The Last Dive Bar in America: Downtown Ralphs Grocery Bar
The Future of Drinking is Now!
For an inexplicable reason my editor was hounding me for an entire week to write an article about the bar in the Ralphs Supermarket in Downtown Los Angeles. It was all because we had made a joke about it when we had seen it while drunkenly shopping for wine there. By the end of the week on Sunday, however, the editor was on my neck and squeezing.
I tried to go on Saturday night, in fact I had called from an art opening and was told by someone at Ralphs that the bar was closing in an hour, at 10PM. They seemed surprised that I had even asked. They were open 11AM to 10:00PM, seven days a week, an early bar, not a night bar, despite selling alcohol in the grocery until 2AM. Good. I respect bars with daytime hours. Here and there I have been known to enjoy a daytime tipple. I made a mental note of it and decided to go to Ralphs Day Bar when it was open and to enjoy the rest of my evening.
On Sunday I had a few obligations and couldn’t make it over despite all of my best efforts. By Monday, which was my deadline, my editor who had never relented from his texting, finally exploded in fiery wrath — I was a good for nothing worm and would accomplish nothing in my life (unless I wrote this article on time). And he was probably right. But anyway he had proved his skill in the editor’s craft of cat-wrangling — I felt sincerely guilty. I pleaded to him that I felt like Odysseus, that I had been trying my absolute damndest to get there and simply could not, despite every effort, and begged for an extension. It was true, I had been trying and in fact, like Odysseus I had been out on the wine-dark party scene of Los Angeles all weekend, without stopping home for days. An extension was granted. After a meeting with a business partner in Silverlake, I climbed into my battered old Toyota Yaris and drove to Downtown Ralphs Grocery Store Day Bar.
As I said, I had been alternately partying and meeting with business associates all weekend, so I had not yet had an opportunity to shower as of my arrival in the Ralphs parking lot on Monday at 3:00PM. In the garage, I freshened up with a stick of Tom’s of Maine deodorant from my trunk. Parking at Ralphs was for only 90 minutes with validation and would be ten dollars, every fifteen minutes thereafter. A bit above my price range. I set a timer on my phone and realized as I stepped onto the elevator that this would not be a relaxed affair.
Upon exiting the elevator I saw that the store was particularly quiet. I used my drinker’s intuition and immediately located the bar. It was over by the pre-made and bakery goods section.
I took a seat and the bartender explained that beer is sold and priced by the size of the glass here, and that there were two options: small or large.
It’s $3.95 for a 12oz glass and $4.95 for a 14oz glass. Why the 2oz difference? I couldn’t do the math on it but the more I reflected on it, the latter option (more beer) sure seemed like a good deal.
I saw from the wine menu (pictured above) that Ralphs Bar is somewhat disappointingly officially called the “Cork & Tap,” which must have been a nod to the fantasy role playing computer games Ralphs corporate henchmen play in their spare time. It was obvious anyway that they had never been to Los Angeles or a non-franchised bar establishment.
[Note: Despite the official name for the remainder of this article I will of course continue to refer to the bar only as “Downtown Ralphs Bar.” Later it was confirmed by other patrons that this is indeed the official-unofficial bar name. Even the corporate bartenders did not disagree with this sentiment.]
I knew what I was doing, so I first ordered a Guinness, as a kind of test, and it arrived in a stout Michelob Ultra glass. The bartender seemed to know how to pour Guinness which was a surprising plus. I watched and waited for my beer to settle until it was ready to drink. Meanwhile I surveyed my surroundings.
I saw that the customer next to me was eating an egg salad wheat-bread sandwich from a plastic container, which happened to not be from Ralphs (despite our being seated directly across from the pre-prepared sandwich isle), with a side of Ralphs-brand pre-prepared soup. He wore black basketball shorts and a plain dark grey t-shirt. He was showing the bartender YouTube rap music videos and the bartender in turn was showing this customer what seemed to be his favorite boxing match clips. At the opposite end of the bar, a couple of heavyset businessmen in shirtsleeves and ties sat speaking Armenian while sipping beer and eating sushi with chopsticks.
I sipped my beer and began to feel rather comfortable. Guinness is good. I enjoyed the cold glass of this dark beverage, with its frothy head. The place was relaxed and perfectly climate controlled. It was also nice to gaze at the passing stream of Monday shoppers. I felt like a little lad sitting in mommy’s shopping cart again. The bartender agreed that it was “kind of a quiet day.”
The man in the basketball shorts with the Ralphs soup was friendly and explained that I could get some of the pre-made Ralphs food and add it to my tab here. That sounded like a good idea, so I asked the bartender to pour a Ballast Point Grapefruit Sculpin, and then I wandered around the prepared food section of Ralphs for a few minutes, and finally settled on a classic seaside sushi combo. Right away I have to note that the food selection is excellent compared to most other bars, as it’s literally in the middle of a supermarket.
