One Day and Two Nights in Hollywood

Musso's, Lake Hollywood, Hollywood Bowl. Plus: Readers Respond

It is an axiom of travel that no matter where you go, whatever you do, you always have to take yourself with you. You and all your baggage, personal and otherwise.

I was reminded of this after a recent weekend in LA—well, Hollywood to be exact.

I went to college in LA for a while and besides the people I met there (some of whom became lifelong friends), I hated most everything about it. The crowds, the congestion, the traffic, the smog.

GET ME OUTTA THERE!!!!!!!!!!

That was my attitude then. It’s not my attitude now. Now I kinda like the place. The whole big messiness of it.

All the stuff that used to bother me when I was younger doesn’t bother me as much anymore. Maybe I don’t carry around the same baggage as I used to. Or maybe somehow it’s gotten lighter over the years.

In any case, we had a hecka good time in Tinseltown, and I thought it might be fun to share a few of the highlights with you—

Musso’s

One of the grand dining institutions of Hollywood is Musso and Frank Grill, and these are the three drinks they poured for us.

From left to right, let me introduce “the best Cosmo I ever had,” according to one member of our party, a next level food person. “Tart and refreshing.”

Next to the Cosmopolitan is a Glenlivet Scotch, aged 12 years, served “neat”—poured directly from the bottle into the glass.

And to its right is a vodka Martini. “Crisp and perfectly briney,” explained the other member of our party, also a next level foodie. “Expertly chilled so any roughness of the alcohol is lost against the refreshing frost.

“The best part,” she adds, “was they give you the remainder in a chilled carafe—making it feel like you get two drinks for the price of one.”

Musso’s—its shorthand name—is known for the quality of its cocktails and expansive drinks menu, and in this regard it did not disappoint. And if you have one or two drinks too many and happen to forget where you are, they kindly remind you on the butter dish.

Founded after the end of World War I on the eve of the Roaring Twenties, Musso’s is quintessential Old Hollywood—the oldest restaurant in the city. And yet it remains a pretty happening joint—retro hip, so old it’s new, with tons of old school Italian ambience.

It’s an experience. That may be the best way to describe it. Most everyone who goes there leaves with fond memories of it.

As for the food, it’s a Mambo Italiano, Big Night sort of place. They don’t cheat you on the portions, and what arrives at your table transported to you by a charming, tie-wearing red-jacketed waiter, is exactly what it should be. Sometimes it even exceeds your expectations, such as with this showstopper of a 12-ounce New York steak—

Cue our cultivated martini drinker. She is the one who ordered the steak.

“The steak was hardy,” she remembers. “Just what you want in a fine piece of meat. No sides, and I swear you could taste every steak that had been grilled on the Musso’s grill for the last 100 years.”

That is the story behind the famed Musso’s grill: That it’s been around since the beginning of the restaurant, that it’s the same grill that has fired up steaks for Rudolf Valentino, Rita Hayworth, Steve McQueen, and out-of-towners from around the world.

It’s located behind the bar, and you can sit at the bar drinking your martini and kibitzing with friends and strangers while watching the grand masters of fire and meat put on a show in the entertainment capital of the world.

Legends like ghosts hover around the restaurant. One undeniable aspect of its appeal is the thought that you may be sitting in the same booth where Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio once sampled the braised short ribs and where Joe, a jealous but loving husband, asked her to please cover up a little bit because men were looking at her.

Actually, the men may have been looking more at Joe than Marilyn. He was pretty famous in his own right in the early 1950s Golden Age of Hollywood.

But you want famous? Musso’s got famous.

Charlie Chaplin was a regular; his favorite dish was roast lamb and kidneys. Doug Fairbanks nuzzled Mary Pickford over fettucine Alfredo. Gary Cooper and Greta Garbo liked to get together for breakfast and have flannel cakes and coffee. Writers like William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler hung out there.

Even today, A-listers like Ryan Gosling and Jessica Chastain might glide in for cocktails and a late-night meal with friends, seeking privacy in Musso’s Back Room, another place filled with ghosts and legends.

The restaurant is hugely popular with tourists, obviously, but what’s kinda cool about it is that celebrities still like it and so do the locals.

Ever see the Netflix comedy The Kominsky Method? One of its running gags was the very, very elderly and extremely shaky waiter who waited on Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin whenever they had lunch or breakfast there.

Musso’s is located on seamy and seedy Hollywood Boulevard. Which is not exactly Rodeo Drive, y’know? Jay Leno’s old line—”If God doesn’t destroy Hollywood Boulevard, he owes Sodom and Gomorrah an apology”—still applies.

Nevertheless, there are two landmark Hollywood movie theaters close by—Grauman’s Chinese and the Dolby—and don’t forget all those Hollywood stars you see everywhere at your feet.

Deservedly, Musso and Frank—for Joseph Musso and Frank Toulet, the founders—has a sidewalk star of its own.

