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This will only be of interest to certain friends of mine. Hey, Certain Friends of Mine! Remember that great little restaurant I took you to over on Pico Boulevard a block west of Beverly Glen? The little hole-in-the-wall place called The Main Course? You were skeptical at first but one bite of their food — especially if you took my advice and ordered the turkey meatloaf — prompted you to thank me for introducing you to a great, albeit tiny place to eat.

They've closed and they posted this message on their webpage…

Dear Customers! The Main Course restaurant is out of business due to changing circumstances surrounding our lease. We want to thank you for your continued support over the last 37 years! We will miss you!

We'll miss you too, Main Course. I assume "changing circumstances surrounding our lease" means a landlord raising the rent sky-high, which seems to be happening more and more these days. It won't be long before every little, independent merchant will be displaced by a big chain. I wouldn't mind that as much if Applebee's or Outback could make a turkey meatloaf a tenth as good as the one served at the Main Course.

Their statement makes no mention of looking for a new building in which to reopen. In the past, every time a favorite restaurant of mine has shuttered, they've said they will find a place to again flourish…or sometimes, they say they already have a location and are just dickering to nail down the fine points of the contract. I can't recall one that ever actually reappeared, at least in anywhere near its previous form. Sad…but that's just how it is.

There was a time when Love's Wood Pit Barbecue restaurants dotted the California landscape and seeped into other states, as well. Some folks believe it's impossible to get decent barbecue in a chain. You need a small, one-of-a-kind restaurant in a building that used to be a welding shop and was converted by some guy who's obsessive about good bbq and has been doing it all his life. I've been to some great places that fit that description and also some where the food was close to inedible.

Love's fell somewhere in-between but they were always conveniently located and there are times you need to eat and you can't find one of the "other" kind of bbq joint, or maybe you're just not in the mood to gamble. Love's had decent ribs, great chicken, terrific sandwiches and easily the best beans I've ever had in my life. I used to go to every Love's I ventured near and for a time, I had a running correspondence with a gent who was either the president of the company or very close to that. Each time I ate at a new (to me) Love's, I'd send him a critique. He'd write me back a nice letter and toss in coupons for free meals. A fine relationship.

But I liked Love's for other reasons beyond the coupons. They were friendly and dependable and the food was pretty darned good. So you could often find me at the one on Pico Boulevard near Beverly or at the one on Hollywood Boulevard at Cherokee or at the one in Encino or the one in Pacific Palisades or any other one. I probably went to twenty different Love's including the one Love's Junior they operated (briefly) on Ventura Boulevard in Van Nuys. It was an attempt to repackage their cuisine into something that functioned like a fast food outlet. Had that experiment succeeded, I assume we'd have seen them in locations too small to handle a full-sized Love's or in food courts.

Alas, over the years the chain just lost business and got smaller. The one on Pico, which had once been a kind of "flagship" Love's and was used as a model and training facility for others, turned mysteriously one day into a place called Noonan's. Noonan's was the name of the company that supplied uncooked ribs to many L.A. restaurants and they went into business in some kind of partnership with Bob Morris, who had founded R.J.'s for Ribs, Gladstone's and other popular Los Angeles restaurants. (Morris now operates the Paradise Cove Beach Cafe in Malibu, which is not covered on this site because it's open and thriving.)

Then it became Bob Morris' Beverly Hills Cafe even though it wasn't really in Beverly Hills…and it may have changed names one or two more times before closing down. The building is now the office of a limousine company. The Love's on Hollywood Boulevard seems to change identities every time I'm in the area.

There were some changes of ownership and some lawsuits in the Love's operation. A lot of them closed and the ones that didn't changed names. The Love's in Brea, for instance, changed its name to Riley's and went on serving the exact same menu for years. The one in Chula Vista renamed itself The Great Rib Restaurant, which was a subtitle that Love's sometimes used in its advertising and on its signs. Eventually, all such after-life Love's closed. For a while, the company website claimed there was one left in Jakarta, Indonesia but I wasn't about to go and check.

Folks who loved Love's still love it…and miss it. If you do some Googling, you'll find a number of different recipes that purport to be the secret to replicating Love's Beans and others that teach you how to make the sauce. Since the recipes differ, some or all of these are obviously wrong.

