Truck stop theme bar Stinkers coming to Silver Lake next month

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Ever notice how dour-faced hipsters are too busy looking cool to ever actually crack a smile in some Silver Lake or Echo Park bars? That may change next month when Stinkers debuts at 2939 W. Sunset Blvd. (right across the street from the Silverlake Lounge).

Saints & Sinners lounge owner Bobby Green has turned the former under-attended Johnny‘s space into a truck stop-themed watering hole, with a full liquor license. Nearly 5,000 vintage aluminum beer cans (think Hamm’s, Olympia, Ballantine’s, etc.) from around the country line the walls here, and bartenders will be able to correspond with passing truckers on I-5 with a CB radio set up behind the bar (staff will have the ability to run correspondence through the house sound system).

Throw in a few 1970s posters of Burt Reynolds, aluminum diamond-patterned walls, a chandelier made from 1970s beer can pull tabs, an honest-to-God hood from a 1978 Trans Am on a wall in the ‘Trucker’s Lounge,’ and you have the makings of a bar that Bo ‘Bandit’ Darville would approve of.

But the most talked about design feature at Stinkers will surely be the mechanized skunks that line the top of the bar (see picture above). Green has the stuffed, backward-faced skunks rigged so that when a bartender pulls a cord, steam will come out of their respective backsides. No word yet on if they have figured out how to make the steam (which is actually liquid CO2) smell anything like real skunk spray, but we are guessing that the effect should sufficiently get the point across without scaring off bargoers.

The food component at Stinkers is still being worked out, Green says, but he promises that at least some thematically linked items will be served at the bar. ‘We’ll have some food,’ he said late last week. ‘It’s still being worked out, but we’ll of course have peanuts and Slim Jims as snacks at the bar. The guy next door at [adjacent restaurant] Local might put together a limited happy hour menu for us.’ We are hoping for grits, but will settle for tater tots, just for the record.

Look for the trucker-inspired diamond-plate aluminum door with a mysterious ‘S’ branded into it early next month, when the bar bows (most likely Nov. 7). ‘I’m doing everything I can just to make people smile,’ Green says. ‘Hopefully, people will like it.’ That’s a 10-4, big Bobby.

Stinkers, 2939 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles. (323) 661-6007

-- Charlie Amter