As for the rest of our dinner, our next-level Cosmo drinker enjoyed the sand dabs—“lightly floured and sautéed, served under a piccata sauce (lemon, butter, capers) flecked with tiny pieces of fresh tomato.”

As for the Scotch drinker in the party, my choice for dinner was solidly fixed in my boyhood when I worked part-time as a dishwasher at Banchero’s family-style restaurant on Mission Boulevard in Hayward. The chicken parmigiana was, in the words of one member of our party who tasted it, “a memory blast of 1960s Italian-American cuisine.”

Lake Hollywood

I’m told that one of the hip things to do in LA when you get together with someone for business or pleasure is to combine the meeting with a walk or hike. It’s also a good thing to do after a night of drinks and hearty Italian fare.

The place we went for our Sunday morning walk-and-talk was the Hollywood Reservoir, also known as Lake Hollywood.

I mean, besides the coast, how many places in LA can you take a walk in a nice natural setting around water?

The reservoir was built in the 1920s for water storage reasons. Celebrities living in the hills can now draw upon it when their supplies of Pellegrino run low.

The drive to get there is up narrow and windy neighborhood streets that reminded me of the upper Silver Lake section of LA or in the Bay Area, the Berkeley and Oakland hills. At the top is a small area for parking that can get crowded on busy weekends.

But once you’re out of your car and on foot you’ll find a lovely, flat walk that takes you on a 3.5-mile loop around a blue body of water popular with ducks and geese. Plus, up in the hills above you, you have a unique view of the Hollywood sign.

What could be more Hollywood than that?

The Bowl

As fate would have it, that night we did indeed find a place that is more Hollywood than that: the Hollywood Bowl.

The Bowl is the best outdoor concert venue I’ve ever been to. It is both spectacular and homey, world class and yet neighborhood-y as well.

It is a grand amphitheater carved into a sloping hillside with a concentric-shaped band shell set down into the center of it. The dazzling light show that infused the band shell with bright beaming colors—now blue, now red—made it feel like an alien space ship had landed amongst us.

And high above your head are giant spotlights that are beamed across the night sky, forming an X. Whenever there is a show at the Bowl, they flip on these lights and people from miles around can see them.

The Bowl opened in the same booming era as Musso’s, and it has its share of legends and ghosts too.

Judy Garland sang there. So did Ella Fitzgerald. The Beatles stopped in during their 1964 British Invasion tour of America. Stevie Wonder, Donna Summer, and Garth Brooks are only a few of the more recent acts that have rocked the Bowl.

As for the night we were there, that was a pretty good show, too.

Jennifer Hudson, Andrea Bocelli, Michael Bublé, Kristin Chenoweth, Brian McKnight and many more all sang their hearts out in a special birthday tribute for record producer and songwriter David Foster. The birthday boy cracked jokes, played piano, and led a symphony orchestra spiced up with a hot jazz brass section.

Given the star-packed lineup, it’s probably no surprise that the concert drew a sellout of 18,000 people. This is unusual for the Bowl, given that it is the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and hosts many classical concerts. (The Philharmonic’s lead conductor is Venezuelan-born Gustavo Dudamel, who led the symphony at the gorgeous reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral two weekends ago.)

Naturally, because of the crowds, there were some LA-type things we had to contend with, namely:

The traffic getting into and out of the venue. (We did take Uber, though.) The throngs of people practically everywhere—trying to find an empty table for a picnic, waiting in line to get your tickets scanned and bags checked, riding the escalator up to your seats, then walking out amid the press of bodies after the show was over.

But hey, it’s LA, right? You gotta expect some of that, and I am so glad that my tired, old personal baggage did not prevent me from seeing Michael Bublé walk onto the stage like he owned the place (and he did) and deliver a rendition of “Fly Me to the Moon” that was hot as Musso’s Grill and that Sinatra himself would have enjoyed.

Readers Respond

Like so many Tilting West readers, Greg Schmitz really gets around. After our piece last month about the heartbreaking but inspiring D-Day invasion site of Normandy, France, he wrote in an email about how he had just visited Luxembourg’s American Cemetery where thousands of American soldiers who lost their lives in the Battle of Bulge are buried.

And then we followed that up with a tribute to Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker statue in San Francisco, noting the connection between the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral and Pearl Harbor Day, both of which occurred on December 7.

Lo and behold, Greg just happened to be visiting Pearl Harbor at that moment too!

“My wife and I are in Honolulu and visited Pearl Harbor yesterday (12/4),” he emailed. “They are getting all ready for a ceremony on the 7th. They have placed 2,400 small American flags to honor those who perished. The colorful swirl of oil that still seeps from the sunken USS Arizona masks the horror of the deaths of those brave souls who are entombed below. A very solemn tribute.”

Two of Greg’s pictures from his visit—the approach to the memorial for the sunken USS Arizona, which incurred the heaviest loss of life of any American ship that day, and a shot of the Stars and Stripes from within the memorial itself—convey the beauty and solemnity of the occasion.