Hipsters’ Secret Password: Olive

“New York wasn’t happening for me. It’s over. It’s really over. I hesitated coming here, but . . . I got the agent, and now I should be here.”

Such is the gist of conversations around the bar at Olive, the restaurant-cum-bar with an unlisted phone number and without a sign out front, so as not to attract passing strangers. (The tiles underfoot outside the front door do spell out Olive, but they’re tough to read when whizzing by on Fairfax.)

Here, happy young Hollywood hipsters mingle every night--yes, Monday through Sunday. Things perk from 10 or 11 p.m. until the place closes at 2 a.m., when kindly valets deliver BMWs to their rightful owners. Understand that without a sign announcing the place--which looks like an undistinguished box--those valets and the fancy little cars are the only indication that you’ve arrived anywhere at all.

Sound clubby? Well, Olive is not a private club. Olive is not a nightclub. Officially, says co-owner Sean MacPherson, it is a restaurant with the following policy: As a rule, reservations are required for dinner, and the bar is reserved for people waiting for their dinner tables. If it’s not busy at the bar, people may come in just to drink. The doorman checks names off the dinner reservation list and looks like he doesn’t kid around.

It may not be a nightclub, but it is a place where a lot of people want to hang around at night downing--would you believe it?--martinis. And people do come in when the place is packed and have no intention of eating dinner. One recent night these included Julia Roberts and Jason Patric and several Olive regulars who said they had eaten dinner elsewhere.

Barton Fink might have hung out here, had he been a bit trendier and had a sublet on Melrose. The bar is populated with screenwriters straight off the plane from New York, writer/actors, producer/writers, director/actors and just plain actors, many of whom earn their living waiting tables at other establishments.

There are also garmentos and music video folk and someone who said cryptically only that he was doing business in Russia. Most of the people in the crowd are in their 20s; 40-year-olds beware. Here you will look old.

The dress mode is straight from the mind of David Lynch--dyed black hair, hoop earrings and black leather motorcycle jackets on both sexes. Smoking is de rigueur and a cigarette machine is conveniently positioned inside the entrance.

Along with smoke, recordings of lounge tunes from throughout the decades pervade, although it’s far too noisy to make out any particular tune. The place is dark and windowless and the walls are painted with circus-like harlequin patterns. The New Yorkers say they think Olive is “New York-y” because it’s so small, dark and crowded.

Along one wall is a lineup of portraits of “geniuses” (MacPherson’s word) including Mohandas Gandhi, Winston Churchill and Sen. Alan Cranston.

Name: Olive

Where: 119 S. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles.

When: Daily, 5 p.m. to 2 a.m.

Doorman: Dresses in black, and if looks could kill . . .

Prices: No admission fee. Martinis, $5.50. Cigarettes, $2.75.