1933 Group co-owner Bobby Brown.
Last week Silver Lake’s newest bourbon bar, The Thirsty Crow, opened its doors to a neighborhood eager to say good-bye to former occupant, Stinkers Truck Stop. Now, in the place of steaming skunk butts there are antique wall sconces, beer cans are cleared away for a bourbon barrel and the trucker-themed cocktails like the Diesel Martini and the Large Marge have been replaced with the classic Sazerac, Old Fashioned and even a variety of Manhattans. I had a chance to chat with 1933 Group co-owner, Bobby Green, about why Stinkers had to end, how a land-speed record inspired this bourbon bar, and which drink on the new cocktail menu he’s most excited about.
Caroline on Crack: Why a bourbon bar?
Bobby Green: I’ve become a huge fan of bourbon ever since Bigfoot West [a 1933 Group bar] opened. But before that I was a fan of Old Crow whiskey. It’s been around since the 1800s. I build and race racecars as a hobby. I do land speed racing. My car is named the Old Crow after the whiskey. It’s like a torpedo with wheels.
Bobby Green's Old Crow racecar.
We race at the Bonneville Salt Flats once or twice a year. For the past three years we’ve gotten a land speed record. So every time we get a land speed record we have a bottle of Old Crow whiskey. So we get a record, then we open a bottle and then everyone in the pits gets a shot. And everyone that comes by the pits gets a shot. So once the bottle is empty we fill it with salt from the salt flats and then we write the date and the record and it goes on the shelf. So that’s been a tradition for years so I’ve always wanted to kinda incorporate that with opening a bar. I already planned to open the Old Crow bar. Well, it turns out you can’t name a bar after alcohol. You couldn’t open the Jack Daniels bar or the Absolut bar. So we named the bar the Thirsty Crow because it’s one of Aesop’s Fables.
CoC: What made you decide to end Stinkers?
BG: Stinkers drew too much of a bridge-and-tunnel crowd. People from Long Beach were driving to Stinkers to check it out. And we’re more of a neighborhoodie kind of thing. But it was still a little too wacky for [the locals] and they were constantly asking for better stuff, better beer and whiskey. The local crowd was coming anyway but they were like, “You should get this or you should get that.” So we just decided the crowd around Silver Lake was maturing so much more than what we could give at Stinkers. That was our goal anyway, we want to give a neighborhood what it lacks. We can tell from the four nights of soft opening people are just flocking and they’re happy.
