Denzel Washington – IAMNOTASTALKER

March 21, 2011March 19, 2011

The Quality Café

While stalking in Downtown Los Angeles a couple of weekends ago, the Grim Cheaper and I found ourselves hungry so I suggested grabbing some lunch at the Quality Café on West 7th Street – a diner that has appeared in countless productions over the years. When we showed up to stalk the place, though, we were shocked to discover that it was completely boarded up. I was even further shocked to discover, once I returned home, that, aside from some brief blurbs about its filming history, I could not seem to find any information about the place online. I was extremely curious if the cafe had ever been an actual working restaurant or if it had only ever existed as a film set. So I contacted fellow stalker Harry Medved, author of one of my very favorite stalking tomes – Hollywood Escapes: The Moviegoer’s Guide to Exploring Southern California’s Great Outdoors – who was nice enough to give me the scoop on the former greasy spoon. As it turns out, the Quality Café was indeed a real life restaurant at one point time. It closed its doors a few years back and is now used solely for filming, although word on the street is that the place might re-open as an eatery once again in the near future.

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Being that it is completely boarded up and there is not a whole lot to see while there, the Quality Café does not make for a great stalking venue, but because it has such an incredibly vast filming history, I figured it was worthy of a blog post.

In Catch Me If You Can, it is while dining at the Quality Café that a waiter clues Carl Hanratty (aka Tom Hanks) into the fact that Barry Allen, the alias Frank Abagnale Jr. (aka Leonardo DiCaprio) has been using, is the actual name of the comic book character “The Flash”.

In 1995’s Se7en, Tracy Mills (aka Gwyneth Paltrow) confesses to Detective Lt. William Somerset (aka Morgan Freeman) that she is pregnant with Detective David Mills’ (aka Brad Pitt’s) baby over a cup of coffee at the Quality Café.

Morgan Freeman returned to the Quality Café in 2004 to film the scene from Million Dollar Baby in which his character, Eddie Scrap-Iron Dupris, takes Maggie Fitzgerald (aka Hilary Swank) out to celebrate her birthday.

In Gone in Sixty Seconds, the Quality Café is the diner where Helen Raines (aka Grace Zabriskie), the mother of Memphis (aka Nicolas Cage) and Kip Raines (aka Giovanni Ribisi), works.

In Training Day, Detective Alonzo Harris (aka Denzel Washington) and Jake Hoyt (aka Ethan Hawke) meet up at the café on their first day of working together.

In Old School, Mitch Martin (aka Luke Wilson) takes Nicole (aka Ellen Pompeo) to the Quality Café and tries to convince her that he is actually a nice guy.

In Mr. and Mrs. Smith, John Smith (aka Brad Pitt) and Eddie (aka Vince Vaughn) meet up at the Quality Café to discuss the failed assassination attempt of Benjamin Danz (aka Adam Brody).

In 2001’s Ghost World, Enid (aka Thora Birch) and Rebecca (aka a very young Scarlett Johansson) spy on some supposed Satanists while dining at the Quality Café.

In 2009’s The Stepfather, the Quality Café is where David Harris (aka Dylan Walsh) asks Michael Harding (aka Penn Badgley) to be his best man.

In Sex and Death 101, the Quality Café is where Death Nell (aka Winona Ryder) tells Roderick Blank (aka Simon Baker) her life story.

In 2008’s The Midnight Meat Train, the Quality Café is where Leon’s (aka Bradley Cooper’s) wife, Maya (aka Leslie Bibb), works.

In 1993’s What’s Love Got To Do With It, the Quality Café is where Ike Turner (aka Laurence Fishburne) takes Anna Mae Bullock (aka Angela Bassett) out to dinner for the first time.

The Quality Café was the site of a triple murder in the Season One episode of CSI: New York titled “Outside Man”.

In the Season One episode of Mad Men titled “5G”, the Quality Café stood in for the Delight Café where Don Draper (aka Jon Hamm) met up with his half-brother, Adam Whitman (aka Jay Paulson), whom he had been estranged from for years.

Harry Medved also let me know that, according to Marty Cummins, the key assistant location manager for 500 Days of Summer, the Quality Café is where Summer (aka Zooey Deschanel) broke up with Tom (aka Joseph Gordon-Levitt) at the beginning of the flick.

