Foxfire Room: A Dive Bar Dream

I moved to Los Angeles in 2003, and just a few days after arriving went out for drinks with a friend who was one of two people I knew that lived here.

I had just moved from Chicago, where I went to college, and Amanda had lived across the hall in the dorms my freshman year. I picked her up at her apartment in some neighborhood called Valley Village, and we went up the street to her favorite neighborhood bar. We hadn't seen each other in some time and she said it would be a good place to just hang, have a drink and chat. 

She took me to this little dive bar on Magnolia Boulevard that was like something out of a dream. Not long after we arrived she informed me the bar was the location in the 1999 film Magnolia where William H. Macy's character gets drunk.

The room is pure dive bar heaven and a perfect place to catch up with an old friend. There is a spacious and comfortable outdoor smoking patio (we were both smokers at the time, I have since quit, thank God), complete with heating lamps and a large tent. Often the smoking area is more crowded than inside, as is often the case with any true dive bar.

Inside you will find leather-covered booths, creaky wooden chairs, dartboards, a golf video game, wood-paneled walls and plenty of happy drunks. If you have grown weary of fedoras, designer jeans and entertainment-industry speak, and just want to have a relaxing, stiff, cheap drink, slide on down to the Foxfire. It's a good place to catch a ball game or sing some karaoke. There's always some dude in a flannel shirt that's a little too drunk, even on a Tuesday afternoon, but in an amusing way. The crowd and staff are always friendly and as un-hipster as it gets, which can be a glorious change of pace in this hipster nexus of the universe we call Los Angeles.

I am not alone in my love for the Foxfire Room. Askmen.com ranked it as one of the 10 Best Dive Bars in Los Angeles.

Attached is a YouTube video from Magnolia when William H. Macy first walks into the bar. It is the only YouTube clip of the scene I could find. It is not in English, which for this purpose is good because you can just focus on the decor of the bar and soak up all its divey goodness.

The film clip is from 12 years ago and yet from what I can tell the place hasn't changed a bit since, and probably looks very much the same inside as it did 12 years before that. This is a good thing for a dive bar. One does not want change at a local dive bar; one wants time to stand still.