[dropcap size=big]F[/dropcap]or sixty-three years and over three generations of family ownership, the Venice Room bar and steakhouse in Monterey Park has been host to cops and robbers, bikers and biker chicks, dykes and their broads, attorneys and their clients, teachers and coaches, judges and jailbirds, kick-ass karaoke singers, post-game Montebello Dodger fans, and everyone in between.
It is a repository of local lore, and represents a veritable gente’s history and living archive of the greater Eastside. The stories I’ve heard from my aunties, cousins, in-laws, and neighborhood homies about the Venice Room comprise a collective cultural memory of the San Gabriel Valley.
To those who know and love it, the “V-Room” is a special place unlike any other around Los Angeles. Words like “family,” “reunion,” “old friends,” and “good people” come up often when regulars describe the feel of the place. Old photographs of esteemed V-Room visitors line the hallway walls. The décor and famous grill-your-own steak dinners have been the same “since the sixties,” a point of pride for the Lombardos, the family who owns the bar.
In a fast-changing world, today’s patrons take comfort in the familiarity of the V-Room’s vintage surroundings and atmosphere – think Dal Rae’s Calabrian cousin.
'The Mongols were welcomed as long as they didn’t dress in their logos.'