The Pacific Dining Car just west of downtown came up a year short of its centennial when it closed in the COVID-19 year of 2020. It was a hangout for politicians and power muckety-mucks. During the Democratic National Convention here in 2000, you could show up at 2 a.m. and see statesmen and deal-makers eating the signature baseball steak, or my favorite, Eggs Sardou. Any hope of reopening the landmark went up in flames<\/a> in March, right after the Pantry closed.<\/p>\n The Pig \u2018n Whistle was originally a chain of restaurants and candy shops, founded by John Gage in 1908. He opened his first location in Downtown Los Angeles.<\/p>\n (From the private collection of Patt Morrison)<\/p>\n California, and especially L.A., were out of the nation\u2019s sight and mind for so long that we were left to cultivate our own notions of good food. The culinary mismatch between \u201chere\u201d and \u201cback there\u201d let the folks \u201cback there\u201d believe we shot our food on the hoof and ate it with bare hands. But our cosmopolitan eateries eventually created a singular \u201cfusion,\u201d with its own explosion into a thriving restaurant scene. Not all of our stars are onscreen; more than two dozen are in the Michelin firmament.<\/p>\n Newsletter <\/p>\n Get the latest from Patt Morrison<\/p>\n Los Angeles is a complex place. Luckily, there’s someone who can provide context, history and culture.<\/p>\n Enter email address <\/p>\n Sign Me Up <\/p>\n You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. <\/p>\n Everyone has a lost restaurant to mourn. I would lay flowers at the grave of Ago<\/a>, a flossy Italian restaurant on Melrose Ave. in West Hollywood, gone in 2019. I weep for its vanished gnocchi, sublime as angel farts [note: this is metaphor. Are angels corporeal? Would they even have farts? I do not know.]<\/p>\n A postcard showing the F.W. Woolworth store at 431 South Broadway in downtown Los Angeles. It was famous for having the \u201clongest lunch counter in the world.\u201d <\/p>\n (From the private collection of Patt Morrison)<\/p>\n Restaurants have a high mortality rate; generally more than 80% make it through the first year, and about half are still around after five years. Yet so much can derail them: fractured supply chains, staff blowups, quirks of locations and traffic, social media ambushes, even the unexpected, like COVID.<\/p>\n So survivors are remarkable, and originals even more so. It borders on the impossible to verify anything venerable as \u201cthe first,\u201d but L.A.\u2019s first restaurant was likely in the Bella Union Hotel, opened in downtown in 1850 in an even older building. The first free-standing restaurant may have been the \u201cOld American,\u201d opened maybe a year earlier, but it too eludes confirmation.<\/p>\n Hard to know what restaurant food was like in that long ago, but very likely beef, the region\u2019s major food group, or mutton, with potatoes and onions and a palate cleanser of beer or wine or the local liquor, aguardiente. [A Bella Union newspaper ad 20 years later vaguely promised that its bill of fare \u201cshall be inferior to none in the State.\u201d]<\/p>\n I have my doubts that the Bella Union or even the Old American was L.A.\u2019s first restaurant. Food was surely being cooked and served and sold in private houses and small shops and on street stands in ethnic enclaves under the Anglo-Angeleno radar. Eventually, such places did get \u201cdiscovered,\u201d and the local gentry might have bragged that they had just found the most delish little caf\u00e9 hidden away in an edgy neighborhood.<\/p>\n In 1921, The Times suggested that daring tourists might try the food in \u201cforeign quarters,\u201d like \u201cChinatown\u2019s alleys,\u201d whose waiters were described in stereotypes. Italian restaurant-goers were advised to ditch steak and potatoes to try \u201cauthentic\u201d Italian food like artichokes, and the \u201cpeculiarly seasoned tomato sauce.\u201d Or they could join movie stars and sports heroes for original chili burgers at \u201cPtomaine Tommy\u2019s\u201d in Lincoln Heights, which started out in 1913 as a street lunch wagon.<\/p>\n Into the 20th century, some things Mexican were considered declasse, except in designated quaint settings like Olvera Street. Restaurants serving Mexican food to Anglo-Angelenos often styled themselves \u201cSpanish.