by Alex Wells
Uncle Ollie’s Penthouse sounds like a place you’d be molested at the age of fourteen but it looks like the bar you’d have built if you’d been allowed to design one when you were fourteen: free video games, comfy Chuck-E-Cheese bright red booths, posters and neon all over the walls, a stripper pole, tattooed bartenders, a drop-ceiling of skateboard decks and a full-size fiberglass lion you can sit on. There’s also a horse, which is clearly the horse that used to be at late and much-lamented downtime dive Bar 107. In fact, a lot of this stuff used to be at Bar 107, which makes Uncle Ollie’s kind of its spiritual and more-stylized successor—Skyfall to its Casino Royale.
Or one can hope. When we went, the music was terrible—silk shirt 90’s R&B played at a volume that might’ve been ok if anyone was using the dancefloor but as-deployed only served to guarantee no honey you might be trying to sex up could hear your pick-up lines. (While we’re on it—what is it with LA’s consistent musical vibe-dyphoria? Why does this city so consistently force bartenders in Hatebreed t-shirts to serve drinks to fratty club music?) It’s always a crapshoot whether immaculate decor will translate into a watering hole with genuine vibes or just become so expensive to maintain that the whole thing collapses into late-nights-and weekends only, ruining any dive potential.
So what’s Ollies’ long-term plan to stay cheap and cheerful? First off: location—it’s just above the excellent and too-often neglected Escondite, in that Skid Row limbo between more pedestrian-friendly bar-hopping in the Historic Core and the Arts District. Secondly: no glassware or time spent washing it. Uncle Ollie charges a five-dollar cover and issues you a red plastic kegger cup which you are instructed to keep an eye on lest you be charged a second time—an interesting and eco-unfriendly hack that I’m surprised more bars haven’t used and whose cleverness is augmented by having the door-girl executing it be both attractive and not yet giving jaded-and-pissed-off-at-anyone-coming-in-for-even-existing vibes. As with all things Ollie’s, this is quite promising and we have no idea if it’s sustainable.
Image: Staff