If you want to party like it’s 1923, Los Angeles is the place to do it. Some of the city’s most fabled bars and restaurants have been in operation for a century or more; you can still drink a martini in Charlie Chaplin’s favorite leather-lined booth, eat dinner at Walt Disney’s chosen Scottish pub, or order tamales at the Mexican restaurant frequented by Anna May Wong.
Nineteen twenty-three was a big year in Los Angeles: powerful studios Walt Disney and Warner Bros were founded, and the Hollywood sign was erected in the hills above the city. And while the cocktails are no longer 50¢ nor the steaks a dollar, the era’s vintage decadence is enjoying a revival.
From New York to London, martinis have become the trendy drink of the early 2020s, while caviar goes viral with gen Z on TikTok. In the wake of a pandemic, and in the face of rising fascism, the glittering excess of the 1920s is clearly striking a global chord. In Los Angeles, that aesthetic never went out of style.
From Musso and Frank, the restaurant beloved by Hollywood writers, to a 1920s bowling alley still popular with A-listers, here’s a guide to four of the best of LA’s enduring roaring 20s venues.
Gangster memorabilia and a historic sandwich at Cole’s French Dip (founded 1908)
Cole’s French Dip is a dark, cozy venue in the city’s downtown, with stained glass windows and velvety red wallpaper, perhaps best known for its claim as the originator of the famous beef sandwich served on crusty bread au jus.
On a mid-December night, patrons line up at the bar for a classic cocktail paired with a very vintage sandwich. Cole’s is one of the city’s oldest restaurants, with a history stretching back to before the era of the freeway, when Los Angeles was connected by a network of Pacific Electric streetcars.
It started out as a place where commuters could grab a quick bite at the downtown streetcar terminal. The long, ground-floor space where the restaurant stands today was originally a stable where streetcar riders could leave their horses – a kind of “horse valet”, as Cedd Moses, the venue’s current owner, put it.
By the 1920s, downtown Los Angeles was “booming”, and Cole’s restaurant would become “a hangout for gangsters and politicians and the gals that danced in the burlesque houses up and down Broadway,” Moses said. When Prohibition was repealed, customers lined up around the block to celebrate, and Cole’s is said to have sold 19,000 gallons of beer.
Today, a corner booth is adorned with photographs of Mickey Cohen, a prominent LA crime boss of the 1940s, who preferred the booth because his “back was against the wall so he didn’t have to worry about anybody shooting him in the back,” Moses said. Tucked in the back of the restaurant is a small speakeasy-style bar, The Varnish, with a much-praised cocktail menu.
The origins of the French Dip sandwich, which Philippe’s, another restaurant founded in LA in 1908, also claims to have invented, are still the subject of local debate – according to Cole’s legend, Moses said, it was invented for a customer known as “Death Valley Scotty” who had “bad teeth from living out in the desert” asked for his sandwich to be dipped in jus “to soften the bread”.
Martinis and dealmaking in the red leather booths at the Musso & Frank Grill (founded 1919)
For a true roaring 20s evening on Hollywood Boulevard, you can now see a classic film at the newly restored Grauman’s Egyptian Theater, a kitschy venue first opened in 1922, and then head across the street for dinner or drinks at this old school restaurant owned by the same family since 1927.
“Change is a bad word here,” said Mark Echeverria, the great-grandson of one of the restaurant’s early owners, who currently serves as the restaurant’s chief operating officer.
Each of the restaurant’s dark wooden booths has a history, which Echeverria narrates as he strolls the rooms: the only booth with a window was the preferred seat of Charlie Chaplin, who used to challenge Rudolph Valentino to race their horses down Hollywood Boulevard and demand the loser buy a meal at Musso’s. (The window allowed Chaplin to keep an eye on his horse outside, Echeverria said.) No 3 was Marilyn Monroe’s booth. No 24, tucked alone against a wall by the bar, was a favorite of Frank Sinatra, Orson Welles and, in later decades, Johnny Depp.
One of Echeverria’s earliest childhood memories is sitting in booth 87 with his grandmother and cousins, feeling “so sophisticated” as one of Musso’s famous bartenders “made us our Shirley Temples in martini glasses, with another glass for cherries”.
The detective novelist Michael Connelly sometimes sits in booth 88, previously the favorite booth of the noir author Raymond Chandler. In a city of constant innovation, Connelly has written, Musso’s serves as an “anchor”.
The restaurant’s “new” dining room dates back to 1955; the old dining room still has the same decor from 1934, including old wallpaper touched up by an Italian restorer who also worked on the Sistine Chapel. Patrons can still duck into an old-fashioned telephone booth – once the first pay phone in Hollywood. (In 2010, one couple sneaked a priest into the restaurant and got married in the phone booth in the middle of dinner service, Echeverria said.)
Musso & Frank’s famous martinis are always stirred, not shaken, and served in extra-small martini glasses, with a second round in an iced sidecar to keep the drink properly chilled, said general manager Andrea Scuto. (Estimated martinis sold per year? Something like 60,000.) Steaks are cooked to order on the warped iron bars of the same grill that has been in use for decades, and Echeverria says two of his favorite seats in the house are at the counter right in front of the grill, where patrons can watch the grill-master at work.
