After work in the client’s Hollywood office, I took some time to walk down Sunset looking for something to do and/or eat.
What strikes me as an oddity in bars in LA is that there doesn’t seem to be any draft beer. Surely, I haven’t been in many bars here, but of the ones I have been in (and there are a few within walking range of my hotel on Sunset) there isn’t a single tap. It’s all about cocktails.
I walked down to the House of Blues, thinking that maybe there would be some blues, beer taps, and maybe some dinner. I found none of those three there, sitting at the bar. I was struck by the decorations in the building. Everything from the paint on the walls to the dress and demeanor of their employees was worth noting. The use of incense was unique.
The walls weren’t the usual “stupid things screwed into the wall” motif that is rampant among the cookie-cutter restaurants, but a painted-on creole-style factory-built organism. Sure, it’s not the same spray-on decoration as any other restaurant, but the same spray-on decoration as every other House of Blues.
The bartender spun his bottle opener on his finger obsessively while doing a crossword, and he was the anti-stereotype of a good blues-house bartender - not chatty or interactive at all, not even enough to take my dinner order. He did give me a calendar of their concerts for the next month, supposing I looked in place here in this bar in this strange city. Well, if I’m in town, maybe I’ll stop by, thanks for offering.
I walked back to the hotel and stumbled around the lobby and pool areas looking for the restaurant. They were serving food in the lounge, but I didn’t feel like sitting out there exposed with the folks in dress suits and bikinis, so I went on to their diner-like restaurant.
This place, decorated like a hipster diner - like the rest of this hotel, really - had funky 60’s-colored lamps, weird leathery seats, and candles all over the place. No taps, but a selection of 10 or so bottles of beer.
So, here I am in LA, toddling about on the Sunset strip. I’m walking around in clothes that I bought to look presentable for this business trip – a style that I’m not really accustomed to wearing. I’m eating somewhere that is right out of… I don’t know what. I half expect a guy in the corner with a microphone reciting bad poetry and an audience of wine-sipping finger-snapping beatniks.
Clearly, the veneer here is affected. They’ve made this restaurant look like this. Unlike authentic diners, like those around home where the grease-colored vinyl seats are a byproduct of vinyl and grease, the seats here came “brown”. At the same time, even though the place is manufactured, I wonder what it will look like in ten or twenty years, after the “new” sheen has worn off. Will it look like a “real” diner? Or will it look like an aged mock-diner?
Where are the real places that these places are trying to emulate? Do they still exist, or have they knocked them down to make more room for the next look-alike? Is there really a place that looks like the House of Blues; a place that has grown that decor organically over the years instead of having it painted on by a crew of construction workers? Where is that original beatnik diner?
In ten or twenty years will I be someone who dresses in these clothes? Or will I be a person who dresses in these clothes trying to pass myself off as a person who dresses in these clothes? I’m very much not feeling like I’m in my own skin. When I get home, I’ll be taking a long shower and forgetting that I was ever here, and perhaps the person I was while I was here will wash away with that memory.
