I'm looking for a good, reasonably priced auto repair shop in West LA.
 Specifically I'm in Santa Monica and would like to find a place
within a 5 mile radius that would service a 2001 Chevrolet Tahoe. 
Currently I need to get the rear brakes repaired and get my alignment
done.  The quote that I got from the Chevy dealer in Santa Monica was
quite high and so I'm looking for an alternative.

I would accept two possible answers to this question:

1.  Anecdotal information about an auto repair shop that would be
close to me that could do these repairs and that I could use for
future automotive repairs.

2.  A website (or websites) where I could further research auto repair
shops.  Something like an epinions.com except where I could look up
people's opinions on auto repair shops.  I'm not aware of anything out
there that is like this but if I'm wrong and there is a site like this
I would gladly accept it as a response.

You might want to check out Car Talk's "Mechan-X-Files" here:
http://cartalk.cars.com/About/Garage/mechan-x/find.html . You can
search by zip code and make of car for user-recommended mechanics. No
Chevy specialists came up within 5 miles of 90406 (the zip code I
found for Santa Monica) but it did supply a list of generalists within
5 miles. It might give you some leads. Hope this helps.