Meet the Jumbo's Clown Room dancer whose sexy, effortless cookbook is ‘for the girls'

Los Angeles Times

06-03-2025

In another life, before she was a beloved veteran dancer at Jumbo's Clown Room, Scarlett Kapella picked up a day shift at a sleazy yet notorious strip club in the Valley called the Candy Cat — well, notorious because it was once the strip club where Charles Manson's girlfriends danced for wads of cash before being convicted for murder.
Decades later, on a Saturday afternoon, Kapella danced onstage to a song now tinged with irony: 'Every1's a Winner' by Hot Chocolate. Men — 'old perverts,' as Kapella muses — approached the stage to tip her, or at least so she thought. Instead, they served themselves hot dogs from a Crock-Pot strategically placed at her feet — a scene so surreal and unsettling that it could have been dreamed up by David Lynch. Kapella recounts standing there topless, 'completely engulfed in pungent steam of hot dog water, canned chili and nacho cheese.'
The hot dog incident was a low point in her career. Still, it serves as a charming origin story of the stripper turned chef and now cookbook author.
'From that moment, I felt I had to reevaluate my life, and I vowed to combine stripping and food in only the sexiest, most elevated way possible,' she says.
In that spirit, Kapella is releasing her first cookbook, 'Wine Me, Dine Me, 69 Me,' featuring flirtatious recipes and sultry photographs of Jumbo's Clown Room dancers.
For years, Kapella's ongoing photography project documenting sex workers' lives called 'B—! You Strippin'' organically led to her shooting with food as a prop. From there, she was inspired to create an updated version of a 1970s-era aphrodisiac-themed cookbook with the help of her fellow dancers.
'My Freak in the Sheets Cake is directly inspired by Lola, a veteran dancer and my best friend,' she says. 'She can sit on a cake and make it high art.'
The resulting book is a spunky, sultry twist on a classic homemaker's cookbook with some bite. Kapella isn't interested in cooking for an exhausted husband after a day at the office — what's fun about that? Instead, she's serving dinner for the girls counting bills under the neon lights in strip clubs. 'I am truly blessed to have access to these unique beauties willing to spend an afternoon splooshing in my apartment.'
The cookbook, which includes sexy and fun recipes for Key lime pie, matcha pancakes and cocktails, is dedicated to Kapella's grandmother, Joann, who owned a catering company in Kapella's hometown of Palm Springs. As a child, Kapella had insomnia and passed the nights by watching Food Network.
The erotic recipes in her cookbook are perfectly suited for the aftermath of a one-night stand or to impress a date. 'I wanted to keep the recipes effortless since dating, love and relationships are hard enough,' Kapella says.
The cookbook also serves as a love letter to her mischievous mother, who 'lined medicine cabinets with obscene pages from adult magazines to deter snoops.' Kapella hails from a 'long line of party houses' — a California family well-versed in party tricks that didn't shy away from a good time.
It's no surprise, then, that Kapella ended up at Jumbo's Clown Room on her 21st birthday and was smitten with the divey bikini bar in East Hollywood. 'I fell in love with the girls. They danced to Nine Inch Nails — all different shapes and sizes.'
At the time, Kapella was pursuing modeling, where suffocating beauty standards of thinness were the norm. The bizarre mirrored world of the strip club felt like a reprieve from a culture that worshiped size zero.
Kapella auditioned, and 16 years later, her tenure as a favorite dancer has become synonymous with what makes Jumbo's Clown Room so endearing. The mention of her stage name — Pantera — elicits cheers and adoration from Jumbo's regulars. She jokes that she is the 'Carrot Top of Jumbo's Clown Room,' known for her props, from phallic balloons to a briefcase full of photocopies of her breasts, a bit that once earned her a satisfied handshake from Laurence Fishburne. The cookbook contains the same whimsy and playfulness Kapella is known for on the pole.
Like many dancers, Kapella can recount the lore of her workplace at her acrylic-nailed fingertips. For one, David Lynch wrote 'Blue Velvet' from the far corner of the bar. Anthony Bourdain — a hero of Kapella's — was a champion of the joint and featured it in his show 'No Reservations.' He understood it. No rendering of the club since can quite compare.
Like Kapella, he approached food without pretension, or as she describes it: 'chain-smoking, trash-talking, and could make a bomb risotto.' He had a practicality that cut through the 'gatekept boys club' of the culinary world that once felt hostile to Kapella.
'Cooking is like a performance — it can go very wrong, but when it's good, it's so good,' she explains. Kapella is known to host elaborate dinner parties. These days, cooking for her female friends is more enjoyable than cooking for a love interest. ('Speaking as someone who has battled flames from a vintage stove trying to bake the perfect pie, I can say with confidence: No one is worth flambéing yourself for,' she says.)
At a Thanksgiving dinner that Kapella hosted, she encouraged guests to cut out photos from pornographic magazines and paste them into what she joked was a 'porn-ucopia.' Martha Stewart is her idol, she notes.
Speaking of dinner parties, Kapella remembers an elaborate 'dinner party from hell' hosted by a Jumbo's Clown Room dancer who was, at the time, also a drug dealer. Her famed dinner party guests were an eclectic mix of renowned musicians, strippers and, expectedly, guests with nagging drug habits. 'This one guy laughed so hard that his tooth flew out and landed on a plate in front of him,' she says.
Kapella makes a compelling dinner party guest — for stories like this that she has accumulated from over a decade as one of Los Angeles' most adored strippers, observing the city from a mirrored stage in platform heels.
'Wine Me, Dine Me, 69 Me' is not Kapella's first foray into the Los Angeles culinary scene. She invented Topless Tapas, a culinary experience where strippers serve a curated menu of small plates and cocktails. 'Topless Tapas had been scribbled on a Post-It on my wall for years,' she says.
For the event, Kapella collaborated with her friends, Izzie Pop and chef Jonathan Whitener, who co-founded local restaurants such as All Day Baby and Here's Looking at You. Whitener died in 2024 but was an advocate for Kapella's culinary ventures and consulted her on early drafts of her cookbook. 'There is a lot of interest in doing another, but it feels sacrilegious after Jonathan's untimely passing,' she says.
Until the next time she burns a Key lime pie, Kapella can be found bathed in red light on the Jumbo's Clown Room stage, where she has amassed a cult following of eager patrons. 'People have always said it's like the show 'Cheers.' I don't know what's so comforting about it, but it's magic,' Kapella says of her iconic workplace. 'It's cheesy, but I discovered myself there.'