The Abbey, at least part of it.
The Abbey is coming to get you. It doesn't matter if you're gay or straight, young or old, hungry or thirsty, famous or infamous; The Abbey has something to offer, as long as you don't mind standing.

I remember when The Abbey was across the street, at the place that is now Bossa Nova. It was a little coffeehouse, tucked just far enough off the main drag to be inconvenient, with an ominous, full-sized cross against the back wall. At least I think the cross was there. This was fifteen years ago. Memories fade, especially ones blanketed by alcohol. This would've been in my amateur drinking days, my kamikaze-on-the-rocks days. I would only go to the original Abbey to sober up before driving home, and only then--these were also my broke days--if my endless search for free parking hours earlier had spiraled me out to the far western edge of Weho. Back then, coffeehouses were anomalies with a touch of the Bohemian, not the home bases of ubiquitous familiarity that they are today. And The Abbey was second-tier anyway. All the action was down in the real heart of West Hollywood, the intersection of San Vicente and Santa Monica. Six Gallery was the coffee shop of the moment. And Rage, a few doors down, ruled the bar scene.

A broad generalization that carried more than a little truth was that if you were underage, or were with friends who were, you went to the Six Gallery. Those who were over 21 went to Rage, or at least started the night there. Rage was famous. It was the one gay bar all out-of-towners knew by name.

How things have changed. The Abbey crossed the street. Free parking in West Hollywood became as hard to find as a Catholic Church (there is one). And that sleepy tail end of Robertson Boulevard where it now lives is the main drag. A traffic bottleneck is de rigueur in front of The Abbey and the businesses that survive on its spillover. Rage is a shell of its former self. And Six Gallery? Closed, years ago. Courtesy of The Abbey.

When The Abbey moved, it started to grow. It grew up. It grew out. It is still growing. I am part of a generation who grew up with it. My taste for sugary cocktails like the Kamikaze went the way of my Ace of Base CD. I'm a Scotch man now. (Although I can still slam the occasional vodka-Red Bull to jump-start an evening.)

The Abbey's location change was a savvy move for owner David Cooley, and it started to pay dividends immediately. The old place was cramped and uncomfortable. No wonder I never like eating at Bossa Nova. The new digs were spacious with a large, inviting patio where you could chat with friends and people-watch. As The Abbey became more popular, the people-watching got better. The adjoining statuary store, Terra Cotta, shared the patio during daylight hours. Stone Romanesque busts and chiseled likenesses of Saint Francis interspersed among The Abbey's tables added character, instead of being in the way. But by night, the patio was strictly Abbey territory.

ABOVE: The Abbey, circa 1994.
BELOW: The author, around the same time.


It was a great place to congregate, to start or end a pub-crawl. It was the staging area for bigger adventures and the green room of the club scene. It was also a great place to sober up. The coffee has always been good, and the bakery treats recall the years before 'carb' was a dirty word. I once threw up not so much "at" The Abbey, but all over it--inside and out. My roommate promptly covered his backseat with free copies of Frontiers magazine and drove me home.

There was a time, in the mid-90s, when I could walk into The Abbey and know twenty, even thirty people by name. It was good cheap fun and everyone knew it. There was no hesitation in going out by yourself, because a hilariously random group of friends would be waiting for you at The Abbey.

Now, I'm lucky if I know a soul. The Abbey is too big, too powerful. It's a brand name now, and if Mr. Cooley has his way, one that will be cropping up in other cities. One couple I spoke to on a recent Friday night had driven in--from Victorville--just to hit The Abbey. They'd heard about it on cable television's depot of faggotry, Logo. And while The Abbey manages to be many things to many people, cheap is no longer one of them. Drinks are at London or New York prices. There are no drink specials. There is no happy hour. There doesn't have to be. On a weekend, there's a line to get inside that stretches down Robertson Boulevard. But that line could just as easily be there on a Thursday.

