The Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel doesn’t always identify booths and tables by numbers—the conventional restaurant system so the staff knows where to seat guests. Instead, they often refer to the names: Marilyn Monroe. Charlie Chaplin. Sophia Loren. Elizabeth Taylor. It’s not just some Hollywood gimmick. Each of them were actually regulars at the Polo Lounge, and those were actually their preferred tables. “She had breakfast there. She had her caviar there, her glass of Champagne there. Everything used to be there,” director Pepe de Anda says, pointing to a green leather booth in the back room of the Polo Lounge that used to be frequented by Marilyn Monroe.

We’re sitting here on a July afternoon. The 11th to be exact, the very day the famous Los Angeles restaurant turns 85. Golden hour descends on the patio behind us, which is dotted with palm trees, fuchsia bougainvilleas, and birds of paradise—the flora that makes you forget about things like earthquakes and fires and instead see Southern California as an oasis here on earth. Waiters set silverware upon the tables, lined with Hollywood Regency–style wrought iron chairs with hunter green cushions.

De Anda is the fourth maître d’ in the Polo Lounge’s history. He admits he didn’t personally ever seat Marilyn Monroe, who tragically died in August 1962 at the age of 36. But, he did seat a lot of others: “Johnny Carson, Kirk Douglas, Michael Douglas. You just name it. Just name it,” he tells me.

How about Frank Sinatra? “The Sinatras, yes. I had the opportunity to serve them many, many, many, many times.”

He began working at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 1986 as a bus boy at the Cabana Café, the sun-soaked eatery by the hotel’s famous pool. Eventually, he worked his way up to a server at the Polo Lounge. When the maître d’ before him, Nino Osti, retired, the hotel’s management asked him to sub-in until they hired his replacement. “I’m still waiting on that somebody because I’m here. After 37 years, I’m still here,” he says, laughing.

It’s no small feat. The Polo Lounge isn’t just a run-of-the-mill restaurant in Los Angeles. It was (and still is) the power-lunch restaurant in Los Angeles—where the entertainment industry’s biggest players gathered to see, be seen, and broker deals in the California sunshine, all while eating McCarthy Salads mixed tableside.

Here’s how it all began. Hernando Courtright, the owner of the Beverly Hills Hotel in the 1940s, decided to display a silver trophy cup belonging to his polo-playing friend and oil tycoon Charles Wrightsman in the hotel’s restaurant. The food-and-beverage concept for the space was getting redone at the time, and the whole polo thing just kind of…stuck. In 1941, they officially christened the space as the Polo Lounge, now complete with a photograph of Will Rogers and Darryl Zanuck (the cofounder of 20th Century Fox) playing the equestrian sport behind the bar. Seven years later, the Polo Lounge received a refresh at the hands of masterful architect Paul R. Williams.

As the Golden Age of Hollywood reached its glamorous zenith, so did the Polo Lounge, earning itself the now legendary nickname of “Hollywood’s commissary.” In fact, so many of Tinseltown’s rich and powerful went there for lunch that the restaurant installed phones into the booths, lest they miss an important call. Cellphones rendered this particular feature redundant—but to this day, the Polo Lounge still serves lunch to such urgent decision-makers.

Although dinner, too, has had its fair share of Hollywood moments. Especially during the winter awards-show stretch. “One night I remember we were extremely busy. It was during the Oscar season. We have at every single table very high-profile guests. Some guys were having drinks at one of the cocktail tables by the bar. I was at the door. On their way out, they looked at me and said, ‘Pepe, do you know how much money you have here right now?’ I didn’t. I just started looking around and said, ‘Oh my God.’”

De Anda won’t name-drop the living—discretion, after all, is paramount at the Polo Lounge. However, he does indulge in telling me a few stories about dearly departed regulars of the past. Kirk Kerkorian, the fearsome billionaire owner of MGM, who ate there three to four times a week. “Same table, same position, same food,” he says shrugging. Or Whitney Houston, who one time got up unannounced to play the piano after their regular pianist’s shift ended. “There were not too many people in the room. Some of them even were asking for the check. Nobody recognized her until she started kind of rambling the songs that we usually play. It was like a two-hour concert. People started saying, ‘Oh, excuse me, can I have another round?’” I ask him to tell me more. But a band starts to do a mic check, an auditory sign that De Anda doesn’t have much time before the rush of dinner service begins. And tonight there will be a rush: They’ve invited a number of regulars to a special dinner commemorating the restaurant’s anniversary. De Anda donned a tux for the occasion.

