HMS Bounty is a Koreatown dive bar that smells like wood polish and old carpeting, and Dave Teeple wouldn’t have it any other way.
Dave has been behind the stick here since the early 1990s, long before the stretch of Wilshire between Vermont and Western became what marketing people now call a “neighborhood.” He’s watched Koreatown get rediscovered about four times. The bar, to its credit, has not changed its opinion of itself.
The HMS Bounty occupies the ground floor of the Gaylord Apartments, a 1920s building that still looks like it expects Dashiell Hammett to come through the door. The interior runs nautical without being kitschy — ship wheels, wooden paneling, low amber lighting — and the booths are deep enough that you can have a conversation without performing it for the room. The place opened in 1960 and has the posture of somewhere that knows it was here before you and will be here after.
Dave works the bar the way good bartenders do: minimal commentary, accurate pours, no upselling. He knows the regulars by drink order. The couple who come in every Tuesday. The writer who parks himself in the back booth with a legal pad. The industry people who show up after wrap. He doesn’t romanticize any of it, but you can tell he finds it worth showing up for.
The well drinks are cheap by any reasonable Los Angeles standard — most cocktails land between nine and twelve dollars, which feels almost anachronistic given the zip code. The beer selection doesn’t pretend to be anything more than it is: a rotation of standards and a couple of drafts. Dave once described the menu philosophy to a regular as “everything you actually want, nothing you have to explain.”
The kitchen does bar food with unusual sincerity. The patty melt is legitimately good — buttered rye, caramelized onions, a burger that doesn’t fall apart mid-bite. The French onion soup shows up on cold nights and people order it seriously. This is not food that’s trying to trend anywhere.
The crowd on a given weeknight is a cross-section that most bars would have to manufacture artificially: film people, nurses from nearby Cedars, older Koreatown residents who’ve been coming here since before the current wave of interest, twenty-somethings who found it on some list and stayed because the booth was comfortable and nobody rushed them. Weekend nights tilt younger and louder, but the bar holds its shape.
What Dave represents — and what the HMS Bounty represents by extension — is a particular kind of institutional patience. The bar has survived the death of the neighborhood around it, the resurrection of that neighborhood, and several rounds of people declaring it “due for a rebrand.” It is not being ironic about its ship wheels. It is not doing a concept. It is a bar that opens at noon, closes late, and treats the intervening hours as an end in themselves.
Parking on Wilshire is metered and competitive; the side streets off Normandie are your best option after 7 p.m. Happy hour runs weekdays until 7, which is worth knowing. Dave will be there.