If there is a single defining moment that marks The Abbey's adulthood, it is undisputedly the day it got its liquor license. That is when everything changed. The first expansion went out the back. Before that, The Abbey had a large room in the rear that seemed to lack purpose. The cross stood there for a while, then disappeared. Now the only cross associated with The Abbey is the one on its logo. The pool table era failed to inspire. And filling the room with second-hand sofas led to little more than a not-so-secret place to make-out, or a refuge from the city's annual ten days of rain.

But the liquor license gave Mr. Cooley a mission. The first bar sprung up. The lightly colored back room was redesigned with dark woods and dim lighting. The sliver of open space behind the building became the now famous bungalows (Or are they cabanas? In truth, the cozy nests are somewhere in between the two). The little structures, however, are exclusive. Unless you're famous. Or willing to submit to the greatest rip-off ever foisted on a clueless public: bottle service. Anyone for a $300 bottle of Stoli? It comes with an endless supply of lemons!

A second bar, this one on the patio, followed some time later. The walk to get a drink became even shorter. The line of people waiting at the coffee counter got shorter too, because with the liquor license came the laws that went with it. The under 21 crowd was welcome...during the daytime only. It was as though Fagin had sent his band of sticky-fingered urchins out to pick some pockets and bolted the door behind them forever. An entire generation of gay kids must've wandered aimlessly through the city's streets until the invention of the Iced Blended brought them to the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf like moths to a flame.



The young crowd had nowhere to go.

True Abbey story: having just knocked back my third berry martini, I struck up a conversation with a man and woman at the next table, one boozy Sunday afternoon a few years ago. They didn't seem like a couple, more like a gay guy and his best gal-pal. The girl mentioned that she liked my jeans and that she wished she could try them on. I told her she could. And what possessed me to say the next thing I'll never know. "If I can try on yours."

She paused and said, "Okay." We got up and marched toward the bathrooms. On the way she offered, "I should tell you, I'm not wearing any underwear."

"Then I guess we're using the same stall," I said. We blew past the attendant in the men's room and piled into a stall. She was telling the truth about the underwear, which meant, at least from a hygienic standpoint, cramming my business into the tight jeans of a smaller woman might not have been the brightest idea. But at this point, the three martinis had become four.

Now in each other's jeans, we headed back to our table. It was my first and only time in women's trousers. Too loose in a few places and too tight in many more. Way too tight. But the loss of circulation kept my mind from being gay-bar paranoid about the four-inch floods and top button that wouldn't close.

It was then she announced, "My husband will love this!" I froze. It was too late to turn back. We were at the table presented to my friends and her husband for their amusement. But I was just waiting for the punch. "What do you think, honey?" she asked her husband.

He looked at me, then at her, then back at me..."Cool, man." Of course everything was cool. This was The Abbey. The girl and I went back to the men's room and swapped into our own clothes, again in the same stall, only this time, a little more sheepishly.

The Abbey's ascent to the top was rapid and uncontested. Now with bars inside and out, it was ready to dominate West Hollywood. Only one obstacle remained: Having to share space with Terra Cotta probably felt like going on the hottest date of your life and having to bring your kid brother along.

I don't know the specifics of the deal. I don't know if Terra Cotta simply went under and Cooley snapped it up, or if there were more underhanded matters at work. There is always the smell of decaying flesh whenever I cut through the park next door to The Abbey. I'm sure it's coincidence.

However it happened, The Abbey took over Terra Cotta and the result was more space than it knew what to do with. So, it built a third bar and then a fourth one a while later. Try to think of another establishment--club, restaurant, concert hall, you name it---that has four bars in Los Angeles. Let's see, there's the Staples Center (if you count the American Airlines VIP lounge) and Dodger Stadium (if you include the Stadium Club and the moveable beer carts). So relative to its size against those behemoths, The Abbey stands alone. And the bars at The Abbey aren't small. There's enough combined counter space to challenge all of Silverlake to a game of beer pong.

The Abbey, from space.

As with any self-respecting bar, the opportunity to sell booze brought with it the chance to assert an identity with the creation of signature cocktails. The Abbey staked its claim with various vodka martinis. There is nothing revolutionary about an apple martini these days, but seven or eight years ago the drink was positively cutting edge. The first one I ever had was at The Abbey. The apple martini branched into caramel apple, red apple and Washington apple, while the berry family has spawned such current Abbey offerings as chocolate raspberry, raspberry lemon drop and wild berry. There are no fewer than five banana variations on the menu as well.

