Polo Lounge

The Beverly Hills Hotel was there first, in 1912, before the city of Beverly Hills existed. In 1941 a Bank of America vice president, Hernando Courtright, bought it with three friends, and on July 11 of that year he opened the Polo Lounge, named for the players who came in to toast their wins after matches in the bean fields. A photograph of two regulars, Will Rogers and Darryl F. Zanuck, playing polo still hangs behind the bar.

Every booth has a past. Marilyn Monroe asked for table 6, a private booth facing the patio and the Brazilian pepper tree, and drank Dom Pérignon there. Sinatra had table 2. Elizabeth Taylor had table 8. Marlene Dietrich helped end the rule against women in trousers. The room has played itself in The Way We Were, Shampoo, American Gigolo and Beverly Hills Cop II. Pepe De Anda, who was turned away in shorts in 1985 and now runs the place, calls it Hollywood's commissary.

The room has played itself in The Way We Were, Shampoo, American Gigolo and Beverly Hills Cop II.

The dish is the McCarthy salad, named for a polo-playing lawyer, Neil McCarthy, and tossed at the table: iceberg and romaine, chicken, beets, egg, aged Cheddar, bacon, tomato and avocado, all finely diced. They sell nearly six hundred a week. There is a wagyu burger, steak tartare and tortilla soup, more than 250 wines, and a pianist every night.

Lunch on the patio is the classic order; breakfast is the quiet one, with the apple pancakes people have asked for over the years. Why it impresses: 'The Polo Lounge cannot be touched,' De Anda says, and the regulars make sure of it.

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