Oldfield’s Liquor Room: A Liquor Room for Barney Oldfield

Venice Boulevard west of Overland is Palms and Culver in working clothes: low buildings, evening traffic, people who have finished a Westside day and want one more room before home. Oldfield’s Liquor Room opened here in 2011 in the shell of the old Saints & Sinners, rebuilt by Bobby Green as a tribute to Barney Oldfield, the early-century racing champion who was Green’s lifelong hero. Green designs bars the way some men restore cars. He races vintage machines at Bonneville. This parlor is that same instinct applied to drink: a 1930s liquor room that looks as if it were assembled from black-and-white photographs and then put back to work. The guests are professionals from Culver and the studios, couples who wanted a last cocktail without crossing into a hotel, friends who still believe a bar can be a destination and a neighborhood at once. They dress with ordinary care. They stay.

The interior is the reason the diamond moved here. White subway tile, a massive wooden bar that could have moonlighted in a Midwestern saloon, an antique lever register, mismatched period details, bartenders in bow ties, a small patio for the milder nights. It is intimate without being secretive. There is no password. There is no dining room pretending the drinks are a prelude. The house pours from five until late, often until two, which is the schedule of a liquor room that intends to be used. Happy hour early in the evening is the civil way in. The rest of the night belongs to people who came for the stick.

The list honors the man on the wall. Oldfield’s Hemingway is the signature: rye in place of rum, maraschino, cane, fresh juices—a riff with a spine. The Blitzen Benz and the Blonde Comet carry race-day names. The Outlaw and the Amoxycillin keep the house in the classic American grammar of whiskey, rum, citrus, and bitters. Fresh juice, house infusions, shrubs, and Culver City market fruit are the kitchen the bar does not need. Panini appear at happy hour for guests who want ballast. The pour is the plot. Ask for an Old Fashioned or a Manhattan if you want to see whether the tile and the wood were earned.

What you gain here, instead of a parlor attached to a restaurant, or a hotel whisky cart with a corporate list, is a Westside liquor room with a founder’s obsession and a single address. Parking on Venice is simpler than downtown improvisation. Late hours mean the night does not have to end when the dinner seats turn. Comfort is traditional in the useful sense: a kept bar, a correct cocktail, a stool or a small table, a room that still expects adults to sit and talk.

The graceful limits are the limits of a neighborhood parlor that became a destination. The room is small and will fill. It is handsome rather than palatial; Chestnut Club still holds the Chesterfield luxury, Wellesbourne the manor quiet. The 1933 Group operates other Los Angeles rooms, though this one is not a national replica. Guests who wanted Japanese whisky theater will stay at Wolf & Crane. Guests who wanted a finished 1930s liquor room on the Westside, open late and built by a man who still cares about machines and history, will be glad of the drive down Venice.

Oldfield’s Liquor Room is a Citywide Spotlight Nightcap Diamond Destination because Evangeline could not remain in a set that excludes restaurant-adjacent parlors, and because this house can: independently imagined on this block, unique to Los Angeles, luxurious in tile and wood and late light, and serious about the American cocktail as a last good thing in a long day. Choosing it is choosing craft, a founder’s private mythology, and the comfort of a room that still looks like a liquor parlor and behaves like one.