The rest of the martini list reads like a dessert menu: white chocolate, Key lime pie, Butterfinger, dulce de leche and Creamsicle, the last of which is impossible to order with a straight face. But there is nothing straight about this flouncy collection of cocktails. Nor are they quick to prepare, which isn't such a bad thing. At $12 apiece, it's nice to see a little workmanship. All the garnishes are thick chunks of fruit that take more than a single bite to finish. The martinis are made with Effen vodka, a company that cut a deal with the devil Abbey to be their principal provider. Should you wish a different vodka in your drink, say Stolichnaya, Absolut or even lowly Smirnoff, The Abbey charges you an additional $2 for hurting Effen's feelings.

I've been hitting The Abbey a lot lately in preparation for this piece. It was starting to break me. Oddly, the beers are reasonably priced (for West Hollywood) at around $6. On a recent Friday night, our bartender was noticeably annoyed when my friend asked what beers they had. This friend was (quite understandably) expecting to see either a beer list on the wall by the martini, mojito and caipirinhas varietals, or a line-up display of the bottles as is done in most bars. Finding none of these, he asked the bartender.

"What? Beers?...They're right over there," he scoffed, motioning to the end of the bar, as if it were obvious. It should be pointed out that A) this friend is visiting from Europe and therefore not an Abbey regular and B) the bartender is a douchebag. What he was motioning to was a tiny fridge at the far end of the bar and a few inches from the ground. The window of this little beer prison was so frosted over that what it contained was anybody's guess. After we pointed out said fact, the bartender grudgingly rattled off the beer list as best as he could remember.

The Abbey's beer fridge.

Beer, real beer that is not the gutless water that Bud Light or Coors Light (Nazi piss) call beer, has been anathema in abs-obsessed West Hollywood for years. Might as well step up to the bar and order a Big Mac. But at The Abbey, the sense is more that the annoyance comes from cutting into the profit margin.

Greed could be the undoing of The Abbey. There's a can't-miss sign that now hangs by the bar register that states, and I'm paraphrasing, that any customer neglecting to close out his or her credit card tab at the end of the night will be charged an 18% fuck-you fee by the management. Twelve dollar drinks don't bring in young people, and young people are what fuel the L.A. bar scene, gay or straight. Perhaps Mr. Cooley doesn't care. Older, more established folks have more money. I'm in my mid-thirties. I went to The Abbey last weekend and felt like the youngest person in the room. The Abbey grew up years ago and is now in danger of growing old.

Lazy afternoon at The Abbey.

Has The Abbey reached middle age or just its mid-life crisis? Club music pounds from its speakers all day and night. Plasma TV screens flash meaningless images (along with some advertising) to a balding, graying clientele. But on any given night, or afternoon for that matter, the crowd at The Abbey can look like an open casting call for One Tree Hill. The place is bulletproof, Teflon-coated, and amazingly resilient. Like the giant room that used to be Terra Cotta, The Abbey can shift and morph into whatever is needed at the moment--dance floor, private area, sit-down restaurant or story time by the fireplace.

The irony of The Abbey is also its greatest accomplishment. It reigns as the undisputed epicenter of gay life in West Hollywood, and by extension, all of Los Angeles, while managing to be the acceptable, cool and non-threatening alternative for straight people to have a drink in Gaytown. Ask your straight friends to join you at the Mother Lode? Fuck no. Trunks? Too scary. Mickey's? Too many strippers. But The Abbey? Oh, I've heard that place is cool.

Jennifer Love Hewitt "hosted" an Oscar party at The Abbey. Openly gay celebrities, all six of them, feel they can relax there. Mercifully, the paparazzi leave the place alone. It's the one gay establishment recently-out basketballer John Ameachi admitted to visiting during his playing days. It's an interesting fact not because it is scandalous, but because it is decidedly not. Seeing a famous actor--gay, straight or miscellaneous--at The Abbey is hardly news at all, because The Abbey is for everyone. Now, you run into that same actor at Cuffs in Silverlake? That's a different story.

