Splendid dives

DOWN where the hangout, the hole in the wall and the greasy spoon run together, there’s a lovable mutt called the dive.

If you go by the dictionary, a dive is a shabby or unsavory bar or restaurant. To its regulars, though, it’s a haven from the striving world; a comfortable, friendly, unpretentious place with some special charm or aura.

A fashionable “scene” -- say, Swingers in Santa Monica -- can’t be a dive; fashion involves too much striving. And you can’t become a dive by trying. Look at Ed Debevic’s and the House of Blues, which yearn for divehood but will never, ever attain it. It’s just a spirit that develops between a place and its regulars. If a dive’s owner retires or has to sell it for some reason, it’s amazing how often the new owner is a customer who bought it just to keep the place going.

People rarely think of dives when they think of L.A. They think of fast food joints or California cuisine, maybe of exotic pizzerias or Asian restaurants. But L.A. treasures its dives even more than most cities do, because they’ve always been an endangered species here, thanks to the rapid growth and ever-changing demographics that have marked our town for, oh, 120 years or so.

Of course, age alone is not enough to make you a dive -- some of our oldest restaurants are much too exalted for that. Take Musso & Frank’s (1919), the Pacific Dining Car (1921), Tam o’ Shanter (1922), El Cholo (1927) or Canter’s Delicatessen (1931 ... well, hold on; maybe Canter’s is a dive at that).

Some dives, at least in the view of ex-customers, soullessly abandon their divehood. Duke’s Coffee Shop was a true dive when it was at the Tropicana Hotel, they say, but when it moved up to Sunset Boulevard ... well, these days Duke’s has valet parking. Say no more, they say.

Others lose their customers for one reason or other. Phil’s Diner (1928-1996), a spirited little joint in an imitation railway car next to the North Hollywood train station, outlived the railroad but couldn’t survive the noise and dust when the new Red Line station was being built. The ultra-tacky West L.A. joint Kelbo’s, opened in 1947, may have coasted on its Polynesian theme too long; by the early ‘90s, people had stopped going. A quaint Sun Valley truck stop named Pink Cafe got “discovered” by a Hollywood crowd in the ‘80s and eagerly changed its name to Cadillac Jack’s Cafe. These days it’s just a movie location you can rent when your script has a scene set in a truck stop.

The following tour is a personal selection. I’m not fool enough to walk into an argument about the best dives in town. That would require a lifetime of study, and anyway, the definitions are not hard and fast. Where do you draw the line between a dive and a hangout, or a greasy spoon? Plenty of dives serve nothing more elaborate than sandwiches, but several steakhouses qualify. And don’t think food is a minor part of a dive’s success. Surprisingly often, dives refuse to give out their recipes.

96 and still dipping

Some places would resent being considered dives. Cole’s PE Buffet is certainly one. Opened in 1908, back when the Pacific Electric Building was the terminus for the area’s trolley lines, it originally was a classy downtown restaurant. Its Tiffany lamps aren’t replicas installed during the ‘60s Art Nouveau craze, they’re actual Tiffany lamps.

But when the trolleys stopped running, Cole’s found itself in a backwater, and over the years it has developed a somewhat brooding spirit, particularly in the bar. The dining room has the weary, gallant air of tradition gone a bit to seed (the rowdy New Year’s Eve party scene in “Forrest Gump” was shot here, probably to play off this quality). The result is one of the most distinctive personalities of any restaurant in town.

Philippe’s the Original, which opened the same year as Cole’s a dozen blocks to the north, has a more unpretentious style, but Philippe’s bustles a bit too much for a dive. The two have long wrangled over who invented the French dip sandwich. Whichever was first, Cole’s makes a more careful version, the meat cut just so and the bun dipped in very dark broth with a practiced hand, possibly just because the counterman has a lot more leisure.

“Eatz Cafe,” reads a hopeful sign tempting newcomers to swerve off busy Los Feliz Boulevard. It shares a parking lot with the nine-hole municipal golf course that hugs the east bank of the Los Angeles River.

You’d figure Eatz as just a greasy spoon if all you had to go on was its menu, an ancient list of short-order dishes enclosed in a worn plastic cover. A few of the sandwiches are old standards that have become rare in the last quarter century, such as fried egg, meatloaf or liverwurst and Swiss on rye.

