The “What Women Want” Coffee Shop

“If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard.”  So says Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.  I should have heeded her advice because for years I have been searching for the coffee shop from the 2000 comedy What Women Want and as it turns out the answer to my query has been in a box in my closet since before filming even took place.  Let me back up a bit and explain.

A few nights after my parents and I moved to Pasadena in late February 2000, we grabbed dinner at the Il Fornaio restaurant in Old Town.  Upon arriving, my mom spotted a notice on the front door stating that the Italian eatery was going to be closed the following day for a film shoot.  We, of course, asked our server for further details and he explained that the shoot was for a Mel Gibson movie named What Women Want.  So bright and early the next morning, my mom and I headed back over to the restaurant in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the goings-on.  To our delight, we were allowed to sit on a bench right outside of Il Fornaio’s entrance (the very same bench the Grim Cheaper and I took our engagement photos on almost ten years later!) and observe pretty much everything.  It was my very first experience being on a working set and I couldn’t believe my luck that it was happening within 72 hours of moving to L.A.  The crew could not have been nicer to us, letting us hang out for hours.  One even gifted me with the day’s call sheet which I’ve kept in a memento box ever since.  Flash forward to last month.  While helping me unpack after our recent move, my mom noticed how many celebrity autographs I have and suggested I frame them and display them via a gallery wall in my new office.  (You can see the finished result here.)  So, I promptly began digging all of my autographs out of my plethora of memento boxes and, while doing so, was shocked to come across the What Women Want call sheet.  I had completely forgotten I had it!  I didn’t think much about it and didn’t even unfold it to take a closer look, in fact, until a lightbulb went off in my head a few minutes later.  Though a call sheet chronicles all of the information for a particular day of shooting (location details, call times, scheduling information, key phone numbers, parking maps, etc.), sometimes data for future filming is also noted.  Knowing the odds were incredibly slim but with fingers crossed, I opened up the paper to see if the coffee shop scenes happened to be listed and, lo and behold, they were – along with an address, spelled out in black and white!  The information I had been seeking for years had been right in my own backyard – or closet, in this case – the whole time!  As the call sheet informed me, the What Women Want coffee shop scenes were lensed at 400 South Main Street in downtown Los Angeles.  (Though the sheet notes the address as “400 Main St” with no north or south designation, being that there is no structure at 400 North Main, it was easy to discern that filming took place at 400 South.)

I just about fell off my chair when I did a Google Street View search for the address and imagery of the San Fernando Building, a very popular filming location, came into focus on my screen.  Not only had I stalked the historic site before, but I’d covered it on two separate occasions in articles for other media outlets.  More on that in a bit.

The Italian Renaissance Revival-style structure was commissioned by wealthy wheat farmer/landowner James B. Lankershim in 1907 and originally consisted of 6 floors.

Considered the city’s grandest office building at the time of its inception, the luxe John F. Blee-designed property boasted a marble lobby with 22-foot ceilings, a Turkish bath, a café, a billiards room, and a penthouse which Lankershim called home.

In 1911, two additional stories were added to the top of the building by architect R. B Young.

Sadly, by the ‘90s, the property – and the neighborhood surrounding it – had fallen into disrepair.  Enter Tom Gilmore of Gilmore Associates.  In 1998, the visionary developer purchased the San Fernando, as well as three additional area buildings, and began rehabilitating them.  Killefer Flammang Architects was hired for the extensive transformation process, during which the San Fernando office units were converted into 70 modern loft rentals with concrete flooring, open floorplans, tile bathrooms, and high-end kitchens.

The building, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a Historic-Cultural Monument, began leasing out units in August 2000 and by March of the following year was 93% occupied.

The San Fernando’s ground floor also garnered new tenants, in the form of high-end restaurants, cafés, studios, and shops .  It is one of those spaces that was utilized in What Women Want.

The site pops up a couple of times in the movie as the spot where cocky ad exec Nick Marshall (Gibson) grabs his daily cup of joe – and regularly hits on barista Lola (Marisa Tomei).

Purported to be a Dietrich Coffee outpost in the flick (I am unsure of why the call sheet refers to it as a “Starbucks”), the coffee shop was not a real café at all, but a fabrication constructed inside of a vacant storefront for the shoot – a tidbit I learned years ago from the movie’s DVD commentary with director Nancy Meyers and production designer Jon Hutman.

Yep, you read that right!  The What Women Want coffee shop was just a set, albeit an extensive one.

As noted in the commentary, the entire coffee shop was a build-out, even the lobby seen in the background.  (Another interesting tidbit that I learned from Meyers’ commentary is that Frank Sinatra greatly influenced both the character of Nick and the movie as a whole.  Not only was Nick’s apartment based on Sinatra’s apartment in Come Blow Your Horn, but Hutman incorporated orange, Sinatra’s favorite color, as an accent hue in all of the sets.  One example is the directory sign visible below, which boasts an orange stripe across the top.)

So, if the whole What Women Want coffee shop was just a set, one that was completely dismantled after shooting wrapped, why was I so fixated on identifying it?  I cannot really answer that question.  Though I was fully aware that no part of the locale would be recognizable from the flick, I was still obsessed with tracking it down – and spent years trying to do so.  I think possibly my intrigue was not in spite of the café being a set, but because of it.  Uncovering the reality of the space’s aesthetic as compared to the fantasy that was shown onscreen piqued my interest.  What can I say?  The magic of Hollywood captivates me.

