Make California Post a Preferred Source Picture a bar that’s more like one long dining room table. If you’d prefer to retreat to a booth, good luck getting there without brushing past someone and being pulled into a conversation with people you’ve never met.
In a city as stratified and transient as Los Angeles, a neighborhood bar provides an essential social good — a place where we can be at home among strangers. Where we are welcome to take a seat no matter how long we’ve been away, and encounter someone whose life is nothing like our own.
I was in grad school for education in downtown Los Angeles when I found my place. One day my tired classmates and I walked past an equally tired sign on Eighth and Grand. A once-white plaque with peeling red lettering — “Hank’s Fine Dining & Spirits.”
Hank’s did not serve food. It did not even have a drink menu. For the remaining two years of our grad school experience, we would wonder where the fine dining was, or whether any object in that place could be described as fine.
Besides Nina the bartender, with whom each of us fell separately in love, for different reasons.
“What do you have?” my friend asked stupidly our first time there, looking around for the nonexistent menu.
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She was a pretty woman in her 40s with sinewy, tattooed forearms that flexed when she hoisted beer kegs. She ran the place like the formidable captain of a poorly behaved pirate ship, with a knack for knowing when to intervene and when to let us be.
She flirted with the chronically awkward guy in our group, though that was such a new experience he couldn’t recognize it as such.
We tried to convince him to write his number on a receipt while he protested in terror, and while he never did it, Nina of course heard us. Because Nina heard everything. After that, she flirted with him more. We all knew it was to gift him some confidence.
The thing that made Hank’s special was its layout. A long, narrow room, a single bar with about 3 feet of space between the stools and the wall. There were tables at the back, but no one sat there. It would have been like going to a house party and hiding in the closet.
With all of us huddled around the bar, it wasn’t immediately apparent who you had come with and who was a stranger. Boundaries were porous. It was normal for us to be deep in a conversation when some random person looked over and gave their 2 cents.
We were mostly sheltered kids, going to USC, and this place exposed us to a wider section of the city.
“I think I might be making a huge mistake,” I said about my degree to a grizzled old man who had been there since 11 a.m. He grunted and tipped perilously from his stool. Nina took his car keys and ordered him a pizza.
It’s one of the last memories I have of her, slapping a pizza down on the bar. Hank’s closed during the pandemic.
The news was wholly unsurprising, but still hit me like a wound opening up. I had wanted to go back to say hi to Nina and tell her I was finally a teacher. I hadn’t realized just how much.
If you think a bar is merely a place to drink, here is what you must understand. A bar carries the histories of everyone who has gone there. It connects you to a story larger than yourself.
Not only that, it connects you to your past. To call a place timeless is to say it both transcends time and marks it.
You walk in and see all at once who you are, who you could be, and who you used to be.
I wonder where Nina went. I’ve never seen her outside Hank’s and when I try to picture it, my imagination fails. It is easier to picture her disappearing like a ghost into the building’s very walls, entombed with the memories of my youth.
I hope she found another place like Hank’s. But I also know that there are fewer and fewer of them with each passing year.
What is the answer to this? Do we cry? Do we look backward? Age our already aging selves by telling others about the “good old days” while they politely wait for us to stop talking?
My imperfect solution is that if we cannot have Hank’s, we can try to make every place a little more like it.
Here is how: Stand at the bar instead of sitting at a table. Put down your phone. Turn to the person next to you.
Mary Dahm is a writer and medical technology publicist based in Los Angeles.
