Why Musso & Frank Grill matters.
Musso & Frank Grill is a storied American restaurant where Hollywood's entertainment mythology meets four generations of family stewardship, an extraordinarily intact early-twentieth-century dining room and a century of writers, actors and filmmakers treating the restaurant as an unofficial clubhouse.
Set along Hollywood Boulevard near North Cherokee Avenue and just steps from the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the restaurant occupies the boulevard's historic entertainment district between Highland Avenue, Cahuenga Boulevard and the movie palaces and commercial buildings extending west toward the Hollywood Roosevelt. Red leather booths line dark wood partitions beneath cream walls, brass fixtures and coat hooks, preserving a dining-room composition largely untouched by successive restaurant-design fashions. A long mahogany bar organizes the newer room, its red-jacketed bartenders working behind ranks of bottles beneath restrained overhead lighting. White tablecloths, wooden chairs and counter seating maintain distinct dining scales across interconnected rooms. The result is a restaurant whose red booths, mahogany bar, brass detailing and remarkably durable dining-room arrangement preserve the physical intimacy of old Hollywood within the commercial center of contemporary Hollywood Boulevard.
What defines Musso & Frank Grill.
Musso & Frank Grill is best known for surviving more than a century as Hollywood's oldest restaurant through an unusual combination of family continuity, literary history and direct connection with the motion-picture industry. Frank Toulet opened Frank's Café at 6669 Hollywood Boulevard on September 27, 1919, later partnering with Oregon restaurateur Joseph Musso and hiring French chef Jean Rue, who developed a menu whose core endured for decades. John Mosso and Joseph Carissimi purchased the business in 1927, beginning the ownership lineage that continues through Mosso's descendants. The restaurant expanded into its present adjoining address, and an exclusive Back Room opened in 1934 as Hollywood's studio system was reaching extraordinary scale. Screenwriters working under studio contracts gravitated there from nearby offices, with Dashiell Hammett, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley and other writers becoming associated with a loose literary circle later characterized as Hollywood's answer to the Algonquin Round Table. Charlie Chaplin belonged to the early film-industry clientele, followed across later decades by Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Steve McQueen and generations of directors, actors and producers. The restaurant also contained Hollywood's first pay telephone, giving studio figures a place to conduct business between meals and drinks during an era before portable communications detached dealmaking from physical gathering places. Rue remained associated with Musso's cooking for 53 years, giving the restaurant exceptional continuity between its founding period and later Hollywood. John Mosso's descendants ultimately consolidated ownership after the Carissimi family sold its interest in 2009, preserving a family connection extending back to the 1927 acquisition. More than a century after Toulet's opening, the same family lineage continues operating Musso & Frank from Hollywood Boulevard.
Grenadine of Beef remains one of the clearest expressions of the restaurant's old-school French-American cooking, cutting filet mignon into medallions and finishing the beef with béarnaise. Welsh Rarebit carries another surviving historical preparation through melted cheese and ale over toast, a dish increasingly uncommon in contemporary American restaurants. Flannel Cakes preserve an exceptionally thin griddled pancake associated with breakfasts once eaten there by Greta Garbo and Gary Cooper, retaining a preparation that reaches deep into the restaurant's early decades. Roast Prime Rib arrives from the restaurant's traditional meat program alongside dishes such as grilled lamb kidneys, calf's liver and steaks, keeping cuts that disappeared from many mainstream American dining rooms in active circulation. Martinis follow the same commitment to continuity: the drink arrives exceptionally cold in a small glass with the remaining portion held in a sidecar over ice, preserving temperature through the second pour. These preparations make culinary continuity tangible through techniques, cuts and service rituals that have survived long enough to become living remnants of the American grill-room tradition.
How Musso & Frank Grill fits.
Musso & Frank Grill works as the anchor for a Hollywood outing connecting an architectural fantasy built around Depression-era international retail, the hotel where the Academy Awards began and a Gothic Revival church whose tower became a highly visible symbol of Hollywood's response to the AIDS crisis.
Begin at Crossroads of the World, completed in 1936 as one of the country's earliest outdoor shopping centers. Robert V. Derrah arranged the complex around a Streamline Moderne building shaped like an ocean liner, then lined its pedestrian passage with Cape Cod, French Revival, Italian Renaissance Revival, Moorish and Spanish Colonial Revival architecture intended to suggest an international marketplace. The project was promoted with the theatricality of a Hollywood production, and its opening received press treatment comparable to a movie premiere. Retail gradually gave way to offices during the 1940s and 1950s, bringing tenants including the Screen Actors Guild, Standard Oil and American Airlines before later generations of screenwriters, casting agencies, music producers and costume designers occupied the complex. Continue to The Hollywood Roosevelt, opened in 1927 after a film-industry investment group including Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Louis B. Mayer and Sid Grauman financed the twelve-story Spanish Colonial Revival hotel. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences maintained offices on its mezzanine, then staged the inaugural Academy Awards in the Blossom Room on May 16, 1929. Douglas Fairbanks presided over a fifteen-minute presentation before 270 guests, with Wings receiving the award now recognized as Best Picture. Another artistic chapter arrived in 1987 when David Hockney painted the Tropicana Pool floor, placing one of Los Angeles' most distinctive works by the British artist inside the historic hotel. Conclude at Hollywood United Methodist Church, whose congregation began organizing in 1909 and eventually commissioned ecclesiastical architect Thomas P. Barber for its present English Gothic Revival sanctuary. The church's later history became closely connected with the AIDS crisis after congregant Lyle Loder disclosed that he was living with AIDS in 1986 and died the following year. Thirty-four additional members of the church community subsequently died from complications of the disease. Congregants attached two enormous red ribbons to the tower for World AIDS Day in 1993, replacing them with permanent versions in 1996 and turning Barber's Gothic tower into a public memorial visible across Hollywood. The progression moves from Derrah's architectural interpretation of international commerce through the hotel where Hollywood institutionalized its annual film honors and culminates in a congregation that transformed its architecture into a public response to one of the industry community's most devastating twentieth-century crises.
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