What’s New is Old Again

By Julie Jaskol | October 3, 2026 | Photography by Christopher Gonzalez

Bobby Green, the co-owner and creative director of the 1933 Group, doesn’t know what’s harder, historic preservation or running a restaurant. “Both are horrendous,” he said with a laugh. “You’d have to be an absolute masochist to do either one.”

And yet for nearly three decades, he and the 1933 Group have done both, restoring and reviving some of Los Angeles’ most beloved and imperiled bars and restaurants and creating some new watering holes that feel like old favorites.

It began with the Bigfoot Lodge in Atwater in 1999. A fantasy of a north woods hunting lodge, full of taxidermy and brown liquor, it was an original creation. So was La Cuevita in Highland Park, a Mexican grotto featuring mezcal; Oldfield’s Liquor Room in Culver City, hearkening back to a pre-Prohibition saloon; and several others that evoked various periods of history with era-appropriate cocktails.

But then things got real.

In 2010, the 1933 Group took on The Idle Hour, a 1941example of programmatic architecture, in which buildings are shaped like food, animals, or everyday objects to serve as enormous advertisements for what is inside. The Idle Hour in North Hollywood was shaped like a whisky barrel to attract the attention of passing motorists to its bar. It served as a tavern and café, then a dinner theater, until 1984, when it closed, standing empty for more than 25 years.

In some ways, restoring an existing historic landmark was easier than creating the historic-feeling environments he had been undertaking until then. “For the other projects, I had to come up with a design and concept from scratch,” Green said. “With the Idle Hour it was a relief. I knew what this place had to look like.”

He thrived under the challenges and constraints of historic preservation.

“If you are a designer and your work is in Architectural Digest magazine, preservation is going to be nothing but a hindrance to you,” he said. “But if you’re a designer like me who loves a vintage aesthetic, you welcome it. It’s easier because it becomes a playbook, an instruction manual. I don’t have to make that aesthetic decision; it’s been made for me.”

Despite overseeing 12 bars and restaurants, Green considers himself more of a historic preservationist than a restaurateur. “I focus on the history of the building, the history of the business, and the design and restoration,” he says.

Adrian Scott Fine, president and CEO of the Los Angeles Conservancy, said that’s exactly why Green and the 1933 Group are so successful at what they do. It’s not just a commitment to historic accuracy, but a deep love for the stories each restaurant tells.

“You go into one of their restaurants and you want to know more,” he said. “They really embrace the story and amplify it in a way that celebrates their roots, that makes each place just a little bit more so.”

They may be a little spiffed up and elevated, Fine said, “but the restaurants are still rooted in the authenticity of the place and the story of what it was.”

Which includes food.

“We were just bar people. We’re about cocktails,” Green said. “It was actually preservation that forced us to be food people. Idle Hour was a bar with food, so I guess we’ll have to learn about food now.”

The same was true with bowling, when the 1933 Group took on its next historic preservation project. The Highland Park Bowl, apparently the oldest bowling alley west of the Mississippi River, opened during Prohibition. It managed to thrive thanks to an obliging doctor upstairs who wrote prescriptions for medicinal whisky that could be filled at the “pharmacy” below. In 1966 it became Mr. T’s Bowl, in honor of its new owner Joseph Theresa, then a punk rock venue beginning in the 1990s. It closed in 2014 and the 1933 Group stepped in.

The building was in bad shape. But it yielded delightful surprises, as 1933 Group tore away awkward alterations to reveal original bowling lanes and ball-return machinery, a 1930s mural, and a dramatic, arching bow-truss ceiling and skylights.

“It’s amazing what was hiding behind the remodels over the years,” Green said—he has traced the trends of restaurant and bar design in LA since the 20th century. “If you could suddenly find yourself in LA in the mid-1920s, everything had skylights, and it was bright and airy. Then around mid-century you go through a dark time, with dark vinyl booths, no windows, low ceilings. That’s why you get all these dive bars that are dark, dark holes. If you start peeling back the fake paneling and knock out the drop ceilings, you find casement windows and skylights totally intact, just covered with drywall.”

A lot of that had to do with new technology at the time. “Those drop ceilings were somewhat necessary for 1950s-60s air conditioning, so the cool air stays down near people,” Green explained. “The windows weren’t double-paned and were fighting your AC, so you just covered them up.”