\u201d<\/p>\n A postcard showing Glendale\u2019s renowned Casa Verdugo.<\/p>\n (From the private collection of Patt Morrison)<\/p>\n At Glendale\u2019s renowned Casa Verdugo<\/a>, the food was straight-up Mexican \u2014 tamales, enchiladas, burritos \u2014 but advertised as \u201cSpanish\u201d cuisine. El Cholo<\/a>, on Western Avenue, just celebrated its 100th birthday as a \u201cSpanish\u201d caf\u00e9. There are tales of Angelenos who traveled to Spain and were astonished to find that Spanish food was not, in fact, tamales and enchiladas.<\/p>\n Cafeterias have gone retro chic now, but L.A.\u2019s early cafeteria craze wasn\u2019t ironic or hip. They served what working Angelenos needed: standard, middle-American comfort food at plausible prices \u2014 and, for non-working Angelenos, sometimes no price at all.<\/p>\n Clifton\u2019s<\/a>, founded in the Depression year of 1931, once ran a chain of cafeterias arguably less notable for the food \u2014 beef dishes, fried chicken, Jell-o salads \u2014 than for the elaborate d\u00e9cor of religious dioramas, exotic South Seas vistas, and redwood faux forests.<\/p>\n The founder, Clifford Clinton, was a good-government civic crusader, and his cafeterias\u2019 policy was to let folks eat free if they couldn\u2019t afford the tab. As a hungry young writer, Ray Bradbury made full use of that policy. What is left of this giant, Los Angeles\u2019 unofficial kitchen? It now bears the name Clifton\u2019s Republic, a weekend-only bar at Clifton\u2019s old downtown address.<\/p>\n In the 18 decades since the Bella Union\u2019s opened a kitchen, Angelenos never lost their beefsteak appetites, and 20th century steakhouses arose as haute cuisine, with steak places arrayed along La Cienega\u2019s \u201cRestaurant Row.\u201d<\/p>\n In Studio City, Glendale, Palm Springs and Bakersfield, waiters at the Saddle and Sirloin restaurants handed diners a page of beef choices, and a few chicken and fish alternatives, printed on a die-cut menu embossed to look like a fancy gun holster.<\/p>\n On the far end of the grill sizzle was the vegetarian restaurant. It did not begin, as you might suppose, in the hipster 1960s. The Source<\/a>, on Sunset Boulevard, was launched in 1969 by a Cincinnati-born guru who called himself Father Yod. Woody Allen made fun of the place and its vibe in \u201cAnnie Hall.\u201d His character met Diane Keaton there and snottily ordered \u201calfalfa sprouts and mashed yeast.\u201d<\/p>\n The food reform movement was a hit with Angelenos. <\/p>\n The Vegetarian Caf\u00e9, in downtown Los Angeles, hosted a July 1901 lunch meeting of the Women\u2019s Christian Temperance Union. The menu: corn soup, beet salad, baked beans, unfermented grape juice, and sliced \u201cprotose\u201d with lemon. Protose was a meat substitute of wheat gluten and peanuts, cooked up by the food reformer Dr. John Kellogg, the fellow whose name you know better from a line of sometimes quite sugary cereals.<\/p>\n In Hollywood, studios tended to lay claim to nearby restaurants almost as extensions of their own commissaries, with cocktail privileges. Paramount people adopted restaurants on Melrose: first Lucey\u2019s, and later Lucy\u2019s El Adobe, which together lasted a hundred years.<\/p>\n A postcard showing Lucey\u2019s in Hollywood, which opened in 1922.<\/p>\n (From the private collection of Patt Morrison)<\/p>\n Lucey\u2019s<\/a> opened in 1922, and silent stars like Clara Bow showed up in limos and ordered fistfuls of caviar. Paramount artists painted the murals in the restaurant\u2019s VIP room. Lucey\u2019s headwaiter Don Avalier was reportedly \u201cdiscovered\u201d there, and screen-tested for a bio-pic of Rudolph Valentino. He didn\u2019t get the starring role but he did get other movie parts, often playing \u2026 a headwaiter.<\/p>\n This Lucey\u2019s closed some time in the 1950s. In 1964, the other Lucy\u2019s, the fabled Mexican restaurant, opened a little way away. It too was an actors\u2019 hangout, but celebrated as the place where governor Jerry Brown and singer Linda Ronstadt met and launched their headliner romance. That Lucy\u2019s closed in 2019, the year before Covid.