The following one, which is sometimes attributed to the L.A. Times, is probably bogus.  For one thing, Love's beans contained bits of pork and beef in it, probably leftover scraps from other things prepared in their kitchens.  At no point does this supposed recipe for their barbecued beans tell you to add any such pieces of meat…nor does it call for any beans, either.  So I'm pretty sure it's wrong but here it is anyway…

2 cups cider vinegar
3 1/2 cups brown sugar
2 tablespoons salt
2 tablespoons onion powder
2 tablespoons garlic powder
2 tablespoons celery seed
1 tablespoon black pepper
1 tablespoon paprika
2 tablespoons lard
1/4 cup pickling spices

Place lard (not shortening) in a pot. Add sugar and then other ingredients. Cook over a low flame stirring occasionally until sauce reaches the desired consistency.

Every so often, I order a case of genuine Love's sauce from the Love's website. As you might imagine from all that alleged brown sugar, Love's sauce was very sweet but it was and still is awfully good. Putting the sauce on things I now eat makes them better but it also makes me miss the real restaurants all the more.

Skooby's was a small hot dog stand located under a movie theater marquee on Hollywood Boulevard, directly across from Musso-Frank's Grill, a restaurant that will never go outta businees — I hope. Skooby's served great dogs with a great snap and was kind of a godsend to those of us who like neither the chow nor the lines at Pink's. Skooby's was what Pink's should have been, given its reputation.

The hot dogs were great, especially if you left off enough toppings to be able to taste the meat…though asked once if I preferred Skooby's over my other fave (Carney's, still open), I answered that I preferred the dogs at Carney's and the french fries and lemonade at Skooby's. I also liked the parking better at either Carney's, which may have been the reason Skooby's is no more. I rarely go to anything in that area that doesn't have a parking lot, even for one of the best hot dogs in town.

My second-favorite place to get pizza in Los Angeles abruptly closed the other day, reportedly for good. It was Frankie and Johnnie's, a tiny business about the size of a phone booth located on Little Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills, just west of Rodeo Drive. Frankie and Johnnie's should not be confused with the Johnnie's New York Pizza chain, though it probably was, often.

Frankie and Johnnie's served very fine pies with very thin crusts and if you bought slices as opposed to a whole pie, they'd reheat them in their big oven and come out much crisper. It was very difficult to walk past the place and not stop in for a slice or two. They also served an amazingly wide range of decent pasta dishes — amazing because the whole kitchen there seemed to be about the size of a Honda Civic. I'm going to miss that place.

You're probably wondering what my favorite place is to get pizza in Los Angeles. Once upon a time, it was Damiano's, featured elsewhere on this site. Now, it's Vito's Pizza on La Cienega, a few blocks south of Santa Monica. It's not fancy but the pizza is made expertly and many friends who obsess on "New York Pizza" and somehow believe one cannot find rotten pizza in Manhattan, swear that Vito's is as close as you can get. It is very good and I really hope I never have to say farewell to it on this blog.

Jan's Restaurant was located on Beverly Boulevard just east of La Cienega. It billed itself as "L.A.'s Best Coffee Shop." One wonders how the folks at Astro's over on Fletcher Drive — owned by the same family and featuring almost the exact same cuisine — felt about that. But Jan's was pretty good. In the seventies, I lived a block from the place and was in there at least twice a week. Breakfasts were as good as any other option I had. For lunch and dinner, it wasn't the greatest but it was several notches above Denny's or Norms or any other big chain you could name.

I especially liked the Spaghetti Burger, which was not as many assumed a hamburger with spaghetti on it. It was a hamburger with a dish of spaghetti on the side.

Jan's was reasonably priced and had good service. It closed in mid-March after more than fifty years in business. We've lost too many of that kind of eatery.

To the surprise of no one who has followed the chain's decline in recent years, the last Koo Koo Roo — the one in Santa Monica — is gone. The Luby's company, which acquired Koo Koo Roo and Fuddrucker's in 2010, has turned the last location into a Fuddrucker's…an ironic finish since the operating premise of Koo Koo Roo, once upon a time, was to offer an alternative the traditional burger and fries fare.

