Matt Jumps was nice enough to send me a link to this article about plans to renovate and upgrade the last remaining Clifton's Cafeteria. Clifton's was once a small chain with several outlets in Southern California. I went to the one in the big Century City mall and it had terrific food and it was always packed…so much so that its closure came as a shock to many. I suspect it had something to do with it being the wrong restaurant for the demographic of the shopping center. The complex there (now a Westfield mall, as all malls will someday be) was full of upscale stores that didn't cater to the kind of folks who'd eat in a cafeteria. It would not surprise me if a profitable business was squeezed out for just that reason…though more likely, their low-priced meals simply couldn't sustain the rent there.
There were other Clifton's but we're down now to the last of its kind, the one in Downtown L.A. That's the one that's about to get a makeover as part of a general attempt to refurbish that whole shabby, homeless-filled area. In fact, the old Clifton's was the perfect commissary for that vicinity. Food there is cheap and the cafeteria has a policy of feeding those who can't pay. The new owner says that he'll retain that policy and that his new hires will come from the ranks of the local homeless. (The plan seems to be to upgrade the downstairs cafeteria but to keep the meals inexpensive, and to add upscale dining on the second floor. It's a pretty ambitious endeavor…and some or all of it, they say, will be open 24/7.)
Urban renewal of those blocks down there would seem to be too great a task but I'm no expert on the kind of math that would be involved. I can tell them this, though: My business doesn't take me often to that area but around six times in the last decade, I was in the vicinity and thought I'd stop in at that Clifton's for a meal. Like most folks with lots of food allergies, I prefer cafeterias to sit-down eateries and I also had fond memories of the Clifton's in Century City and an earlier chain in Los Angeles called the Ontra Cafeterias. Only one out of my half-dozen attempts to patronize the downtown Clifton's was successful. That is, I only actually got there once and the food was quite disappointing. My sense was that management was keeping the prices down by using the cheapest-possible ingredients…and also that they weren't doing enough business to have much turnover of the food, which all seemed to have been sitting around for a while. The Century City location did such volume that the chow was always being freshly-prepared, which was one of its appeals.
All of that will be corrected if the new proprietor does what he says he's going to do. Still, if he wants to make a go of the place, he really has to fix the problem that kept me from going there the other five times. I literally could not find a place to park. After circling the block so many times I should have been registered to vote there, I thought of other, easier places to dine and drove off to one of them, instead. The one time I did dine there, I pulled into a lot where I paid — I am not exaggerating — about twice what the meal at Clifton's cost me. Just to park. The article linked above notes how much Ray Bradbury loves the place. Well, he would. He doesn't drive.
Like I said, I love cafeterias and I lament how few and far-between they are. If I wanted to go patronize a place with loads of freshly-made selections like the old Ontra chain or the Clifton's in Century City, I literally do not know where that would be…but I bet I'd have to travel quite some distance. If they can rejuvenate the downtown Clifton's and solve the parking problem, I'm there.