The photo above is of the Tail o’ the Cock at 44 S. La Cienega Boulevard, aka “Restaurant Row.”  There was another at 12950 Ventura Boulevard — both popular dinner joints famous for their America menus (steak, prime rib, etc.) and bar scene.  The Tail o’ the Cock claimed to be the first place in Los Angeles to serve Margaritas and it may well have been, I don’t know.

As one might gather from the name, the big selling point at Tail o’ the Cock wasn’t the food so much as the cocktails.  It was a popular place for people to meet for drinks, especially late in the afternoon.  An awful lot of Hollywood deals were consummated there over martinis.  It was where a voice actress named June Foray met with two animation producers — Jay Ward and Bill Scott — and they told her they wanted her to play a new character named Rocky the Flying Squirrel.  And there were probably less important roles cast there involving big Academy Award productions.

I ate once at the one on Ventura.  I recall the food being satisfactory but not much more.  I recall the room being somewhat dark and depressing.  I recall the service being quite friendly and efficient.  It was the kind of place where the servers and the bartenders had been there for a decade or more and had no intention of going anywhere else.  Then the two places closed down, one after the other.

Owner-founder Sheldon A. (Mac) McHenry sold the one on La Cienega in 1982 and it closed in 1985.  There’s an office building there now though it does have an Indian restaurant on the ground floor.

The one in the Valley closed a few days after New Year’s, 1987.  It was razed and a shopping mall was built in its place.  A lot of people still remember the two restaurants fondly.

The legendary dining place of the stars was over at the corner of Beverly Boulevard and Doheny in a building that is now a Bristol Farms market.  Perhaps, once upon a time, the food was the star attraction but by the time I began going there from time to time in the eighties, the star attraction was the star attraction…being able to say, “Gregory Peck was dining right across the room.”  My own most memorable experience there (recounted here) was a meal with Jimmy Stewart.  I also lunched there the last day it was open and Nancy Reagan was in the next booth.

For this, one paid about twice the price of similar food almost anywhere else.  I never found the meals worth the price and the service, if you weren’t a regular or famous, could be downright curt.  I observed the striking contrast when I dined there with Mr. Stewart as opposed to someone who wasn’t famous.  I didn’t expect to be treated as courteously when not with Mr. Stewart as with, but the difference was greater than it had to be.  The Stewart-less time, we were seated at a table the size of a Cheerios box and the waiter had the attitude of, “Why do I have to wait on you?” with the “you” dripping in dismissal.  It must not have been typical of the hospitality there or the place would have closed long before it did.

When it did finally shut down, there were many “end of an era” articles and tributes, all recounting the glory days when you might see Bogart pop in for a bowl of chili.  No doubt the fact that it ceased to be “The Place Where the Stars Eat” contributed to its demise but I also think the price/value ratio and catering to the famous had an awful lot to do with it.  If you wanted to overpay for London Broil, there were better places to do that. Especially if they didn’t know who you were.

A Yellow Pages ad

Wan-Q was a terrific Chinese restaurant located on Pico Boulevard, just east of Robertson, in the building that now houses another terrific Chinese restaurant called Fu’s Palace.  Unlike Wan-Q, Fu’s Palace is not a dark place full of tropical decor and little streams and waterfalls that run through the room.  I took some of my first dates to Wan-Q because it seemed to be that kind of place, but its main clientele was local Jewish families.

If you were Jewish in the sixties in Los Angeles, it seemed almost mandatory that your family have a favorite Chinese restaurant.  In that area, loyalties were divided between Wan-Q and a place a few blocks east on Pico named Kowloon, which is also now long gone.  There were other Chinese eateries along that stretch of Pico but somehow, even local newspaper reporters sensed the great Wan-Q/Kowloon rivalry and wrote of it.  We were Wan-Q people but once, just to be fair-minded, we dined at Kowloon and confirmed our hunch that it was inferior.

The waiters at Wan-Q were great and they really did fit the Great Chinese Waiter Stereotype of all looking alike…but you could tell them apart by the loud Hawaiian-style shirts they wore.  There was one who thought the funniest thing in the world was to ask, when a family ordered something with pork in it, “Are you Joosh?”  That was how he pronounced “Jewish.”

