Clifton’s Cafeteria in Los Angeles closes its cafeteria

Clifton’s Cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles quietly closed its cafeteria this summer and now the historic site primarily will run only as a nightclub for now.

In the interim, Clifton’s dropped the “Cafeteria” from its name and now is called Clifton’s Republic.

No one seems 100 percent sure when Clifton’s stopped serving food, but Los Angeles Magazine seems to have pinned down a ballpark figure — June — after the restaurant’s $14 million remodel and reopening in 2015:

The culture, shared experiences, and traditions that were baked into the Salisbury steak evaporated when the original restaurant closed in 2011. They wheezed back to life when it reopened four years later, but died again when chef Jason Fullilove departed just a few weeks into his tenure. Nine months later Chef Andrew Pastore introduced a menu that included dishes like cauliflower quinoa cakes with roasted beet puree. Pastore left in June (he has since taken a new gig at King’s Seafood) and the tray line went dark. […]

A recorded message this summer suggested a remodel would be completed in six weeks. Six months later the message has become, “We have closed our historic cafeteria until further notice.”

Clifton’s still serves a little food at its Old Mill coffee bar, but that’s it. The fact the restaurant stopped serving food during the summer and few cared shows how little-regarded the cafeteria cuisine was.

The magazine reports owner Andrew Meieran said “about half” of Clifton’s expansion work has been completed, and he holds a solid track record of making places profitable.

LA Eater reports that Clifton’s serving more food will occur sometime in 2019:

Meieran reached out to Eater to comment on the temporary closure, saying the Exposition Marketplace will open in the first quarter of 2019, with classic Clifton’s dishes plus some globally inspired dishes based on travel. Meieran says he hopes to serve a wider array of dishes instead of the more traditional American offerings that the cafeteria used to serve. To comment on the cafeteria’s closure, Meieran did say that they were working on the marketplace idea about a year after Clifton’s reopened because of the “peculiarities and complexities” of operating the cafeteria.

Clifton’s originally opened in 1935 near what was the original western terminus of Route 66 in downtown Los Angeles, before the highway was extended to Santa Monica. It closed in 2011 for the extensive remodeling.

(Image of Clifton’s Cafeteria by Michael Li via Flickr)

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