The Catch – IAMNOTASTALKER

Today’s locale required a ridiculous amount of stalking – of myself. A few months back, while scanning through a television show making screen captures for a post, I spotted what I thought was the side of The Trails Café, one of my favorite L.A. eateries. A quick look at Google Street View’s imagery of the restaurant confirmed my hunch. Distracted by the piece I was writing, I failed to jot down the information, though, and promptly forgot about it. Flash forward to last weekend when the Grim Cheaper and I found ourselves hungry during a stalking trip to Griffith Park. I suggested we pop by The Trails and, while enjoying our scrumptious egg salad sandwich, was reminded of the place’s onscreen appearance. The only trouble was I could not for the life of me recall what show I had seen it in. Figuring it would come to me eventually, I snapped photos of The Trails and added it to my To-Blog List. Days later, though, I was still at a loss. The only remedy I could think of was a deep dive through my browser history. That dive turned out to be far deeper than I had envisioned. With the GC as my guide, I pulled up my search history, inputted “Trails Café” and quickly discerned that I made the discovery of the restaurant’s cameo on January 9th. As I backtracked through all of the other queries I performed on that date, I felt like I was entering A Beautiful Mind territory. I don’t normally consider myself as having ADD tendencies, but my online habits are evidence to the contrary. At no time that day did I have less than ten windows open – often on multiple browsers. Using the disjointed information to pinpoint what show The Trails had appeared in proved extremely time consuming (and a bit unnerving), but I eventually hit pay dirt – the eatery was featured in the pilot episode of The Catch, which I had discovered while making screen captures for my post on Emerson College Los Angeles. Phew!

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The Trails Café was founded by Grammy-winning music producer Mickey Petralia and television executive Frank Lentz in June 2005. The venture might seem an unusual one for two people with backgrounds so widely removed from the culinary world, but as Petralia told L.A. Weekly in a 2010 interview, “When I first started putting this place together, I code-named it ‘Operation Exit Strategy.’ The record industry had started to change, and I was pretty certain it was never going to get back to where it was. It’s hard to sustain a house and two kids on music alone now.”

Situated just steps from the idyllic Ferndell Nature Center, another one of my favorite L.A. spots, the structure that now houses The Trails was originally a city-owned concession stand that served mediocre burgers. By the time that Petralia and Lentz got their hands on the place, it had long been sitting vacant and boarded up and had grown run-down.

The duo spent about nine months cleaning up the property and transforming it into a charmingly rustic eatery, all of which was done during off time from their day jobs.

While the menu was originally helmed by musician Aaron Sperske, at some point pastry chef Jenny Park came on board as a co-owner and the mastermind behind The Trails’ delectable offerings including pastries, sandwiches and salads, all of which are made from scratch each day on the premises.

The tiny café (it measures less than 400 square feet!) quickly became an area staple, with hungry patrons flocking there like bees to honey. Most days you’ll find the colorful picnic tables packed and throngs of people waiting at the order window.

It is not hard to see why The Trails is so beloved. Not only is the fare amazing, but the setting is absolutely idyllic. Sitting there, you half expect woodland fairies to come flying by, sprinkling pixie dust in their wake.

The restaurant is also something of a celebrity hot spot. Such stars as Amanda Seyfried, Flea, Minka Kelly, Jessalyn Gilsig, Jayma Mays, Drew Barrymore, Alia Shawkat, and Paul Adelstein have all popped by for a bite to eat. Mandy Moore even did a photo shoot at The Trails for How You Glow.

Considering its celebrity clientele and gorgeous aesthetic, it is no surprise that the eatery wound up onscreen.

In the pilot episode of The Catch, private investigator Alice Vaughan (Mireille Enos) discovers that her fiancé, Christopher Hall (Peter Krause), is a fraud who has made off with her entire life savings. Her team decides to try to ensnare him, but, as her employee Danny Yoon (Jay Hayden) laments, “This guy was good – like really good. His entire web presence is gone. No archived search items, no photos. I don’t even know how to start investigating.” Alice assures him that she has photographs of Christopher, but when she heads to her computer to bring them up she realizes that his face is obscured or turned away from the camera in every single one. Two of the pictures she scans through in the scene were taken at The Trails Café. The restaurant’s appearance is fleeting at best in the segment, which is perhaps why I had such a hard time recalling it.

Alice and Christopher are sitting on the café’s southern side in the images, in the area pictured below.

The Trails Café was also featured in the Season 14 episode of Visiting . . . with Huell Howser titled “Ferndell,” which aired in 2006.

In the episode, which you can watch here, we are given a glimpse of what the eatery looked like when Petralia and Lentz first took it over in 2004. The industrial shack is quite a stark contrast to the whimsical café that exists now.

Thanks to fellow stalker Justin, I learned that The Trails also appears as The Tummy Pleaser concession stand in the Season 1 episode of Salute Your Shorts titled “Cheeseburgers in Paradise,” which aired in 1991.

Quite an extensive scene was shot there affording us a fabulous look at the property in its original state.

I cannot say enough good things about The Trails Café. There’s a reason I included the place in My Guide to L.A. – Coffee post. It is definitely one of the best spots in the city to grab a latte and enjoy a shaded respite.

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

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The Trails Café, from the pilot episode of The Catch, is located at 2333 Fern Dell Drive in Griffith Park. The entrance to Ferndell Nature Center, my favorite L.A. walking trail, can be found just south of the restaurant at the intersection of Fern Dell and Black Oak Drives.

