I hadn't yet written about the 2020 closure of one of my favorite LA institutions, Pacific Dining Car, because I was in denial. I thought once the COVID-19 pandemic was over, really over, it might reopen.
Even when they auctioned off the big restaurant sign that stood in their parking lot, along with the two beef cattle that were attached to it, I still believed that somehow it would come back.
Even when they sold off everything inside, everything from the curtains and lighting fixtures down to the spoons and the menus, I thought there was a chance it could be reborn.
I wanted to believe them when they said they had plans for it—not to fear, because Pacific Dining Car wasn't going away entirely.
But the building—which I'd always mistakenly thought included an actual train dining car—sat there for five years, languishing, while homeless people set up camp inside and set multiple fires.
It was supposed to be a treasured landmark—designated as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 2023. But in a classic case of demolition by neglect, the building was left unsecured for too long.
It caught fire one last time on Thursday, March 20, 2025—a fire so devastating, it made the structure unsafe to occupy, too dangerous to even just stand there, lest it crumble out onto the sidewalk. It had even gotten to the point where it was too dangerous for firefighters to keep showing up to battle the repeated blazes. So it was demolished right there, on the spot.
I'd like to keep alive that feeling I used to have going to Pacific Dining Car, whether it was in the daylight of late afternoon, when they used to have the most impressive happy hour spread of free snacks in the bar area...
...or when a new evening was dawning, and I'd take myself out to a solo dinner sometime around my birthday.
For years, Pacific Dining Car was to me what I suppose Musso & Frank's is to other vintage-loving Angelenos. I always thought PDC was underrated and overlooked, maybe because of its less desirable location in the Westlake area of LA, as opposed to smack dab in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard.
It's not just that love a good old steakhouse. I'll choose to eat on a train car over not eating on a train car any day. Even if it was just built to look like a train car.
In my earlier days in Los Angeles, I could only afford happy hour at Pacific Dining Car. Then there was this one night in maybe 2012 when I went out dancing at Cicada Club and found somebody to buy me a late-night breakfast there.
You could get breakfast anytime on that train car. And it was open all night long, 24/7 since 1981. In those late hours, it always felt like something important was happening—or that someone important would see me canoodling with my newfound date at our table.
I started going more often when I signed up for their loyalty program and got one free entree of my choosing (above) and free baseball steaks for my birthday every year.
Baseball steak was the thing to get at Pacific Dining Car.
I always tried to convince others to go with me to eat on that train, but getting few takers, I mostly went alone and drowned my sorrows in a dirty gin martini.
And because the steaks were free, I could indulge in a giant bucket of garlic mashed potatoes and a flourless chocolate cake (above) for dessert, too.
If the fourth-generation family members who ran Pacific Dining Car could've kept it going, the business would've turned 100 years old in 2021. It was at this location on 6th Street since 1923.
There actually used to be three Pacific Dining Car locations—one in Newport Beach and another in Santa Monica, which was the only of the two remaining by the time I came around. Unfortunately, that one also closed in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Opened by the same family in 1990, its façade didn't look so much like a train—but I still decided to go there once for brunch on my birthday in 2019.
The interior (above) was appointed similarly to the Westlake location, with chandeliers and tasseled window coverings and fabric wallpaper. It was elegant, and it felt old. I figured I'd go back sometime—but just months later, it was gone forever.
The Santa Monica location's building still stands—relatively unremarkable from the outside, especially without the Pacific Dining Car association. In January 2023, I drove by and noticed that the Veterinary Emergency Group would be moving in soon (above).
Google Streetview, November 2023
The way it looks now, you'd never know what delicious magic used to lie inside.
I hate this feeling. I hate having lived in Los Angeles long enough to see too many of these types of places close. Because after 14 years of living here, it's not enough that I was able to visit a place just once before it closed.
I want long-term relationships with places.
It used to be that if I heard a place was about to close, and I'd never been, I'd rush over there to experience it my one and only time before time ran out. Now I find myself grateful when I've missed out on a place before it reaches its ultimate demise.
I don't think I want to know what I'm missing out on. I don't want to feel the loss so personally, so profoundly.
What's the point of checking a place off my list unless the experience is going to be meaningful in some way? Unless I can go back if I like it—or dare I say, if I love it?
Photos above taken at various times, from 2018 to 2023.
I couldn't agree more. I had been going to Pacific Dining Car in Santa Monica since 1993 and then the downtown PDC (I called it PDC before abbreviations became hip) starting in 2017 after I moved to Angelino Heights-Echo Park. It was the most comfortable place to eat a meal in LA and the meals were always great. I will always miss it.
ReplyDeleteI was today years old when I realized there wasn’t an actual train car at Pacific Dining Car. RIP PDC.
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