Hung Up on Clifton’s
I was watching an episode of the HBO series Hung today when another favorite location caught my eye — twice! Although the show is set in Detroit, the location crew used the famous Clifton’s Brookdale Cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles as the settings for two restaurants the show’s characters dined in. Both are featured in episode #5, titled Do It, Monkey.
The first restaurant is a plush red-wallpapered eatery that might look familiar to Mad Men fans — it’s the third floor of Clifton’s, which I wrote about last May. For Hung, the room was decorated pretty much the same way we saw it two years ago. While it was classed up a bit as Don Draper’s New York getaway, for the tacky fondue restaurant patronized by actors Jane Adams and Steve Hytner not much change was needed. Our photo of the dining room is here.
The second restaurant was used by a different set of Hung characters as the woodsy-themed buffet where a suddenly downsized Anne Heche and family must eat. This is the ground floor of Clifton’s, where most of the customers dine. In the top photo, they dressed up the wall behind the buffet line with knick-knacks. Other than that, the restaurant is basically untouched in all its kitschy glory. I love that you can see a bit of the ’50s era Specialties sign (better photo here). The wide view at the bottom is the main dining area, surrounded by painted murals, fake pine trees and a stuffed moose head. It’s wonderful! My photo of the area from a different angle is here.
Mad About Clifton’s
While catching up with Mad Men, we noticed a locale that looked strangely familiar in the season 3 opener, Out of Town. It was the quasi-Victorian restaurant where Don and Sal have dinner with two stewardesses and a pilot from the airline flight they just took. I couldn’t pinpoint the place until I heard one of the show’s actors on the commentary describing the perfectly preserved, Disneyland-like ambiance of the eatery. Right then I knew it as the third floor of Clifton’s Brookdale in downtown Los Angeles. How fun!
Contrast the publicity still below with the photos we took during our October ’09 visit. It looks like the Mad Men set dressers replaced the Clifton’s memorabilia on the walls with various old-style paintings, but they kept the lighting fixtures and the flocked wallpaper the same — not to mention the arches and the dark wood stair banisters (click the images for a closer view).
Saturday: L.A. Is My Bitch
We’re back from our trip to Los Angeles. We did a lot in five days. In the end, both of us agreed it was the best trip ever. I will have some photos to share later on, but first a travelogue of what we did. I was going to write up all of our trip in one blog post, but there was simply too much! For now, I will regale you with what we did the first day.
- Saturday — An early morning. Left at 5 a.m. and got to Long Beach at about 10:30. We had a lunch scheduled later on with our friend Dan (who lives there; lucky him), so after finding a parking spot we walked around the piers and the commercialized areas around the aquarium. It’s funny how, after all these years, the ocean is so exotic to me. Since Christopher was in a seafood mood, we settled at the King’s location downtown for a long lunch of good conversation with Dan. This was an excellent, relaxing way to start off our trip! We said our goodbyes to Dan and headed off through the treacherous freeways towards downtown L.A. (actually, the traffic was surprisingly okay for L.A. the whole time we were there). After a bit of confusion with the one way streets, we finally located the fabboo Westin Bonaventure Hotel where we were booked for two nights. I always loved this hotel, going back to when it was the setting for the waitressing sitcom It’s a Living. Architecturally, the place is forever stuck in a retro-futuristic ’70s, which is totally cool with me. It’s also laid out in a crazy way, with elevators going only to certain floors and restaurants and shops perched confusingly on rounded balconies above the expansive lobby. I dug it! Luckily, our wedge-shaped room was furnished with tasteful late ’00s decor. Later that night, we met with Christopher’s old friend Shirley for dinner. Shirley once worked as Edith Head’s assistant and now has an office at FIDM (where the current Project Runway season was filmed). She had tons of entertaining stories about everyone from Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn to Joan Crawford. It was such a trip driving around in her car and having her point out every important building in the area! She took us to a trendy Beverly Hills eatery called Orso. This place had the neatest outdoor patio with giant trees and subtle lighting in an environment that vaguely reminded me of the restaurant inside Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean. As we sat down, I noticed a beautiful woman sitting at the table next to us that looked exactly like actress Wendy Malick of Just Shoot Me fame. I tried hard not to stare (luckily she was in the same sightline as Christopher), but this lady did speak with actressy hand gestures to the gentleman dining with her, so I’m gonna say it was her (and damn, she looked great). Although it was after 11 p.m. when we finished our meal, we weren’t exhausted at all. Shirley drove us around, showing us Bullock’s Wilshire, Paramount Pictures and all the fancy homes in that area. All in all, a night that could only be described as magical.
Dog-Gone (Temporarily)
For the next week, Scrubbles.net will be on vacation in Los Angeles. While we won’t be able to visit a locale as exquisite as the dog-shaped café above, we have a full itinerary and will be taking tons of photos to share later. See you then!
Image from California Crazy by Jim Heimann and Rip Georges.