Today, the storefront where the What Women Want coffee shop was set up houses a Spanish/Mediterranean eatery named Bäco Mercat.  (The space is denoted with a pink bracket below.)  Founded by Josef Centeno in 2011, the popular restaurant is named for the baco-style bread that is utilized in its sandwiches.

Though Bäco Mercat occupies the entire southern half of the San Fernando Building’s ground level (as was the case with the What Women Want coffee shop), prior to that the space was divided into two separate units with a café named Banquette inhabiting the more northern storefront, as you’ll see in some screen captures to come.

The entrance doors Nick utilizes in the movie are situated on the northern side of Bäco Mercat.

Ironically, while re-stalking the San Fernando Building recently, I was so excited to finally be seeing the What Women Want café site in person that I failed to snap photos of the buildings across the street (the Hellman Building and the Farmers and Merchants Bank), which were visible in one of the coffee shop scenes and are the only recognizable elements that still exists from the film.  Thank goodness for Google Street View!  As you can see in the collage below, while the windows of the Hellman Building have changed a bit, the column of the Farmers and Merchants Bank pictured behind Nick is easily identifiable.

As is the decorative lip that runs across the top of the Hellman Building.  (You can check out a historic image of the Hellman which shows the street level windows in their original form and as they appeared in What Women Want – before they were altered to run all the way down to the sidewalk – here.)

As I mentioned earlier, the San Fernando Building has a prolific film resume.  In the Season 1 episode of Police Story titled “Fingerprint,” which aired in 1974, Allen Rich (Tim Matheson) attempts to evade the police by ducking into the structure.

The episode grants us a great glimpse of what the property’s interior looked like at the time.

In 1977, the San Fernando Building popped up in the Season 2 episode of Starsky and Hutch titled “Huggy Bear and the Turkey” as the site of The Pits bar, where Foxy Baker (Emily Yancy) seeks out Huggy Bear (Antonio Fargas) and J.D. Turquet ‘Turkey’ (Dale Robinette) to help her find her missing husband.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve written about the San Fernando on two other occasions.  I briefly covered the site and its appearance in the 1983 “Beat It” music video in this Discover Los Angeles article about Michael Jackson’s L.A. that I penned in 2016.  While I originally thought that the video’s pool hall segments had been lensed at the Hard Rock Cafe where the bar scenes were shot, back in August 2013 set designer/builder Michael Scaglione, who worked on “Beat It,” was kind enough to give me copies of his original location sheets.  As they detailed, filming of the pool hall bits actually occurred at Brunswick Billiard Academy, formerly located in the basement of the San Fernando.  Though not much of the space can be seen in the video (which you can watch here) . . .

. . . you can catch some additional glimpses of it in this clip about the making of “Beat It” from Entertainment Tonight’s The Jacksons Exposed! special.

Brunswick Billiard Academy is also where Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) plays pool in 1988’s Bull Durham.

The movie provides us with much wider views of the pool hall than those featured in “Beat It.”

In the 1992 comedy Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, Joe Bomowski (Sylvester Stallone) responds to a call about a jumper at the San Fernando, which is said to be located at 486 South Main Street.

The building’s actual interior was also utilized in the scene.

Dick Harper (Jim Carrey), Jane Harper (Téa Leoni) and Frank Bascombe (Richard Jenkins) discuss how to rob Jack McCallister (Alex Baldwin) while sitting in front of Pete’s Cafe and Bar, which formerly occupied the northern half of the San Fernando Building’s lower level, in the 2005 comedy Fun with Dick and Jane.  Today that space houses PYT.

Bob Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg) hides out – and almost gets arrested – in the San Fernando’s entrance while spying on Sarah Fenn’s (Kate Mara) meeting with Nick Memphis (Michael Pena) at the Barclay Hotel across the street in the 2007 action flick Shooter.

In 2009’s (500) Days of Summer, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Zooey Deschanel) shop twice at Old Bank DVD, which was formerly located next to Banquette on the San Fernando’s lower level.

You can just see the edge of Banquette in the second screen capture below.

In the Season 5 Rear-Window-inspired episode of Castle titled “The Lives of Others,” which aired in 2013, Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion) spies on his across-the-street neighbors in the San Fernando Building via a pair of binoculars while holed up in his apartment due to a skiing accident.

A couple of scenes also took place on the sidewalk out of in front the building.  (Why an address number of 500 was posted on the San Fernando for the shoot, I am unsure.)

That same year, Anton Zevlos (Jeff Griggs) dined with his family at Pete’s Cafe & Bar in the Season 5 episode of NCIS: Los Angeles titled “Iron Curtain Rising.”  You can check out a photo of the eatery’s interior that matches what is shown below here.

As I detailed in this post for Los Angeles magazine, Kate King (Leslie Mann) calls her husband, Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), to remind him about a dinner engagement while standing in front of Bäco Mercat in the 2014 movie The Other Woman.

For more stalking fun, follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Los Angeles magazine and Discover Los Angeles.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: The coffee shop from What Women Want was created inside of a vacant storefront at the San Fernando Building, which is located at 400 South Main Street in downtown Los Angeles.  The storefront now houses the restaurant Bäco Mercat.  You can visit the eatery’s official website here.

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