The upside-down world of Ivan Kane’s Cafe Was

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The first indication that Ivan Kane’s Cafe Was intended to be wild and wacky came when Times staffers (those of us covering food and nightlife) were informed by reps of the restaurant and bar (located at Hollywood and Vine) that there was a space between the ‘Wa’ and the ‘s’ in ‘Was.’

We’re usually too busy to play fun games like adding irrelevant spaces in the middle of perfectly good words, so we just referred to Cafe Wa s as Cafe Was and that seemed to work out just fine.

Then, shortly after the Great World Stock Market Crash of 2008, Cafe Was came up with the blithe idea of starting brown bag bottle service. Customers feeling low about their 401-ks swirling down capitalism’s toilet could lash out by spending $58 on a bottle of Jack Daniels in a brown paper bag. If they were feeling especially surly they could chug straight from the bottle.

Fast forward to the holiday season. It’s going to be a grinchy Christmas to be sure, what with unemployment skyrocketing and everybody buying Ralph’s brand products at the grocery store instead of name brands. So to cheer us all up, Cafe Was decided to, as they put it in a news release, ‘make some sense of the upside down nature of things by constructing a completely upside down Christmas tree. Instead of grumbling about bailouts or whining about where to go, pull out your bohemian best to see the Seussian sensation gleefully hanging above the grand piano.’

Apparently this bit of yuletide whimsy was decided upon when ‘a group of thinkers and tastemakers gathered together to craft what has become a new holiday tradition at Cafe Wa s.’

Those thinkers, they thought and they thought about what Christmas was and Wa s not; then out of a tastemaking fog they did see a way to give Christmas an upside down tree.

-- Jessica Gelt

To see more pictures of interesting Christmas trees, check out the Travel section’s post on trees from around the world.