I carried my selection several steps back to the bar and ate it with my fingers because I couldn’t find chopsticks, nor did I care to ask for any.
One of the televisions was playing ESPN and the bartenders flipped the other one over to FX. The movie Pixels (2015) happened to be on and there was silent assent from all of the patrons. Adam Sandler, Josh Gad, and Peter Dinklage chased a giant Pac-Man as they piloted Mini-Coopers through New York City. Everyone at the bar was transfixed. But they were also laughing. I found I had a stupid grin on my face too. I didn’t know why. It was a Preston-Sturges Sullivan’s Travel’s (1941) watching-Mickey-Mouse-while-incarcerated-forever kind of moment of pure communal joy.
The female bartender wore thick black frames and a blue members only jacket in an East-LA-punk-meets-Rockabilly sort of way. The male bartender wore a black hat with red accents (Ralphs colors) and a pretty cool black Ralphs-logo embroidered polo. He added custom pins to the hat which was a nice touch.
My attention drifted and I stared blankly toward a woman on a cellphone with a baby strapped to her chest as she ordered a hefty “artisan” panini sandwich from the deli counter nearby. My neighbor in the basketball shorts then confided to me that, “It’s getting too chilly,” and he put a paper coaster over his beer glass, which I would guess was a Corona, by the color and clarity of the liquid. I assumed he wanted me to watch it for him. He had clearly been nursing it for some hours. As he was leaving a couple who he seemed to know arrived and they nodded to each other.
The man directly ordered a Ballast Point Grapefruit Sculpin for himself and another for his girlfriend. These were without a doubt Ralphs Bar regulars. He immediately plugged his phone into an outlet beneath the bar that I hadn’t known existed. Incredible convenience! You don’t see that sort of thing at an old fashioned wooden bar counter. He wore a big hoodie and a black-on-black Dodgers ball cap and was rather heavyset. Everyone was still watching Pixels and he and his girlfriend had no qualms about joining in.
After fifteen minutes, the man in basketball shorts was back, surprisingly without any jacket or longer trousers, despite his having complained of the cold. The heavyset man saw him and explained that he had gone with his friends and his girl a few nights ago to Akbar in Silver Lake. He right away detected that it was a gay bar, but reluctantly went inside. He complained of a gay man in a g-string doing the splits. “Oh hell no!” He said. “Oh hell yeah,” His girlfriend said to the man in basketball shorts, nodding. He repeated his statement. “Oh hell yes,” she argued.
A young woman arrived and sat down next to me. She wore a jean jacket and had curly hair. The bartenders ignored her, enthralled by Josh Gad’s battle with some kind of animated computer game monster, until the commercial break finally arrived. They apologized to her for the delay.
“No worries. It’s been one of those days.” She said.
“Did you make that?” Asked the male bartender, somehow knowing, and complimenting her jewelry.
“Yes,” She said.
“You’re an artist.”
“Yes,” She said, responding with wholehearted confidence.
It seemed that suddenly the bar was out of the Grapefruit Sculpin, so he gave her half a glass on the house. Her day was looking significantly better, in my estimation. Everyone went back to watching Pixels, except for the patron in basketball shorts who was watching Facebook and YouTube videos on his phone at full volume. It didn’t really bother me, however.
The alarm went off on my phone. I had to leave Downtown Ralphs Bar to avoid the parking fees, but otherwise would have gladly remained. But the story wasn’t over. I resolved to come back. As soon as I possibly could.
Maybe he joined me because he was micro-dosing, or maybe it was the imaginative descriptions of the picnic smorgasbord we could create with the Ralphs deli ingredients, but I was able to actually convince a friend to join me for dinner that same evening at Downtown Ralphs Bar. I parked at his artist loft and we Ubered over, so as not to be as time-constricted as before, bearing in mind the inevitable 9:45PM last call.
Once inside, we made our way to the cheese section and began to select from the dozens of fantastic dairy imports in stock at Ralphs. Just five hours later I had returned and we were full of excitement.
We made other selections of fine victuals at Murray’s cheese stall (who is Murray? I’m not sure — Ralphs and supermarkets in general are patterned on the idea of gigantic Mid-East bazaars, except without any staff or culture), stuffing plastic cups full of oily vegetables, and then we carried all of our artichokes and olives, packaged salamis, and rustic garlic bread a few steps over to Downtown Ralphs Bar.
We took a seat and I realized that I didn’t have my wallet or my identification. The female bartender was still there but had forgotten me and wouldn’t take my word that I was of legal drinking age. The smiles dropped from our faces.
