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Celebrities Need Comfort Food Too:

A Hollywood Hangout Turns 100

NPR Morning Edition

he legendary Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard Echeverria says Musso's started as a writer's hangout. (F. Scott
opened before there was a Hollywood sign. For 100 years Fitzgerald would mix his own mint juleps behind the bar.)
Tnow, stars, studio heads and writers have settled into the "The Screen Writers Guild was actually across the street, and back
restaurant's red leather banquettes to negotiate, gossip, drink and in the '20s and '30s these studios were hiring novelists to come and
eat. write screenplays," Echeverria explains. But the movie moguls
Anyone who has dined at Musso's didn't always like the scripts — and
has an opinion about it — and after the writers didn't always like the
100 years, that adds up to a lot of changes. So? "The novelists would
opinions. They include: "It's our come to the Screen Writers Guild
favorite place to go for special to complain and then walk across
events," and "We go for the martinis, the street and get drunk at Musso's,"
not the food" and "The food's not Echeverria says.
bad, especially the chicken pot pie Film and TV people still come to
every Thursday." Musso's, especially on Thursdays
Musso's specializes in comfort food for the chicken pot pie. Gonzales has
from an earlier generation — some served them for 47 years — almost
dishes have been on the menu for half the life of the place. Gonzales,
decades. You can order tongue, calf now 66, just works lunches. It's good
liver, lamb kidneys, sweetbreads or exercise, he says, but hard on the
sauerbraten. (When Keith Richards feet — "You have to wear the right
of the Rolling Stones is in Los shoes," he says.
Angeles, he gets the liver and onions.) For a century now, through droughts, downpours, mudslides,
Welsh rarebit, another old-school dish, is not for calorie-counters. fires and earthquakes, there's been Musso & Frank's Grill. In
It's a melted cheddar cheese sauce spiked with beer, mustard, 1994, a friend of mine was working nearby during the Northridge
Worcestershire and Tabasco sauce poured over toast points and earthquake — the town was terrified. After work, he went to dinner
served on a platter with a big spoon. (There are tomato slices on at Musso's, where it was business as usual. The place was packed, he
the side for the dieters at the table.) Some people order the rarebit said; apparently everyone needed comfort food that night.
without really knowing what it is, says server Sergio Gonzalez.
"Where's the rabbit?" they ask.
The menu has been lightened up over the years, according to Musso's
fourth-generation owner/operator Mark Echeverria. But the dishes
that last the longest are the comfort foods. "People want to know
they can come into a restaurant and get that dish that they had 30
years ago," he says.
Generations of stars and filmmakers have been Musso regulars —
George Clooney and Brad Pitt eat here, and decades earlier you might
have run into folks like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett,
Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.

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