[Last updated 1/1/24 8:38 PM PT—Mural has been painted over.]
When it comes to this blog, I'm trying to focus more of my energy on chronicling some of the places in LA that really mean something to me, rather than making cursory visits to landmarks, reporting on them, and then moving on.
And I don't remember a time when I didn't associate LA with Pann's Restaurant.
circa 2020
And that would take me straight past Pann's, whose neon sign I admired and whose tilted roof didn't look like any of the family restaurants I'd seen in Upstate New York or the steel-sided diners of New Jersey and the Tri-State Area.
But I've always been drawn to the 1950s—and a time before you had to dial the area code even when it wasn't long distance.
It wasn't until 2010 that I first stepped inside Pann's, having just landed at LAX...
...and heading off on one of the many scouting expeditions I launched to prep for moving here.
I'd be staying somewhere in the Culver City / Mar Vista area of the Westside, not terribly far from Pann's, and I was hungry.
I remember feeling excited to walk through the front door.
My arrival felt like an event.
Asking for a table for one, I got offered a stool at the counter...
...and as much as I usually like sitting solo at the bar...
...I was so worn out from my flight that I asked for a booth in the back, and the hostess obliged.
I was immediately transported to the diner scenes in Pulp Fiction, which had been shot at now-demolished, similarly Googie sister restaurant called Holly's in Hawthorne. My mind, however, conflated them into one location. As I ordered my chicken sausage, biscuits, and diet soda, I kept waiting for someone to hold up the joint. Fortunately, no one did.
Despite my initial perceived state of famishment, my eyes turned out to be bigger than my stomach, but the food I'd ordered was so good that I boxed it up and brought it with me to the backyard cabin I'd rented for a couple of nights. (It was supposed to be an in-ground pool called "The Cave," but I got upgraded to "The Treehouse.") It was cool out those nights, so I thought my leftover would be safe unrefrigerated—until I found them commandeered by ants and had to throw them out, uneaten.
That was the same trip I gave myself mild food poisoning by snacking on the unrefrigerated tabouli I'd been keeping away from the ants in my rental car.
Over the last eight years, I've stopped stopping at Pann's after landing at LAX. I'm usually too anxious to get home to my apartment. For a while, though, I'd made it a point to stop there after dropping someone off at the airport or before picking them up.
In 2014, I cried my eyes out at Pann's after sending Casey off on the trip that he would use to cheat on me, and I did so again when I sent him off to Alaska for what I thought would be several months and a make-or-break hiatus from our firestorm romance.
circa 2020
circa 2020
circa 2020
Update 2024: Sometime since I took the mural photos above in 2020, the wall was painted over and is now a solid dark red color.
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Related Posts:
The Oldest Bob's Big Boy, And Its Nearby Adoptive Brother
Photo Essay: A Hollywood Diner Campaigns for a Hollywood Candidate
To Live and Cry in LA
Photo Essay: Retro Digestion in LA's Most Futuristic Restaurant Designs (Updated for 2019)
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