Despite the fact that I live in Palm Springs, I tend to think of myself as having my finger on the pulse of L.A. But when penning A Film Lover’s Guide to Tomorrow’s Movie Location Stars for Los Angeles magazine in 2015, I overlooked two key spots, which I hope speaks more to the vast landscape of the city than it does to my lack of awareness. Though I noted Wilshire Grand Center, Hollenbeck Community Police Station, 8500, Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, and the revamped Grand Central Air Terminal as the then newly-constructed sites I thought location managers would soon be flocking to, I somehow failed to include The Broad, a contemporary art museum in DTLA with a highly unusual perforated exterior, and Emerson College Los Angeles, an arts and communication school in Hollywood with a campus the Times deemed “a futuristic complex of aluminum and glass.” I actually did not become aware of the latter until watching the Season 5 episode of Scandal titled “Pencils Down” in March 2016, a full two years after its completion.

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In “Pencils Down,” Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) clandestinely meets up with Alex Vargas (Danny Pino) outside of the supposed Washington, D.C.-area venue where Mellie Grant (Bellamy Young) and Susan Ross (Artemis Pebdani) are participating in their first presidential debate. One look at the staggering wall of geometric panels pictured in the background of the scene and the dramatic vistas shown in wide shots and I was transfixed. I promptly paused my DVR and began trying to figure out where filming had taken place. Because Scandal shoots in L.A., I knew the locale had to be somewhere within the thirty-mile-zone, though I was certain I had never come across it in any of my stalking travels. So I did a Google search for “new modern building” and “Los Angeles” and pored through the countless images that were kicked back until finally landing upon one of Emerson College that matched what I had seen onscreen. Pulling up additional photos of the campus only served to make me more obsessed with the place. Though I immediately added the school to my To-Stalk list, it was not until this past December that I finally made it out there. Thankfully, Emerson, or ELA as it is also called, was worth the wait.

Construction on the 107,000-square-foot, 10-story, $110-million structure began in 2012 and grew out of a need for a more permanent place for the Boston-based Emerson to house and teach students in its semester-abroad program – abroad in this case being Hollywood.

The program, originally established in the 1980s, allows for participants to not only spend a semester studying in the show business capital of the world, but to also participate in invaluable internships at places like MTV, Comedy Central, and E! Entertainment. With no West Coast home base to call its own, students were originally taught in leased space in Universal City and put up in furnished units at the Oakwood at Toluca Hills by Avalon complex in Burbank. That all changed when Emerson’s Hollywood campus was completed in early 2014.

The striking complex, situated on the site of a former Sunset Boulevard parking lot measuring a scant 0.80 acres, essentially consists of one large box-shaped building with an open center. Two residential towers housing 217 dorm rooms, as well as a few faculty apartments, make up the framework of the structure.

Common areas, which include classrooms, editing labs, two black box theatres, a screening room, a conference room, rehearsal space, and lecture halls, are situated in between the two towers.

To say the site, which is the brainchild of Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne of the Morphosis architecture firm, is dramatic would be an understatement.

As ELA’s founding director (and the executive producer of Friends!) Kevin Bright said of the structure, “I don’t care whether you walk around it or drive by it or you see it from a distance; the thing about this building is it demands your attention.”

I’ve honestly never seen anything quite like it.

Considering the building’s completely unique and dramatic aesthetic, it is no surprise that location scouts came a-calling pretty much immediately.

As this ArchDaily article puts it, “Looking to the local context, the center finds a provocative precedent in the interiority of Hollywood film studios, where outwardly regular facades house flexible, fantastical spaces within. With rigging for screens, media connections, sound, and lighting incorporated into the framework, the upper platform serves as a flexible armature for outdoor performances, transforming the undulating scrim into a dynamic visual backdrop. The entire building becomes a stage set for student films, screenings, and industry events, with the Hollywood sign, the city of Los Angeles, and the Pacific Ocean in the distance providing added scenery.” The place truly is a location manager’s dream.

Besides appearing in the scene in which Olivia and Alex exchange damaging information on rival presidential candidates in “Pencils Down” . . .

. . . one of Emerson’s residential hallways served as the spot where Susan breaks up with her cheating boyfriend David Rosen (Joshua Malina).

At the beginning of the Season 1 episode of Extant titled “More in Heaven and Earth,” which aired in 2014, ELA portrays the upscale The Villas condominium building where Molly Woods (Halle Berry) attempts to question Derek Pearce (Rocco Vienhage) about the Aruna mission.

Molly returns to The Villas in a later scene only to discover that Derek has died, the victim of an apparent suicide.

Julie Gelineau (Grace Gummer) and Odim James (Charlie Bewley) also dine on the premises in “More in Heaven and Earth.” In the episode, the two share a meal at Emerson Kitchen, a restaurant that was formerly located on the college’s ground floor. Today that space houses Homeward Ground.

On The Catch, a now defunct series that aired on ABC from 2016 to 2017, ELA appeared regularly as the exterior of the Anderson/Vaughan Investigations office.

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

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: Emerson College Los Angeles, from the “Pencils Down” episode of Scandal, is located at 5960 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. You can visit the school’s official website here.

Tag: The Catch

The Trails Café from “The Catch”

Emerson College Los Angeles from “Scandal”