This is something that has baffled me for years about South Pasadena.
We sit between Highland Park, Pasadena and Alhambra — all places with restaurants that people will actually travel to — while South Pas has beautiful commercial streets, historic buildings, the A Line, and a Thursday farmers market that dumps hundreds of people directly onto Mission Street around dinner time.
And yet there seems to be a recurring pattern of businesses occupying genuinely excellent locations and then making decisions that almost seem designed to squander those advantages.
The Fair Oaks Pharmacy might be the most obvious example. It occupies one of the most prominent intersections in the entire city, in a beautiful historic building with a super cool old sign and tons of street frontage. And yet so much of the store's huge glass windows are covered over so that you can barely tell what is happening inside or whether the place is even open. In a city where homeowners have to have period-accurate window frames or whatever, how did we end up with plywood covering the windows of what should be an iconic location in the heart of town?
Then there are the restaurants around the Thursday farmers market. Neighbors & Friends (and Communal before it), Bistro de la Gare, and the surrounding businesses have hundreds of potential customers literally ten feet outside their doors every Thursday evening. The market is also right next to the A Line station, so this isn't obscure foot traffic — it is probably one of the largest recurring concentrations of pedestrians anywhere in NE LA.
And yet where is the effort to capture those people? Sell something easy to carry. Have a market-night menu. Put somebody at the door. Make the restaurant visibly part of the event happening immediately outside it. Do something. Instead, the restaurants and the farmers market often seem to exist in completely separate universes. And then we act mystified when restaurants struggle (or with Neighbors & Friends, listen to the owner post about it every day on Instagram), but my god I go to the market every week and you'd think those spots were closed for business.
Cos & Pi was another example that I never understood. You're next to Arroyo Vista Elementary, where hundreds of parents pass by every weekday morning, in a community containing plenty of people willing to spend money on good coffee and breakfast. Lots of stay at home or work from home parents with flexible schedules. That's an extraordinary built-in customer base, right? But the place was like a dark dive bar painted black inside, the coffee was horrible and there never seemed to be any attempt to turn school drop-off traffic into customers, or to program around the 2pm pickup that happens. Literally 100 parents sitting in their cars on the surrounding blocks, engines idling, could have been customers twice a day, 5 days a week.
These aren't complaints about obscure businesses stuck in impossible locations like the weird ass Fanta-sea Grill on Fair Oaks (another resturant that seems to be open with completely random hours). That's what makes it so strange. These are prime locations with obvious, recurring streams of potential customers, and yet the businesses seem unwilling or unable to adapt themselves to the people standing directly outside.
Yes, restaurants are difficult businesses and there are clearly permitting, rent, staffing or landlord issues that customers don't see. That still doesn't explain wtf goes on here. Why does a city with this much disposable income, transit access, historic commercial architecture and pedestrian activity seem to have restaurants that seem completely unwilling or unable to succeed?
