The Spare Room

Hollywood's Cocktail Parlor, Reconsidered

There is a particular kind of bar that only makes sense inside a historic hotel: one where the building's own mythology does half the work, and the drinks program has to do the rest without leaning on it too heavily. The Spare Room is a bar in Los Angeles at 7000 Hollywood Blvd, inside the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, and its cocktails, bowling lanes, and board games make it a dependable late-night choice. The Roosevelt opened in 1927 and hosted the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. The Spare Room is the latest and most coherent chapter in the property's ongoing effort to mean something to Los Angeles's drinking culture rather than simply trade on address and nostalgia.

Walking into the space, the tonal shift from the Roosevelt's lobby is immediate. Where the hotel's public areas carry the visual weight of Old Hollywood, The Spare Room operates more like a private club that happens to be open to the public: lower ceilings, warmer light, a bar counter that demands you sit down and commit to the evening rather than pass through. Vintage bowling lanes run along one side of the room. Shelves of board games occupy corners. The effect is deliberate and has held up across multiple shifts in Los Angeles bar culture, which is not a small thing to say about a hotel bar in a city that treats novelty as a survival requirement.

How the Room Has Shifted

When The Spare Room opened, the dominant mode for ambitious hotel bars in Los Angeles was either the rooftop pool-deck model or the high-volume lounge that served cocktails as an afterthought to bottle service. The Spare Room positioned itself against both. Its format, centered on games, intimate seating, and a cocktail menu taken seriously as a program rather than a revenue line, was closer in spirit to what bars like Death & Co (Los Angeles) would later bring to the city: the idea that a drinks-led bar could hold its own as a destination without a kitchen carrying it.

That positioning has required periodic recalibration. Los Angeles's bar scene has matured considerably over the past decade. The city that once lagged behind New York, San Francisco, and Chicago in cocktail seriousness now has a deep roster of technically accomplished programs. ABV in San Francisco and Kumiko in Chicago represent the kind of deliberate, concept-driven bar that has become the new baseline for ambition in American cocktail culture. Locally, Bar Next Door and Standard Bar occupy adjacent parts of the Los Angeles market with their own distinct formats. The Spare Room has had to hold its position in that increasingly competitive field by doing what it has always done: making the room itself as much a reason to visit as any single drink on the menu.

The evolution here is less about dramatic reinvention and more about the quiet work of staying coherent while the surrounding scene changes shape. A bar that opened with a game-parlor concept risked becoming a gimmick once the novelty wore off. That it has not is partly a function of the drinks program keeping pace with the city's rising technical standards, and partly a function of the format being genuinely useful: the bowling lanes and board games give people a reason to stay for three hours rather than one, which changes the economics and the atmosphere of the room in ways that reward both the bar and the guest.

Where It Sits in the Los Angeles Bar Scene

Los Angeles bar culture has historically fragmented along neighborhood lines more sharply than most American cities. Silver Lake runs toward natural-wine-adjacent, low-intervention beverage programs. Downtown clusters its most ambitious cocktail bars near the Arts District. Hollywood, despite the address density, has always been a harder neighborhood for serious drinking: the tourist traffic, the club-adjacent venues, and the sheer volume of hotel bars competing for the same pool of visitors make it difficult for any single bar to build the kind of regular local following that sustains a cocktail program through trend cycles.

The Spare Room has managed this by functioning simultaneously as a hotel amenity and as a genuine bar destination, two things that are much harder to reconcile than they sound. Hotel bars that try to serve both masters usually end up serving neither well. The ones that succeed tend to do so by building a room with enough personality that locals treat it as theirs regardless of what hotel it sits inside. By that measure, The Spare Room has succeeded at something that consistently eludes its competitors on the same boulevard.

For context on how this compares across American cocktail markets, bars like Jewel of the South in New Orleans, Julep in Houston, and Superbueno in New York City each represent different approaches to the question of how a bar earns its identity beyond the novelty phase. Bar Leather Apron in Honolulu and The Parlour in Frankfurt extend that conversation internationally. The Spare Room's answer to the same question has been format consistency and a room that does not overstay its concept.

Planning Your Visit

The Spare Room is located inside the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel at 7000 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90028. Reservations are recommended. Dress code: smart casual. Expect about $45 per person.