Some of the restaurant’s skillful, red-jacketed bartenders and waiters have become Hollywood legends in their own right: a painting in the restaurant shows the late Ruben Rueda, who worked at Musso’s for more than 50 years, tending bar in heaven for Anthony Bourdain and other favored patrons.
Old-school privacy rules also prevail – cellphone photography is restricted, and no media are ever allowed in the restaurant when customers are there.
Enchiladas and Hollywood history at El Cholo, LA’s oldest Mexican restaurant (founded 1923)
This family-owned Mexican restaurant has operated for decades from a cozy, wood-beamed bungalow on Western Avenue – a street often thought of as the furthest western boundary of a much smaller Los Angeles.
Tradition is prized: the menus at El Cholo, which celebrated its centennial this year, mark the date each dish was introduced. Sonora-style enchiladas and green corn tamales date back to the restaurant’s 1923 founding; guacamole was added in 1955, and nachos in 1959, thanks to the intervention of a Texas-born waitress, Carmen Rocha, who is widely credited with introducing nachos to Los Angeles.
The margarita was added to the menu in 1967, and “I can’t imagine the restaurant today without it”, said Ron Salisbury, the grandson of the restaurant chain’s original founders, Alejandro and Rosa Borquez. His father had feared serving hard alcohol to customers, Salisbury said, and had limited the drinks to beer and wine. But by 1966, when Salisbury took over, “the city was changing, times were changing” and he feared that if El Cholo did not catch up to the city’s booming cocktail culture, the restaurant “would just be swallowed up and disappear”. The margarita did its job, and helped ensure El Cholo survived for another generation – as evidenced by the patrons gathered for happy hour, salty-rimmed drinks in hand, on a recent Wednesday evening.
Burritos came even later: they didn’t make it on the menu until the restaurant’s 50th anniversary, Salisbury said, after he had started hearing about their popularity with police officers in East Los Angeles.
In El Cholo’s early years, it marketed itself as a “Spanish” cafe, one of the tactics Mexican restaurants used to appeal to customers even as Mexican food and culture faced stark discrimination. Salisbury, now 90, remembers Los Angeles as “this comfortable little sleepy town” where a celebrity sighting was “no big deal” and air conditioning was “a real extravagance”.
As a young child, his father would always introduce him to the actors who stopped by: he remembers meeting Anna May Wong, the pathbreaking Asian American actor recently honored by a commemorative quarter, as well as actors from Gene Autry to Cary Grant. According to El Cholo lore, Gary Cooper liked strawberry jam on his tortillas. Jack Nicholson celebrated at El Cholo when he got one of his early breakthrough roles, Salisbury recalled; Mike Love of the Beach Boys was a regular before he decided to co-found the band.
Salisbury, who started working at the restaurant at 14 or 15, unloading dishes, warming tortillas and making coffee, has since overseen an expansion of the El Cholo brand across southern California and now to Salt Lake City in Utah. From El Cholo’s beginnings, “people came from all over,” he said. “It’s one of the few restaurants where we had people who had driven in Rolls-Royces and people who came in on welfare checks, and they’re all eating next to each other.”
Vintage bowling and celebrity sightings at the restored Highland Park Bowl (founded 1927)
The Highland Park Bowl in LA’s north-east corner has had many lives – from 1920s bowling alley and possible whiskey pharmacy during prohibition to a punk venue in the 1980s.
When its current owners took over in 2014 they found the space in disrepair, said Bobby Green, who, along with his business partners, specialises in renovating historic LA bars. But after clearing out piles of trash, including a dozen bicycles, they found the historic lanes from 1927 intact, along with an old Arts and Crafts mural of a forest on the back wall.
Today, the space is serving plenty of cocktails alongside its eight lanes, and is known as a celebrity hangout, as well as backdrop for TV shows, from Shameless to Umbrella Academy.
The old building proudly displays historic artefacts on its walls, like the 1927 and 1929 bowling league banners and vintage bowling team name plaques, Dimitri Komarov, another partner, said. Old bowling pinsetters were refashioned into chandeliers, and extra bowling machine parts into bar shelves. The alley’s mid-century popcorn and candy machines, some with dusty candy still in them, can be found in the lobby.
In the refurbished alley’s first year, old regulars came by to see the place, Green said during a recent tour of the space. “I personally have met two guys in their 80s that worked here setting up the pins as kids,” he said.
Green said they hired an archivist, Maxim Shapovalov, to dig through old business records to find clues to the venue’s earliest days. There used to be a pharmacy in operation next to the bowling alley, along with doctors’ offices upstairs, he said. During prohibition, doctors could give medical prescriptions for alcohol, and pharmacies sold the medicinal liquor, which makes it possible that the 1920s bowling alley was also a spot where locals might have brought in their prescription whiskey, Shapovalov said, though he did not find definitive proof.
More recently, the bar has hosted birthday parties for stars including Diplo and Queen Latifah. Sometimes A-listers show up just to bowl with the other patrons: the Elvis star Austin Butler and Bottoms star Kaia Gerber were photographed by paparazzi outside the bowling alley in September.
The bowling bar does sometimes get “the occasional one-star Yelp review” from the most avid bowlers, Green said: the vintage wooden lanes are placed too close together to execute more modern spin ball moves. But now, at least, customers don’t need a prescription for their old-fashioned.