But it’s more than that. It has the attraction of distinctive ‘50s dinette architecture, complete with Googie-style canted windows. The building takes the form of a sturdy barrel vault enclosed in a more conventional box structure. You can sit in this moderne style geometry and gaze out on people putting around the tiny golf links while you work on, say, a grilled cod on sourdough.

Could you be more Silver Lake?

There has been a restaurant at Millie’s address since 1926, when the Devil’s Mess opened there. Over the years no Silver Lake dive has had a more devoted following. This is one of the places that a customer has bought to keep it from going out of business. The same customer has bought it twice, in fact -- Paul Greenstein sold it in 1989 to a waitress and a few years later bought it back again.

A few years ago Millie’s acquired a second room, so now it has, in addition to sidewalk dining and a lunch counter, a tiny dining room crowded with tables. But over the years nobody has ever feared Millie’s would go upscale; in one incarnation, its waitresses wore pajamas. The walls are covered with aged tchotchkes, including a Highway 66 sign (Sunset Boulevard was part of the legendary Route 66) and a fly-blown Sixties-era Pepsi sign from Vietnam.

Along with generous helpings of shaggy bohemian vibe, Millie’s serves breakfast (egg dishes and banana-walnut or berry pancakes) and lunch (sandwiches, burritos and salads) all morning and afternoon. The food is more carefully prepared than you might expect, or think when you see it thrown on the plate, and the coffee particularly good.

Is Barney’s Beanery still a dive, now that it has valet parking in the evening? Just look at the crowds of people chugging suds, eating chili and playing ferocious air hockey. Sure, it’s still a dive.

In any case, you just can’t discuss L.A. dives without mentioning this West Hollywood immortal, which started serving chili in a tiny shack 75 years ago when the neighborhood was undeveloped countryside. Movie studios opened up in the vicinity, and in the ‘30s Barney’s became a hangout for actors.

A number of restaurants could make the same sort of claim, but with this difference: Eventually either the actors stopped coming there and the restaurant closed, or the same actors kept coming and it became an old fogeys’ hangout. Barney’s, through some peculiar alchemy, has continued to appeal largely to twentysomethings, generation after generation: pop artists in the ‘60s, punk musicians in the ‘80s and so on. Studying the bleached, corroded, tattered stuff on the walls is like taking a walk through the history of pop culture.

Barney’s current 12-page menu lists hundreds of items, from calzone puttanesca to pot roast with eggs (breakfast is served all day). To tell the truth, none of the new dishes is strikingly good, though none is offensively bad. It’s still worth getting the chili, which is in a solid, meaty style with just a bit of hotness and an aromatic dose of cumin.

Some old Hollywood hangouts look set to last forever. If there’s ever a nuclear war, it won’t be cockroaches that survive. It’ll be the Formosa Cafe.

It started in 1925 when a retired prizefighter set up an old trolley car on property owned by film stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. It became an actors’ hangout and began accumulating too much Hollywood history to describe. The walls are lined with unsolicited celebrity photos going back seven decades.

The original room, the one that started as a trolley car, is still in use; squint hard and you can imagine Paul Newman, Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor hanging out there when they were sprouts. Other structures have been added since, roughly quadrupling the area. The newer parts are plusher and more dimly lit.

The Hollywood connection is still lively -- the parking lot is where Shannen Doherty allegedly smashed a beer bottle on somebody’s windshield five years ago. Despite fears that its use in a scene in “L.A. Confidential” a few years ago would change it, this continues to be an entertainment industry dive (a certain amount of Hollywood business gets done here, but the conversations you overhear are more likely to be just the usual grousing).

The food? Basically good old American Cantonese with a couple of not-quite-convincing Thai dishes.

Sawdust bar with peanut shells

“Glad to see you back,” says Jay Fiondella to my musician friend, who figures it has been about eight years since he was last at Chez Jay.

This is a congenial little bar, with the emphasis on “little,” down near the Santa Monica Pier. The floor is covered with sawdust, together with a fair number of peanut shells (Chez Jay roasts its own and automatically gives you a bowl of them). Striped awnings hang over the bar and the handful of tables, Christmas lights are strung up all year round and a strange melange of stuff has been stapled to the walls.

