernatural thriller for $750,000 about a guy named Bear who uses a novelty toy called a One Wish Willow to make his coworker crush fall in love with him. The wish works. That's the horror. The movie opened in May to $17 million, then kept climbing until it crossed $339 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing film in Focus Features history. It beat out a bidding war at TIFF that included A24 and NEON, which tells you everything about how that festival screening went.
The Little Toni's scene is the one everybody is talking about online. It's where Bear and Nikki have dinner, and something deeply wrong starts to surface. Since the movie caught fire at the box office, posts on Reddit identified the location, then TikTok took over, and now the restaurant has a line out the door most evenings. One fan drove an hour and fifteen minutes from Palmdale with her whole family just to eat there. She told the Hollywood Reporter she also saw a TikTok where the cannolis looked good, which is the most honest reason anyone has given. The staff at Little Toni's said most visitors show up with their cameras already out.
The restaurant has been there since 1956, which means it survived seven decades as a quiet North Hollywood neighborhood spot before a horror movie turned it into a pilgrimage site. Some regulars who have been coming for thirty years showed up recently to find an hour-long wait and had no idea what was happening. One of them asked if there was someone famous in the movie. There is not. That's kind of the whole story.
If you want to make the trip, the address is 4745 Lankershim Boulevard. Go see the movie first. Obsession hits digital platforms on June 30, so you can watch it from your couch before you go out and sit in the booth that made half the internet spiral. And when you get there and someone at the next table looks at you like you're not supposed to be sitting there, just know that feeling is exactly what Curry Barker was going for.
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