Coffee Dan’s opened on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue in Los Angeles, California, in the early 1950s. Open 24 hours a day, the diner was popular with locals and also became a gay hangout.

In one of his books, the noir crime writer John Gilmore recalls meeting some famous leading men of the era there. ‘One afternoon that spring, I found myself talking with Montgomery Clift in East Hampton. Clift, I supposed, had been drinking since the previous day or earlier, but I reminded him that I’d met him in Coffee Dan’s on Hollywood Boulevard years before.

‘It’d been the middle of the night and he’d been sitting there with Burt Lancaster and James Jones, who was decked out in Indian jewelry, and all three of them were pretty pie-eyed. Clift was nipping from a flask and acting out the scene from Here to Eternity in which he plays the bugle.

There was another famous Coffee Dan’s in San Francisco first mentioned in the 1916 silent comedy the Heiress, it opened in the 1920s and became a speakeasy.

We don’t believe the two were connected, or it could be that the LA Coffee Dan was named in honor of the first SF one. It certainly had a role in the creation of one of the biggest restaurant chains in America... in 1956 a small chain called Danny's Donuts changed its name to Danny's Coffee Shops. Coffee Dan's sent a Cease and Desist letter to the owner Harold Butler who decided to change one letter in the name and Danny's became Denny's Coffee Shops. The 'Coffee Shops' was dropped in 1961 and Denny's now has over 1,600 locations.

Coffee Dan’s in LA, which served diner food such as waffles, eggs and hamburgers, closed in the 1970s.

Courtesy Private Collection.