One narrow room beside the Pantages, open since 1934, where the neon, the Hirschfeld style mural, and the $7 well drinks all tell the truth.
Frolic Room has held the slot beside the Pantages Theatre at 6245 Hollywood Blvd since 1934, with speakeasy years before that. Howard Hughes owned both the bar and the theater from 1949 to 1954, per Smithsonian Magazine, and the neon sign from that era still runs.
Time Out calls it a bar not for dilettantes but drinkers, a neighborhood hangout in a neighborhood without many of them. Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, and Charles Bukowski all drank here; Bukowski's photo still hangs over the bar, per LA TACO.
Who would hate it? Anyone who says mixology out loud. There is no cocktail program, and that is the point.
The east wall carries the Hirschfeld style mural installed in 1963: Einstein, Monroe, the Marx Brothers, and W.C. Fields in a single caricature parade, restored in 2012. Hirschfeld's hidden NINA appears three times in it, per the Hollywood Partnership.
Order a well whiskey and Coke at $7 or a $6 bottled beer; Scoundrel's Field Guide calls the pours a needed dose of affordability and notably strong. The move is a shot and a beer before or after a Pantages curtain.
Old timers hold the rail while Pantages crowds surge around curtain times and tourists wander in off the Walk of Fame. Time Out's read: a straightforward, friendly little room in which to get loaded with others of a similar mindset.
The most defensible dive in Hollywood, where the neon, the mural, and the prices still agree with each other. Bring a twenty; leave change.