Why The Daily Pint matters.
The Daily Pint is a storied neighborhood pub where Pico's residential Westside character meets an English public-house tradition, a room built around serious drinking culture and the deliberately unvarnished social intimacy of a Santa Monica local.
Set along Pico Boulevard near Twenty-Third Street and just south of Virginia Avenue, the pub occupies a low commercial strip between Santa Monica College, residential blocks and the east-west corridor leading toward the Pacific. The interior compresses around a long wooden bar beneath densely arranged bottles, beer signage and decades of accumulated pub decoration. Pool tables and shuffleboard extend the room beyond the drinking counter, giving the narrow property a second social zone organized around games and groups. A large King Charles III mural added during the latest renovation gives the exterior a conspicuous British marker against Pico Boulevard's otherwise modest storefront rhythm. The result is a compact neighborhood pub whose worn-in proportions, recreation areas and bottle-lined bar preserve the informal character expected of a drinking room shaped over decades.
What defines The Daily Pint.
The Daily Pint is best known for Phil McGovern turning a rough biker bar into a nationally noticed destination for craft beer and whisky during a thirty-five-year ownership run that began in 1987. McGovern arrived in the United States from England as a hairdresser, established a Beverly Hills salon called British Hairways and pursued a longstanding ambition to own a pub when the Pico Boulevard property became available. He drew its name from a lyric in Wings' “Band on the Run,” connecting the new business to British popular culture without constructing a conventional themed pub around it. Beer eventually became the institution's defining specialty, with McGovern cultivating relationships with American craft producers during a period when that movement remained far smaller than its later Los Angeles footprint. By 2008, Friday cask nights were drawing enthusiasts for unpasteurized, naturally carbonated ales from breweries including Firestone Walker, Stone Brewing and Craftsman, and demand prompted plans to expand cask service beyond the weekly ritual. McGovern also manipulated individual firkins himself, producing variations such as Stone Vanilla Bean Porter and cask ales conditioned with fresh hops or vanilla beans. The bar celebrated twenty-five years under his ownership in 2012 with rare releases from Stone, Russian River, Lost Abbey and Firestone Walker, including Pliny the Elder and special anniversary beer. A major institutional change arrived in June 2022 when George Hemingway purchased the pub from McGovern after more than three decades under its defining proprietor. Hemingway brought an unusual background spanning law, restaurant ownership and professional football administration; from 2006 through 2019 he had owned Budapest Honvéd Football Club in Hungary. He closed the property for extensive renovation before reopening it in March 2023, retaining The Daily Pint's drinking-focused character as a new ownership era began.
More than four hundred whiskies now turn the back bar into the clearest expression of The Daily Pint's contemporary specialization, spanning Islay peat, Scotch from other producing regions, bourbon, rye and bottles sourced beyond the principal Scottish and American traditions. Flights make that depth comparative, allowing distillery character, grain composition, maturation and regional peat influence to register across smaller pours without requiring the collection to function merely as visual abundance. Beer operates on a faster cycle through twenty-five rotating taps, moving between Southern California breweries and international producers as kegs change through the year. Bottled selections extend that rotation into styles and producers unsuited to permanent draft placement, preserving breadth without fixing the program to a static tap list. The absence of a conventional restaurant kitchen keeps the operation unusually concentrated on those two drinks programs, placing selection, turnover and bartender guidance at the center of the visit. The Daily Pint divides its contemporary drinking culture between a deep whisky library designed for deliberate comparison and a draft system designed for continual change, sustaining two different forms of connoisseurship inside the same neighborhood room.
How The Daily Pint fits.
The Daily Pint works as the anchor for a Pico-area outing connecting a burial ground reaching into Santa Monica's Californio history, a Spanish Colonial Revival playhouse created through a private civic bequest and a surviving beach cottage rescued from demolition through one of the city's most persistent preservation campaigns.
Begin at Woodlawn Cemetery, whose twenty-six acres trace their origins to land once belonging to Arcadia Bandini de Stearns Baker, the Californio landowner closely associated with Santa Monica's early development. The property was known during the 1870s as Ballona Township Cemetery through its location within Rancho La Ballona. Bandini de Stearns Baker deeded the site to her nephew Juan Carrillo in 1884, and Carrillo transferred it to the city. Its burial landscape subsequently accumulated generations of civic leaders, artists and residents, creating a record of the population that developed Santa Monica beyond its original resort economy. Continue to Miles Memorial Playhouse, commissioned through a $25,000 bequest from civic leader J. Euclid Miles in memory of his daughter Mary. Architect John Byers designed the 1929 building in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, using white stucco, red tile and wrought iron within what became Reed Park. The surrounding land had an earlier recreational history that included California's first polo game during the 1880s and Southern California's first golf game in 1897. Heavy damage during the 1994 Northridge earthquake led to a major restoration, preserving the theater as a public performance venue after its structure had been compromised. Conclude at Preservation Resource Center at the Shotgun House, the last intact example of its residential type in Santa Monica. Built in 1897 as Ocean Park rapidly developed around tourism and rail transportation, the three-room board-and-batten cottage originally stood near the Santa Fe depot and remained residential property until 1996. Demolition threatened it around the turn of the century, and partial destruction had already begun in 2002 when preservationists secured an emergency intervention. The house subsequently endured storage at Santa Monica Airport, another relocation to a municipal yard and a third move in 2014 before the Santa Monica Conservancy rehabilitated it. Its 2016 reopening as a preservation center completed an extraordinary conversion from inexpensive nineteenth-century vacation housing into an award-winning piece of surviving urban history. The progression moves from land carrying Santa Monica's Californio and civic history through a philanthropically endowed theater and culminates in an ordinary nineteenth-century cottage whose survival demonstrates how the city's preservation movement expanded the definition of architecture worth saving.
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