Wan-Q was the first place I ever had Chinese Food and to this day, my concept of the right way to prepare certain dishes is rooted in how they were prepared there.  As I said, I took dates there.  One time, I took a lady named Karen to Wan-Q on our way down to the Music Center downtown to see Art Carney star in a production of Prisoner of Second Avenue.  For some reason, we drastically over-ordered.  Karen and I stuffed ourselves to capacity and there was still enough food on our table to feed a family of four.  The waiter offered to box it all up but we decided it wouldn’t keep in the car ’til after the play.  We were sitting there, feeling it was a shame to toss out all that grub when I noticed my parents walking in with my Aunt Dot.

They were seated on the other side of the restaurant and didn’t see us, which was fine with me.  My folks and Aunt would thought it was “cute” to see me there with my date…and if you’re 18 and out on a date, the last thing you want is to be cute the way you’re cute to your parents.  So we figured out how we could get out of Wan-Q without being spotted but before we left, I told the waiter, “Box all this food up and after we’re gone, give it to the people at that table and ask them to take it home for Mark.”  When I got home that night, my mother laughed and said, “If you’re hungry, I could heat up some of your dinner for you!”

It was a sad day when Wan-Q went out of business, not only for my family and for the proprietors of the restaurant but also for whoever owned that building.  It proceeded to house a veritable United Nations of different failed restaurants (Mexican, Polynesian, Jamaican, etc.) before finally, after a decade or so, reverting to its birthright as a Chinese eatery.  I used to drive by and marvel at how each new tenant adapted some of the exterior decor of the previous resident.  The odd roof that’s there now and the split telephone poles nailed to the sides of the building are, I believe, leftovers from when it was a Caribbean-themed eatery called the Sugar Shack.  They didn’t make a lot of sense then, either.

Click above to see this a little bigger

The Dog Houses comprised a chain of very small restaurants around L.A., often on a piece of land that also held a large car wash.  I’m going to guess that was the idea.  Someone said, “Hey, let’s design a little restaurant that can fit in a spot that doesn’t seem big enough for a restaurant and where people have to wait around for their car to be washed.”  And then someone else said, “Uh, like a hot dog stand?”  And the first person said, “Kind of…but let’s make it a little more upscale so we’ll get the business of folks who think they’re too good to eat at a hot dog stand.”

At least, that seemed to be the premise, though I don’t think the one in the above photo was near a car wash.  It did however display uncommon courage by daring to sell hot dogs around the corner from Pink’s.  As you can see, a Dog House was a small building that vaguely resembled a dog house…and I vaguely recall some had stools that looked like hydrants.  You could dine inside at the counter or outside in a small porch area with tables.  Either one was cramped but inside, it was worse.

Outside, they often had waitresses and menus, and the selection was obviously limited by the size of their tiny kitchens.  Basically, it was burgers, dogs and a few sandwiches and salads, and I think some of them also served breakfast.  The food was not wonderful but I think it was a case of the cute decor making you expect something better than your basic hot dog/burger stand.

Scot’s was a small chain of McDonald’s knock-offs and we used to go to the one located on the Southwest corner of Pico Boulevard and Westwood — land that now contains a Barnes & Noble.  Their mascot, who I believe only existed as one piece of line art, was a sexy lady wearing kilts and doing a dance.  They had a huge drawing of her towering over the main building.

One suspects the lady and the chain’s name was because someone thought, “Hmm…maybe people go to McDonald’s because they think it’s Scottish.”  Or perhaps the thought process was that people weren’t that familiar yet with McDonald’s — this was before that company’s big advertising blitz — and that they’d go to Scot’s, thinking it was the place they had in mind.  Either way, there was nothing else at Scot’s that had anything to do with Scotland unless it was that the food was cheap and there’s a stereotype of Scottish folks as excessively frugal.

The menu was pretty much what McDonald’s then had plus a few extra items such as pizza.  When they finally closed down, the structure at Pico and Westwood went through a year or three of name and ownership changes.  For a while, it was Pride’s, then something else, then something else.  They finally cleared the land and built a Lone Ranger Restaurant there.  It didn’t last long, either.