Making modesty part of the Koreatown scene

IN Koreatown, there are many ways to get a drink, most of them expensive. On a typical night, you might end up sipping a $12 soju cocktail or procuring a $100 bottle of Crown Royal for the table. Your outfit had better look expensive too.

What you crave is a place with cheap, strong drinks where nobody bothers to dress up. Where you go to fulfill that craving is Frank ‘n Hank.

With its motley clientele, friendly neighborhood feel and $3 well drinks, Frank ‘n Hank could not be more different from the slick, pulsating nightlife that surrounds it. The bar, presided over by a genial, proudly unglamorous Vietnamese American woman named Snow, is at first glance an anomaly on this stretch of Western Avenue.

But the better you know the area, the more you realize that Frank ‘n Hank is of a piece with it, as much as karaoke clubs and 24-hour Korean tofu joints.

People such as Eddie Thilesen, a retired actor and steadfast American Legion and Elks member, began drinking here 40 years ago, when beers were less than a buck, the place was owned by the father-son team of Frank and Hank and there wasn’t a Korean restaurant in sight. Thilesen is still a regular, hearing aid and all.

The hunt for authenticity or inexpensive drinks, or both, also brings a younger crowd and even a celebrity or two, including Vince Vaughn. Legend has it that Charles Bukowski downed a few here, back when Frank and Hank still tended bar.

Early on a recent Wednesday evening, Thilesen sat nursing a Miller beer ($2.75 nowadays), having walked from his apartment. A pair of younger regulars had bicycled. Frank ‘n Hank was doing well on the purest test of a neighborhood bar: how many patrons get there on their own locomotion.

Grant Rudd was celebrating his 65th birthday and had brought trays of stuffed jalapenos and spring rolls to share with his fellow barflies. He stops by whenever his wife, a nurse, works the night shift.

“Between now and 9 o’clock, I know everybody by name, what country they’re from, what they drink, you name it,” said Rudd, a retired barber who moved to L.A. from England six years ago.

The old-timers refer to 9 o’clock with all the dread of a witching hour, for that is when those younger non-regulars start trickling in to play pool, throw darts and get inebriated for little more than a tenner.

The late-night crowd is not hipster, nor self-consciously anti-hipster, but that rare thing in L.A.: a reasonable reflection of the city’s ethnic and economic diversity. There might even be a real car mechanic among them, not just an indie rocker in an ersatz mechanic’s shirt.

The essence of Frank ‘n Hank remains the same after 9 o’clock, as it probably has for decades: you and some friends, a long pour and a cheap dose of temporary happiness.

weekend@latimes.com

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Frank ‘n Hank

Where: 518 S. Western Ave., L.A.

What: Well drinks $3; Budweiser, Miller and Coors $2.75; imported beers $3.50

Info: (213) 383-2087