Cole’s French Dip opened its doors in 1908, back when Los Angeles still smelled like horse sweat and the newspapers were full of train times and oil claims. The bar sat at the base of the Pacific Electric building, back when red cars ruled the city and the idea of “downtown nightlife” meant whiskey and card games, not rooftop DJs. Cole’s was the kind of place built to outlast fashion. And for more than a century, it did.
The booths were scarred from a hundred thousand elbows. The red leather cracked. The tile floors shifted under your feet. Light crept in through dusty transoms in the afternoon and faded by dinner, leaving the room in a kind of permanent dusk. Time moved differently inside. The modern world pressed its face against the window, but never made it through the door.
Regulars kept the place stitched together — cops off the day shift, bartenders from better-lit places, public defenders with ten-minute lunches, and pensioners with nowhere else to be. Tourists came for the sandwich, but the regulars came for something quieter: the way the bartender nodded when they walked in, the way the sandwich arrived without needing to be ordered. There were arguments and jokes and silences that didn’t need filling.
The French Dip was the headliner, and it earned it — slow-roasted beef on a crusty roll, au jus dark and rich, spicy house mustard that could make your eyes water. It wasn’t precious. No truffle oil, no aioli. Just meat, bread, juice, and the knowledge that you were eating something that tasted the same in 2024 as it did during the Eisenhower years.
Behind the swinging doors, The Varnish offered a different tempo. Dim lights, hushed voices, stirred-down rye drinks served with reverence. That was the cocktail crowd. But in the front, it was all boilermakers and highballs, beers in pint glasses — 19,000 gallons a year, easy. That’s a pint every 90 seconds, all year long. It added up.
This was also one of the many joints Charles Bukowski drank in.
Cole’s wasn’t pretty, and it didn’t care. The floors were warped. The bathrooms were suspect. The menus were laminated, because they’d seen things. A little blood, a little whiskey. The kind of place that didn’t blink when someone cried into their drink, or laughed too loud, or passed out at the bar. Life happened in public there, and nobody rushed you along.
People met their spouses at Cole’s. People got divorced at Cole’s. Fights broke out. Peace treaties were brokered. Old men told lies and young men believed them. There were ghosts in the walls — of waitresses who’d worked double shifts for thirty years, of bartenders who never called in sick, of lonely people who came in out of the rain and stayed longer than they meant to. You could feel them when the crowd thinned and the lights dimmed.
Now the lease is up. The building’s got newer ideas. The barstools will be auctioned off, the neon unplugged, the red booths carted away. The meat slicer, probably older than half the city’s skyline, will be cold for the first time in decades. And Los Angeles will lose something it didn’t know how to keep.
Because places like Cole’s don’t get made anymore. You can’t franchise soul. You can’t fake patina. You can’t order a century of stories off a menu. And when it’s gone, it’s gone. There’s no app for that.
The last day of service for the landmark restaurant, which claims to have invented the French dip, will be Aug. 2.
