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The Black Dahlia cocktail at the Biltmore Hotel's Gallery bar
Where: The Gallery Bar at the Biltmore Hotel - 506 S. Grand Ave., LA, 90071 213-624-1011
When: Last weekend
What: The Black Dahlia
The Gallery Bar and Cognac Room in the Millenium Biltmore Hotel is one of the best places to enjoy a cocktail in Los Angeles, but I won’t say it has the best beverages in the city, despite the fact that’s exactly what a 2007 Reader’s Poll in the Downtown News said. Drinks here cost $16 each, so it helps to have a partner to share the goods and split the price, cooties and social etiquette be damned.
The Biltmore opened in 1923 after eighteen months and $10 million dollars (back then dollars) of construction as a “symbol of Los Angeles’ success and ambition.” This was during our glory days of grand designs and palatial development downtown, from the Bradbury to the Million Dollar Theater.
The hotel’s guest registry is impressive: Senator John F. Kennedy used the Music Room (now the Lobby) as his Democratic campaign war room at the 1960 convention while LBJ operated out of the Emerald Room. The Beatles were flown to their penthouse suite via helicopter to evade fans downstairs during their first American tour in 1964. Ronald Reagan was feted a farewell lunch in 1981 before moving to the White House, and the Duke and Duchess of York were treated to a Royal Gala in 1988.
The Biltmore has served as a military R&R facility during World War II and the headquarters of the International Olympic Committee during the 1984 Summer Games. They hosted the 3rd Annual Academy Awards® and, in 1927, the Crystal Ballroom was the flashpoint where the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences was born. There’s a napkin in the hall with sketches for what became the Oscar® statuette.
But perhaps one of the most notorious notes in the hotel’s colorful past was that struggling actress Elizabeth Short, a.k.a. the Black Dahlia, was reportedly last seen alive in the hotel lobby in 1947. The Dahlia case is our city’s infamous unsolved murder, and I’ll spare you the gory details. But they are tragic. Now there’s a drink named after the sobriquet assigned to Ms. Short by reporters covering her death.
The Black Dahlia: Grey Goose Citron Vodka, Chambord, Kahlua, orange peel garnish
I felt a twinge of morbid guilt while drinking this massive martini. Would Elizabeth consider her untimely and unseemly butchering worth the admission to immortality? Does the El Coyote Mexican Café serve a “Sharon Tate” cocktail, or Barney’s Beanery shake up an ice cold “Pearl”? (the nickname for singer Janis Joplin, kids) Both establishments were also the last public places where famous women were spotted before their deaths, but perhaps some people would rather drink to the departed, not sip them.
The Biltmore has aged very gracefully into the 21st century (with a few facelifts), like Catherine Denueve or Meryl Streep. But her cocktails have gone the way of Elizabeth Taylor: unsubtly shocking. They’re elephantine and, sadly, inelegant. Besides the Dahlia, they have six versions of the Manhattan, also $16 each, also with enough fluid ounces to pacify the Lizard King. Their Grand Manhattan, fr’ instance, features a full-diameter orange slice clunking around the rim, giving the drink the appearance of a stripper in a life preserver.
These are anchor cocktails, designed to be nipped at over a few hours of live jazz (Friday and Saturday nights, check the schedule) and meditative reflection as you soak up the ghosts of the past.
This evening, however, I was on my way to the Cicada Club with friends. Tracie, our bartender, says others drop by the Gallery Bar on their way to the Cicada (she can tell by the fedoras). We chugged our poison like rock stars and ambled to the Lalique glass doors of the Oviatt Building before any alcohol effects reached us. But just barely.
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