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A Palace You Can Visit in Los Angeles
The Polo Lounge is Back — Lunch for our Private Los Angeles Tour
From the air the hotel and the grounds surrounding it pop right out to our private helicopter tour guests circling over Beverly Hills. The Pink Palace — also known as the The Beverly Hills Hotel. And from the ground it is even more splendid. For more than 100 years this grand hospitality center has entertained movie stars, hosted royalty, and treated all its guests with the aplomb and consideration expected of one of the finest hotels anywhere. This is a jewel of the Dorchester Collection of elegant hotels around the world. Not only do we bring our guests on their custom tour with us to see the hotel, we encourage them to enjoy a meal at the fabulous Polo Lounge. With us at your side we can share many stories of just the restaurant. The restaurant is newly reopened after renovations that updated the decor while still preserving the original design and ambience that is a welcome tradition at this home away from home for so many of Hollywood’s elite over the years. We are talking about Charlie Chaplin and Marlene Dietrich. We have eaten beside Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, Billy Crystal and Thomas Haden Church. And they have enjoyed their meals near us. When you dine there we recommend the McCarthy Salad named for famed entertainment attorney Neil McCarthy.
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Self-Portrait with Helicopter
Private Los Angeles Tour Departs Heliport
As our guests are getting ready for their flight over Los Angeles, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Malibu and the coastline we enjoyed a chance to grab this interesting self-portrait with the helicopter in the background. Since photographs are an essential part of the tour experience we provide we are truly professional photographers and, judging by the interest we generate on Pinterest, many more folks than just our private tour guests are enjoying our work.
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Looking East from the Eastern Building
Sunrise in Los Angeles
Thanks again to an Elite Adventure Tours friend who knew we would love this photograph of downtown Los Angeles’ Eastern Building taken early in the morning. This exquisite art deco building from 1930 has been repurposed into 147 spectacular apartments and is located on Broadway in the old Theater District. Since many of our private Los Angeles tours explore downtown Los Angeles we will regularly drive down Broadway and point out this beautiful torquoise terra cotta structure and prompt our guests to remember the many times they have seen it in movies and on television. It’s a star!
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Flying, Food and Fun at the Spitfire Grill
Private Los Angeles Tour Lands at Spitfire Grill
Santa Monica Airport was once Clover Field and a very large aircraft manufacturing facility (Douglas Aircraft: DC-3s, B-17s, B-47s). Today private luxury jets fly in and out of this beautiful airport by the sea. If you are there visiting the Museum of Flying and get hungry then we suggest the Spitfire Grill nearby. Terrific food and a wonderful aviation-themed restaurant to feed and entertain you.
Sitting in the patio enjoying a fine lunch with our private Los Angeles tour guests recently, we talked about the film Spitfire Grill, written by the owner of the restaurant, Lee David Zlotoff. The murals, painting and other artifacts inside and outside the cafe really speak to airplane lovers and make this a great place to go to talk about flying, food and film.
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A 60s Polynesian Bar Worth Visiting
Elite Adventure Tours Stops at Historic Bar
Imagine a bar where they do not serve beer or wine. The Tiki Ti ONLY serves tropical cocktails as they have been doing for more than 50 years. There are 92 different drinks on their menu so who needs beer or wine. Look over the menus from its earliest days and trace the evolution of island cocktails over all these years. Begun in 1961 by Ray Buhen, a master mixologist with roots at Don the Beachcomber, where all the other tiki bars faded into history the Tiki Ti flourished. Intimate (small) and quaint (locals, rum lovers, history buffs), the Tiki Ti always gets looks as we pass by on our private Los Angeles tour through Hollywood on the way to Beverly Hills, it is so tiny next to the hulking KCET television studios. Like the Frolic Room and the One-Eyed Gypsy, there are bars in this city with stories to tell and we not only like to help tell them but are happy to bring our guests in possibly to make a new story.