And while the exterior of the restaurant appeared as a local hangout in 2004’s You Got Served . . .

. . . as you can see in the above screen captures, a different restaurant was used for the interior filming.

EMBED-The Quality Cafe in Movies Mash-Up – Watch more free videos

You can watch a fabulous compilation from the Screen Junkies website of several different movies that have been filmed at the café by clicking above.

Big THANK YOU to Harry Medved for filling me in on the restaurant’s history.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The Quality Café is located at 1238 West 7th Street in Downtown Los Angeles. The restaurant is currently closed to the public and is only available for film shoots, so I can’t say that I’d really recommend stalking it as there is just not a whole lot to see.

December 10, 2010March 3, 2011

Our Rehearsal Dinner at POP Champagne & Dessert Bar

As I’ve mentioned many times before on this blog, POP Champagne & Dessert Bar in Old Town Pasadena is my very favorite restaurant and, even though I wasn’t even engaged at the time, when I first walked through its front doors over a year and a half ago, I immediately knew it was the place where I wanted to hold the rehearsal dinner for my wedding. The only problem was that the Grim Cheaper and I had long been planning on getting married in Malibu and having a rehearsal dinner at a restaurant located over fifty miles away from the wedding venue wasn’t exactly the most viable of options. After the GC finally proposed, though, and we sat down to begin our wedding planning, my mom suggested that we hold the actual wedding rehearsal in the backyard of my parent’s Pasadena home, which is located just about two miles from POP, and an idea was born – our nuptials would be a two-city celebration! Much to the GC’s chagrin, I had long before decided that all of our wedding guests would be invited to our rehearsal dinner. Because weddings seem to go by in such a blur and because the vast majority of our guests were from out of town, I did not want the time spent with our closest loved ones to be limited to one short evening. I was a little worried, though, that our family and friends might be upset over the fact that each night’s festivities would be held in a different city, which would entail everyone having to rent a car AND moving hotel rooms from one night to the other. As it turned out, though, people absolutely LOVED the idea! Because most of our family and friends were not from the area, many of them told me afterwards that they loved getting to experience two very different parts of Southern California over the course of our wedding weekend. YAY!

Holding the rehearsal in my parents’ backyard actually turned out to be very memorable for my family, because just two weeks after the wedding my mom and dad put their beloved house up for sale – the same house they had lived in for the better part of a decade. So, it was nice to make one last and very significant memory there before we had to say good-bye. And yes, as you can see in the above photographs, during the rehearsal I did wear the Carrie Bradshaw veil that my best friend, Kylee, made for my Sex and the City-themed bachelorette party.

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Because fifty people would be attending, I did not want our rehearsal dinner to be a formal, sit-down event. I wanted our friends and family to be able to mingle and get to know each other and a formal sit-down dinner would not have been very conducive to that. So, we asked Kristin and Matt, the owners of POP Champagne Bar, if they could create a cocktail party-type atmosphere for us and they ended up pulling it off beautifully! In fact, they couldn’t have facilitated it better had I given them a roadmap! They wound up giving us the entire front portion of the restaurant and had several different groupings of tables and chairs set up for people if they wanted to sit down, while servers walked around with tray-passed food. There was also a buffet table set up with wine and champagne and a sampling of the food so that guests could also help themselves. The evening turned out perfect! Not only did the GC and I get to walk around and talk to all of our closest friends, but most of our guests also spent the evening mingling and speaking with different groups of people, so, by the time the wedding rolled around, everyone had really gotten know each other, which was so incredibly cool! And while I realize that it is a (large) added expense, if you can swing it, I honestly cannot more highly recommend inviting all of your guests to the rehearsal dinner. Doing so made our special day that much more memorable.

