The Original Pantry, a landmark Los Angeles restaurant, is on the verge of maybe/possibly shutting down after operating in this city since When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. I mean the Age of Man, not the movie. It was (note the past tense) a wonderful 24/7 place to grab a steak or other very American entree and an especially great place for breakfast. That was true until a slow but an almost-tangible downslide began in 1980 when a gent named Richard Riordan purchased the place.
Mr. Riordan was the Mayor of Los Angeles from 1993 to 2001 and not, in my opinion, a particularly good one. That didn't matter much because the way Los Angeles is set up, the mayor has about as much power as one of those 25-cent batteries they used to sell at RadioShack — the kind you could put into your transistor radio and hear about half a song before you had to swap it out. We used to say, "His skill as a politician put him where he is today — in the restaurant business." He also ruined a great eatery called Gladstone's out by the ocean in Santa Monica.
Mayor Riordan was a nice man — I ate with him once and liked him despite Trumpian politics — but all his businesses suffered or shuttered. He passed away two years ago.
I'll tell you how great the Pantry was, once upon a time. You usually had to wait a long time to get in — and we did. And then once you were seated at a table, they immediately served you an unasked-for dish of cole slaw…and I still went there. The food was good, the food was cheap and the place was kind of legendary. It was open 24/7 and its owners, including the former mayor, bragged that they never, in all its seeming centuries of existence — actually since it opened in 1924 — were closed or without a customer.
Then COVID hit and they closed…and I think they did also once or twice to correct health code violations. Lately, they've been open not every day at every hour but Wednesdays through Sundays from 7 AM until 3 PM on weekdays and 5 PM on weekends. You'd think that if they could only turn a profit during those hours, someone would say, "Hmm…maybe we're doing something wrong."
So I don't go there anymore and neither do enough people for the place to be open at night. I feel bad for its employees, some of whom have been there since it was a great place to dine but I'm already seeing on the Internet, people who haven't eaten there for decades saying, "This is a landmark…we need to save it." And my thinking is that it's a little late for that. Someone should have begun applying corrective measures before it turned into a Denny's — and not a very good one.