Why The Fountain Bar matters.
The Fountain Bar is an alfresco cocktail bar where Beverly Grove's retail and cultural corridor meets an unusually exposed drinking room positioned directly beside The Grove's choreographed water display and beneath a mature coral tree.
Set within The Grove near its central lawn and just east of the Original Farmers Market, the bar occupies an open-air position between the property's pedestrian streets, cinema complex and landscaped gathering areas. A coral tree rising sixty feet above the seating provides the principal overhead element, replacing the conventional enclosed ceiling with a broad natural canopy. Bar stools and small tables wrap tightly around the compact service counter, keeping most seats visually connected to the surrounding pedestrian circulation. The adjoining fountain places moving water, changing light and music immediately beyond the drinking area, giving the room an unusually permeable boundary with its surroundings. The result is a tiny outdoor bar whose architecture consists less of enclosure than of tree canopy, fountain edge and direct participation in the public realm surrounding it.
What defines The Fountain Bar.
The Fountain Bar is best known for bringing chefs Bruce and Eric Bromberg's Blue Ribbon restaurant lineage into a dedicated open-air bar conceived as part of the brothers' first major California operation. Food had shaped the Brombergs' lives from childhood, including summers in Venasque in southern France and a household where their grandmother cooked and baked and their father maintained a deep interest in French cuisine. Eric attended Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and Bruce followed after completing anthropology studies at the University of Colorado Boulder; both subsequently worked in ambitious professional kitchens before questioning the exclusivity and formality surrounding fine dining. They converted that training into Blue Ribbon Brasserie on Sullivan Street in New York in 1992, opening a restaurant built around eclectic cooking and service extending until four in the morning. Its name carried a deliberate double meaning: a blue ribbon represented first prize in American culture and translated the cordon bleu associated with their French culinary education. The original operation became an after-hours gathering place for cooks and restaurant workers, and Blue Ribbon subsequently expanded from its New York base into sushi, fried chicken and other restaurant formats across several American cities. Los Angeles became a consequential chapter in 2017 when the Brombergs and longtime partner and sushi chef Toshi Ueki brought Blue Ribbon Sushi Bar & Grill to The Grove as the group's first California restaurant. The Fountain Bar emerged alongside that expansion as a separate Blue Ribbon operation devoted to cocktails and compact plates, and by December 2017 it was already producing limited drinks tied to the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. More than three decades after the Brombergs opened their first Blue Ribbon, the Los Angeles bar remains part of a restaurant group whose original fifteen-person staff produced twelve long-term contributors and partners who continued playing important roles in the company.
Build Your Own Gin & Tonic turns customization into the clearest drinking signature, allowing the spirit-and-tonic structure to change through the guest's selected additions rather than locking the drink into one house combination. The idea has historical precedent in the bar's early cocktail program: its 2017 Dark Side paired Plymouth Navy Strength Gin with Fever-Tree Indian Tonic and dried red chiles that colored the drink as they steeped, and The Force combined gin with Mediterranean tonic before cucumber juice supplied a vivid green finish. Fountain Spritz subsequently moved toward vodka, Aperol, elderflower liqueur, fresh lemon and cava, using sparkling wine and citrus to lighten the bittersweet aperitif base. Strawberry Margarita took a different route by infusing tequila with bell pepper, inserting a vegetal note beneath the fruit and agave. The food follows the same preference for recognizable forms with concentrated accents: truffle fries layer Parmesan over the potatoes, crispy rice provides a fried foundation for sushi-bar flavors and spicy chicken wings carry Blue Ribbon Chicken Spice with honey. The Fountain Burger anchors those smaller plates with a full sandwich, giving the abbreviated menu enough weight to function beyond cocktails without turning the compact bar into a conventional dining room.
How The Fountain Bar fits.
The Fountain Bar works as the anchor for a Museum Row outing connecting an automobile collection founded by a publishing magnate, a craft institution born from an artist's gallery-and-restaurant experiment and Los Angeles County's independent art museum.
Begin at Petersen Automotive Museum, founded on June 11, 1994 by publishing entrepreneur Robert E. Petersen and his wife Margie. Petersen had built an automotive-media empire around titles including Hot Rod and Motor Trend, making the museum an extension of a career spent interpreting American car culture through publishing. Its home began as a 1962 department store designed by Welton Becket & Associates for Japanese retailer Seibu, later became Ohrbach's and was adapted for automotive display after Robert Petersen selected the largely windowless structure. Kohn Pedersen Fox radically recast the exterior in 2015 during a $90 million renovation, wrapping Becket's rectilinear building in sweeping stainless-steel ribbons. Twenty-five rotating exhibitions now distribute more than 150 vehicles through the interior. Continue to Craft Contemporary, whose institutional history began when painter Edith Robinson Wyle opened The Egg and the Eye on November 1, 1965. Wyle combined a first-floor gallery devoted to craft and folk art with a mezzanine restaurant serving more than fifty varieties of omelets, turning the establishment's name into a literal pairing of visual art and food. Gilbert Stanley Underwood had designed its three-story neo-Georgian building in 1930, decades before Wyle transformed it into an arts destination. The inaugural exhibition assembled Native Alaskan sculpture, J. B. Blunk wood sculpture and work by Beatrice Wood and Harrison Mcintosh. Wyle secured nonprofit status in 1973 under the Craft & Folk Art Museum name, and the institution later adopted Craft Contemporary to emphasize making as both process and object. Conclude at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, whose origins reach the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art established in Exposition Park in 1910. Art separated into an independent institution in 1961 as civic leaders pursued a dedicated museum capable of accommodating a rapidly expanding collection. William L. Pereira & Associates designed the Wilshire Boulevard campus that opened in 1965 with the Ahmanson Building, Hammer Building and 600-seat Bing Theater, creating the largest new American art museum built in a quarter century. Expansion brought the Anderson Building in 1986 and Bruce Goff's Pavilion for Japanese Art in 1988 before the museum acquired the neighboring May Company building in 1994. The progression moves from automotive publishing converted into collection-building through Edith Wyle's fusion of craft, exhibition and food and culminates in a county collection separated into an independent art institution that helped establish Wilshire Boulevard as Los Angeles' principal museum corridor.
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