A flirty bartender ruled my favorite chaotic LA dive bar. I still mourn its loss

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Picture a bar that’s more like one long dining room table. If you’d prefer to retreat to a booth, good luck getting there without brushing past someone and being pulled into a…

Picture a bar that’s more like one long dining room table. If you’d prefer to retreat to a booth, good luck getting there without brushing past someone and being pulled into a conversation with people you’ve never met.

In a city as stratified and transient as Los Angeles, a neighborhood bar provides an essential social good — a place where we can be at home among strangers. Where we are welcome to take a seat no matter how long we’ve been away, and encounter someone whose life is nothing like our own.

I was in grad school for education in downtown Los Angeles when I found my place. One day my tired classmates and I walked past an equally tired sign on Eighth and Grand. A once-white plaque with peeling red lettering — “Hank’s Fine Dining & Spirits.”

Hank’s did not serve food. It did not even have a drink menu. For the remaining two years of our grad school experience, we would wonder where the fine dining was, or whether any object in that place could be described as fine.

Besides Nina the bartender, with whom each of us fell separately in love, for different reasons.

“What do you have?” my friend asked stupidly our first time there, looking around for the nonexistent menu.

She was a pretty woman in her 40s with sinewy, tattooed forearms that flexed when she hoisted beer kegs. She ran the place like the formidable captain of a poorly behaved pirate ship, with a knack for knowing when to intervene and when to let us be.

She flirted with the chronically awkward guy in our group, though that was such a new experience he couldn’t recognize it as such.

We tried to convince him to write his number on a receipt while he protested in terror, and while he never did it, Nina of course heard us. Because Nina heard everything. After that, she flirted with him more. We all knew it was to gift him some confidence.

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