RESTAURANT REVIEW : Pretty Good Grub for a Pool Hall : The Hollywood Athletic Club’s Grill Room is still one of the great rooms in L.A.--a fine place to eat dinner or shoot a rack.
The Hollywood Athletic Club, that magnificent stone building on Sunset just west of Cahuenga, is not actually an athletic club. It is a pool hall. If you want a real athletic club, walk up the side street to the Hollywood YMCA. If you want to play pool, or have a drink, or eat dinner, or host a private party, the Hollywood Athletic Club will suit you fine. (It’s a good place to keep in mind if you’re going to one of the nearby theaters.)
I didn’t always know that the Hollywood Athletic Club is not a gym. So I was initially quite surprised when I walked through the front door and into a haze of cigarette smoke. It makes sense: The downstairs is filled by dozens of beautiful, full-sized pool tables. A sea of green felt. Heaven knows, shooting pool, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer out of long-neck bottles is one of life’s great pleasures. Even those of us who may no longer indulge can’t argue it.
Yet, I was all the more surprised walking into the Grill Room, the restaurant on the premises, when I saw smokers--not just in the bar area, but in the dining room proper. Our waitress explained that the Athletic Club is licensed as a club, not a restaurant, and therefore is exempt from the city no-smoking ordinance. There is no official nonsmoking section, she said, although we could be seated in the side room if the smokers were bothering us. The side room, however, opens onto the pool area, where the smoke was more intense than that from the few dining room smokers. We stayed put. The ventilation proved adequate.
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The Hollywood Athletic Club was built in 1924. While pool tables reside where the once-massive member’s dining room used be, the Grill Room is still one of the great rooms in Los Angeles: Wood-paneled, with high ceilings and a spacious, mirrored bar, it’s exactly what one expects in a sumptuous, old-fashioned men’s club. The chairs are comfortable, the tables roomy. There’s a good view of the bar.
The Grill Room provides customers with a workmanlike dining experience: The servers and kitchen staff, headed by chef Edward Whedbee, all do their jobs just fine. Except, perhaps, the big fat fresh Santa Barbara prawns grilled and slathered with barbecue sauce and served on a forgettable, unfortunately limp corn fritter.
Sauteed crab cakes, notably small and swimming in a tasty tomatillo salsa, share the fritter’s fragile limpness. Decent vegetable pot stickers come with a pungent sherry dipping sauce.
Most of the salads are fresh and well-dressed and, except for the house dinner salad, little mere starters. Apple cider vinaigrette overly sweetens a spinach salad topped with chewy sun-dried tomatoes. A gingery Chinese chicken salad is simultaneously crunchy and quenching.
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Pastas are baroque, rare breeds, as if to suggest mere semolina noodles are too boring for this establishment: red pepper tagliatelle , black fusilli , basil linguine . The most plain, penne , is pleasurably crisped and served with an uncharacteristically dull puttanesca sauce.
Under these tempered lights, the black fusilli , long shiny curlicue strands roiling with dark spinach, look like a big bowl of shiny blackberries--what a surprise, then, to taste smoked Gouda, lemon, saffron and the faintly fishy flavor of the pasta itself.
The Grill Room’s grilled items are stalwart square meals. Meat. Potatoes. Colorful mixed vegetables. Generally, portions are hefty--all but the teeny, delicious, and therefore disappointing New Zealand lamb chops with their wonderful mint pesto. Free-range chicken is tender and juicy. The Kansas City strip steak is a huge, beautifully cooked, serious slab of not-marvelous, not particularly tender meat. Its categorical opposite would be Mom’s Virginia meat loaf, which is downright fluffy.
For some reason, desserts are slow to arrive--a fact that’s important to consider if you’re trying to make a show. But chocolate souffle cake is worth the wait, as is a dense, buttery lemon tart.
* Hollywood Athletic Club, 6525 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, (213) 962-6600. Lunch and dinner 7 days. Full bar. Major credit cards.