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Mulholland Dam Creates Lake Hollywood
Dam View on a Private Los Angeles Tour
Almost all of our custom tour guests in Hollywood spend time in areas where they see this view of Lake Hollywood and the Mulholland Dam. The dam, built in 1924, filled this reservoir with water which in those early days served all of Los Angeles. There is a 4-mile loop around the lake for hikers and joggers and other outdoor enthusiasts. At dawn and dusk you can enjoy the local wildlife (deer, coyotes, raccoons, skunks, bobcats) and the local wild life (actors, writers, directors). If you are the kind of filmlover who peppers your conversations with quotes from Chinatown or Earthquake then you will immediately recognize filming locations along the hiking route. Turning 180° from this view you are staring right at the Hollywood Sign which represents a different healthy hike up to the top of Mt. Lee just behind the sign with a magnificent view of both the Los Angeles basin and the San Fernando valley. If a private hiking tour interests you be sure to contact us. We know great trails throughout the Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountains.
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Special Parking in Santa Ynez
Helicopter Landing at a Santa Ynez Winery
Talk about a special parking spot. How about this spot we get at a secret Santa Ynez winery where we take our private Los Angeles tour guests who want a wine tasting adventure. We are met by the owner with his ATV to drive us through the vineyards to the tasting room. This kind of special treatment is a part of all our tours and we really highlight it with our wine adventure tours. It’s not just a hot towel service and snacks, we’re talking gourmet picnic lunches, special owner-guided tours of wineries and opportunities to sample wines unavailable to the general public. Our Santa Ynez Valley tours might include ostriches and a cute Danish village (Solvang) or town from the Old West. We also can take our wine loving guests to other wine areas in different directions from Los Angeles (Malibu and Temecula). Whatever our guests want we can put together in a custom luxury adventure.
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Nothing Obscure about Santa Monica’s Camera Obscura
Ancient Camera Interests Private Los Angeles Tour Guests
Dating back to 1898, the Camera Obscura in Santa Monica allows guests to enjoy the same visual examination of the area that earlier beachgoers did. Perhaps the earliest of optical inventions, this type of device was employed by renaissance painters (Leonardo da Vinci) as well as philosophers (Aristotle), astronomers (Johannes Kepler) and scientists (Roger Bacon). The idea of the pinhole camera preceded lens technology and permitted projection of inverted images onto a surface so that solar eclipses could be safely watched or individuals observed without their knowledge. The Santa Monica Camera Obscura was moved from its original beach location to the Senior Center atop the palisades overlooking Santa Monica Bay in 1955 where it can be found today.
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Margarita? Los Angeles? El Coyote!
Where Do All the Actors Go for Margaritas?
We keep track of all the Best Of information that we can for places to eat, drink, dance, shop, stay and do in Los Angeles, Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Since many of our private Los Angeles tour guests are new to Los Angeles (even new to California) they are likely to ask us, “Where’s the best margarita around here?” The answer to anyone knowing the area as well as we do, even without a Best Of list, is El Coyote. This 80+ year old restaurant that we pass regularly on our custom luxury tour between Hollywood and the Original Farmers Market is a terrific place to enjoy great Mexican food and super margaritas. Frequented by entertainment industry people (it is just up the street from CBS Studios) the restaurant is notoriously known as the last place that Sharon Tate and her friends ate on the night they were attacked by the Manson family. Anyone visiting or new to Hollywood should make it a point to get to El Coyote right away for a great time and a great margarita.
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Sun Sets on a Private Los Angeles Tour
Great Photographs Mark Hollywood Tour
Among the many things we do so well on our private Los Angeles tours is capture great photographs. We know our guests love that we take these photos because we generally have the best camera in the van (prosumer digital SLR camera) and we take so many photographs every day that we really do know how and where (and when) to get the best shots of the area and of our guests. Each of them have extensive digital photo albums after their tour to share with family and friends. This photo was taken from a hilltop in Griffith Park on a perfectly clear evening looking out toward Santa Monica Bay. Palm Trees — so Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Do you know who else loves our photographs? Our followers at Pinterest.