I get to see De Anda in more casual wear—meaning a suit and tie—on another visit when I come to the Polo Lounge during lunch service. I arrive at 11:20 a.m., a full 40 minutes before the standard socially acceptable afternoon meal time of noon. Yet as the Beverly Hills Hotel’s culinary director, Ashley James, leads me into the impeccable stainless steel kitchen, lunch orders are already coming in and trays are already heading out the door.

I’m here to observe one area in particular: the salad station.

In the 1940s, a hot-shot entertainment lawyer named Neil McCarthy sauntered into the Polo Lounge’s clubby green dining room and asked the chef to whip him up something specific: a chopped salad with chicken, lettuce, avocado, tomato, cheddar cheese, beets, egg, and bacon, with balsamic vinaigrette. They obliged. McCarthy, whose clients included Ginger Rogers and Ava Gardener, was one of their steadfast regulars, often coming for lunch after playing polo at the nearby Midwick Country Club. Eventually, they decided to add it to the menu.

Today, the hotel estimates that the Polo Lounge serves 650 McCarthy Salads a week at a whopping $46 per bowl. (Beverly Hills: famously not cheap.) But it’s likely way more: the hotel’s other restaurant, the Fountain Coffee Room, technically doesn’t have the salad on the menu. However if you ask nicely, they’ll send one down anyway. And if you throw a private event in one of their ballrooms? The Beverly Hills Hotel will provide a mini McCarthy Salad station if you wish. And then there’s room service…

James tells me that the kitchen team completes the prep for the McCarthy Salad ingredients every day by 11:15 a.m. Then, they’re put in the hands of one man: Danny Torres, whom they call “El Rey McCarthy.” For more than 20 years, Torres has been making the famous salad at the Polo Lounge. He stands there calmly in front of his assembly line of ingredients. What’s the key to putting together a McCarthy Salad, I ask him? “Make it with love,” he says with a small smile. Then he makes a salad with the utmost precision in under a minute, putting all the ingredients into a bowl-shaped amphitheater. (This, I learned from James, is a key part of the McCarthy Salad experience, as it allows the guest to see the salad as the waiter tosses it tableside. “It’s very visually friendly,” he says. They’ve been using this exact ceramic for 25 years.) I open up my mouth to ask another question—but the waiters are swooping in with orders. Lunch service has begun…and so have the McCarthy orders. And by 11:33 a.m., Torres has already whipped up four that are promptly whisked away.

I head into the Polo Lounge’s dining room—hunter green, wood heavy, and clubby—and cozy up in a booth with views of both the kitchen door and the patio. I spy women in Chanel tweed suits and Hermès Birkins and more than one pair of Louboutins. Also, inexplicably, some men in sweatpants, who I secretly suspect are richer than those in red soles. (The Polo Lounge used to have a strict dress code, once upon a time requiring men to be in a jacket and tie and women to be in skirts or dresses. It was Marlene Dietrich, actually, who got the no-slacks-for-ladies rule repealed in the 1940s.) The McCarthys fly out of the kitchen—first to a woman in a Hailey Bieber–esque slicked-back bun, black sunglasses, and an Hermès Kelly; then to an older man in a blue blazer who nods with approval when it’s presented to him by his water. I overhear three women in a booth, who look straight out of a Nancy Meyers movie with their cream-and-beige outfits, order the salad one after the other.

De Anda comes over to my booth and greets me warmly. But he’s in high demand: Patrons pass by him, giving him handshakes and even hugs. De Anda later tells me that he estimates 70% to 75% of the Polo Lounge’s customers are regulars. (Thank God he’s good with faces: “I need to see the face! Sometimes they’ll call me. They say, ‘Pepe, it’s John.’ In my phone, I have 10, 20 Johns! When I see the face, I know which John.”) The remaining 25% of diners, he says, are a mix of tourists and hotel guests.

And, of course, the celebrities. As I go to leave, I pass the actor Laura Dern. She stops in her tracks. “It’s so pretty,” she says, gazing out to the patio in all its bougainvillea-filled glory, just as Hollywood heavyweights have probably said for 85 years—and probably even 85 more.