Musso & Frank Grill opened on Hollywood Boulevard in 1919, which is to say: the oldest restaurant in Hollywood is older than every operating film studio. Charlie Chaplin was a regular. Faulkner wrote screenplays in the back booths. The martinis they pour today — ice-cold, gin or vodka, lemon twist, three olives — are made the same way they were a hundred years ago, in glasses that would look familiar to anyone who walked in the door in 1925.
What's changed in those hundred years is everything around them. Hollywood's cocktail history is, more accurately, the history of how a single neighborhood drank through some of the strangest economic conditions an American place has ever experienced. Worth knowing if you live here. Worth knowing if you visit.
Prohibition: 1920–1933
The Volstead Act took effect in January 1920, eight months after Musso & Frank opened. Within a year, every legal distillery in California had closed, every legal saloon had been shuttered, and Hollywood — like every American city — went underground. Speakeasies operated behind unmarked doors. Hotels and restaurants poured cocktails out of teacups when the right customers came in. The Hollywood film industry, which was just beginning to consolidate around studios in the 1920s, drank as much as ever; it just drank illegally.
The supply chain for that era is fascinating to read about now. Most of the gin came from bathtub operations, hidden basements in Echo Park and Boyle Heights. Bourbon came in from Canada, smuggled by water down the coast. Tequila came across from Tijuana in trunks. The cocktails of Prohibition were strong on aromatics — lots of citrus, mint, sugar — because the spirits underneath were rough enough to need the cover.
The studio years: 1933–1975
Repeal arrived in December 1933. Hollywood's drinking became legal again overnight, but the distillery infrastructure had been wiped out and the regulatory environment that followed didn't favor small producers — the licensing required to start a distillery was prohibitive, and the city zoning that emerged in the postwar years didn't permit it. The neighborhood went a hundred years without a working distillery operating within its borders. Every drop of every spirit poured at every Hollywood bar in those decades was made somewhere else.
That didn't stop the cocktails. The studio years produced some of the most cinematic drinking in American history. The Brown Derby on Wilshire was where everyone deal-made over Cobb salads and gimlets. The Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel was where every studio executive's third cocktail of the day quietly happened. Musso & Frank held its corner of Hollywood Boulevard. The Roosevelt Hotel's pool bar served the late-night crowd.
The dive years: 1975–2010
By the late 1970s, the studio era was ending and Hollywood Boulevard was visibly declining. The neighborhood became dirtier, rougher, less safe. The cocktail bars that survived were either icons protected by their history (Musso & Frank, the Frolic Room next to the Pantages) or dives that catered to the working-class population that still lived in the surrounding blocks. There was no craft cocktail movement here. The Polo Lounge kept its altitude; everywhere else was getting cheaper drinks for fewer dollars.
The Frolic Room — a tiny neon-lit dive next door to the Pantages Theatre — is the bar that most defines this era. Bukowski drank there. So did half the working actors of the 1980s. It hasn't changed since. You should go.
The craft revival: 2010–present
Around 2010, two things happened. The first was a long, slow reinvestment in Hollywood as a neighborhood — hotels rebuilt, the Walk of Fame cleaned up, restaurants opening on Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevards. The second was the national craft cocktail movement reaching Hollywood specifically: speakeasy-style bars opened behind unmarked doors (No Vacancy, Black Rabbit Rose), the Roosevelt rebuilt the Tropicana pool bar, and a wave of new cocktail bars between Sunset and Melrose started taking the craft seriously.
What was still missing, even with all of that revival, was a working distillery. Every bottle behind every Hollywood bar was made somewhere else — Kentucky for bourbon, Britain for gin, Russia or Poland for vodka, Mexico for tequila. The neighborhood had every other piece of cocktail infrastructure except the actual production.
Hollywood Distillery, 2025
We opened the front door of Hollywood Distillery in 2025 — the first working distillery inside Hollywood since Prohibition emptied them all out a hundred years earlier. We make four spirits: Oasis Vodka (from California dates), Nopalera Gin (built on prickly pear), and our two whiskeys named after the original water channel that fed early Los Angeles, Zanja-Madre Bourbon and Rye.
We don't claim to have invented anything. The infrastructure of Hollywood drinking has been here longer than we have, and Musso & Frank will be open after we're gone. What we have done is close a gap in the neighborhood that's been open for a hundred years. The spirits in the cocktails are now made on the same blocks where the cocktails get poured.
If you want to taste them where they're made, our tour runs Thursday through Sunday. Book here.