Bar Harry Opened in Toluca Lake, and There Is a Campground Behind It
There is a boat hanging from the ceiling behind a cocktail bar on Riverside Drive. It has been cut in half, suspended from an upstairs balcony and turned into a DJ booth. People are dancing underneath it.
That is the back half of Bar Harry, which opened this week at 10111 Riverside Drive in Toluca Lake. The front half is a dim, 1970s-leaning cocktail room. The back half is a fully built fantasy campground called Camp Funtime. Both are open now, seven nights a week.
The team puts it more plainly than we could:
Bar Harry is the grit and the glam. Camp Funtime is the escape. And the entire experience is built around the most important ingredient of all: MOXIE!
Two years in the making
The concept belongs to Richard DiSisto, the Los Angeles hospitality veteran behind Tipple & Brine, Tunnel Bar and Murph's Service Station, and it is the product of what the bar calls more than two years of imagination, vision, design and development.
He assembled a deep bench for it. Bar Director Johnathan Fite came from Employees Only Los Angeles, where he was Bar Manager and Principal Bartender. Executive Chef David Lopez has cooked at Alba, American Beauty, Mastro's Steakhouse Beverly Hills and Chi Spacca. Operations Director Beverly Mejorada runs the floor.
The pitch is a room where, in the bar's words, “highly considered cocktails, chef-driven American comfort food, music, mid-century modern design and just the right amount of mischief come together across two unforgettable spaces.”
The muse is Debbie Harry, before she was Debbie Harry
Not the Blondie frontwoman at her peak. The bar is explicit that its reference point is “the young, fiercely independent artist she was before becoming a cultural and musical icon.”
The era being invoked is gritty, creatively explosive downtown New York, when Blondie was emerging on the punk and new wave scene and playing rooms like CBGB and Max's Kansas City. As the bar describes it, a time when “music, art, fashion, film and nightlife collided, and a new generation of artists began creating their own rules.”
That independent spirit, creative fearlessness and unmistakable moxie are the beating heart of Bar Harry.
The front room runs with it. Low light, vintage 1960s princess phones, 1970s details, intimate booths, high-tops and a striking wall mural of Harry herself. DiSisto designed both spaces with his longtime design partner Murphy Michaels, and the two of them describe the result as two distinctly different worlds that somehow feel like they were always meant to exist together.
Camp Funtime started with a T-shirt
This is the detail that explains the whole project.
In the late 1970s, Debbie Harry was photographed wearing a vintage summer camp T-shirt for a place called Camp Funtime. The camp did not exist. It was a shirt.
DiSisto and Michaels built it anyway.
What is back there now:
An Airstream serving as the bar
Picnic tables, booths and fire pits
Vintage camp signage, a hanging canoe and oars
Collectible 1970s rotary phones mounted at every table
The half boat overhead, working as the DJ booth
The DJ spins everything from the 1960s through the early 2000s. The bar's own description of the experience is hard to improve on: guests “sing, dance, drink, dine and let loose beneath a boat in the sky.”
The cocktails
Fite arrives from one of the most decorated cocktail families in the world. Employees Only New York took World's Best Cocktail Bar and World's Best Drink Selection at Tales of the Cocktail in 2011 and placed No. 4 on the World's 50 Best Bars list. The Los Angeles sister location has since closed, part of a run of closures across West Hollywood that we tracked earlier this year.
What he is pouring in Toluca Lake:
Bunny 68, vodka, champagne syrup, soda water, acid solution and passion fruit foam, a tribute to the year Harry became a Playboy Bunny
Chelsea Hotel, gin, Aperol, rosé, Lillet and Pamplemousse with a dehydrated orange wheel, nodding to Blondie's connection to the Hotel Chelsea and its countercultural scene
Cheesecake Sour, bourbon, strawberry cordial and lemon, milk-washed with cream cheese and graham aromatics
Bugs Bunny, mezcal, carrot and rosemary shrub, dry vermouth and lemon with a light foam and a rosemary sprig
Call Me, rum and mezcal with lemon-poppy coconut cream and pineapple gomme
The Bronx, Suntory Toki, Cynar, Nonino and orange bitters
Funtime Old Fashioned, bourbon, demerara and chocolate bitters, finished with charred marshmallow and graham cracker
There is a full spirits list, wine, draft and canned beer, and two mocktails, a Sour Fizz and a Pomegranate Buck. The stated goal is cocktails that are seriously well crafted but, like the room, designed to make sure everyone is having a really good time.
The kitchen
Lopez is cooking American comfort food with the edges sharpened. Fried squid with lemon, jalapeño, toasted sesame, seaweed and kimchi aioli. Toro larb. Harry's Sliders on Margaret River Wagyu with Gruyère, garlic aioli and pickles. Heritage wings in buffalo, nude or nam jim jeaw with ranch and pickled cucumber. Blockbuster Chicken under the house special sauce.
The crispy fish sandwich puts halibut and American cheese on a pillowy potato bun with herbaceous tartar. Bigger plates run to chicken parmesan, steak frites and The Bodega, plus a meatball wedge layering Wagyu, veal and pork meatballs with burrata, red sauce and herb salad on a hoagie. Sides are corn ribs, beef tallow fries and potater tots.
The bar describes the menu as “nostalgic, indulgent, playful and seriously delicious, exactly what comfort food should be, with just enough imagination to keep guests coming back to see what's next.”
What we have our eye on
We have not eaten here yet, so the verdicts above belong to the house, not to us. Two things we want to see in person: whether the kitchen holds its own once the DJ starts, which is the real test of a chef with Lopez's background in a room built for volume, and Camp Funtime on a Friday at midnight, which is presumably the version this was designed for.
Toluca Lake does not get many swings this big. The Valley side has been building a genuine late-night scene for a while, from The Last Canteen on Ventura to the rooms along Riverside, and a two-concept property with an Airstream and a suspended boat is a confident bet on that continuing.
Visiting
Bar Harry and Camp Funtime are at 10111 Riverside Drive, Toluca Lake, CA 91602. The phone is 818-505-3040 and reservations go through hello@barharryla.com.
Open seven days a week, all starting at 5:00 p.m.:
Monday and Tuesday until 11:00 p.m.
Wednesday and Thursday until midnight
Friday and Saturday until 1:00 a.m.
Sunday until 11:00 p.m.
The bar posts updates on Instagram at @barharryla.
Which leaves only the question the bar itself closes with: how soon can you get here?
Details, descriptions and quoted material in this article were provided by Lawrence Moore & Associates on behalf of Bar Harry. Photo credit: Nick Gingold / Craft Media LA.
Food Journal Magazine has not yet dined at Bar Harry. Tasting notes will follow a visit.
I hope your hungry!!
Matthew Tropp | FJM
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