Snow White Café

6769 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90028
(323) 465-4444
www.snowwhitecafe.com
twitter.com/snowwhitecafe
Parking: It’s Hollywood. Try neighborhood street parking or the massive Hollywood & Highland lot ($2 for 4 hours w/ validation).
Daily, 1-7pm, $7 34oz. beer mugs – good selection

What kind of damn bar is this? No, honestly, I can’t figure out who it caters to – locals, drunks, tourists, or a combination of the above? Not that there’s anything wrong with the café’s 1-7pm happy hour, which offers a cheap-drunks’ dream of 34oz. mug of draft beer for $7. But the whole idea of the place… it’s just a little strange.
For starters, Snow White Café sits at the Northeast corner of Hollywood & Highland in a little hole-in-the-wall kind of space. This whole section of Hollywood is kinda, for lack of a better term, Hollyweird. Lots of tourists, but a little seedy as well with down & out homeless folks, homeless folks dressed up like movie characters, and homeless folks dressed like Jesus. So to have a dive bar situated in the midst of this makes at least marginal sense, I guess.

Second, there is Snow White artwork all over the walls. Yes, this is in Hollywood, so a movie theme makes sense – but Snow White? Classic-Movie-Kitty Packard pointed out that the “We hope we have pleased you” sign above the door inside the bar was actually painted by Disney artists back in the day. Maybe they got the sign and designed the rest of the space around it? Who knows? I do know that I love Yelper Lindsay B.’s astute observation on the décor: Like...If a shitty amusement park in Iowa was a total Disney rip-off and had a ride called "Black-Haired Beauty and Seven of Her Smaller Friends", this is what the inside of that ride would look like. Hats off to Lindsay B. for her poignant description!

There’s also an odd sort of food menu – I get the burgers, wings, quesadillas, etc – they all make sense. But there are also appetizers like Chicken Vegetable Soup ($6.95), Fresh Mozzarella ($8.95), Mixed Pickles ($4.95), as well as several pasta selections ($8.95-$11.95) and full-dinner entrees like Half Chicken ($10.95), Baby Lamb Chops ($18.95), and New York Steak (17.95). With so many tasty, well-known restaurants in the area, it almost makes me want to try Snow White’s dinner – to figure out why anyone would rather eat there than at say… Musso & Frank or Geisha House?

But I definitely understand why you would go to Snow White Café for a good happy hour deal over any of the other establishments – the $7 choices of draft Bud, Bud Light, Miller Light, Red Moon, Amber Bock Shock Top, Stella, IPA, Summer Ale Seasonal, Widmer Hefeweizen, Modelo Especiale, and Heineken are pretty cool. No food deals on Happy Hour special, but Classic-Movie-Kitty & our almost newlywed pals, LB & JC, enjoyed an order of French fries, that I unfortunately missed the pricing of (bad reviewer, bad!), before our Egyptian movie screening. They couldn’t have been more than $4 or $5, which isn’t bad given the healthy (or un-healthy!) portion.

I don’t know that I’d be making my way back to Snow White Café just to have that experience of being there again. But I could see myself stopping by for a pre or post movie 34oz mug of beer or maybe the next time I’m hosting cheap drunk visiting tourists…

-- JB

Rating: 3 Martinis (good beer deal, but weird!)