<\/p>\n More than Sunset Blvd. or Hollywood Blvd., Melrose Ave. was where the stars came out, and dined in. One of two Nickodell restaurants<\/a> was nudged alongside Paramount. In 1928, it began selling affordable food to starving actors, and did so even after they were no longer starving.<\/p>\n In 1982, Nickodell\u2019s steak sandwich with grilled onion and potatoes cost $6.95, a price you could hardly afford to duplicate at home, wrote Times food columnist Rose Dosti. Each day of the week offered a special: chicken cacciatore on Mondays, frankfurters and sauerkraut on Wednesdays, and so on. When it closed, in 1993, veteran TV actress Peggy Rea mourned its special dishes. \u201cFrom here you go into the world of alfalfa sprouts.\u201d<\/p>\n Our big, warm climate and our wide-open spaces made possible something that earned its own genre: mimetic architecture, whimsical buildings that look like something else, often the thing that they sell. The Brown Derby restaurant didn\u2019t sell derbies, but The Tamale, on Whittier Blvd. in East L.A., sold tamales, and the trade of Randy\u2019s Donuts in Inglewood is unmistakably doughnuts.<\/p>\n A postcard showing the Jail Cafe, which opened at 4212 Sunset Boulevard in September 1925.<\/p>\n (From the private collection of Patt Morrison)<\/p>\n In 1927, the \u201cBuffalo Times\u201d gave us an eyeroll in print over an igloo-shaped restaurant with papier-mache icicles, a merry-go-round restaurant with revolving tables, a \u201cbullpen\u201d restaurant with a live bull and waiters dressed as matadors. And it singled out the Jail Caf\u00e9 on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood, where the El Cid restaurant<\/a> now stands. The Jail Caf\u00e9<\/a> set tables and chairs in \u201ccells\u201d for patrons served by waiters wearing trustee uniforms, presided over by a cashier dressed as a warden. When two masked men showed up there in March 1926, customers thought it was just part of the show \u2014 until the robbers fired their guns and relieved diners of about $500.<\/p>\n The caf\u00e9 ship \u201cCabrillo\u201d<\/a> was a gigantic mimetic. Beginning in 1903, it was berthed in Venice, if you can say \u201cberthed\u201d about a vessel that wasn\u2019t a real ship. Early on, and briefly, waiters were unfortunately tricked out in white wigs and satin knee breeches, a la Versailles-on-the-Venice-canals. The dishes and the prices invited a well-heeled clientele \u2014 Charlie Chaplin, Jack Dempsey, Sarah Bernhardt. Sand dabs and halibut, still edible and plentiful there, were held in a net slung under the hull and served moments later. If you preferred food with legs, there was roast pheasant and, of course, steak. The place was auctioned off down to its timbers in October 1946.<\/p>\n Germans once had a large presence in Los Angeles, with beer gardens, restaurants, churches, and a downtown club and sports center. But as happened elsewhere in the country, much of L.A.\u2019s public German community went to ground after May 1915, when a German U-boat sank the British ocean liner Lusitania.<\/p>\n So it was surprising to see that when the Second World War came around, a Manhattan Beach restaurant named Little Bavaria kept its doors open. On June 8, 1942, the restaurant ran an ad in The Times touting its 80-cent home-cooked dinners. That same night, the feds raided the place, and subpoenaed its owner, a German-born naturalized citizen, and three employees. The feds said the place was possibly an \u201cimportant listening post\u201d for German-friendly ears, considering that it was a popular lunchtime destination for dozens of workers at nearby defense plants.<\/p>\n A postcard showing Willard\u2019s original restaurant, which opened 1928 at 9625 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles.<\/p>\n (From the private collection of Patt Morrison)<\/p>\n If by now you\u2019re still hung up on first\/oldest, I direct you to the oldest surviving restaurant in L.A. County: the Saugus Caf\u00e9<\/a>. Best birth date estimate for this railroad cafe: 1886 or 1887, and its address is now in Santa Clarita, a town that didn\u2019t even exist then, but which rallied to save the caf\u00e9 during Covid.<\/p>\n Why the longevity? Because fusion, flank steak, fusilli, futomaki \u2014 tastes come and tastes go. But diners are forever.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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