The Writer's Room Lounge / Speakeasy

Hollywood, Los Angeles –

Formerly the back room of famed restaurant Musso & Frank, where early-century scribes like Hemingway and Fitzgerald sipped swill and poured literary gold into their suds-stained notebooks, The Writer’s Room may be that one Hollywood speakeasy with legit ties to the era it claims to represent.

Sherlockian scenesters know to duck off Hollywood’s bustle and make their way back to the hidden entrance in the alley between Las Palmas and Cherokee Avenue, which leads through a canopied garden dotted with small palms, high-backed couches, and hanging lanterns reminiscent of a corridor to some 18th-century Turkish bath.

But pre-war America is alive and kicking down the grand wooden staircase, which descends into a narrow interior adorned with distressed chandeliers and flanked by dim leather booths and a few scattered portraits of Andy Warhol and Ziggy Stardust.

The bar in the corner – helmed by seasoned mixologists – serves everything from absinthe to cranberry and vodka, and bottle service is available for artsy partiers who want to continue discussing Goethe and Faulkner around a sturdy fifth of Johnnie Walker.

Whether it’s a hip indie DJ or a sultry burlesque dancer tantalizing from her raised stage, entertainment is never lacking, and neither are the crowds of industry folks, actors, and savvy cool cats who pack the thousand-square-foot haunt faster than ol’ Ernest could lay waste to a mojito. The secret may be out at The Writer’s Room, but the golden age is definitely in.