Here's a question: What is the only bar in West Hollywood where you can stand at the bar and light up? That's right, The Abbey is smoker-friendly. Either of the two outdoor bars allows smoking, yet the patio is so large that not once have I been annoyed by someone's smoke. And I hate smoke. It's just another way The Abbey has figured out how to be all things to all people. The tiny smokers' patio at Rage looks like a depressing holding cage where gay men go to die.

Several afternoons in a row at The Abbey I saw tables of moms with little kids and strollers. There was a group of suits having a business lunch. In the shade sat pretentious guy with laptop, sipping a latte. It's the same scene you might find at any outdoor patio in Brentwood, Sherman Oaks or Larchmont Village, except the music is considerably more obnoxious. If there's a reason The Abbey chooses to play bumping house music at 11 A.M. it's beyond me. Do they expect people to throw down right then and there? Forget the chopped salad. Let's dance!

Here we stumble upon another key to The Abbey's conquering of West Hollywood. It kills every other bar in town by the fact that it is even open at that hour. The sun never sets on The Abbey and rarely does the moon. Technically, The Abbey is a restaurant, at least in the daytime, which is why folks of all ages are welcome. And by staying true to its coffeehouse roots, its being open for breakfast doesn't even seem strange. Only between the hours of 2 A.M. and 8 A.M. is The Abbey not able to take your money. But if there's a way around that one, I'm sure Mr. Cooley is working on it.

It's the gay bar you can bring your mom to. In fact many gay kids, eager to show their concerned mothers that being gay doesn't mean re-enacting scenes from Cruising, have done just that. Other bars and clubs might be hotter on a given night of the week, but The Abbey has a decent-to-packed crowd seven nights a week.

Sundays are clearly a goldmine. Gays have already elevated brunching to an art form, so the early crowd fills the tables and gets the Mimosas flowing. But Sunday afternoons are a popular time for socializing and alcohol, so as the brunchers are paying their bills, the languid afternoon crowd begins to take over the tables. Late afternoons are a great time at The Abbey, providing the managers are willing to unfurl the umbrellas, which often times they inexplicably are not. The light is good. The liquor is flowing. The prospect of an easy night on the sofa lies ahead. These are the moments where Los Angeles is truly glorious.

And as the sun is going down, the club next door, Here, is gearing up for its biggest night of the week. The Abbey, of course, is happy to take the run-off.

Having brunch, or any proper meal at The Abbey, however, is a bit like going to Matsuhisa for the décor--it's just not what the place is known for. I've forced myself to eat at The Abbey several times in the last few months, and every time I've been amazed at its persistent ability to screw up even the simplest of dishes. The breakfast potatoes disappoint stunningly while the chicken Caesar salad is on par with what you might get at an airport. The menu bills itself as "modern American comfort food", and thankfully, there's nothing that strives to be too ambitious. Fine dining, this is not. The Muy Grande Weho burrito, while hilarious to say, is both misconceived and poorly executed.

If the food seems like an afterthought, no wonder. The Abbey clings to its restaurant appellation the way Scientology holds onto "church"--it's the secret of its success. Without serving food--not bags of chips or beernuts, but proper sit-down fare with china and flatware--The Abbey is just a bar. And that means different laws, stricter regulations, and remaining closed until after noon or later. All of which are serious threats to the bottom line.

It's easy to bash on The Abbey now; it's always easy to snipe at the one on top. But it's even easier to love it for what it is, for what it's become, and for what it was. When I travel to other cities and fancy a night on the town, I'll often ask the concierge for a suggestion of where to go. I don't dance around the issue anymore. I don't get cute or coy. "What do you have that's like The Abbey?"

Amazingly, I never have to elaborate. The meek little man behind the counter always knows exactly what I'm talking about. Invariably, he'll sigh, and with sadness in his voice say, "Nothing. But I'll do the best I can..."

The Abbey: located in West Hollywood at the north end of Robertson Blvd. atop a giant pile of money. Shitty food. Good cocktails, but expensive, except during Pride Weekend when they're really expensive.