Simon's Take - It's difficult to hate a bar like Tangier, with its well-stocked bar with beers on draft (Stella Artois, Guinness, Pyramid Hefeweizen, Sierra Nevada) and its spacious outdoor seating area. Not to mention it's geographically the closest bar to my apartment, a mere block or so away. And yet, despite all that, I do hate Tangier. Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.
One of my favorite aspects of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares (the BBC version, not the overfunded American version, which can suck a dick) is when Gordon Ramsay tries to explain to a befuddled restaurant owner that their business is failing because it lacks a clear image. They'll stammer about how their menu has 400 items in a dozen or so cooking styles, offering both Mexican food and sushi, while Ramsay patiently tries to clarify to them that they should just do one thing, with only a few menu items, but do it well (seriously, this is, like, 60% of all episodes). He's right, of course, and having a distinct image applies even more to the ownership and management of a bar than a restaurant. A successful bar knows the crowd it intends to attract and can anticipate exactly what that crowd wants from a night out; thus, the miserable losers lined up outside the Cha Cha Lounge in Silverlake on a Saturday night are distinctly different in their stylistic preferences from the pathetic douchebags queued up a few miles away outside the Ivar, but everyone is spending money on booze and happy.
What then to make of Tangier, a bar and restaurant in an artsy-posh area of Los Feliz that caters to an uneasy mixture of drunken office drones, indie music kids and guido-style Armenians? Too fancy for the neighborhood's younger residents and too sleazy for the older ones, Tangier has struggled to define itself since its opening. Is it a restaurant, with a consistently vacant and suspicious dining area? Is it a concert venue, programming mostly local artists and, inexplicably, rappers on the Oakland experimental hip hop Anticon label? Is it a classy bar, the kind you can take a date to, or is it a sports bar, with its large monitor showing ESPN in HD above the bar? No one seems to know, least of all the people who work there, who all have the attitude of sullenly biding their time in purgatory.
The problem here is the crowd that frequents such an establishment. Unless a decent band is playing - an increasingly unlikely prospect due to the management of The Fold, the music scheduling organization that books Tangier and other neighborhood venues, but that's the subject for another article - you could firebomb Tangier on any given night and be fairly certain to harm no one of any value. At 9 p.m. on Thursday, the bar was initially packed by three tables' worth of overweight women in work attire boisterously screaming at each other the top of their lungs like a pack of corpulent hyenas. Then they left and the bar area went from crowded to eerily empty in one giant, pear-shaped exodus of fat. Feeling suddenly vulnerable, I went to sit outdoors while I waited for my "friends," but it was empty there, too, and it made me feel sad and lonely, so I went back inside. Then the bar started to fill up with musicians that were playing in the back room that night and their friends, mainly girls with tattoos and ill-conceived piercings and emaciated dudes wearing jeans that a recent Dachau survivor would have difficulty squeezing into. Scattered amongst these types were a few pairs here and there who seemed to feel that they might be in the wrong bar: a few older couples on dates, a bunch of girls apparently on a "girls night out" but also clearly wondering why no one was hitting on them or buying them drinks, and a group of dudes in slacks and striped dress shirts who probably would have been buying the girls drinks if the atmosphere at Tangier wasn't so damn uncomfortable. Everyone then got kicked out when the bar abruptly closed at midnight.
It's too bad because, like the increasingly unfortunate Derby across the street, Tangier could be really cool. There's plenty of good space within, and it's not badly designed; as previously stated, its walled-in outdoor seating area, with heat lamps and a fountain, really is quite a nice place to get your drink on if no one else is there. But as is, you should only go to this place if you're looking to drink yourself into a misanthropic stupor that will last for days.
Evan's Take - I've never gotten a real bead on this place for the very reasons stated above. This seems to be the primary Los Angeles venue for the alternative hip hop collective, "Anticon", but I've yet to catch any decent show here by any other artists. You get quite a bit of singer-songwriter stuff, none of it really good.
I stuck to mostly jack and cokes... with one Stella. The bartender wasn't aloof so much as she carried herself as if she'd recently been smacked in the face with a volley ball, and could only squint meanly at the bar patrons for any sign of her mysterious assailant. Getting served takes some time and effort... which was weird, since there really wasn't that many people there.
I also ordered an appetizer... some bizarre shrimp cocktail; it consisted of two delicious jumbo shrimp, and then a gross concoction of shredded bits of shrimp, and a bunch of random spices and vegetables. To be fair, I ate the whole thing, but you could have thrown a sauteed puppy on my plate that evening, and that cute little fucker would be half digested by now.
As you can tell by this review, and the lovely picture of me above... I'm far too classy and good looking for a pit like Tangier.
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