LaFayette Hotel

On our lists of the best cocktail bars, live music venues, activities and arcades & games in San Diego.

Poolside at this 1946 hotel, drinks and light bites come from the Pool Bar under garden trellises, while indoors The Gutter pours cocktails alongside a two-lane bowling alley with a gravity-fed ball return, pool tables and shuffleboard. Consortium Holdings, the local group behind seventeen other San Diego bars, reopened the property in 2023 after a renovation that added a jazz club and a rum bar alongside the original Olympic-sized pool, where lap lines still run under green leopard-print lounge chairs. Bob Hope once owned one of the hotel's penthouses, and Conrad Hilton later took over the property outright; it's now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.