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For 25 years at the original pantry cafe, Alejandro Ortiz went on a path from Cleaner to Prep Cook and, more recently, Server. Often he pulled night shifts and double shifts. He worked so much that he missed the birth of one of his daughters.
It’s like a gut punch when the original Pantry Cafe owner announced on March 2 that it would close a 100-year-old restaurant in exchange for meeting workers’ demands to maintain union protection. I felt it.
“They’re just kicking us like dogs,” Ortiz said. “Not many years later? It’s unfair.”
Former mayor Richard Riordan bought a pantry in 1981 as part of a major real estate transaction, saving his meal from a smashing ball.
Former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan is talking with supporters and customers at the original pantry cafe in downtown Los Angeles during his 2002 major campaign for the California governor.
(Gary Friedman/Los Angeles Times)
After Riordan’s death in 2023, Richard J. Riordan’s administrative trust took over the ownership of the restaurant, the historic and cultural monument in Los Angeles, which opened its doors on May 29, 1924.
The trust’s biggest beneficiary is Mr. Gennel Castlebury, executive assistant at the Richard J. Riordan Management Trust, said the trust’s biggest beneficiary is the Riordan Foundation.
For months, trust has been in the process of selling the pantry, Castlebury said in a prepared statement of the era.
“The mayor’s property trustee will ultimately close the pantry and sell the property at the location, and the best path to providing the foundation with the most financial resources to continue its fantastic charity mission. I decided that was the case,” Castlebury wrote in an email. The era.
The united local 11 representing the restaurant workers tried to renegotiate the contract and requested that the trust agree to maintain employee and union representatives even under new ownership. In response, the trust threatened to close the restaurant next month.
A recent Thursday morning was packed with counters from an original Pantry Café in downtown Los Angeles.
(Nick Agro/For the era)
Jose Moran, a server who started out as a dishwasher 45 years ago in the pantry, said he hopes to work another year before resigning.
“I was shocked when they said they were going to close soon,” said the 66-year-old. “I feel very disappointed.”
Server Jose Moran presents customers with drinks on a recent morning at his original pantry cafe in downtown Los Angeles. Moran is at risk of losing 45 years of work if the 100-year-old facility closes in March.
(Nick Agro/For the era)
Castlebury said some of the union’s requests are “altogether unacceptable as the next owner of the pantry site needs to run the restaurant there and labor without renegotiation with the next owner. He said he would require the contract to be taken and the next owner to submit. If you want to change something, it would be a tedious process.”
“This would severely limit Riordan’s real estate, even if it completely invalidates its ability to find a buyer for the location,” Castlebury said in a prepared statement. “The union’s proposals will severely interfere with any sales and therefore unacceptably harm both the Riordan real estate and the Riordan Foundation.”
The pantry is a diner’s icon known for its plate-sized pancakes and buttery sourdough toast. In many cases, customers form a queue extending from the entrance on the side of the building. Seats extend from behind the diner’s long dining room to a cash-only check-out register in the cage. The restaurant reportedly has served Martin Luther King Jr., Marilyn Monroe and countless other well-known figures over the years.
Customers waiting for a table at the original pantry cafe earlier this month in downtown Los Angeles found shelter under the awning.
(Nick Agro/For the era)
For decades, the pantry was a 24-hour meal, but that tradition ended during the Covid-19 pandemic. Currently, the restaurant is open from 7am to 3pm or 5pm.
The local 11, united here, filed pending unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Commission, which argued that the threatened closure violated federal labor laws.
In August, Castlebury said the trust provided a “stay bonus” to employees who continued to work in the pantry until diners closed or unspecified hours in 2026. The bonus ranged between $1,500 and $20,000 per person, depending on years of employment.
Marisela Granados, a server who started working as a cashier at the pantry 26 years ago, said she was offered $20,000.
She did not sign the letter.
“If you sign it, you’ll have to give up your rights,” she said. “I don’t want to do that. That’s not right.”
On Wednesday, Granados and dozens of pantry workers picked up the diners and had signs that read, “We are the pantry.”
Here, Unite co-president Kurt Petersen called the situation “scary.”
“Given what we know about the former Mayor Riordan, he will roll inside his grave about this situation,” he said. “He loved those workers and his restaurant was part of him and his life and heritage.”
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