Clifton's was a project initiated in 1931 by an eccentric millionaire named Clifford Clinton (Clifton was a contraction of those names) and eventually became a chain of 8 cafeteria-style restaurants, each with its own theme, serving Californians during the darkest days of the Great Depression. The second facility, known as Clifton's Brookdale but now renamed Clifton's Cabinet of Curiosities, opened in 1935. That construction interval says something about the scope of the project. Clifton's occupied 5 floors of a new building, and was designed as a destination restaurant. It was also the largest cafeteria-style restaurant on the planet. But unlike today's destination restaurants, Clifton's had no fixed prices, just a policy of letting clients pay what they could afford. It shared this philosophy with the other restaurants in the Clifton's chain, which featured neon signs urging customers to "Pay What You Wish"; no one seeking a meal was turned away. At the height of the Brookdale Clifton's 75-year run, it served 15,000 customers a day. But surprisingly, this mission did not result in austere, Soviet-style architecture. Clifton's was a predictor of both Disneyland and Las Vegas. Among the restored features you'll find inside are murals of wild and scenic California, nature dioramas, stuffed wildlife including a lion, plaster of Paris mountains, a faux redwood tree four stories tall, a bar counter impacted by a bronze meteorite, and a floor with fossilized dinosaur eggs. Viewed against the current vogue for spare, clean-lined Mid-Century Modern, Clifton's may seem like over-the-top kitsch, but let's remember that when it opened, average families could not afford travel, and many considered themselves lucky to afford food. Fully 80% of home mortgages were under water during the Great Depression's deepest abyss. Clifton's Brookdale kept its doors open for 75 years, closing in 2010, by which time it was serving around 2,000 Los Angelenos a day. It was the last surviving link in the Clifton's chain...
Clifton's was purchased in 2010 by developer Andrew Meieran, someone with large ambitions and deep enough pockets to fund a 5-year restoration (that's right; it took 2 years longer to restore than it took to build) and the restaurant occupies four floors of the building, as it did in its heyday. Some serving areas, including the bakery, were open during the long renovation process. The new chef, Jason Fullilove (you cannot make this stuff up), a graduate of a trendy haute cuisine outfit in Malibu, found a file with original recipes, and has revived some of them, including the famous Clifton's Jello. The "pay only what you can" policy is gone, but one policy which has been made a permanent fixture is the requirement to choose 10% of all hires from graduates of local shelters for survivors of abuse and homelessness. And there have been a lot of hires; Clifton's 5th floor kitchen occupies ten thousand square feet and employs 50 cooks.
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