Not to mention the food was ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE – and almost unbelievably reasonably priced. There are several different special events menu choices available at POP and we chose the most expensive one, which was only $12 per person! Included in that price were seven different menu items of our choosing. We ended up picking the deviled eggs with chive truffle, bacon onion, and blue cheese flavoring (my favorite), POPcorn chicken (pictured above to the right), chorizo and Anaheim chili meatballs, sliders with three different toppings including bacon-gorgonzola mayonnaise, Pasilla chili-chorizo, and goat cheese & date (the GC’s favorite), the flatbread pizza du jour, wild mushroom and goat cheese bruschetta, and olive, mushroom, and sun-dried tomato flavored tapenade crostini (pictured above to the left). And there was no shortage of food! Amazingly enough, after two and a half hours of being there, Matt informed us that we hadn’t even eaten fifty percent of the food we had paid for! LOL For dessert we picked the three-item menu at $6 per person which included chocolate-covered strawberries, a trio of homemade cookies, and the house-made churros served with three different dipping sauces – spiced warm chocolate, Dulce de leche, and creamy strawberry. Because the bottles of wine and champagne offered at POP are all on the pricier side, Matt offered to special order some lower-priced options for our rehearsal dinner. We told him the amount we wanted to spend per bottle and gave him free reign to choose the brands he thought best and he ended up picking out some spectacular options for us. So not only was the party absolutely fabulous – all of our guests were raving about both the atmosphere and the food – but it was also completely affordable! And while not yet a filming location (although it was almost chosen to be in the soon-to-be released No Strings Attached movie, which would have been just about the coolest thing ever!), POP has become something of a celebrity hangout as of late. Such stars as Mila Kunis, Denzel Washington, Marc Curry, and The Bachelor’s Jason Mesnick and Molly Malaney have all been spotted there and ’80s pop star Tiffany even threw herself a birthday party at the restaurant! Love it!

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: POP Champagne & Dessert Bar is located at 33 East Union Street in Old Town Pasadena. You can visit the restaurant’s official website here.

June 22, 2010June 21, 2010

Casey’s Irish Pub

One location that I have been wanting to stalk for what seems like ages now is Casey’s Irish Pub (aka Casey’s Bar & Grill), a historic Downtown Los Angeles watering hole that has appeared in COUNTLESS movie and television productions throughout its more than thirty year history. I first found out about the bar over six months ago while doing some online research on locales featured in the first X-Files movie and the place has been high up on my “To Stalk” list ever since. But until this past weekend, I had yet to make it there. My delay in visiting the bar was not for lack of trying, though, believe me. For some reason, every time my fiancé and I found ourselves in the area, Casey’s Irish Pub was, unfortunately, closed. I’ve lost track of the amount of thwarted Casey’s stalking attempts that were actually made, but, trust me, the number is higher than you can count on one hand. Thankfully though, this past Saturday night, fate finally intervened and my fiancé and I found ourselves just a few blocks away from Casey’s during a time when the bar was actually open! YAY! And, even though I was in a fairly bad mood at the time – unfortunately, there is still some health drama going on with my dad and I also recently found out that one of my closest friends is ill, so it’s not exactly a happy time for me – we decided to stop in anyway. And I am SO glad that we did, because my spirits were lifted almost immediately upon walking through Casey’s beveled-glass doors.

The two-story building where Casey’s now resides was first constructed in 1916 and originally housed a general store on its street level and a Turkish bath on its basement-level. In 1924, the general store and bathhouse were closed and an upscale restaurant named B&M Cafeteria was opened in their place. The former general store space was transformed into B&M’s main dining room and the former Turkish bath location became the kitchen area. In the years following, the restaurant went through numerous changes of ownership and several different restaurant incarnations, until 1969, when it took on the name of Casey’s Irish Pub. Casey’s owners had the two-level property completely revamped, most notably moving the entire structure thirty feet back from the street in order to make room for an enclosed basement-level patio. After changing hands – but not its moniker – a few more times, in 2007 Casey’s was acquired by the nightlife development company 213 – the very same company that was also responsible for restoring the popular Cole’s Restaurant a few years back. (Once again I must apologize for the ultra-blurry photographs that appear in this post. I STILL cannot figure out how to use my new camera and I am growing seriously annoyed! UGH!)