Koo Koo Roo started in Los Angeles in 1988 when two brothers, Ray and Mike Badalian opened their first location and before long, their second. The one I went to was in a little strip mall at the corner of Beverly Boulevard and Orlando Avenue, a few blocks east of La Cienega. Before the mall was built, the land housed a Roy Rogers Roast Beef Sandwich stand and then a Golden Bird Fried Chicken shop. Another Koo Koo Roo was located in Koreatown.

The night of the Academy Awards in 1990, Kenneth Berg, a semi-retired real estate broker, passed by and noticed the long line of customers at the Beverly/Orlando location. He decided to stop in and get a "to go" order to eat while watching the Oscars and he was impressed with what he later described as "…the best chicken I ever had in my life." He soon met the Badalian brothers, invested in their business and later bought them out. He not only liked the chicken but the whole concept of healthy "fast food."

The story of Koo Koo Roo became one of ups and downs. New stores opened. Other stores closed. Berg's staff added an expanded menu that included freshly-carved turkey and he renamed the chain Koo Koo Roo California Kitchens. Later, he purchased a controlling interest in the Arrosto Coffee chain and opened coffee bars within his Koo Koo Roos.

It seemed like every few months, Koo Koo Roo was opening more stores and closing others while experimenting with new menu items. The folks who loved Koo Koo Roo (I was one) really loved it but there never seemed to be enough of them. Eventually, Berg's company sold out to the Fuddrucker's people and though they added their burgers to most outlets, they didn't reverse the company's fortunes…and finally that last one closed.

I miss them. I liked their signature chicken breast. I liked their turkey. I thought their macaroni and cheese was wonderful. But clearly, not everyone liked Koo Koo Roo as much as I did.

In the eighties, there was a war of competing hamburger chains: Fuddrucker's versus Flakey Jake's. I liked them both but slightly preferred the latter, particularly the Flakey Jake's on the northwest corner of the intersection of Pico and Sepulveda in West Los Angeles.

The premise of both chains was simple. They sold pretty good hamburgers, a notch above McDonald's and Burger King at a correspondingly (but not exorbitant) price. They both had other menu items but you went there for the burgers, which were served on a bun cooked on the premises in their own bakery. The bakery also made cinnamon buns and other goodies which you could purchase to take home.

One thing I liked about them was the "dress-it-yourself" bar that I first encountered at Woody's Smorgasburger, which has become the major topic of this site. You got your burger nude and you carried it over to an area where they had ketchup and mustard and onions and lettuce and tomato and cheese sauces and other toppings. The hamburgers at Flakey Jake's were pretty darned good and I ate at the Pico-Sepulveda one often.

The two chains were in fierce competition to open up new locations across the country — some company-owned, some franchised. In a few cases, they competed head-to-head: There'd be a Flakey Jake's literally across the street from a Fuddrucker's. Fuddrucker's also sued Flakey Jake's charging "infringement of trade dress" (copying its format) and then Flakey Jake's counter-sued Fuddrucker's charging "restraint of trade" and in '82, they settled out of court on undisclosed terms.

Around this time, Flakey Jake's, which had been founded by a Seattle-based seafood restaurant chain, sold out to Frank Carney (co-founder of Pizza Hut) and a group of investors. Apparently, they couldn't make a go of it. Before long, all the Flakey Jake's closed…or seem to have closed. Fuddrucker's, meanwhile, continues to thrive and currently has around 200 outlets across the U.S. — few of them, I'm afraid, in areas where I travel. I'm curious why one chain succeeded and the other didn't because they were, after all, pretty much the same thing

There used to be a number of Chuck's Steak Houses in Los Angeles and I miss 'em. There are still Chuck's around — the nearest one seems to be in Santa Barbara — but they do not seem to be a chain, exactly. They seem to be independently-owned places opened with the blessing (and perhaps, financial participation) of this guy Chuck.

Chuck was Chuck Rolles, a former All-American basketball player who opened his first restaurant in Hawaii in 1959. The concept was pretty simple. You could get a good steak, a baked potato or rice and a trip to the salad bar for a reasonable price, and you didn't have to get all dressed up. One of the features of a Chuck's Steak House has always been the casual, friendly atmosphere. Another was the self-serve salad bar, which at the time was a relatively new idea. Yet another is or was the simple menu, which at times has fit on the side of a little cask on your table.

