THE ENABLER

The Gold Room in Echo Park is two blocks west of the famously gentrified Little Joy and Short Stop. As rising rents price out entire families, the bar has managed to hold onto its working-class and Latino charisma despite the influx of shag and tight jeans.

The Gold Room’s relative success at this should prompt a mutually understood decorum for gentrifying local bars. It’s like teenagers and sex: You shouldn’t do it, but if you must, here’s how to protect everyone involved.

The rules: Don’t order anything involving more than two ingredients, especially if one is a pomegranate. Don’t recoil from locals making eye contact; they are silently judging you and have every right to do so. But most important, don’t overwhelm the regulars with a population explosion after you decide that Tuesdays are now Ironic Country Ballad night.

That’s what the Little Joy did, and the Enabler would sooner drink Tabasco shots with a chaser of broken glass than go near there on a weekend.

The Gold Room’s owners have kept the purple-neon backlights, baskets of unshelled peanuts and Spanish-speaking bartenders in short black skirts, and the Enabler loves them for it.

The only glint of ascendant hipsterdom is the Smiths album in the jukebox. But come to think of it, everyone at the Gold Room should be able to agree upon the Mozfather. Rules are rules, after all. 1558 W. Sunset Blvd., (213) 482-5259

-- theguide@latimes.com