Casey’s Irish Pub is absolutely HUGE (over 10,000 square feet!) and features a gorgeous mahogany bar, hand-pressed tin ceilings, a live-music stage, a dart room, a billiards room, and several private event areas, including the “Captain’s Quarters” (pictured above). Not only is the bar’s ambiance fabulous and unique, but the food is also INCREDIBLE, despite what the reviews on Yelp state. As I’ve mentioned numerous times in the past, I am an INCREDIBLY picky eater, especially when it comes to chicken, and I have to say that Casey’s serves up some of the best food in L.A. My fiancé and I especially loved their famous pub fries – which are an absolute must-have while dining at Casey’s – and their Cobb salad. The staff there could also NOT have been nicer and one of the bartenders even went so far as to take me on a little mini-tour of the place, which is how I got the above-pictured photographs of the Captain’s Quarters. 🙂 Love it!

The thing I was most excited about, though, was the fact that Casey’s not only serves champagne – and good champagne, at that – but they serve it in old-school champagne glasses, ala the kind Marilyn Monroe was always pictured drinking out of. So darn cool! I honestly can’t recommend stalking Casey’s enough!!!! I can pretty much guarantee its a place that stalkers and non-stalkers alike will appreciate!

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Walking through the doors of Casey’s Irish Pub is truly like stepping back in time and it is not very hard to see why filmmakers have returned there again and again over the years to capture the place’s unique ambiance on film. And, thanks to the bar’s definite New York vibe, it is most often portrayed as being in a city other than Los Angeles. In 2002’s Mr. Deeds, Casey’s stands in for the New York bar where Babe Bennett (aka Winona Ryder) went to drown her sorrows after being rejected by Longfellow Deeds (aka Adam Sandler).

In the first X-Files movie, Casey’s appeared as the Washington, D.C. bar where cutie Fox Mulder (aka David Duchovny) met Dr. Alvin Kurtzweil (aka Martin Landau) for the first time.

Ironically enough, though, for the scenes which supposedly took place outside of the bar, producers filmed at a different location entirely, yet they chose to use the actual Casey’s name on the exterior signage. Casey’s real-life exterior is pictured above and, as you can see, it is located below street-level and looks nothing like the exterior shown in The X-Files.

In 2006’s 16 Blocks, Casey’s stood in for the New York bar where Detective Jack Mosby (aka Bruce Willis) celebrated his birthday.

In Charlie Wilson’s War, Casey’s was featured as the Washington, D.C. watering hole where Congressman Charlie Wilson (aka Tom Hanks) took his lady friend Joanne Herring (aka Julia Roberts) for a drink before leaving on a trip to the Middle East.

In Good Night and Good Luck, Casey’s pops up as the New York bar where Edward R. Murrow (aka David Strathairn), Fred Friendly (aka George Clooney), and their co-workers wait to read the reviews of their just-aired See It Now television special about Senator Joseph McCarthy. Ironically enough, according to the movie’s DVD commentary, Casey’s was one of only two non-studio locations used in the filming of Good Night and Good Luck – the other being the Masonic Temple in Pasadena.

In 1998’s Fallen, Casey’s stands in for the Philadelphia bar where John Hobbes (aka Denzel Washington) met up with his cop friends Lou (aka James Gandolfini) and Jonesy (aka John Goodman) after the execution of a notorious serial killer.

In The Deep End of the Ocean, Casey’s stood in for the Chicago, Illinois restaurant where Detective Candy Bliss (aka Whoopi Goldberg) took Beth Cappadora (aka Michelle Pfeiffer) for a bite to eat a few weeks after Sam, Beth’s kidnapped son, was returned to her. Both the interior and the exterior of Casey’s were used in the flick.

Casey’s has also been featured in numerous episodes of the television series Mad Men, including the Season 1 episode titled “The Hobo Code”, where it stood in for P.J. Clarke’s, the famed, real life 125-year old watering hole located in Manhattan.

Casey’s also popped up in the Season 2 episode of Mad Men titled “For Those Who Think Young”, as the spot where Don Draper (aka Jon Hamm) is shown eating a steak and eggs breakfast after learning from his doctor that he is not in the greatest of health. The bar was also apparently featured in an episode of CSI, although I am not sure of which particular episode.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: Casey’s Irish Pub is located at 613 South Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles. The restaurant is open from 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. each Monday through Wednesday, from 11:30 a.m. to 2 a.m. each Thursday through Saturday, and from 3 p.m. to 11 a.m. each Sunday. You can visit the official Casey’s website here.