Chuck's expanded in many directions with various partnerships and my main recollections are of one in Valley at (I think) Sepulveda and Ventura, and another on Third Street near La Cienega, near where I was then living. It was near a studio called the Record Plant where many rock musicians of the seventies recorded very famous albums. I don't think I ever went to that Chuck's without seeing someone who was super-famous in the music industry…and if you didn't recognize them, an obliging waiter would whisper to you something like, "See that guy over by the bar? That's Phil Spector."

The Record Plant burned down one night and I have a feeling that contributed to Chuck's exit from that area. But maybe the Chuck's people just decided to give up on Los Angeles because that's what they did. I liked the food there tremendously, especially the rice that came with your steak. You could substitute a baked potato for a few bucks more but the rice was so good, most people learned not to. Folks I dined with were always trying to figure out what they did to the rice to make it so good but the servers would just tell you, "It's a secret." A woman I dined with there once claimed the rice had been cooked, then stir-fried in sesame oil. I have no idea if that's so.

Chuck's spawned numerous imitators in the seventies. I went to at least three steak places that tried to replicate Chuck's down to the nth degree…and they usually managed to get everything right except for that rice. None of them caught on. Only Chuck's was Chuck's and I wish we still had one in town.

The Buddha's Belly on Beverly Boulevard just east of Fairfax closed last September. The eclectic Pan-Asian restaurant had struggled for some time. The last-ditch effort to keep it open involved turning its private dining room into Buddha's Lounge (a bar 'n' snack place) and then making the place look more like a cocktail lounge. I was never a huge fan of the food there — I was once served an entree that was so overcooked as to be inedible and the management had zero interest in replacing it — but I had friends who loved it. I didn't much like the parking situation either, and suspect that accounted for some of its problems.

But a lot of people swore by its unique twist on some Asian staples. The magician Ricky Jay seems to have loved it…or maybe it was just coincidence that he always seemed to be at the next table when I ate there. Maybe he knew some magic trick to turn what he was served into something edible.

Everyone called it "Tom Bergin's" or "Tom Bergin's Tavern" but the real name of the place on Fairfax that closed at the beginning of July was Tom Bergin's Old Horseshoe and Thoroughbred Club.  It was also called "Tom Bergin's Old Horseshoe Tavern" in some advertising and a lot of people referred to it by its advertising line emblazoned on a neon out front — "House of Irish Coffee."  By any name, it was one of the oldest restaurants in Los Angeles, having opened in 1936 on Wilshire Boulevard by a lawyer named Tom Bergin.  It moved to its final building in 1949.

Tom Bergin's sometimes claimed to have been the first restaurant in America to serve Irish Coffee.  Other venues have claimed that honor and I don't want to get into that.  It was also one of about eight thousand bars in the country that claimed to have been an/the inspiration for the TV series, Cheers.  Again, I am agnostic on the subject.

It closed last year for ten months for an extensive renovation but when it reopened, crowds did not flock to it, not even after a rave review from Jonathan Gold.  My guess is it was done in by its location, which was near nothing.  It wasn't a great place to meet someone for a lunch confab.  It wasn't a great place to stop in for a bite on your way to or from something else.  As the years roll by, Angelenos seem to be less willing to dine somewhere that isn't super-convenient.  It was always packed on St. Patrick's Day for obvious reasons but rarely any other time.  I never ate there post-renovation but before, it was one of those places that I liked due to its friendly atmosphere but the food was just too disappointing.  Perhaps if I was a drinker, I might have liked it more.

But I liked the chummy feeling of the place and I liked the servers and staff, some of whom had been there for decades.  I could have done without the paper shamrocks everywhere, each displaying the name of a patron but they weren't the problem for me.  The problem was that I always came out feeling like I must have ordered the wrong thing…

As I write this at the beginning of 2021, Tom Bergin's is open and I hear good things about it. Once there's no more Pandemic, I'll try to get by there. If it's as good as it used to be, I may become a regular.

