The Romanoffs (2018), a recent online television series, was met harshly by critics, with the self-declared Duchess Marie of Russia calling it ‘fatally indulgent’ (Marshall 2018), not unlike the tsars themselves. Yet, the series has brought the continuity of Hollywood's fascination with Russian royalty to the fore. The origins of this discourse go back to the symbiotic relationship between Hollywood and its colony of White émigrés, which, in the 1930s, counted about 1,500 members (Day 1934: 1). Its economic commodification can be best illustrated by a 1932 exhibition of Russian decorative art objects belonging to the Romanovs, chosen from the collection of Dr Armand Hammer at Bullocks, a luxury department store on Wilshire Boulevard. Russian actor Ivan Lebedeff and American pianist and actress Norma Boleslavsky (Drury) posed for the Los Angeles Times holding an empty royal champagne bucket, a testimony to the refugees’ social drama, albeit with a price tag attached.

In his review of the exhibition, Arthur Millier expressed his disapproval of the tsarist regime while simultaneously examining the meaning of this spectacle within the context of multicultural Los Angeles: ‘So don't be astonished if, in the near future, when you dine in Hollywood, some blond lady of the screen says casually: “Oh, yes – these belonged to my great aunt, the late Czarina. The double eagle was our family crest, doncherknow”’ (Millier B13).

Back in 1932, Millier's class-conscious example was certainly plausible because Los Angeles restaurant goers had long been familiar with those double-headed avians, among other heraldic paraphernalia, of Hollywood's Russian colony. While many cities across the world, including Berlin, Paris, Shanghai and New York, also hosted large populations of Russian émigrés with their own restaurants, it was the proximity of the Hollywood film industry that contributed to the uniqueness of the local Los Angeles nightlife. The exilic identity struggles that these restaurants endured mimicked the way in which Russia itself was captured on screen, described by Olga Matich as a ‘slippery relation between invented and authentic Russianness, between simulacra and their originals’ (Matich 2005: 209).

This chapter is dedicated to the history of Los Angeles's restaurants of the first wave of Russian immigrants, also known as the White emigration, and the complexities of its identity as gleaned from these establishments’ interior decorations, menus and biographies of their owners.