Frolic Room, Hollywood.

The Hollywood Boulevard dive that survived Hollywood Boulevard.

Frolic Room opened in 1934 as a private club for Pantages Theatre patrons next door. It became a public bar in 1949 and has poured continuously since. The room is twenty-two feet wide, sixty feet deep, and lit by the original 1949 Al Hirschfeld mural that runs the length of the back wall. The bar back is original. The booths are original. The stools have been re-upholstered four times in seventy-six years, all in the same red vinyl.

The neon sign on Hollywood Boulevard, which reads FROLIC in tall yellow letters with a small ROOM beneath, was installed in 1949 and registered as a Los Angeles cultural landmark in 2009. The sign has not been turned off since 1949 except during a 2003 maintenance pass. The neon glow is a Hollywood Boulevard fixed feature.

Why this matters. Frolic Room is the rare Hollywood Boulevard establishment that resisted the boulevard's decade-long pivot to tourist-trap economics. The bar still pours honest drinks at honest prices, and the regulars are still a working LA crowd, not a souvenir shop crowd.

The Hirschfeld mural along the back wall.

Al Hirschfeld, the New York Times caricaturist whose line drawings defined Broadway theatre advertising for sixty years, painted a sixty-foot mural along the entire back wall of the Frolic Room in 1949. The mural depicts approximately 250 entertainment-industry figures of the late 1940s in his signature one-line cartoon style. Bukowski is reportedly hidden in the crowd, although no one has confirmed the figure.

The mural has been touched up twice (1973, 2001) by Hirschfeld-trained restoration painters, both with the artist's blessing before his 2003 death. The figures in the back-wall section nearest the toilets are slightly more degraded than the rest of the mural because of forty years of cigarette smoke before California's 1998 indoor smoking ban. The smoke patina is part of the mural's surface now.

Stand at the bar with a beer. Walk slowly along the mural. Identify the figures you can identify. Most regulars have a favourite figure they look for every visit.

A Coors Banquet and a shot of well bourbon.

• Coors Banquet: five dollars a bottle. The Frolic Room standard. The bottle is the right form factor for the room.
• Shot of well bourbon: four dollars. The bartenders pour Old Crow or Evan Williams without asking.
• The Bukowski: ten dollars. A boilermaker (Coors plus the bourbon shot) given the Bukowski name by the regulars in 1985 after his Quentin Tarantino-era resurgence.
• Vodka soda: seven dollars. The 1990s Hollywood drink that the bar still pours.
• The thing nobody knows: the bar will pour you a Negroni at twelve dollars made with the Campari, gin, and vermouth that have been on the back bar since 1989. The Negroni is honest. The bartenders will look at you with quiet approval.

Tuesday at 4pm. The Boulevard quiet hour.

Frolic Room opens at 11am every day and closes at 2am. The bar is busiest Friday and Saturday between 9pm and midnight, when the Pantages Theatre next door empties and the post-show crowd fills the booths. The honest hour is Tuesday at 4pm: the bar is half empty, the sun comes through the front window for forty minutes between 4pm and 4:40pm, and the Hirschfeld mural is at its most legible.

The 11pm Friday hour is the second great time. The post-show theatre crowd is loud but they leave by midnight. If you can stay until 1am you get the local Hollywood working crowd: bartenders ending shifts elsewhere, the Pantages stage hands, the occasional film editor walking over from CBS Television City.

Sunday afternoon is also good. The bar opens at noon. The 1pm to 3pm window is the slowest scheduled time and the bartenders will tell you which figure in the mural is which.

What is true, what is not, and what the bar will say.

Two stories define Frolic Room's literary mythology. The first: that Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, drank at Frolic Room on the night of her 1947 murder before walking down Hollywood Boulevard to her death. The second: that Charles Bukowski drank at Frolic Room daily during his 1980s LA residence and that several scenes in his last novel were drafted at the back booth.

The Black Dahlia story is unverified. The bar's Black Dahlia connection is supported by anecdotal regular accounts but no documentary evidence. The Bukowski story is partially verified: a 1986 LA Weekly profile of the bar quoted Bukowski as saying he drank there "when the apartment was too quiet." The bartenders will tell you both stories if you ask, and they will tell you in the same neutral tone, neither confirming nor denying. This is the bar's gift to its mythology.

Thirty-five dollars per person, three rounds.

Plan for thirty to forty dollars per person for a two-hour visit. Three Coors Banquets at five, two well bourbon shots at four, one Negroni at twelve if you do the upgrade, twenty percent tip. A pair of friends drinks for sixty to seventy-five dollars total. A four-top: a hundred and twenty.

Cards are accepted. Cash is preferred for the well-bourbon orders. Two dollars per drink on the bar is the local norm. The tip pool includes the Pantages-side door staff who manage the post-theatre crowd.

The Pantages crew, the Bukowski pilgrims, the Hollywood working class.

Frolic Room draws three populations. The first is the Pantages Theatre staff and post-show crew: stage hands, bar staff, the occasional touring musical cast member. The second is the Bukowski pilgrim contingent, often German or French literary tourists, occasionally East Coast academics writing dissertations. The third is the Hollywood Boulevard working crowd: souvenir shop staff who have been in the Boulevard for decades, plus a small contingent of LA city employees from the nearby Hollywood Police Station.

You will not find a Beverly Hills crowd here. The Frolic Room's economic identity has remained Boulevard working-class by deliberate refusal to pivot to tourist pricing. The neon sign is the bar's invitation to anyone who can read it.

How not to be the worst person at Frolic Room.

• Do not photograph the Hirschfeld mural with flash. The 1949 paint is fragile. Use ambient light only.
• Do not ask the bartenders to confirm the Black Dahlia story. They will not, no matter how long you stay.
• Do not ask which booth Bukowski drank at. The answer is "all of them at one time or another" and the conversation will end.
• Do not bring a stag party. The bar will pour but the booth row will resent your group.
• Do not request a cocktail with three or more ingredients beyond the Negroni. The bartenders will pour but they will not enjoy it.
• Do not, ever, take a photograph of the neon sign from inside the bar. The bar will ask you to step outside.
• Do not refer to the bar as "the Frolic" or "Frolic's." It is Frolic Room. Always.

Musso & Frank, Frolic Room, Boardners.

The classic Hollywood Boulevard dive walk: dinner at Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard at 7pm, the 1919 institution serving martinis and lamb chops. Walk three blocks east to Frolic Room at 9pm for two Coors and a Bukowski. End at Boardners on Cherokee Avenue at 11pm for one more, the 1942 dive bar that completes the Hollywood trinity.

For more bars in the area, see our Los Angeles city guide, the Hollywood cocktail bars, and the hidden gems list.

Yes. The most Hollywood dive bar that exists.