The New York Times' Critical Shopper feature visits The Grove and says today that it gets to you, even if you don't want to like it.

The first time you go to the Grove, the immensely successful and completely fabricated commercial center in Los Angeles, you will try to hate it. But then you will watch the old-fashioned trolley passing by, or the dancing fountain as it splurts jovially to the cadence of a Sinatra song, and you will drop your snobby urban integrity and walk around consuming things in a mouth-breathing stupor just like everyone else....

The Grove is everything that is horrible and spectacular about our brand-saturated American lives. It’s a living version of every pretentious theory you may have read back in grad school: a facsimile of a space, a scripted zone, a generic city, a vituperative quote by Baudrillard or Deleuze. But it’s also totally great!

LAT columnist Steve Lopez this week took a tour of Rick Caruso's soon-to-open Americana at Brand, the faux Grove in Glendale.

Photo: Natasha Calzatti for The New York Times