At the Parlour Room, belly up with Philip Marlowe
At the Parlour Room, the new bar from the Hollywood night-life royal Craig Trager, a guest is first and foremost overwhelmed by the wallpaper. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t bode well for a bar — what with all the pretty girls, strapping lads and pillars of booze that should be claiming your attention instead.
But, my, this wallpaper. If Marie Antoinette (the Kirsten Dunst version) were to dictate a new Versailles inside the Polo Lounge, she would cover the place in this stuff. It’s a hypnotic, sexily patrician study in forest-canopy green limned with gold; the sort of fever-dream barroom detail that ups your confidence simply by being in the same room with it.
“When we custom ordered the wallpaper, I told them, ‘I want green on a gold background,’ and they didn’t believe me,” Trager said. “They asked me, ‘Are you sure? Really? You know we’ve never done that before, right?’ ”
Trager’s reply could well have been “Yes, I know, but I’ve done this before.” The Parlour Room is the sixth venture from his Vintage Bar Group, and his fourth in an unlikely niche in Hollywood’s hyper-saturated empire of tipple. Trager’s bars conjure a kind of achievable fantasy of Hollywood-as-neighborhood — the obsidian woods and harlequin diamond tiles of L.A.’s Art Deco heyday, with a genial young bustle that suggests your lissome tablemate might not roll her eyes out of their sockets at your screenplay pitch.
In catering to the everyday denizens of L.A. who return home to a 323 area code after nights out, Trager has cultivated a certain touch that might make Hollywood’s celebrity-traps turn, well, dark green with envy.
The Parlour Room is Trager’s new flagship in this mission. Located in the old Goldfinger’s space in a residential estuary northwest of Cahuenga and Hollywood boulevards, the room has had turnover (whither the nu-Asian-wave, Red Buddha Lounge?). But if the space was ever cursed, the Parlour Room vanquished it.
Like the Well and the Woods, two of Trager’s other local outposts, Parlour Room seems to exist outside of time. There are elements of Old Europe decadence (that wallpaper), Industrial Age ascent (ballroom chandeliers), and swishy Hollywood charm (the black-and-white tiled entryway). But the collective effect is improbably cohesive and contemporary. It’s also accessible — the room is small and gathers around the horseshoe bar. A few hours at Parlour Room leaves one with the same close-to-greatness feeling one gets from watching a friend’s band that happens to be really, really good.
The cocktail menu is heavy on the sort of Depression and noir-era mixes that would be familiar to anyone who’s killed someone with a tommy gun in a pinstripe suit. These drinks have come to dominate L.A.’s drinking life since the mid-aughts, but at Parlour Room they’re purposefully simplified for volume. Philip Marlowe might have puckered at their very sweet take on the Blood and Sand (Dewar’s, sweet vermouth and cherry Heering splashed with orange and maraschino juices), but the Maple Julep (3 ounces of Woodford Reserve whisky, mint leaves and maple syrup) has more thwack to it. The $5 gin martini — sized for adults, no less — could become a change-scrounger’s institution on par with the $2.50 margarita at Barragan’s.
The neighborly savvy in Trager’s approach is a product of his business arrangements. Since finding success with his much-beloved bar Daddy’s in the ‘90s, Trager made a point to give his managers part ownership in each new property, thereby raising the likelihood that attentive (and self-interested) hands are always on deck even as he oversees the coterie of his personal properties and those, like Parlour Room, that he remodels and manages.
“Paul, who runs NoBar and the Fifth [in Valley Village], he started as a barback at Daddy’s 15 years ago and now has a piece of half my bars,” Trager said. But at the same time, the boss’ hand is known up and down the totem pole. “I’m in there taking out the trash and screwing in light bulbs, and the staff knows it. We don’t have floating bartenders — if I hear you’re not learning the regulars’ names, you’re out.”
That might prove a formidable task, as the Parlour room should be making an awful lot of regulars in the coming months. But be sure to arrive late — like the rest of Hollywood, the place feels sexier in dim light.
“If you come by during the day, the green-on-green looks like it’s way, way too much,” Trager said. “I had to tell the staff, ‘Guys, you cannot look at this during the day. Trust me, just wait until night.’ ”
Where: 6423 Yucca St., Hollywood
When: Daily 8 p.m. to 2 a.m., Fridays 7 p.m. to 2 a.m.
Price: Cocktails $10, beer $4-$6.
Contact: (323) 463-0609
