THE ENABLER
If rap videos haven’t been lying to the Enabler all our life, there’s no reason we should ever be able to spend a night pounding cognacs and get out for under $20 -- much less while playing Guns N’ Roses pinball and bowling into the pre-dawn hours. But Shatto 39 Lanes, in the unclaimed badlands between Silver Lake and Koreatown, exists in the kind of gleeful suspended adolescence you imagined adult life was like when you were 12.
Vintage consoles of Street Fighter and Ms. Pac-Man (“vintage” as in “haven’t been moved from their original locations since 1990”) jockey with cheap games of 10-pin (“For fun and health,” a banner says) and an acre of pool tables for your attention under deliciously sickly fluorescent light. It’s a palatial complex of ‘70s wholesome Americana left to sink into sinful disrepair. That’s where the tequila on tap at the Shatto Lanes Tap Room comes in.
But Shatto 39 Lanes does beg a certain question to be asked: If you can walk into a bar and get a hearty shot of Courvoisier for $3.50 without having to put down a security deposit on a stripper, are you still really living the high life?
3255 W. 4th St., L.A. (213) 385-9475
--