His next historic preservation project was especially close to his heart. “The Formosa, God, I used to get served there when I was 19,” he said. “First place that made me want to get into the bar biz.”

Opened in 1939 on Santa Monica Boulevard at Formosa Avenue, surrounded by Hollywood studios, the Formosa Café was frequented by stars and gangsters alike. Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Bugsy Siegel, Mickey Cohen and others downed stiff drinks and ate chow mein amid kitschy Chinese-themed décor and head shots of Hollywood stars on the walls.

In 1991, it was threatened with demolition for a shopping center. Community outcry prevented its destruction, but the mall rose up around it. Then in 2015, it was stripped of its kitsch by new owners and redecorated in tasteful gray, generating outraged backlash. It closed in 2016. Once again, the 1933 Group stepped in.

Restoring the Formosa presented a new challenge. “Highland Park Bowl and Idle Hour are examples of places that had been closed for so long, no one knew what they looked like,” Green said. “It was easy to take it back to its grandest incarnation; people didn’t have memories anyway. But we had to restore Formosa to a version people remembered.”

That meant the kitschy décor and black-and-white headshots are back, as is a restored vintage Pacific Electric trolley car used as a dining room, which had been drywalled to blend into the rest of the building. The stiff drinks and Americanized Chinese food are back too, but elevated.

“No one really says ‘I liked the food and cocktails so much more in the 80s,’” Green said. “You do have to bring up standards of taste and quality of ingredients.”

Other things also have to change to appeal to contemporary diners and drinkers. “Glassware. Materials. Surfaces. Cleanliness. Terrazzo rather than linoleum,” Green said. “There are elements you do change, and a lot that the city forces you to change, like no more incandescent lighting, you gotta have LED.”

Other changes included acknowledging the cultural stereotypes that underlay the décor. Working with historians and the family of original chef and owner Lem Quon, the Formosa team created a new bar area with headshots, posters, and other ephemera that depict the influence of Chinese Americans in Hollywood history.

Tail o’ the Pup is another restaurant that evokes strong feelings from Angelenos and visitors who remember eating there. “It had to go on a sidewalk, not in a mall or food court,” Green said, when he talks about relocating the iconic hot dog stand that had been languishing in a warehouse for years. A 1946 example of programmatic architecture, shaped like the hotdogs it sells, Tail o’ the Pup now perches on Santa Monica Boulevard near LaCienega, where it also cleverly hides the speakeasy-type entrance to the Lucky Tiki Bar upstairs, another 1933 Group original design, with flaming cocktails and a bamboo patio.

Green sees his job as helping people connect with previous generations. “When you live in a city of constant change you don’t have a sense of foundation or history. I honestly think you can trace back mental illnesses or anxiety to living in a city that’s constantly changing,” he said.

“That’s why places like Canter’s and Musso & Frank’s are so beloved,” he said, speaking of two of LA’s still-operating historic restaurants. “Whatever we can save and keep around for future generations, it’s a triumph.”

Fine agrees. “These places help connect us, they ground us in our history and our experiences,” he said. “Especially restaurants. We grow up going to them with our families. Food is comfort, and so are these places.”

While Fine is grateful that the 1933 Group has managed to recreate some of what Los Angeles has lost, he and the Conservancy are trying hard to keep legacy businesses from going under in the first place. In 2019, the Conservancy launched the Legacy Business Initiative, to identify the longtime businesses that gave LA its character, understand the pressures they were facing, and offer support to keep them alive.

Taking their cue from San Francisco, they developed a toolkit in English, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese that included information on succession planning, ecommerce, digital marketing, accessing capital, and zoning and permitting, among other issues. “Often these are small mom-and-pop places, where an owner wants to retire and doesn’t know how to pass along the business,” he said. Sometimes they need updated equipment. “These are places we love but are incredibly vulnerable.”

They found this was one preservation issue that everyone agreed on. The City of Los Angeles and Wells Fargo offered funding to create a registry, grant program, and incentives. One business used a grant to buy a stove, another to expand. “People said ‘Thank you for seeing us and acknowledging us,’” Fine said.

And if he had one piece of advice for people who hate to see their childhood restaurants disappear, it would be to patronize them. “We’ve become complacent. We forget to go to these places that we love,” he said. “Don’t take them for granted.”