Pacific Dining Car Restaurant DTLA | Santa Monica
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Pacific Dining Car Restaurant DTLA | Santa Monica Our History 1921 - That's When It All Started The Pacific Dining Car was born in a railway train car parked on a rented lot in downtown Los Angeles… 1921, It was a very good year for the busy city of Los Angeles, and all of Southern California. It started with a good omen. The California Bears soundly defeated Ohio State in the Rose Bowl, to the delight of the local newspapers, who scornfully declared that the Ohio team wasn't even in the same league as "Our Boys." New oil fields were virtually an every-year discovery in the basin, but June 1921 brought in the kind of find every wildcatter dreams about: the gushing riches of Signal Hill. It was the heyday of the " Red Car." Henry Huntington's Pacific Electric Company ambitiously laid tracks all over Southern California, boasting over 1,200 miles of railways by the mid-twenties. Shrill trolley whistles were an ubiquitous sound throughout the southland, as the little cars careened along at 45 to 55 miles an hour, delivering passengers, mail and morning papers. And Angels Flight was in fine feather, carrying hundreds of delighted passengers every day. Land speculation was booming and reached its frenzied peak in ' 24, going bust in ' 25. The Los Angeles census zoomed from an official 576,000 in 1920 to an estimated one million in 1924. Of that, more than 43,000 were real estate agents, prompting Will Rogers to observe, "Why, they are thick as boot-leggers. Your having no money don't bother them, if they can just get a couple of dollars, or an old overcoat, or a shotgun. Anything for a first down payment." Los Angeles was building, Memorial Coliseum was completed, the Hollywood Bowl under construction. On Wilshire Boulevard, the Ambassador Hotel opened, grandly advertised as "the house of a thousand rooms." Growth & The Second Generation Fred didn't start out to be in the restaurant business at all. As a promising young tenor, he had under- studied the great Caruso, and his dreams were of grand opera. But the voice failed early, and he and Grace left the east coast to settle in Southern California. They brought with them the germ of an idea from a dining spot owned by a colorful Irishman in New York, where they had dined in an authentic railway dining car, remodeled as a restaurant. Fred and Grace, or "Lovey" as she was known to friends, family, and soon nearly the whole city, 1310 West 6th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90017 | 2700 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, CA 90403 | pacificdiningcar.com p.1 decided to build a replica of a dining car to their own specifications. A German friend named Kline loaned them the use of his back yard for the project, and another friend, "Shorty," started construction under a giant fig tree. Fred and Lovey felt that the real dining cars were too cramped, so they added space by building their own car a little larger, with a long counter, and rooms for tables and chairs in back of it, and of course, the steel wheels to move it from one location to another. When it was completed, they rented a site at 7th and Westlake, and moved the car in the dead of night to avoid busy traffic. The little restaurant soon became one of the most popular dining spots in the area. Its menu featured good, hearty standard fare for its times. Seven days a week, long before the 4 pm opening, savory aromas floated from Lovey's orderly kitchen. Sturdy vegetable soup, a tangy steak sauce of their own invention, pies with crusts so flaky they literally melted in the mouth, and an especially popular apple filling all rapidly became city favorites. Virginia, Lovey's daughter, reminisces, "She made the most incredible pies. What a pity it isn't an inherited features. No one had Lovey's light touch with a crust, and no matter how hard I tried, it's an art form that escaped me." Continued Growth As the land boom reached crazed proportions of trade, sell and buy, the location at 7th and Westlake was snapped up by one of the speculators, and Pacific Dining Car was forced to move in 1923. It was just a short jaunt uptown, to 6th and Witmer, but in such uncertain times, with the feverish exchange of any scrap of property, those steel wheels were reassuring insurance against " lost-our-lease." It was a relatively simple matter to pack up everything and move to any other convenient location. The wheels never turned again. PDC stands in the same spot today, so many, many years later. When the lot eventually came up for sale, Fred and Lovey bought. But in the meantime, they rented