Exclusive | Inside Pawn Shop, the star-studded LA sports bar backed by Mark Cuban and Andrew Friedman

Apparently, Mark Cuban and Andrew Friedman weren’t content conquering professional sports. 

Now they’re coming for your neighborhood sports bar. 

Tucked inside a sprawling 8,500-square-foot former pawn shop that dates back to the 1930s, L.A.’s newest reinvention on sports, luxury, and fine dining is born. Located on the corner of Melrose and Cahuenga sits Pawn Shop, a new restaurant and sports bar that features more than 60 televisions, two enormous media walls, private suites, and high-end cocktails galore. 

It’s led by founder and CEO Diego Torres-Palma and James Beard Award-winning chef Tony Messina. Together they’ve made the standard sports bar menu of chicken wings, nachos and mozzarella sticks look insulting by comparison. 

A housemade wagyu hot dog, beef tallow fries, chicken liver mousse, caviar and charbroiled Maine oysters are just some of the menu’s highlights.

But the most interesting thing about Pawn Shop isn’t what’s on the walls or plates. 

It’s who is behind it. 

Billionaire entrepreneur and former Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is an investor. So is Dodgers’ president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman. 

The list of names interested in either investing or being a part of the business is longer than a CVS receipt. 

Aaron Donald, who recently stunned the football world by coming out of retirement and returning to the Los Angeles Rams, has discussed investing alongside his wife, Erica, according to Torres-Palma.

“We literally traded emails when Aaron announced he was coming back,” Torres-Palma said. 

Donald isn’t the only Dodgers-or-Rams-adjacent star circling the new sports bar. Dodgers’ shortstop Mookie Betts met with the company and will now feature his Tequila Providencia behind the bar. Torres-Palma said Providencia’s CEO Rodd Rafieha’s tequila impressed his beverage team enough to earn a place in the well. 

Kendall Jenner’s 818 Tequila also wanted in on the fun.

“We’re excited to have 818 Tequila featured at Pawn Shop LA,” said Lanay Jacobs, President of 818 Tequila. “It’s a lively destination that brings together sports, cocktails, and community in a way our audience will love.”

Torres-Palma has other meetings set up with L.A. superstar athletes as well. 

That collection of names helps explain why Pawn Shop has quickly become less a sports bar and more a hangout spot for athletes and celebrities alike. 

Former NBA player Chandler Parsons, now the co-host of the online show “Run It Back,” makes a point to stop by at least once a week. 

“Pawn Shop is exactly what LA needed,” he said. “Great food, great energy, amazing people, and a genuine love for sports that you can feel when you walk in.”

Sportscaster and radio host Rich Eisen recently held his fantasy football draft there. The entire LAFC team did the same. Actor Anthony Ramos has stopped by several times. Several entertainment executives have used the space, while nearby Paramount staffers have turned its private upstairs suites into off-site work rooms. 

Cuban recently visited with his son and was in awe. 

“Of all the investors, Mark is probably the one that I communicate with the most,” Torres-Palma said. “He’s so pumped. Honestly, he’s probably been our top supporter.”

The timing of Pawn Shop’s opening could hardly have been better.

It arrived during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, instantly giving an unknown sports bar the kind of crowds and atmosphere most restaurants spend years trying to manufacture.

Torres-Palma compares those first weeks to hosting a wedding every few days: hundreds of customers arriving together, watching the same event and wanting food and drinks at virtually the same moment.

The peak came during Mexico’s wild Round of 16 match against England.

“I’ll never forget the roars in here,” Torres-Palma said. “That feeling is why you build these things. It’s such a crazy, loud, energetic feeling that everybody experiences at the same time.”

He even has a phrase for it: “monetizing moments.”

It sounds cold until you stand inside a room filled with hundreds of strangers collectively losing their minds over a goal. When fans of El Tri or the Three Lions look back on that historic match, they’ll remember being at Pawn Shop and sharing a memory they’ll never forget with others. 

That’s what “monetizing moments” is all about. It’s also a pretty good description of the entire sports business. 

The question now is whether Pawn Shop can sustain that feeling now that the World Cup is over. 

Los Angeles is littered with restaurants that were once the hottest reservation in town. Sports bars and national chains have closed locations, too. Novelty disappears quickly here.

Torres-Palma doesn’t seem particularly frightened.

“When people say the restaurant business is brutal or very tough, I always ask them, ‘What’s an easy business so I can go do that?’” he said.

His answer to struggling competitors is considerably sharper.

“Let them quit,” Torres-Palma said. “They should have never played the game.”

That swagger only works if the product backs it up.

So far, Pawn Shop has a legitimate argument that it does.

Its biggest advantage might actually be the food. Pawn Shop feels less like somebody dressed up a sports bar as a restaurant than somebody built a serious restaurant and happened to cover it in televisions.

Customers can tell their server which game they want and staff can route it in seconds to televisions near their table. If someone wants USC football on one screen, the Dodgers on another, Texas football on a third and the U.S. Open nearby, you can get all of them and more at the snap of a finger. 

During NFL Sundays, the two massive central media walls can even show different games, effectively splitting the room into competing fan bases.

“A lot of bars in L.A., we’re learning, don’t put the sound on,” Torres-Palma said. “We will fully lean in to actually having the sound on.”

It seems laughably obvious for a sports bar to play the sound of the game they’re featuring.

That’s also the point.

Pawn Shop is betting there’s a hole in Los Angeles between the neighborhood dive with eight televisions and mediocre wings and the actual stadium experience, where dinner can cost a fortune and nobody is going just for the cuisine.

“We are that clubhouse,” Torres-Palma said. “We just want to be a sports hub.”

And this is only phase one.

Pawn Shop plans original digital programming pairing athletes with Messina, including a concept in which the chef recreates a favorite childhood meal for a player. “Sinatra Tuesdays” are coming, featuring old-school Italian dinners and Hollywood-inspired programming. October will bring outdoor movie nights.

In February, the Super Bowl returns to Los Angeles, a time when Torres-Palma says companies are already approaching Pawn Shop about buyouts, pregame parties and postgame events. 

After that?

Expansion. 

“I think we’ll be opening up No. 2, or be close to opening,” Torres-Palma said of where he expects Pawn Shop to be by next summer. “Probably Vegas, almost certainly.”

For all the celebrity investors, tequila deals, televisions and franchise plans, Torres-Palma keeps coming back to something much simpler.

He wants people leaving Pawn Shop with a story to tell. 

Whether that’s a World Cup goal, a Dodgers walk-off win in October, a Rams 4th quarter comeback, a chance encounter with an actor or athlete, or even a glimpse of a World Series trophy or Super Bowl ring.

“I just really want people to talk about Pawn Shop as a place where, like, ‘Oh, this crazy thing happened to me here,’” Torres-Palma said.

Ultimately, that might be Pawn Shop’s smartest bet. 

L.A. has plenty of places to eat, grab a drink or watch a game. 

But what Cuban, Friedman and Torres-Palma are betting their business on is that L.A. still needs a place where something worth remembering happens while you’re doing all three.

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