The usual arrangement is one bar, one club. A branch finds a room, the room becomes theirs, and everyone else learns to come on a different day. It is a tidy system and it produces the best atmosphere in sport, but it also means a single bar can only ever serve one tribe. A neighbourhood bar on North Figueroa Street in Highland Park does something more unusual: it is the official home of three separate supporters organisations at once, across two sports and two continents.
Supporters clubs are the difference between a bar that shows your match and a bar where fifty people are waiting for it. Tell Karpo which club you follow and get the Los Angeles rooms that have an actual chapter attached, not just the right package.
Three clubs under one roof
The Greyhound Bar & Grill is the official home of the Los Angeles Tottenham Hotspur Supporters Club — which has the distinction of being the first English Premier League fan club in Southern California — alongside Penya Blaugrana LA, the local Barcelona supporters group, and Swoop City LA, the city's Philadelphia Eagles chapter. Three organised memberships, three entirely different calendars, one bar.
That combination is stranger and better than it first appears. It means the room is almost never dark for a reason: Spurs occupy the early mornings from August to May, Barcelona occupy a different set of early mornings on a Spanish schedule, and the Eagles occupy the Sunday afternoons in between. It also means the bar's whole competence is built around organised watch groups rather than incidental sports traffic, which is precisely the thing that cannot be faked.
Open for every Spurs game, whatever the hour
This is the commitment that separates a real supporters bar from a bar that likes football. Not open for the big ones, not open when the fixture is convenient — open for every single Spurs game regardless of what time it kicks off. On the Pacific coast that means a lot of doors unlocked at four and five in the morning for league fixtures nobody outside the club cares about, in November, in the rain, for thirty people.
If you are a Spurs supporter in Los Angeles that sentence is the only information you need and the rest of this is background. If you support something else, it is still a useful signal, because a bar willing to do that for one group is a bar that takes the others seriously too. Barcelona kickoffs land on a similar Pacific schedule and the penya operates on the same basis.
It is a neighbourhood bar first
Strip the supporters clubs away and what remains is a straightforward Highland Park bar and grill with a community reputation and a menu of burgers, wings, pizza and fish and chips. Six wings run around twelve to fourteen dollars, a pepperoni or white pizza is about eighteen fifty, and burger combinations sit in the high teens to low twenties. That pricing tells you what kind of room it is — not cheap, not precious, priced like somewhere people eat on a Wednesday rather than somewhere they visit.
The practical consequence is that a match here does not have the slightly hollow feeling of a bar that only exists for the fixture. You can eat properly, the bar top on a weekday afternoon is a genuinely good place to sit, and the people at the next stool may have no idea a match is on. For a lot of supporters that mix is preferable to a room where the only possible topic is the game, and it is the reason people keep the habit up across a whole season rather than burning out by Christmas.
Highland Park at five in the morning
North Figueroa runs through the middle of one of the most walkable parts of northeast Los Angeles, and the relevant fact for an early kickoff is that it is genuinely quiet at dawn. Street parking is free and immediate. The drive in from downtown, Pasadena, Eagle Rock or Glassell Park takes a fraction of its daytime length. And the Metro L Line runs through Highland Park with a station a short walk from this stretch, which is the responsible answer for a morning that begins with beer.
Afterwards, the same street is one of the better breakfast and coffee runs in the city, and it wakes up at exactly the hour an early match finishes. Walking out at seven thirty into a neighbourhood that is only just opening, with the whole day unspent, is the specific pleasure of this entire ridiculous habit. It is also the part that keeps people doing it for decades. Nobody sets six alarms a season for the football alone; they do it because a city at that hour belongs to about four hundred people, and for two hours you are one of them.
- Official home of the LA Tottenham Hotspur Supporters Club, Penya Blaugrana LA and Swoop City LA
- Open for every Spurs fixture regardless of kickoff time
- Full kitchen — wings, pizza, burgers and fish and chips, priced for regulars
- Metro L Line and free early street parking; North Figueroa for breakfast afterwards
Practical notes
The Greyhound Bar & Grill, 5570 North Figueroa Street, Highland Park, Los Angeles. Official home of the Los Angeles Tottenham Hotspur Supporters Club — the first English Premier League fan club in Southern California — as well as Penya Blaugrana LA for Barcelona and Swoop City LA for the Philadelphia Eagles. Open for every Spurs game whatever the kickoff time; confirm hours for other fixtures. Menu of burgers, wings, pizza and fish and chips, with six wings around twelve to fourteen dollars and pizzas around eighteen fifty. Free street parking early in the morning and a short walk from the Metro L Line.
Tags: #LosAngeles #HighlandPark #NELA #SoccerBar #Tottenham #Barcelona #SupportersClub #PremierLeague #LABars #WatchParty #Figueroa #NeighborhoodBar #ThingsToDoLA #Football
Please drink responsibly. Must be of legal drinking age.
All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Ask Karpo first
Want to know whether your club has an official Los Angeles chapter, where it meets, and whether the bar opens for a 4am kickoff? Ask Karpo for the supporters club nearest you, the room it uses, and what else is worth eating on that street before or after.
