What the closure of an iconic Los Angeles cafe says about the state of California civic life

The Pantry in Los Angeles closed down earlier this month. After decades of being open 24 hours a day, serving tens of thousands — maybe even hundreds of thousands — of diners and acting as a centralizing place of Los Angeles political and cultural life, the restaurant now is sealed off with “closed” signs and has already become a magnet for vandalism.

Lots of restaurants come and go in any major city, and The Pantry’s demise is apparently the result of a complicated dispute about the responsibilities of the trust that controls it. Those things happen.

But The Pantry was not just any restaurant, and its passing touched a chord with people in a way that most eateries do not. Its disappearance speaks to larger changes in California and the nation, and it’s not necessarily for the better.

Many cities have something that approximates what The Pantry was for Los Angeles: a gathering place where politicians and activists and lobbyists and journalists can come together and appreciate each other above or outside their work. Paris has its cafes, Washington has the Sans Souci, Sacramento has Frank Fat’s. Show up at lunchtime or dinner hour and you can count on bumping into the people who comprise a civic culture.

The Pantry became that place for Los Angeles in the 1990s, when Richard Riordan was elected mayor. Riordan also owned The Pantry.

And so The Pantry was, initially, a place to catch up with Riordan as well as a way to understand him better. Riordan paid the staff well and treasured the loyalty that he received and reciprocated. 

When the city council debated a living wage ordinance, Riordan opposed it, feeling that it was too restrictive and might eliminate entry-level jobs. Supporters of the measure accused him of being miserly, but they misunderstood Riordan’s view of the issue. He believed in a living wage — the proof was The Pantry — he just did not believe in government mandating it.

There was no better way to gain insight into Riordan’s politics or priorities than to have lunch with him at The Pantry. It also, incidentally, offered glimpses of his eccentricity: If he told me once, he told me a thousand times that it was smart to order bacon well-done because cooking it longer melted off the fat and thus would ward off heart disease. 

Thank goodness he was a mayor and not a health official.

But The Pantry’s contribution to Los Angeles was not confined to its windows into Riordan. It became one of those places that gave rise to civic life.

The coffeehouse next to parliament

The importance of institutions that supply such gifts has been recognized at least since the writing of Jurgen Habermas, the German philosopher who grasped the importance of the 18th-century “public sphere” in analyzing the strains of culture that allow democracy to take root and flourish. Habermas’ notions, which are given another appreciation in Adam Gopnick’s brilliant and desperately needed defense of liberal democracy, “A Thousand Small Sanities,” include the idea that gathering places supply the rich soil in which democratic institutions germinate and grow. 

As Gopnick puts it, “a parliament can only be as strong as the coffeehouse beside it.”

The Pantry was that place. It hosted breakfasts and lunches and late-night confabs. I attended police retirement parties there, and met countless sources there for lunch, only to then bump into other sources on the way out. 

It wasn’t about the food, though the food wasn’t bad. I once ordered a fruit plate, and my lunch companion looked askance. “They’re not known for their fruit plate,” he archly, and accurately, pointed out. The hash browns were better.

It was that rare place in Los Angeles — rare in any city, but particularly one as atomized as LA — that brought together those with business before the government under one roof to share a meal and meet one another. It helped that The Pantry was open all the time.

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And if a parliament is only as strong as the nearby coffeehouse, then The Pantry’s demise signals rough water ahead for the parliament of the nation’s second-largest city. We are already at a moment where divergent figures barely talk to each other, where the Democratic Socialists are as irritated by centrist Democrats as they are by Republicans, where divides are cultural and deeply political — no longer viewed as differences among public-minded people who share a desire to improve their communities.

That’s dangerous territory, and is reflected up and down in today’s American political system, as true of Congress as it is of California politics.

This is where mediating institutions once helped. It’s harder to demonize your political opponent if you’re in the same bowling league or PTA. Differences of opinion are less stark when you accept that the person on the other side of that disagreement shares your love of basketball or birdwatching — or bacon.

Coffeehouses are where those points of commonality are discovered, where opponents share stories about their kids or their favorite foods rather than lobbing accusations at a public hearing or in depositions.

That’s what The Pantry was, and Los Angeles was better because of it. Riordan knew it.

The neighborhood around The Pantry was pretty hardscrabble in the mid-1990s. Riordan and others had dislodged the long-stalled Disney Hall project, and it barreled to its overdue completion, bringing new life to Bunker Hill and the Civic Center. But the south part of downtown remained threadbare. 

Then came the proposal to build the Staples Center and its surrounding entertainment complex. It offered great promise — since amply delivered — but it created a potential conflict for Riordan, since successful completion of the project was expected to increase tourism and energy in the area around The Pantry. The mayor recused himself from the Staples negotiations (this was back when quaint ideas such as conflicts of interest and rule of law still mattered).

But there was another option. Riordan could have sold The Pantry, removing himself from any conflict. Why, I asked him in the midst of those negotiations, didn’t he simply get rid of the Pantry?

He didn’t hesitate. “I’d rather give up being mayor,” he said.