#brickyard pub

  Earlier in this blog, I wrote about a place called Bow & Truss, which sits only a few doors down from The Brickyard Pub (11130 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood) in the heart of the NoHo Arts District.  The subtitle for my Bow & Truss review was "I Came All The Way To The Valley For This? (Part 1)," (chuckle, chuckle, snort) and I thought the review for its neighbor would be a natural choice to be subtitled "I Came All The Way To The Valley For This? (Part 2)."  And yet...a lingering feeling left me looking for another option.  Why?  Because The Brickyard Pub is a different experience from Bow & Truss.  In order to explain without using adjectives, I made this chart:

(*I actually bought some fried pie from a food truck outside.  It was appropriate for the occasion.) 

  Parking this time wasn't a giant pain in the ass because I had already dealt with the giant pain in the ass that is parking in the NoHo Arts District earlier in the day.  Turns out it's much easier to find street parking on the opposite sides of Lankershim AND Vineland, leading me to believe that everyone in Southern California is obsessed with parking on the same block as their destination every time they go out.

  The Brickyard Pub has some wide open spaces including a front room with shuffleboard tables and dim lights and a back room with pool tables and no privacy.  I suppose you could always do lines of coke in the bathroom, but the Brickyard folk are more of a beer crowd.  Doing lines of coke in the bathroom is more of a Bow & Truss kind of thing.  But really it's more of a Hollywood, WeHo, Beverly Hills kinda thing.  Oh, who am I?  I never did coke in my life.  I never even did Coca-Cola.  I know nothing about drugs.  All I know is that they are bad for you.  Don't do drugs!  They fuck you up!

  Anyhoo, I played a dismal game of pool teamed up with Natalie Rose.  We were about as effective as pool players as we might be at negotiating peace in the Middle East ("You guys like hummus, and you guys like hummus.  Be friends.")  This was followed by a shuffleboard game teamed up with Laura Napoli, who, it must be said, was pulling all the weight.  Not her grace, nor her elegance, nor her eternal optimism could make up for my lacking shuffleboard skills to push our team over the edge to victory, even if the game itself calls for not pushing anything over the edge at all.