With all my reorganizing of photos (with all that work I only saved one large cubbie in my library cupboard), I have been running into other objects collecting dust. I have two fancy shoe size storage boxes full of matchbooks I have collected in the last 40 years. Today, you rarely find matchbooks in restaurants. Mostly it is business cards. Somehow it's just not the same. Having matchbooks is a walk through culinary history. And personal history. Out of the like 100 or 200 books I have, with a few repeats, I picked a few that send me back in time. Scandia, Perrino's, Chasen's, The Brown Derby, and the upside down one in the green, (bad scanning) is Carlos and Charlies.
Scandia was on the Strip, one of the last of the hot places, like Ciro's, or Mocambo. I had just ond chance to go there, when I was first working in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. My old boss, a solo practitioner who liked to go to the best places, took a bunch of his staff there. The outside looked like a ski chalet. The inside was fancy, the kind of place where you worried about which fork you used. I don't remember what I ate, but I know it was great. And as with all the other places from which I got my matchbooks, I felt special getting to go there, Bronx girl making good.
I realize that pretty much all these restaurants I went to in the 1980s, when I was working for that lawyer, and maybe in the beginning of my days as a prosecutor at the State Bar. Scandia closed in 1989, and the others weren't far behind, except maybe Kate Mantilini, which only closed a few years ago.
Where Perino's used to stand, on Wilshire Boulevard there is now a boxy apartment building that has taken the name. I went there at least two times, and much like Chasen's, which was on Beverly Boulevard, closed in 1995, and is now the site of Bristol Farms, which incorporated a small part of the Chasen facade, Perino's had luxurious booths and tasteful fixtures. These were places that had waiters of many years service, and moveable trays of food kept warm by sterno. Certain items were prepared right in front of you. We had office parties at one of the few remaining Brown Derby's, this one on Vine Street in Hollywood. Those matches are from a Christmas party that the firm had there. And Carlos and Charlies had he best dip I ever enjoyed, tuna based and addictive. I saw Joan Rivers there. I saw Joan Rivers in lots of venues, including the old Century City Complex that housed the Shubert Theater. When the public was notified that Chasen's was going to close, it became popular again, and I made reservations there for a friend's birthday, someone I knew would appreciate the magic of days past. You could imagine the good old days of after Oscar night late chili dinners.
By the time I got to Hollywood in the 1980s, many of the more glamorous and historical, from a celebrity point of view, places had already closed. I got to experience the tail end of glittering LA.
For a long time after its closing, Scandia's bones, the building itself, remained standing. Somehow that was a comfort, though I'm not sure why. Then one day a few months ago I was walking along Sunset and I noticed that where Scandia had stood, contractors were breaking ground on another monstrous probably mixed use facility. I felt surprisingly sad over inanimate architecture, but really its about the passage of time and how so much is lost to us and then forgotten. There are still one or two such places left, like Musso and Frank, on Hollywood Boulevard, and it's nice every once in a while to step into the way way back machine. Then back to the disposable now.
I think it's time to use the matches.
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