You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The Original Pantry.
No, not the one in Wilma Flintstone’s kitchen, but the one in downtown Los Angeles.
The Original Pantry is a grease fire of history. It’s a skillet full of memories. It’s a counter where timeless stories have been told.
At 1st glance, the Original Pantry in downtown L.A. is a diner.
You walk in, you sit at a booth or the counter and you order from a waiter.
There are photos on the wall, a menu on the table, a smell of cooking food on the grill.
The interior is pure diner. It’s dingy and unremarkable.
If this is all the Pantry is, it would be replaced by a freeway on ramp by now.
But the Original Pantry is more than food you eat.
The Original Pantry is more than a diner, it’s more than a eatery.
It’s so many things to so many people.
It’s a place that has literally seen it all. Movie stars, world-famous athletes and politicians from around the globe have sat in this diner, at the very counter I am sitting at now.
The Pantry has been in business since 1924.
Irvine Berlin dominated music then. Vladimir Lenin was still alive. IBM was founded.
OMG!
Many places have been in business since 1924. Few have never closed or stopped working since 1924. Even IBM turns the copier off once in a while.
Not the Pantry.
91 years of non stop operations!
That’s the Pantry. It’s the energizer bunny of food service. If the bunny never died and the battery never ran out.
The door has never locked since 1924, meaning there is always a burner on, food cooking, someone screaming “order up.”
Amazing.
The Pantry is the food equivalent of perpetual motion and the answer to one of Einstein’s principles.
Whatever is in motion tends to stay in motion….
You get the idea.
My 1st taste of the Pantry was in 1981.
I was visiting USC as an 18 year old soon-to-be freshman.
My visit to USC was shocking. The campus is in Central L.A. The school is beautiful inside the borders of Exposition and MLK and Figueroa, but outside it’s run down buildings, homeless miscreants and air the color of dirty laundry.
I was feeling nervous, scared, overwhelmed at my educational choice for the next few years.
I picked USC before Al Gore the internet was invited. I picked USC without a school visit. I picked USC thanks to a glossy brochure with a Song Girl, a Palm Tree, and a Trojan Football player on the cover.
That’s for me, I thought.
When I got to the campus in the heart of sizzling, dirty L.A., I saw no cheerleaders or football players and I was immediately home sick.
On the 1st night of my orientation, a group of kids said “We’re going out for something to eat.”
I had nothing better today, so I said o.k.
The Pantry was in the shadow of downtown.
It was empty lots and homeless shelters and bus stations and fighting vagrants pushing shopping arts.
I remember it being ugly, scary, dark, dangerous.
The neon sign in the night said Original Pantry.
It was like a neon oasis in a destitute grease spot in the city.
“What the hell is this place?” I said to someone.
We walk into the Pantry and i’m struck by the uneven floor and the decor that seems to be from different eras the deeper you peer into the restaurant.
We sit at a formica table.
The restaurant is buzzing with activity. Wait staff with white shirts and bow ties zoom around holding plates.
The sign on the wall says “Cash Only.”
Most tables have a salt and pepper shaker when you sit down.
At the Original Pantry, there is a jar of pickles the size of tiny green fists. There is a plate of bread stacked like bricks of Bread. There is a , bowl of celery and radishes that would stuff Mr. Ed.
I read the wall and order a roast beef platter.
The order is up in a few minutes. The portion is so big, I need a doubles tennis team help me finish it.
Over my four years at school, I will visit the Original Pantry many times.
I will always think of the Pantry as a bastion of good in the middle of a dilapidated part of town.
I will always think of the Pantry as a landmark like Dodger Stadium, like the Hollywood sign.
Since 1924, never closed, never without a customer. That’s unbelievable.
Just recently, I went to a L.A. Kings hockey game at the Staples Center, which is a massive, vibrant complex all around the Pantry.
Gone are the homeless shelter and the bus station and dueling shopping cart vagrants.
Now its upscale restaurants like Wolfgang Pucks.
The area is safe and glitzy and family oriented.
The area was blown up with a neutron bomb and rebuilt as part of a major downtown revitalization.
The only thing that remains the same?
The Original Pantry.
It’s been 30 years since I last stepped in the Pantry.
After the game, my buddy says “Ready for a trip down memory lane?”
We walk through the doors that have never locked in 91 years.
It’s like a time warp.
Nothing has changed.
The same grill that was on when I left is on now.
That’s probably the same pan of hash browns cooking in the same skillet.
Amazing.
A restaurant that never turns off the flame on the stove?
The Pantry has never locked their doors?
In a city with the dedication of lint, most of the Pantry staff has worked here for decades.
I order the same meal I ordered as a frightened 18-year-old.
The roast beef is as delectable now as it was then.
I’m not just swallowing food. I’m swallowing memories.
I pay for the bill in cash and leave knowing that somethings in life don’t change.
The Original Pantry is one of those things.
Good then. Good now.
Life’s Crazy™