Outcry Greets Awakening L.A. Landmark

Like other local mystery lovers, Ron Mavaddat had heard the gossip about the old Spanish Kitchen, the deserted Beverly Boulevard restaurant-turned-enduring-Los Angeles legend, serving up ghost stories and tall-tale intrigue like side dishes on its well-worn menu.

He knew the curious history of the place, how it became a hangout for Hollywood stars throughout the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s but did not gain true Southern California fame until one summer night back in 1961.

That’s when owner Pearl Caretto locked up the busy eatery, stacked the chairs on the red and white checkered tables and stuck a “Closed for Vacation” sign in the window before walking out, never to reopen or touch the fixtures in the restaurant again.

Now, nearly four decades after it closed, the old landmark has reawakened at the center of a modern-day culture clash.

As new owners, Mavaddat and his partners want to revive the essence of the old dining house by keeping the Spanish Kitchen name for a proposed restaurant-piano bar. But while the eatery has stood still in time, the surrounding area has changed considerably and many aren’t sure they want the restaurant back.

Once a mixed neighborhood replete with bars and boisterous greasy spoons, the community just east of Fairfax Avenue has emerged as a religious center for some of the most ultra-Orthodox Jews in Los Angeles, including Hasidic Jews who, in their traditional flowing beards, dark frock coats and wide-brimmed fedoras, dress as though time has stood still for two centuries.

Led by local religious leaders, residents have expressed concerns to city officials about a piano bar that would serve liquor near the grounds of a school. A hearing before the city’s zoning administrator is expected within months.

“We’re greatly opposed to this crazy thing,” said Rabbi Yoel Bursztyn of the Bais Yaakov Jewish School in Los Angeles, an all-girls school that will soon open in the same block as the restaurant in a building now housing the Samuel A. Fryer Yavneh Jewish Academy.

Although the restaurant’s zoning has been approved, Bursztyn will lobby city officials to refuse owners the conditional use permit necessary for an alcohol license.

Religious leaders say the showdown was long in coming.

Over the last 15 years, they say, an active community of ultra-Orthodox Jews has settled east of Fairfax Avenue, bringing with them a strict stance against the public consumption of alcohol near their temples, schools and homes. In a city where commercial thoroughfares commonly streak through tight-knit single-family home neighborhoods, the Beverly Boulevard stretch contains several other long-standing restaurant/bars and some newer ones on which alcohol restrictions have been placed. But some say the Spanish Kitchen case, because of the eatery’s heritage and residents’ opposition, could symbolize the ultimate made-for-L.A. Not in My Backyard battle.

“I’m going to blast ‘em,” Bursztyn said of the restaurant owners. “They’re trying to turn Beverly Boulevard into another Melrose. People are coming from all over the city to guzzle alcohol and urinate on our streets. We shelter our children and raise them without liquor or drunkenness.”

This isn’t the first skirmish between Orthodox Jews and an area restaurant.

Last year, Lumpy Gravy owner Bret Crain said the religious community showed up to protest plans to serve alcohol at her new restaurant. As a result, Crain said, she received a restricted license that, among other things, prohibits her from serving liquor without food.

“They call the shots around here,” she said of the religious leaders. “But this is 1997. It’s ridiculous to say that alcohol is evil.”

Crain winced when she received the notice from Spanish Kitchen owners notifying residents of the upcoming hearing. “I knew what they were going to go through. How can these religious people place themselves in the middle of a modern city and take a stand that’s so old-fashioned, rigid, strict and puritanical?”

But others disagree.

“This is a religious neighborhood and people walking to temple don’t want to pass by a bar,” said resident Melissa Abahsera, who has two children in the adjacent Jewish academy. “History is one thing. Alcohol is another. It could endanger our children.”

Meanwhile, City Councilman Mike Feuer’s office has sought to devise a Solomon-like plan to help pave the way for the Spanish Kitchen’s reopening--with a limited alcohol license.

“We need to create a balance to make sure the restaurants can thrive while protecting the neighborhood from people wandering around drunk,” Feuer aide Rochelle Ventura said.

Under the plan, owners would agree to 40 conditions, including a two-drink limit while school is in session, reduced hours and a pledge to clean graffiti within 24 hours.

“The list goes on,” said Ventura, a former Spanish Kitchen patron who would like to see the restaurant return. “We want a restaurant, not a drinking hangout.”

Mavaddat said he will do whatever it takes to make the deal work: “We’re just waiting to see what happens next. There’s no end to the intrigue of this place.”

Aside from hoping to make a profit, he says that he bought the building as a way to preserve the beloved restaurant that Pearl and Johnny Caretto opened in 1932.

Two years ago, Mavaddat, a partner in Pacific Investments, saw two women unlocking the front door to the restaurant. To his surprise, he met two granddaughters of the former owners.

It was then that he learned how Caretto had become a recluse after the death of her husband in 1967 and how she never came to terms with things people said about her Spanish Kitchen.

Mavaddat hopes the restaurant’s aging myths--true or not--will attract a new generation of diners: Had Pearl’s husband, John, been killed by the mob because he failed to pay back a loan? Or had he been shot during a lovers’ quarrel? And what about the ghostly female figure who some say still occasionally stands inside the darkened restaurant?

Some mysteries of the Spanish Kitchen will remain unanswered: Pearl Caretto died in 1994.

But her family says the restaurant has been misunderstood over the years. There were no gunfights, no murders and no ghosts, they say.

Just a tragedy about a woman’s love for her husband and her passion for her restaurant, according to Pat Arnold, a daughter of the Carettos.

When Pearl Caretto, a former silent film actress, closed the doors in 1961, she had good reason. That was when Johnny Caretto was found to have Parkinson’s disease. Pearl took care of her husband, who spent his last years in a Hollywood rest home.

“She just wasn’t of a business mind,” Arnold said in a telephone interview from her home in Sun Lakes, Ariz. “It wasn’t her bag of tricks, running a restaurant.”

After her husband’s death, Pearl became a loner and in time refused to see anyone. She stayed at her apartment above the deserted restaurant, watching Dodgers baseball games on television, ordering out for meals and medicine.

She never touched the restaurant, “because she just didn’t want to mess with it,” Arnold said. However, after vandals ransacked the building in 1980, she did move away.

A year before she died, Caretto finally began looking into selling the restaurant because she did not want to burden her children with the task. At first negotiating with the Yavneh Academy, she sold to Mavaddat, who made a higher offer.

“Look at the charm of this place,” he says, pointing past concrete columns to a gap-toothed sign missing several letters. “It has the grace of a Gothic castle.”

Mavaddat tours the restaurant like a guide at a history museum. Vandals stole some relics, but much remains. He details the refurbishment of the pieces he has saved, the original stained glass and pots, pans, refrigerators and meat grinders from the kitchen where Mexican cook Frank Acuna once created his deluxe dinners that cost just a buck and a quarter.

Frank Tiszai, who owns a photo lab across the street, is glad to witness the looming comeback.

“The place is so well known,” he said. Before the vandals came, he recalled “looking into the windows and seeing the pots and pans still on the stove and the cobwebs and dust all over. It looked like a ghost town. Or the set of a Hitchcock horror movie.”

Meanwhile, as the controversy brews, construction continues at the Spanish Kitchen.

And one keepsake that will be on hand when the restaurant reopens--with or without a liquor license--is the sign handwritten by Pearl Caretto, the one that says:

“Closed for Vacation. Be Back August 23rd.”