A bar that started as a favor

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The 1933 Group didn't begin with a master plan for a hospitality empire. In 1998, a restaurateur pitched two childhood friends running a clothing company on financing a single bar in Atwater Village. They liked the idea enough to become full partners instead of just investors, and the three of them opened Bigfoot Lodge — a wilderness-themed room with taxidermy on the walls and no sign out front for its first five years. It worked. The neighborhood grew up around it, and the group kept going: a new spot roughly every year and a half, each one built around a fully realized world rather than a repeatable formula.

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Nearly three decades later, that same philosophy has produced a dozen distinct concepts across the city — a bayou-themed lounge in a converted Hollywood townhouse, an Old World Mexican grotto specializing in agave spirits, a giant whiskey-barrel bar that's one of the last examples of programmatic architecture left in LA. No two rooms look alike, and that's on purpose.

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Preservation as the whole point

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What sets this group apart from a typical multi-concept bar company is the instinct to save a building before deciding what to do with it. Idle Hour, shaped like a colossal wooden barrel, was headed for demolition before it became a bar again. Highland Park Bowl sat vacant for years — home at various points to a music store, a doctor's office, and a pharmacy — before it was reopened as a bowling alley and pizza spot. The most recent and highest-profile project, the historic Formosa Café in West Hollywood, got the same treatment: careful restoration rather than a gut renovation, keeping the building's bones intact while bringing the drinks program up to the level the group is known for.

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Guests notice. One recent visitor to Highland Park Bowl described the building as even better in person than in photos, with strong drinks, good bar food, and a comfortable crowd on a weeknight. Another, writing about a company holiday party for twenty-five people, called out how responsive and helpful the staff was in coordinating a group reservation — a theme that comes up often in reviews across the portfolio.

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Twelve rooms, twelve different nights out

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The range here is the real draw for anyone planning a night with a group. Want tiki drinks and a tropical hideaway feel? That's the Lucky Tiki. Craving a proper Western saloon complete with taxidermy and campfire energy? Bigfoot West, on the other side of town from the original Bigfoot Lodge. Looking for something quieter and more romantic? Reviewers keep pointing to Oldfield's Liquor Room as an easy, low-key date spot with a strong rum selection and a bartending staff that rarely misses. One regular called it an unpretentious, impeccable cocktail bar with real consistency — the kind of place worth returning to specifically for the holiday-themed events.

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Then there's Tail o' the Pup, the group's one full detour from the bar format: a hot dog stand shaped like a giant hot dog, dating to 1946, that had shuttered for years before the 1933 Group rebuilt it in West Hollywood. Reviewers are unanimous that the Chicago dogs are done right and that the happy hour pricing on house lager makes it an easy add-on to a longer night out.

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Booking for a group

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Because this is a collection rather than a single venue, the right pick really depends on the size and mood of your night. A birthday dinner reads differently at Sassafras's Southern-bayou dining room than it does at La Cuevita's agave-focused grotto in Highland Park, and a bachelorette crowd will have a very different time bowling at Highland Park Bowl than sipping cocktails in Idle Hour's barrel-shaped room. Most of the bars run a standard cocktail price point in the $$ range, with Highland Park Bowl's private bowling packages starting around $100 per person or $600 for a full party buyout.

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Every one of these rooms carries its own reservation flow, so it's worth browsing the full collection before locking in a date — especially if the group's split on whether they want tiki, tequila, or a lane of their own.

👉 Explore and book across the 1933 Group's full collection of LA bars and restaurants on Batch

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