The Mother of All ‘SC Hangouts

Above the bar at Julie’s Trojan Barrel, amid the frescoes of long-departed coaches, quarterbacks and linebackers, hangs a regulation crimson-and-gold football jersey with “Julie 95” emblazoned across the back. It belongs to the proprietor of this place, 95-year-old Julie Kohl, who entered the university’s athletic hall of fame the same year Marcus Allen did.

Julie Kohl’s father, Monsieur Mazet, was one of five partners in L.A.’s Franco-American Bakery. Just before his daughter launched “Meet Me at Julie’s” near the USC campus in 1941, family friend Philippe Matthieu showed the novice how to prepare a French dip. The restaurant became an SC football fixture: John McKay plotted many of his greatest plays upon a tablecloth (Kohl had his regular booth shipped to him at his next coaching job in Tampa Bay), and the proprietess held forth at SC’s greatest postwar victory parties. Although Julie’s shut down in 1997, Kohl remains the boss at Julie’s Trojan Barrel at 37th Street and Figueroa, which she opened in 1956.

“On football game days, it’s awful,” Kohl says. “There’s hundreds and hundreds of people who can’t get in.” Alas, its daily clientele has thinned out to ever more mature ‘SC alumni.

“A lot of professors who used to drink in the afternoon don’t anymore,” she says. As for the students, “they just don’t party like they used to.”