This one is so obscure that I don't have any visual material to post and I can't find a single mention of the place on the web. When the Century City shopping complex was opened in the mid-sixties, there was a restaurant situated on the main mall, right outside the Broadway department store. It was called the Century House and it was nothing special…a decent place to grab a bite if you were shopping over there but that's about it.

I remember very little about the place and would have forgotten it completely except for what replaced it. (You can see the exterior of the Century House briefly in the 1967 movie, A Guide for the Married Man starring Walter Matthau and Robert Morse. In fact, you can see a number of well-remembered but gone locations in L.A. in that movie including a scene set in Kiddieland, the place over at La Cienega and Beverly that was always filled with divorced fathers taking their kids out for a day.)

Around 1978 (that's a guess), the Century House closed and its building was taken over by a terrific steakhouse called The Highwayman. It was the work of an Australian restaurateur who had an amazing way of cooking ribeye steaks with some sort of au jus liquid that I loved. But what were really amazing at the Highwayman were the soups. They changed every day and I remember dining there one night with a date, having a Shrimp Bisque and thinking I'd just found the best soup on the planet.

I hurried back there with a friend a few days later, raving about the Shrimp Bisque. "I hope you have it tonight," I said to our server. He said, "I'm sorry but tonight, the chef felt like making Salmon Bisque instead. But I think it's even better than the Shrimp Bisque." I said something like, "Nothing could be better than that Shrimp Bisque but let's give it a try." As it turned out, he was right. Even better.

I went there often for less than a year and increasingly, the host acted thrilled to see me walk in with my party…because a lot of people weren't doing that. Apparently, the rent there on the Century City Mall was astronomical and business just wasn't good enough to overcome it. One afternoon, after touting the place to several friends I planned to take there that evening, I called for reservations and a brusque voice said, "Sorry, we're out of business" and hung up. I hoped they'd reopen somewhere else but it never happened…and that's all I know about the Highwayman. I wish I knew more about it. I'd settle for the recipe to that Salmon Bisque.

The last remaining outlet of Damiano Mr. Pizza closed unexpectedly at the end of May. Mitchell Kitay, the owner, told the press that he was forced out by the owners of the restaurant Animal, which had purchased the building two years ago. Whatever the reason, suddenly there was no more Damiano Mr. Pizza. A highly-regarded Italian eatery called Jon & Vinny's is now at that address.

To the best of my knowledge, there were once three Damiano's — this one on Fairfax across from Canter's; another one on Robertson two blocks south of Pico and the one I first visited, which was on Pico near Westwood. It was in a corner building that had previously been the original location of Junior's Delicatessen and is now a Maria's Italian Kitchen.

The places were known variously as Damiano's, Mr. Pizza and Damiano's Mr. Pizza. I'd always assumed someone named Damiano bought a pizzeria that was already named Mr. Pizza and just tacked his name on the way a woman named Ruth bought the Chris Steak House and added her name to it. But that was just speculation. I don't really know where the name came from.

What I do know is that until Vito's Pizza opened locally, Damiano offered the closest thing to "New York Italian" I ever found in Los Angeles. The pizza was good — a bit greasy and a bit salty but quite tasty. Even better were the pasta dishes, especially anything with their slow-cooked meat sauce on it. I frequented all three outlets before the first two closed.

The one on Fairfax opened in '64 and quickly became an institution in the area. It stayed open (and delivered!) until 6 AM…7 AM on weekends, which came in handy at times. In addition to great Italian food and beverages, the delivery guys could also bring you cigarettes…and one of their delivery guys told me once that at 5 AM, it was not unusual for someone to call up for a few cartons of Marlboro's and then say, "While you're at it, have him bring a pizza too."

Most of the delivery folks seemed like homeless people with cars and one friend of mine used to tip them extra to stop at the CVS Pharmacy and bring medicines or candy, as well. It was the one place at that hour you could phone and get someone to do that kind of thing for you.

I often got deliveries from Damiano Mr. Pizza but around 1990, I stopped actually going into the restaurant. It was just too dilapidated, crowded and a little dirty. I assume they fixed it up after that — they would have had to — but the shabby surroundings diminished my love of their chow. It was though fun to watch the one guy on the phone juggling ten orders at once, hopping from one call on hold to another.

