Ale’s Well

“Ladies and gentlemen,” says the piano player, “let’s take time out for a brief liquormission,” and at the Tam O’Shanter Inn there is a move to the bar, to the snifters of single-malt Scotch and flagons of McAndrews Scottish Ale, to the freshly fried potato chips that are a feature of this friendly piano bar. Many of the customers--gray hair, expensive sweaters, craggy foreheads--look as if they have been coming to the Tam since they were at USC Law School on the GI Bill, and many of them are capable of singing “Surrey With the Fringe on Top” in a manner that is quite racy, of singing “Hooray for Hollywood” without any irony at all.

Pianist Frank Day has been in the piano-bar biz for half a century, much of it in his Sunday and Monday-night stints at the Tam, and he has a repertoire that ranges from Cole Porter to Jerome Kern, from Puccini medleys to the inevitable “New York, New York.” He is, simply, the finest cocktail pianist in Los Angeles. When he drinks a screwdriver, he has been known to stick the straw in his eye for comic effect.

A couple of blocks from the golf courses of Griffith Park, smack between the L.A. River and the industrial district of Glendale, the Tam O’Shanter Inn is one of the oldest restaurants in Los Angeles, a ‘20s roadhouse enlarged into a sprawling special-occasion joint, a half-timbered barn that sometimes seems like an infinite warehouse of Scottish-themed kitsch.

The Tam, run by the old L.A. family that owns Lawry’s Prime Rib, spent a time in the ‘70s as a restaurant called “The Great Scot,” one of the “Ye Olde Sir Loin of Beefe”-style places popular at the time. The waitresses wear the smart tartan uniforms of that departed era of American restaurants; unfortunately, most of the food, weirdly bland toad-in-the-holes and rarebits and spinach salads, dates from the ‘70s too.

But the food served in the Pub, the large area up front, is fine, big sandwiches stuffed with roast brisket, or pastrami, or Prime rib--Lawry’s Prime rib!--or freshly roasted turkey, nicely dressed, served with good coleslaw. If you ask for it, a waitress will bring you freshly ground horseradish, which adds a nostril-searing punch to any sandwich. If you like, you can usually get a basket of Cajun-spiced batter-fried seafood or a half-pound of steamed shrimp to go with a couple of mugs of ale. The Pub is one of the few thriving examples of the businessman’s restaurant left in town, those sandwich-and-beer lunch places that seem to have been taken over by fast-food and salads.

In New Orleans, the famous cocktail is the Sazerac; the most enduring cocktail from New York may be the Manhattan; but the great Los Angeles cocktail is probably the Moscow mule--a combination of vodka, lime and strong ginger beer first mixed at the old Cock ‘N Bull on the Strip. It’s the drink that pretty much introduced America to vodka. The Tam makes a great Moscow mule, served in a pewter mug. The Cock ‘N Bull used a copper mug, but otherwise the drinks are the same: spicy, not too sweet and sneakily alcoholic.

And the waitresses are a trip:

“I have been having a rich but troubling affair with a gifted saxophonist in Laguna Beach,” one says, setting down drinks in front of some of the best-known composers in America. “But you’re not musicians; I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

“But we are musicians,” says one of the composers, a radical despite his gray hair, who has been called the father of computer music.

“That’s so sweet,” she says. She pats him gently on the shoulder. “You’re trying to make me feel better.”

At the Tam, a big-city bar, nobody knows your name.

* Tam O’Shanter Inn Pub 2980 Los Feliz Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 664-0228. Open Monday-Saturday 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.; Sunday 1 to 10 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. Entertainment. Takeout. All major credit cards accepted. Pub lunch or dinner for two, food only, $12-$16.