Nine members of the original staff, a handful of reporters and executives from Hope the Mission gathered at the Original Pantry this afternoon for a taste test and meet and greet before the restaurant officially reopens on November 19. The furniture has been replaced and finishes refreshed, but it looks pretty much as you remember it. The hole in the side of the 102-year-old downtown landmark caused by a car crash has been filled in. The beloved hole in the tile floor, thankfully, has not.
Former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan loved the place so much he bought it in 1981. The attorney had the foresight to sell off the air rights so the site wouldn’t be attractive to developers looking to build a high-rise. Riordan died in 2023 at the age of 92.
“The Pantry is an L.A. institution,” Hancock Park real estate investor Leo Pustilnikov told Los Angeles last year when he purchased the property. “I see it as part of the legacy and history of Downtown and an opportunity to help my residents who could use employment.”
Pustilnikov’s residents are the thousands of renters in and around Skid Row housed in his vast portfolio of apartment buildings. He partners with Hope the Mission, a non-profit providing housing, shelter, food, and mental health services to the poor. Every day, the organization provides 3,500 meals out of a commissary in North Hills. The non-profit will handle day-to-day operations at the Pantry, a unique arrangement they compared to the Chinatown café run by Homeboy Industries, and 100% of the profits will go back to charity.
“When people hear about food in a shelter, they think it’s going to be a lower standard,” Hope the Mission president Rowan Vansleve said today. “We’ve hired white linen chefs to create borderline gourmet foods.” That same quality is on display at the new Pantry.
Everything we tasted on the menu, which now includes a bánh mì sandwich and adobo spareribs alongside the Denver omelet and patty melt, was tasty and well prepared, but none of it reminded me of the restaurant that closed in 2025. The coleslaw, for example, was not finely chopped, and it was too creamy and not as sweet as the original. We overheard someone who had tried the new style of hash browns compare them to Denny’s. This columnist suggested that the recipes had been passed along like a game of telephone – the same but different.
French toast that was $9 in 2023 is now $16, and today’s $34 flatiron steak replaces the $22 top sirloin offered three years ago. “Our menu is incredibly competitive with the local area, CEO Ken Craft said. “But the quality of the food is through the roof. The meat loaf was the best I’ve had in my entire life!”
The desserts, prepared by pastry chef Natalie Bárcena were the standout. Bárcena has prepared sweets at Milk Bar and Quentin Tarantino’s Pam’s Coffy at the Vista Theater. She’s come up with some thoughtful and well-prepared items like an impossibly rich cheesecake and an outstanding brown sugar apple pie, but none are native to the Original Pantry. Her childhood memories of the restaurant’s Peach Cobbler inform a version that would be at home at a fine dining restaurant but is completely unexpected here – and that’s probably a good thing.
Hope the Mission CEO Ken Craft and president Vansleve attribute some of the changes to the replacement of kitchen equipment, upgrades like baking bread in-house and the institutional knowledge and recipes that disappeared along with the staff that had made them for generations. Vansleve is not convinced that the changes are a bad thing. “The diner is the great equalizer, but there was this grieving that the food had somehow slipped.”
“As a migrant,” Van Sleve says. “I knew about three restaurants in Los Angeles – King Taco, In-N-Out and a diner downtown that looked like it was from the movies. We’ve made a few alterations on the menu because tastes have changed. This has to be successful, and the menu has to evolve.”
The restaurant that once boasted “Through a door which has no key you will enter a cafe that has never been closed since 1924,” reopens November 19. Opening hours will be 7am to 9pm. “The Pantry is not truly back until it’s 24 hours,” Van Sleve said. “But we’ve got to make sure it’s successful. Our goal is to be 24 as soon as possible but we need to see those lines around the corner like they used to be.”
The Original Pantry
877 S. Figueroa
Downtown Los Angeles
The post Our First Look and Taste of the Revamped Original Pantry appeared first on LAmag.
