Search dinner near me along the eastern end of the Sunset Strip and you will find a building that has held a restaurant almost continuously since the middle of the last century. Horses occupies it now, and the arrangement is the old one: a bar at the front where people stand and eat, and a dining room behind it where people sit. Most write-ups cover the back. The front is where the evening actually is.
Bar-first restaurants are the easiest good tables in any city and almost nobody uses them that way. Ask Karpo which rooms near you serve properly at the bar so you can skip the reservation entirely.
The building has a long memory
This stretch of Los Angeles has a small number of restaurant addresses that have never stopped being restaurants, changing names and owners while the layout, the bar and sometimes the fittings survive. That continuity matters more than it sounds: rooms that were designed for eating and drinking decades ago tend to be better proportioned for it than new-build spaces, because they were built when a bar was expected to be the centre of a room rather than an afterthought at one end.
What you get in practice is a front bar with depth — space to stand two-deep, a proper rail, a surface wide enough to eat from — and a back room with the dimensions of a mid-century dining room rather than a converted retail unit. Neither is a design choice made in the last five years.
It also means the crowd is mixed in a way that new restaurants struggle to achieve. Rooms with long histories accumulate regulars who have been coming through several changes of ownership, and that is a substantially more interesting bar to stand in than one filled entirely with people who read the same article.
How to use the bar
The practical advice is simple and reliable across this whole category of restaurant. Arrive without a booking, arrive early rather than at peak, and go as one or two people. Bar seats are almost never reservable, they turn over faster than tables, and the full menu is usually available at them.
Order fewer things than you would at a table, and order the ones designed to be eaten standing or perched — something raw or cold, something fried, bread. The heavy centre-of-the-menu dishes are the ones that genuinely need a table and cutlery, and they are also the ones you are least likely to miss.
This is also, for what it is worth, the best way to eat alone in an expensive restaurant. A bar seat removes the social awkwardness of a solo table entirely, and it is the seat where staff have time to talk to you.
The Sunset Strip, in daylight and after
The Strip has been the centre of Los Angeles nightlife in several distinct eras — a mob-era nightclub district, then the epicentre of the rock scene in the sixties and again in the eighties — and each layer has left buildings behind. Most of the famous venues are still standing and still operating, which makes this one of the few stretches of the city where its own history is legible on the street.
It is also, unusually for Los Angeles, walkable for a stretch. The blocks between the major intersections are continuous with frontages the whole way, and an evening can plausibly move between two or three places on foot, which is close to impossible in most of the city.
The view is the underrated part. The Strip runs along a ridge and the side streets drop away sharply to the south, so the city is laid out below you from a surprising number of ordinary vantage points. Walking half a block off the main road at night is worth doing for that alone, and it costs nothing except the two minutes it takes. Most people never leave the frontage and never see it, which is the usual pattern with views in this city.
Timing an evening
Early is a restaurant and late is a bar, and this building does both distinctly. A six-thirty arrival gets you a quiet room and easy seating; a ten o'clock arrival gets you the version people describe. Choose deliberately rather than taking whatever the booking system offers.
Weeknights are considerably easier than weekends and the difference is more pronounced here than in most neighbourhoods, because the Strip pulls a citywide crowd on Friday and Saturday rather than a local one. A Tuesday here is a neighbourhood bar; a Saturday is a destination, with the queue and the door policy that implies at several of the surrounding venues.
Driving here and drinking is a bad combination for obvious reasons and a worse one because the roads off the Strip are steep, winding and poorly lit. A ride is the sensible plan. Please drink responsibly. Must be of legal drinking age.
Practical notes
Horses occupies a long-standing restaurant building on the eastern Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, with a proper front bar and a dining room behind it. Skip the reservation and eat at the bar — arrive early, go as one or two, and order cold, raw and fried dishes rather than the heavy centre of the menu. It is also the best solo dinner in the building. Come at six-thirty for a restaurant or ten for a bar; weeknights are much easier than weekends. Walk a block off the main road for the view south over the city, and take a ride rather than driving.
Tags: #dinnernearme #horses #sunsetstrip #losangeles #barfood #nightsout #westhollywood #laeats #larestaurants #cocktails #lafood #ladining #solodining #hollywood
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Ask Karpo first
The bar seat is frequently the best table in the house and never the one the booking system offers you. Ask Karpo which rooms near you serve the full menu at the bar, when those seats open up, and what to order once you are on one.
