If you are an Angeleno, you know about Musso & Frank Grill.
You know that Musso’s, as everyone calls it, has been around for more than a century. That its servers and bartenders wear pressed red jackets and provide the sort of attentiveness that comes with years of practice. And given the restaurant’s station on Hollywood Boulevard, you know it has served its share of famous diners.
Last week, the world learned Taylor Swift may well be among them. On “Elizabeth Taylor,” the second track on her new album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” she sings, “We hit the best booth at Musso and Frank’s.”
And since Ms. Swift has encouraged fans to take her lyrics fairly literally, one has to wonder: Did she really? And which booth is it?
“While I’m more than happy to talk about celebrities of that past, those of the current day we do keep discreet,” said Mark Echeverria, the restaurant’s president and chief executive, on Tuesday.
Open since 1919, the restaurant moved once before settling into its current location and opening a storied back room in 1934. It was “a legendary private space reserved for the Hollywood elite,” according to the restaurant’s website, which lists Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe as former regulars. Writers like Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway also spent time there in their days writing for the studios.
More recently, the dining room has been featured in films like Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, “Ocean’s Eleven” and “Swingers.” It even has its own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
“Musso’s and Hollywood, really, we grew up together. Musso’s has not changed much in that time,” Mr. Echeverria said. “I think everybody likes to have a little nostalgia in their heart. When people come to Musso’s they are really stepping back in time to see what Hollywood was like in the Elizabeth Taylor-era.”
“We treat celebrities like regulars and regulars like celebrities,” he added, quoting a longtime server.
On Tuesday, Musso’s was full during prime time, though there did not appear to be an influx of Swifties wearing friendship bracelets, as of yet.
One of the hosts, Sergio Gallardo, was happy to show me the private dining rooms, and he divulged that there is a sort of secret entrance, but it involves sending guests through the kitchen, which the staff tries to avoid.
Mr. Echeverria told OpenTable in 2023 that the best seat in the house wasn’t a booth at all, but rather the two counter seats right in front of the grill. So, the counter was my first stop. After initially taking what Mr. Gallardo said was the “Steve McQueen seat,” I moved to a chair closer to the action. I could feel the warmth of the mesquite grill, populated by New York strip steaks cooking gently, in a perfect row.
The counter is in what is known as the “old room.” The restaurant’s bar is in the “new room” — a separate, more boisterous space. And importantly for the purposes of this article, the bar top is a made of mahogany.
While promoting the new album, Ms. Swift has said that her favorite lyric is from the song “Father Figure”: “I pay the check,” she says, “before it kisses the mahogany grain.”
Was Ms. Swift’s “best booth” actually the bar?
A spokeswoman for the pop star did not respond to a request for comment.
Several of the booths are informally known by the celebrities that once frequented them. The Charlie Chaplin booth is first on the left in the old room. Far in the back corner is the booth often occupied by Jack Nicholson. Across the way, the new room holds the Rolling Stones’s booth, one associated with Alfred Hitchcock and one relatively private booth for Frank Sinatra (No. 224).
Alix Masters, a 32-year-old doctor and native Angeleno and a longtime fan of Ms. Swift, has been to Musso’s at least 25 times. She believes the bar is best, especially on a weekend evening. The best booth, she thinks, is in the new room, in the far corner of the restaurant. But “if you’re meeting an old friend that you haven’t seen in a 100 years and you want to actually get into it, you’re sitting at the counter,” Ms. Masters said.
“Very different experiences in the same restaurant,” Mr. Echeverria noted.
This is not the first time Ms. Swift has drawn attention to a specific location with her songs. She name-dropped the Black Dog pub in London on her previous album, and that bar has leaned into the attention. New York City’s Department of Transportation for a time sold limited edition street signs after Swift dropped the song “Cornelia Street” on her 2019 album, “Lover.”
When Ms. Swift wears something in public — Fazit, Forme bras, Capezio tights — the sales of those products tend to tick up. And when she is even seen coming out of a restaurant, getting a reservation there can become temporarily impossible. (See: Corner Store.)
Whether that fate will befall Musso’s is still to be determined. But Musso’s may not need the bump. The place was packed as Tuesday night wore on, and the musician Beck was seated in the new room. “We’re booked out for several weeks,” Mr. Echeverria said.
It’s hard to tell what impact the song may have, he said, but regulars have started asking: “Can I get Taylor’s booth?”
But he was quick to add: “Because Taylor is a current celebrity, we don’t disclose what booth that is.”
So she has been in?
“She does enjoy many different booths in the restaurant,” he said of Ms. Swift. “I’ll leave it there.”
Jill Cowan and Emmanuel Morgan contributed reporting.
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Matt Stevens is a Times reporter who writes about arts and culture from Los Angeles.
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