Eighty Years In, The Smoke House Is the Last of Old Hollywood Still Serving Dinner
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In a city that bulldozes its history for a parking structure, one Burbank restaurant has spent eight decades refusing to move.
The Smoke House opened in 1946 — and this month it turns 80. That's not a marketing milestone. It's a near-impossible one. The restaurants that fed the men who built Hollywood are almost all gone. The Smoke House is still here, still pouring cocktails, still sliding baskets of garlic cheese bread across white tablecloths a few hundred feet from the Warner Bros. lot.
For a generation of Angelenos chasing whatever opened last week, that staying power is the whole point.
It started with two aircraft workers and 46 seats
The story isn't a celebrity's. It's two Lockheed employees', Jack Monroe and Jim Stockton, who opened a 46-seat spot at the end of World War II. By 1948 they'd moved up the street into the old Red Coach Inn — the Tudor-style building the restaurant still occupies today.
Because the door sat across from Warner Bros. — and a short drive from Disney — the dining room filled with stars from the start. Burbank local Bob Hope was a regular. So was Bing Crosby. The studio crowd never really left.
The wall that reads like a Hollywood yearbook
Step inside and the walls do the talking: wood paneling, red leather booths, and framed photos of the famous faces who've eaten here, layered floor to ceiling.
The most-told story here belongs to George Clooney. He loved the place enough to name his production company — Smokehouse Pictures, founded in 2006 with Grant Heslov — after it. His photo hangs above the round booth he favors. And if the booths look familiar, there's a reason: this is where Jim and Pam held their rehearsal dinner on The Office.
And then there's the bread
Ask anyone who grew up near the studios about the Smoke House and they'll skip the prime rib and go straight to the garlic cheese bread — sourdough, garlic, Parmesan, and two cheeses the kitchen still won't name. The recipe dates to 1946 and has been handed down chef to chef ever since.
The most common question the staff gets? Whether it's secretly made with boxed Kraft mac-and-cheese powder. (Management calls it the number one thing people ask. They're not confirming anything.)
The bread is the legend, but the prime rib is the anchor — carved, classic, served the way it was when Eisenhower was president.
Why it lasted when everything else closed
What's kept it alive isn't one famous regular or one film. It's 80 years of ordinary nights — family dinners, wrap parties, deals closed over martinis, anniversaries that came back around. The Smoke House didn't survive by chasing what's next. It survived by being worth returning to.
This October, that run hits 80 years — and it's worth showing up for. Walk through the door this month and you're not just having dinner. You're toasting one of the last pieces of old Hollywood still serving it — a room that's outlasted nearly everything around it, and is still writing its next chapter.
4420 W. Lakeside Drive, Burbank, CA
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