Luckily and to the rescue was the same patron in black basketball shorts, who had clearly still been at Ralphs these past five hours. He strongly vouched for me to the bartender, who then gave me another overlong squint, finally agreeing that she did indeed remember me from earlier, although I wasn’t so sure. My friend and I were incredibly relieved. More Ballast Point Sculpin had arrived so we ordered drinks and got down to our Scandinavian-Mediterranean themed feast.
Someone brought a portable speaker and placed it on the center of the bar. They were DJing their own music. It was surprisingly good. Our little northern-European picnic felt like a real party.
There’s no way to describe the place except as a dive bar in a Ralphs grocery store. But the metal detectors at the entrance and the fluorescent lights overhead keep everything feeling tranquil. It’s absolutely impossible to imagine being stabbed at this level of candescence. There’s something peaceful and comforting about it all. Perhaps like a padded cell in a psychiatric ward?
It’s just an ugly dudes bar. If you’re a regular dude like me, you’ve finally found the place you can relax. It’s a lowest-pressure, lowest-stakes kind of place, and not particularly a pickup joint although I’m sure you could make it work, particularly if you live in the apartment building upstairs or in one of the new high-rise compounds around the corner.
I thought of possible pickup lines.
“So what brings you to Ralphs?”
“Well usually I go to Whole Foods but sometimes you just want to go to a real dive.”
[Note: I suddenly imagined that the Whole Foods Bar would be filled with attractive cougars in their late-30’s, just waiting for action. Meanwhile, what was a nice guy like me doing in a place like this?]
Nonetheless it was all starting to make sense. Of course if I lived nearby I would want to stop in here and later do some light shopping with a couple of brews in me. If I got tired, I could just have dinner at the bar.
Suddenly, and as a complete surprise, it seemed my editor had gotten locked out of his apartment and was standing in front of me, carrying a single can of soup from the soup isle. He approached the bar with his can. The bartender asked him if he wanted a drink.
“No I’m just buying the soup. Taking the month off.” He gave a strong nod.
I introduced him to my friend who was micro-dosing, or macro-dosing, who ever really knows?
The portable speaker on the bar was playing the song “Cocaine.”
“I’ve never done cocaine to this song. I imagine that’s got to happen sometime.” Said my friend.
My editor left and the night immediately began to spiral in another direction as the patron with the basketball shorts who had vouched for me earlier suddenly began to regale me with stories of his having some time in the past worked in a home for the elderly. Stories of braindead old women, a dancer who could no longer use his legs, etc. I tried not to pay attention and instead shifted the conversation because I needed a definitive answer, was this place really called, “Cork & Tap?”
“It’s definitely NOT called the ‘Cork & Tap’. This is ‘Ralphs Bar.’ Look it up on Google! Google has always got the name. If you google you find ‘Ralphs Bar.’”I was thankful to hear it.
It was evident that nobody gave a damn about sports here except for perhaps boxing. There was no protest. As soon as boxing coverage was ended on ESPN, a diptyque emerged: On the left television screen was Mel Gibson’s Apolocalypto (2006) and on the right, the American version of The Office. It meant something.
“There’s beauty everywhere,” continued the man in his basketball shorts. “I don’t listen to music, I don’t listen to the radio. I just go out onto the street. I listen to the people singing on Los Angeles Street. I listen to the conversations of all the people talking to themselves. It’s more interesting than anything on the TV. All you see on the TV is programming. It’s all programming you. Do you know what I mean, my friend?”
He started talking about American hegemony. It occurred to me then that he had an unplaceable accent from somewhere on the African continent, but I’m no expert in that regard, nor did I want to ask where he was from because sometimes it offends people.
I told him that while it was all true, those fighter jets and that American hegemony was what allowed us to enjoy a simple beer at Ralphs Bar together, but he wasn’t really listening to me anymore, so I turned away because you have to do that with people who are street lunatics.
I turned back to my friend.
“I don’t need a cool bar,” said my friend. “This bar is great.”
The future is all Ralphs bars everywhere. There will be no other bars, and really, who needs them?
We left and my artist friend pulled me aside as we waited for the Uber to take us back to his skid row adjacent illegal-occupancy studio loft.
“To be honest I wasn’t sure at first, but that guy next to you? I loaned him twenty bucks, about six months ago. I know him, he asked me for money, on the street.”
He paused and then continued again on the subject of Downtown Ralphs Bar:
“Who needs small-business bars, all of them fetishizing the past, when all they’re really doing is just fetishizing the beginning of a corporation? They’re not pure, you know. All you need is people. And alcohol. People plus alcohol equals a good time. It equals life.”
Ralphs bar brings together all forms of ugly men, of every race and ethnicity, under bright fluorescent lighting, and the future is a beautiful thing. Let’s give a big cheers and a thanks to the Kroger Company, and it’s just under thirty subsidiary supermarket-chains, and to it’s nearly 3,000 locations. But surely my friends, Downtown Ralphs Bar is the jewel of them all.
