New Things #4 & 5: Going Back to Cahuenga

When I first moved to LA, I lived in Hollywood. It was the heyday of the Sunset Strip but I always felt more comfortable at Goldfingers, Star Shoes, or hanging out on Cahuenga. I believe the only bars still around from back then are Hotel Cafe, Burgundy Room, and The Room. Everything else has changed over multiple times but one of the newbies is a sports bar so my neverending search to find a great LA sports bar continued to The Palm and the Pine.

Nothing says LA Sports Bar scene like a place claiming to be “the original sports club since 2024.” The Palm and the Pine is kind of an unwieldy name and I’m not sure if a tennis themed bar is the best way to go in kind of a trashy stretch of Hollywood. Still, the bar has a good set-up with a lot of TVs and they are able to have live music after the games, which is a must. One problem LA sports bars have is that most of the games are over around 10 or 11, which means people are packing up for what should be prime time at a bar. On the food front, the wings were good not great, the fries almost tasted fishy (which was odd since they don’t have fish and chips on the menu) and the Old Man Mendo gripe is that the bar is filled with stools as opposed to seats with backs on them. The beer selection is fine.
If The Palm & The Pine can establish themselves as a sports bar with live music post-game, I think it has a chance to survive but, as of now, it doesn’t seem to have found its niche. (I’m also a bit biased here because Piano Bar was one of my favorite spots in Hollywood and they’ve never really replaced it.)

After The Palm and the Pine, I tried to go to Status Restaurant & Lounge - which is located where the old Velvet Margarita used to be - but sadly, they don’t have a liquor license so I couldn’t get my one drink to count it as a New Thing.

I bounced down instead to Tribute Bar which commits one of the major sins of LA bars - which do relatively small places make large bars in the center of the space. The worst offender of this is in DTLA - the NoyPitz - although they aren’t to blame. The people who took over the big space before them decided to plop in a huge bar and it’s never made much sense to me. Those owners wanted to create a space on one side of the bar that was VIP but there was nothing VIP about the bar and it screwed up the entire feng shui in order to create table service nobody wanted.

As for Tribute, it just seemed like a generic bar. And listen, not every bar has to have a theme but I feel like this Cahuenga corridor can’t be cheap and if you’re going to stay busy enough to make rent, you need some sort of draw.