Chez Jay has drawn a lot of celebrities since it opened in 1959, and one secret is that Fiondella, an actor himself, carefully protects them from fans and gawkers. If you have a camera on you, he’ll throw you right out.

For a place that looks like a bar, and mostly is a bar, it serves very creditable steaks and seafood. It still gives you the old-fashioned relish tray of carrot and celery sticks at dinner, and at lunch the hamburger comes with about a quarter of a cup of mayonnaise on the side, in case you want to cast all caution aside.

The Shack can stand for a substantial school of beach-town divedom. Located in a cozy isolated pocket of Playa del Rey, it has all the beachy paraphernalia and in-group jokes on the wall you could want, and all the surfer dudes bellying up to the bar, for that matter. Challenging a basic dive principle, the Shack has branches in Hawaii and Santa Monica, but the landlocked one in Santa Monica, at least, has nowhere near as much raunchy, rowdy beach vibe as the one down where Culver Boulevard dead-ends into Pacific Coast Highway.

Its specialty is the Shack burger, which contains a beef patty, a split and grilled Polish sausage, mayo, lettuce and tomato, plus American cheese and even fried onions too, if you want. Grab some napkins -- it slips and slides and falls apart in your hands, but it’s a memorable sort of mess, largely because of the good, garlicky sausage.

A schooner and a pickled egg

The wonderfully cheerful, down-to-earth Long Beach bar Joe Jost’s started pouring beer in 1933, as soon as Prohibition was repealed. Its food goes back even further -- in its original incarnation, it was a barbershop that sold sandwiches to its waiting customers. Eventually the Health Department demanded that Mr. Jost choose between cutting hair and serving food.

It enjoys a highly loyal clientele. The wall opposite the bar is covered with photos of regulars wearing Joe Jost’s t-shirts shot in locations all around the world, a practice known as Josting. The remaining walls are crowded with antique beer bottles and other nostalgia -- go to www.joejosts.com and take a virtual tour, if you like.

The place is famous for its pickled eggs, of which it sells about 250 a day. A wall menu lists cheese, liverwurst, salami and hot dog sandwiches, but if you just order “a sandwich,” they’ll give you a Joe’s special: a hot sausage split and stuffed with cheese and a pickle spear, wrapped in mustard-smeared rye bread. Don’t ask for another kind of bread; rye’s all there is. In fact, you can buy a loaf of Joe Jost’s rye to take home.

Orange County has its own style of diving. Several steakhouses, such as Pinnacle Peak and Trabuco Oaks, are divey joints with a waggish policy of cutting the necktie off anybody who wears one into the place. Being richly provided with beaches, the county boasts a lot of beachy dives, particularly around Newport Beach. In fact, some denizens of Newport never cook. To them, dinner means Happy Hour snacks. It’s a whole Happy Hour way of life.

But Laguna Beach has a unique institution in the Royal Hawaiian. It dates from 1947, well ahead of the Polynesian craze of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and it’s still healthy -- though there’s little on the menu but the tropical cocktails and some Cantonese-style ribs to suggest the “Polynesian cuisine” of those times. Today it’s basically a steakhouse.

What a steakhouse, though. The grass mats on the walls and low ceilings, the quasi-structural bamboo, the tropical plants and aquariums -- it’s a walk in the romantic dreams of a generation ago. The striving world is very far away.

Is this really a dive? Well, when there’s big-screen TV in the bar and you can hear Spanish-language radio as well as the Angels game on top of the Hawaiian music soundtrack, that spells dive, if on a grand scale. Call it a ... high dive.

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Diamonds in the rough

Barney’s Beanery, 8447 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 654-2287.

Chez Jay, 1657 Ocean Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 395-1741.

Cole’s PE Buffet, 118 E. 6th St., Los Angeles, (213) 622-4090.

Eatz Cafe, 3207 Los Feliz Blvd., Atwater Village, (323) 661-2355.

Formosa Cafe, 7156 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 850-9050.

Joe Jost’s, 2803 E. Anaheim St., Long Beach, (562) 439-5446.

Millie’s, 3524 Sunset Blvd., Silver Lake, (323) 664-0404.

Royal Hawaiian, 331 N. Pacific Coast Highway, Laguna Beach, (949) 494-8001.

The Shack, 185 Culver Blvd., Playa del Rey, (310) 823-6222.