There was one period there where I stopped ordering from them because the orders were always incorrect when they arrived…but after a year or so, I finally missed their food enough to give them another try and the first and all subsequent orders were right. You can imagine how much I'm going to miss them now. Mr. Kitay announced was going to reopen in another location but that doesn't seem to be happening. Still, even after I stopped setting foot inside, I was glad it was there…and delivering.

The Carnegie Deli in New York is a great and wonderful place…and probably more prosperous than ever since its neighbor, the Stage Deli, recently closed. The Carnegie Deli in Beverly Hills was not a great and wonderful place, which explains why it isn't there any more.

In the early eighties, the Stage opened an outlet in Century City — also a pale imitation of its Manhattan ancestor but not quite as pale as the west coast Carnegie would be. In 1988 when the Schwab's Drug Store at the corner of Crescent Heights and Sunset was razed, it was announced that the forthcoming shopping complex there would include an L.A. version of the Carnegie. Later, the plan was shifted to 300 N. Beverly Drive at the corner of Beverly and Dayton Way.

The buzz was that billionaire Marvin Davis had had a standing order every day at the Century City Stage Deli for a half-pound of lox, a half-dozen bagels, a pint of cream cheese and four bags of potato chips to be delivered to his office each morning. This did not satisfy him and he decided to open his own deli. (Another rumor was that he opened the Carnegie in Beverly Hills after he was made to wait too long for a table at Nate 'n' Al's down the street.)

The opening on August 9, 1989 was a huge media event with celebrities including Don Rickles, Carol Channing, Billy Wilder and George Burns. Burns was so impressed with the place that he booked it for his 100th birthday party, which was to be held on January 20, 1996. George made it to that date but the deli didn't. The opening was also attended by pickets as Davis and his partners had elected not to sign with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, Local 11. And there were also restaurant critics present, that evening and in subsequent weeks. Few of them liked what they ate.

The place shut its doors on August 26, 1994 and someone had to call George Burns and tell him to find someplace else for his party. There were many reasons for the deli's closure but the big three probably went something like this…

1. Nate 'n' Al's, a long-established local tradition, was right down the street.
2. The food at the Carnegie cost more than the food at Nate 'n' Al's.
3. The food at the Carnegie wasn't as good as the food at Nate 'n' Al's.

Why couldn't they at least replicate the quality of the original in New York? Probably some combination of management and suppliers not being as good. All I know is I ate there twice — once by choice and once because an agent I was lunching with insisted we meet there. I didn't care for the meal either time and I didn't care for that agent.

UPDATE, YEARS LATER: And now, there is no Carnegie Deli in New York anymore.  It was a great place to eat.

Sorrentino's Seafood House was one of several Southland restaurants owned and operated by members of the Sorrentino family. It was located at the corner of Pass Avenue and Riverside in Burbank. A few blocks away was the more upscale Alfonse's, run by the famous chef, Alfonse Sorrentino. The seafood restaurant was reportedly run by two of his cousins. Whoever ran it, it was a great place that at lunchtime was packed with folks in the entertainment industry. When I was working for the Ruby-Spears animation studio, Joe Ruby and I used to go over my scripts at a table at Sorrentino's.

I liked lunch there better than dinner, though both were great. At lunchtime, most entrees came with an amazing kind of potato I've never encountered anywhere else. It was halfway between the consistency of a baked potato and mashed — something like a pudding — and laced with onion. It was not listed as a side dish on the menu, which may explain why it didn't seem to have a name. Every time I asked a waitress what it was called, the answer was "It's just something the chef whips up at lunchtime." He did not whip it up at dinner and believe me: I asked.

The photo above is of Sorrentino's banquet room which got a lot of traffic from TV shows and movies holding wrap parties or press conferences. I rented it a few times on behalf of CAPS, the Comic Art Professional Society, back when I was on its Board of Directors. The food was good, the staff was great. The only reason I can imagine for its closure in the eighties was that they didn't do as much business in the evenings as they did for lunch. An awful lot of deals were concluded and script meetings held in its lush, red booths. I miss it and I miss those potatoes.