and set about building a flourishing dinner trade. Lines started growing just before the 4 pm opening time, as the downtown crowd told each other about Lovey's ambrosial pies, and Fred's sure hand on the grill. Reservations were unheard of, largely due to a lack of a telephone. But, what the heck, if you really had to make a phone call, there was always the public booth at Perley's Standard Oil Station next door. Business was so good, Fred and Lovey hired a waitress to help out. Jane Brown joined the family and stayed a while. About 25 years. Hot muggy dog days in Los Angeles offered little opportunity for relief in the 20's, and dining out at a closed-in restaurant wasn't the most popular pastime. So PDC opened seven days a week, nine months of the year. During the hottest weather, the summer sign went up, and everyone took off for a three- month vacation. The language on the sign was so daring for its time, it made newspapers as far east as Chicago and New York. Fastened across the front doors, it trumpeted: Too D. hot in L.A. Gone Fishing. Why the H. don't you go, too? - Fred and Grace Shocking. 1310 West 6th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90017 | 2700 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, CA 90403 | pacificdiningcar.com p.2 Prime, Aged Cuts of Beef In 1927, one of the customers offered to teach Fred all he knew about selecting exactly the best kind of beef and how it should be hung and aged. Since this Mr. Hardy was a rancher from San Diego, Fred figured he probably knew what he was beefing about. So, next trip to the Abbatoir, Hardy instructed Fred on picking out the finest cuts of prime, and how it should hang to age properly for the best flavor and tenderest texture, in the aging boxes there. These prime savory steaks made an instant hit with the customers. Naturally this kind of success was noticed. What Fred and Lovey noticed was that their prime PDC choices were disappearing before they could get to the mouths of PDC diners. Not in the line of thievery, you understand. More like a little gentle hijacking. Their reputation for choosing the very best and tastiest of steaks had certainly caught someone's attention. While this was flattering, it was also frustrating. Fred and Lovey solved it by putting in their own curing box, and transporting their prime beef directly to PDC for hanging and aging. One of the fine traditions that has carried through to the present day at Pacific Dining Car is this personal selection and on-the-premises aging of the best prime Eastern beef. Throughout the tweties and thirties the menu remained relatively simple, appealing to the basic appetite for steak and fries. Prices started at 65 cents for the Pacific Dining Car special sirloin, up to a dollar for T-bones, buck-and-a-half for filet, and the bank-buster double sirloin went for $3.75. All considered quite dear in the twenties. And remember, salad, running 25 to 35 cents, was a la carte, as was a large baked potato at yet another 25 cents. Coffee was 10 cents a cup, and those famous home-made pies could add 15 or 20 cents to the tab. Now, if a fashionable young man wished to fling his money about and impress a date by going for the most expensive a deux combination, he could blow a whole $5.55, not counting gratuities. At least in those prohibition days, he didn't have to shell out for a couple of pre-dinner cocktails. Unless he'd already visited one of the local speaks. The 1930s The 20's were good times for Los Angeles and Pacific Dining Car, but the gloomy thirties tested everyone's ability to survive. 1929's stock market collapse didn't immediately affect the west coast, but by the late 1930's, Southern California showed a higher bankruptcy rate than any other section of the country. 1932 elected a new president, Franklin Roosevelt, and brought the Tenth Olympiad to Los Angeles. 1933 was a year of myriad crises with Roosevelt declaring a bank holiday to restore some kind of fiscal order, the passage of the 21st amendment ending prohibition, and on March 10th a rolling, shattering earthquake, centered in Long Beach, left over 100 dead in Southern California. Pacific Dining Car struggled though lean days. Lovey's daughter, Virginia, had returned to finish her education on the east coast, and married an energetic young electrical contractor, Wes Idol. They moved to California, searching for better opportunities. Wes had one thing in common with Fred Cook -- he certainly had no plans to ever enter the restaurant 1310 West 6th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90017 | 2700 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, CA 90403 | pacificdiningcar.com p.3 business.