Caviar Between Innings, Mark Cuban Backs a Sports Club in an Old Melrose Pawn Shop
Pawn Shop turned a long-vacant Hollywood pawnbroker into a 7,808-square-foot sports club with suites, screens and a James Beard Award-winning chef.
Behind the original brick and bow truss roof at 5901 Melrose Avenue, the long-vacant Brothers Collateral pawn shop now pours cocktails under 53 screens. Pawn Shop opened there on June 26, a 7,808-square-foot sports club with two video walls and seven private mezzanine suites overlooking the main floor, and The Infatuation’s review landed on September 9.
The investor list reads like a sports page. Mark Cuban is in, alongside Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers’ president of baseball operations, the television producer Michael Davies, Angel City FC captain Ali Riley and the former NBA player Chandler Parsons. The developer Diego Torres-Palma created the project, and the Los Angeles studio Omgivning designed it, hanging work by the sports photographer Andrew D. Bernstein, the painter Stanley Silver and the pop artist Greg Gossel.
The kitchen belongs to Tony Messina, the James Beard Award winner and former executive chef of Uni in Boston. His menu runs from a housemade wagyu hot dog topped with Siberian sturgeon caviar and Japanese mayonnaise to sticky pork spareribs, a dry-aged 40-ounce tomahawk, a house pu pu platter and charbroiled oysters with XO butter. Jason Kilgore, formerly of Dutch Kills in Queens, leads the bar.
Those oysters have become the room’s quiet converts. “I’ve had so many people tell me that they’ve never had oysters or don’t generally like them, and that the charbroiled oysters have been the dish to make them believe again, and so I think that’s really special,” Torres-Palma said. The Infatuation went for the visual. “The towering space, formerly a pawn shop, looks like someone dropped an Alamo Drafthouse inside a DTLA art gallery,” the review read.
Reservations go through OpenTable, where Pawn Shop lists weekend brunch from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and dinner every night, starting at 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and 5 p.m. on weekends, until 11 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and midnight on Friday and Saturday.
