L.A. Dining, 1934-Style

Dinnertime Los Angeles, 1934.

Perhaps you anticipate exquisitely prepared cuisine set on delicate, gilt-edged bone china; Art Deco luxury in black and gold, as executed by a design master such as RKO’s Van Nest Polgase, and a view of one of the most breathtaking panoramas on Earth--the glittering necklace of lights that is Los Angeles at night. If this seems like a fantasy, there is good reason. High-style Los Angeles dining and dancing was a good deal simpler in the ‘30s.

Sardi’s on Hollywood Boulevard was in then, a Schindler-designed vision in chrome and aluminum. There was formal-French Victor Hugo’s, famous for having Los Angeles’ finest cuisine. Everybody knew about the Brown Derby hat on Wilshire Boulevard, across from the Ambassador Hotel, and its slightly swanker sister restaurant on Vine Street, just south of Hollywood Boulevard. The food was good, but the Derby decor--leather booths edged in dark wood--was marginally more than dowdy. The Hollywood Derby was best known for framed caricatures of regulars that covered the walls.

Nightclubbing could take you way out to Culver City and Frank Sebastian’s Cotton Club, the first cousin to the Harlem original. You could visit the rowdy Club Ballyhoo on the Sunset Strip, too. But the top of the town was the Cocoanut Grove, which had been at the Ambassador Hotel since 1921. The decor was variegated and exotic: leafy palm trees left over from Valentino’s “The Sheik,” monkeys, arched doorways and Chinese lanterns; walls designed to resemble Persian carpets and a staircase suitable for the most formal of entrances. In 1934, the Cocoanut Grove was the place for a black-tie good time.

Downtown, the Biltmore Hotel, scion of old Los Angeles money, competed with the Grove by opening the Biltmore Bowl that year, a 1,200-capacity ballroom with a large dance floor that was often filled with jitterbuggers attracted by such big bands as that led by Jimmy Grier. And in 1934, Billy Wilkerson, owner and editor of the Hollywood Reporter, opened his Trocadero on Sunset Strip. Wilkerson got the idea for a nightclub after the small dining area in his stylish Vendome, the town’s best gourmet food store, proved to be popular. The Troc, as it came to be known, though French, owed nothing to Maxim’s or moderne. The nightclub was more like a sidewalk cafe, with painted panoramas of the Parisian skyline, and a downstairs bar somewhat incongruously decorated in the American colonial style. If you did something naughty at the Troc, you could bet on getting a mention in the Reporter’s social columns the next day.

It was no accident that Los Angeles’ most magnificent, most elegant, most ultramodern architectural setting was the menswear store that was not to become a restaurant until Mauro Vincenti took it over for his Rex Il Ristorante almost half a century later. Eddie Brandstatter had gone all-out on decor when he opened his all-glass, ultra-ritzy Embassy Club in Hollywood but the architectural display overshadowed the stars. And after all, people came to see stars, not what some architect had done. In the Los Angeles of 1934, food and ambiance played second fiddle to personality.