You’d be forgiven for thinking The Wolves is a relic from the turn of the century. The downtown L.A. watering hole has the definite look and feel of a step back in time. Heck, even the Los Angeles Date Ideas website listed the place as one of the city’s “coolest vintage bars,” noting it has been “meticulously restored and decorated to its early 20th Century glory days.”
Despite what the arched stained glass ceiling, 1920s-era mahogany booths and location on the ground floor of the historic Alexandria Hotel would have you believe, the establishment is actually a more recent addition to the DTLA drinking scene. The brainchild of restauranteurs Al Almeida and Daniel Salin, and managing partner Isaac Mejia, The Wolves opened its doors less than three years ago in September 2018.
The site’s dated look is no accident. Salin explained to LA Downtowner, “As soon as we walked into this space we knew we wanted to make a bar that felt like it had been here for a hundred years . . . We kept the patina on everything. We didn’t want Disneyland. We wanted edgier. I describe it as ‘dilapidated opulence.’”
In reimagining the once non-descript space at 519 S. Spring St., which formerly housed F Square Printing, a business center/art gallery/karaoke venue, Almeida and Salin certainly had their work cut out for them. The painstaking three-year process, during which the two scoured the globe for antique artifacts to outfit the interior, became a labor-of-love undertaking that was well documented on The Wolves’ Instagram feed.
While the Batchelder tiles that cover the floor are original to the site, the wooden front doors and globe lamposts hail from Argentina. The mahogany booths that line the eatery’s south side formerly belonged to a restaurant in Seneca, New York. Al and Daniel flew to the East Coast to pick up the seating, driving their score back to L.A. themselves, stopping along the way at various spots to procure additional antiques to serve as décor. The result of their cross-country efforts is an aesthetic that is almost as meticulously crafted as the cocktails served onsite.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake But the bar’s true pièce de résistance is its domed ceiling, which originally topped a train station in Paris, Illinois.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake The striking piece was procured on eBay and delivered to the restaurant in panels via flatbed truck. Initially one long span, Daniel and Al had it split in two with the halves installed next to each other forming a double arch over the bar’s main dining chamber. Though they hadn’t actually measured the room before purchasing the piece, it perfectly caps the space, seemingly custom-built for the purpose.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake The completed site is a Belle Époque-inspired masterpiece of rich woods, stained glass, white marble and mirrored paneling. For their efforts, Almeida and Salin were presented with Eater Los Angeles’ Design of the Year award in 2018.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake And where does the bar’s unusual name come from, you ask? It, too, was sourced. Salin, a massive “Gangs of New York” fan, initially hoped to christen the place after one of the criminal organizations at the forefront of the 2002 Martin Scorsese drama. But neither The Dead Rabbits nor The Gopher Gang seemed to fit. So the partners brainstormed for suitable alternatives, eventually landing on The Wolves.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake The watering hole became an almost instant hit, with the Los Angeles Times noting that within a month of opening “lines for a seat at the bar are already routinely an hour and a half long.”
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake The Wolves also soon landed on the publishing world’s radar, quickly becoming a preferred backdrop for magazine photoshoots. Both Colman Domingo and Emma Corrin posed there for “The Hollywood Reporter” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s” Stephanie Beatriz and husband Brad Hoss shot their wedding photos at the bar for The Knot.
Location managers promptly followed suit, as well. Despite being less than three years old, The Wolves is already something of an onscreen stalwart.
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Image Credit: Focus Features -
Image Credit: Lindsay Blake Filmmaker Morgan Neville most recently utilized the bar in his highly anticipated (and somewhat controversial) documentary “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain,” which hit the big screen last month and is also currently available via video on demand on all major streaming platforms. Chronicling the revered chef’s life, which was unceremoniously cut short by suicide in a French hotel room on June 8, 2018, the doc is largely – and hauntingly – narrated by Bourdain with voice-overs culled from the multitude of television shows he starred in over the course of his prolific career. Peppered throughout the extensive footage are interviews with Anthony’s many loved ones and colleagues, including director Morgan Fallon, who worked with Bourdain for more than ten years on such productions as “Parts Unknown,” “The Mind of a Chef” and “No Reservations.” It is at the rear of The Wolves’ main dining room that Fallon sits down to candidly discuss the sad fate of the man with whom he’d collaborated for a decade. The bar provides an elegant and suitably exotic-seeming backdrop for a poignant dialog about one of the world’s best-loved travelers and vagabonds.
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Image Credit: Apple TV+ Other productions to feature the watering hole include the 2019 Apple TV+ series “The Morning Show,” which utilized the site twice. It first popped up in the episode titled “Open Waters” as the supposed New York eatery where Audra (Mindy Kaling) tries to poach talk show host Daniel Henderson (Desean Terry) for her own network.
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Image Credit: Apple TV+ And in the season one finale, titled “The Interview,” weatherman Yanko Flores (Nestor Carbonell) drinks his troubles away at The Wolves after being dumped by production assistant Claire Conway (Bel Powley).
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Image Credit: RCA The 2019 music video for the GoldLink song “Joke Ting,” which features Ari PenSmith, was also shot in part at The Wolves.
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Image Credit: Hulu In “Little Fires Everywhere,” a young Elena Richardson (AnnaSophia Robb) parties with her boyfriend, Jamie Caplan (Luke Bracey), at the bar on what is supposed to be their last night in Paris in 1976 in the episode titled “Duo.”
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Image Credit: Amazon Studios And in the premiere episode of Amazon’s new “A League of Their Own” series, Carson Shaw (Abbi Jacobson) and the rest of the Rockford Peaches spend an evening dancing at The Wolves.