When news crashed-landed that The Original Pantry Cafe was closing forever, Angelenos wept, crying over the loss of a 101-year-old Downtown icon, for the long-serving employees losing their jobs, and facing the prospect of never tasting the restaurant’s famous silver-dollar pancakes and sourdough garlic bread ever again.
One woman, Erika Armenta, the owner of East Los Tacos, felt the pain and did something remarkable about it: She threw several staff members and Pantry fans alike a lifeline.
Over the last three weeks, Armenta has opened her Cesar Chavez Avenue taquería in the early hours of the day to transform it into East Los Pantry, which serves an abridged menu of OG Pantry breakfast classics, with former Pantry staffers employed in the kitchen to do the cooking.
“I was visiting the pantry house for one last meal, just like everybody else,” Armenta tells L.A. TACO. “Alex was our waiter, taking care of our order, and he was just really down that day. He was letting it out, talking to us, basically saying goodbyes to all of us who were visiting. And, you know, it really just stuck with me.”
After Erika left, that interaction stayed in her mind all day. The friends she’d enjoyed that final Pantry meal with encouraged her to contact them and hire Pantry staff at East Los Tacos.
“That idea was good, but then I was like, but they don't know how to do tacos,” she says. “It's different, being a cook doesn't mean you can cook everything. So I was like, ‘Well, I won't hire them for tacos, but what if I hire them for breakfast?’”
Erika brought Alex and a few of his coworkers into the restaurant to share some tacos and offered them her proposal to launch breakfast service. This taco diplomacy worked, and East Los Pantry was born.
Armenta started out with three OG Pantry employees working in the kitchen, which has now grown to six. She’s trying to brainstorm ways to bring more of the 26 Pantry workers who lost their jobs into the taquería, with plans to keep the already popular breakfast pop-up going indefinitely.
“We are seeing positive reviews from the customers, and I think it's doing well,” she says, noting that the conversion to breakfast was easy given the new employees’ experience. “If we keep it up, we can maintain it and run it as a breakfast-and-taco business.
For Alejandro “Alex” Ortiz, who worked for 26 years at the OG Pantry–going from a dishwasher to the clean-up crew to a chef and server—the lifeline has been a major turnaround after the blow he felt from being laid off.
“I'm so happy, really excited to have this opportunity,” he tells L.A. TACO over a hot griddle. “The first week, I felt really sad because I think, ‘What I have to do,’ you know? And then Erika called me and she said, ‘Alex, I got something for you’ and explained what she wants. And I'm excited because I know that people were sad when they heard the Pantry is closed, so I think, ‘I got something for you guys.’ And the customers come and support people too.”
The menu has been condensed to some of OG Pantry’s most popular breakfast dishes. Naturally, there are the silver dollar pancakes that the pop-up couldn’t exist without, along with French toast, eggs done any style, your choice of meats, including the restaurant's revered ham steak, plus sausage, bacon, or chorizo, hash brown potatoes, and sides of epic sourdough garlic bread with pressed seams, along with coffee and OJ.
Recreating the dishes that nostalgic Pantry fans expect and keeping the food coming out quickly in the face of huge demand for the reanimated Pantry menu have been the biggest challenges Armenta contends with.
“The majority of them were customers for a lot of years,” she says. “They come in here and immediately start sharing their stories, ‘Yes, we were customers for 20, 30, 40 years,’ and they have so much history to share. So we're doing everything we can to make it right, to bring all the right ingredients, to make it taste authentic, the way they are used to. That's our goal.”
Over a relaxed breakfast under the restaurant’s “Blood In, Blood Out” Vatos Locos mural, the pancakes were fluffy, the eggs decent, and the Pantry-style garlic bread as addictive as ever.
The taquería’s full salsa bar is a new asset to the Original Pantry experience, especially their chorizo offerings. If French toast isn't your thing, one could also order tacos or a mulita on a handmade tortilla in the morning.
So far, it’s a win-win-win situation. Six Pantry employees remain working together, with more to hopefully come. Pantry fans have a place to breakfast again with a few familiar faces and breakfast dishes. And Erika, who started her taquería as a truck eight years ago, has a new income stream after more than three years of opening this brick-and-mortar, increased media attention and a handful of staffers who are legendarily dedicated to their jobs.
“It was like an immediate change for them because they were so down,” Armenta says. “They were so used to being at a company as a team, as a family. I cannot imagine having to lose that. So the fact that we were able to offer them to come together as a team and keep doing what they were doing, you can see it on their faces. You can see how happy they are.”
“It's a good thing to bring this back, because everybody loves it,” Alex tells L.A. TACO. “Everybody likes the American breakfast style, like chopped potatoes, bacon, and sausage. And I like to cook for my customers.”
Ultimately, as excited as Armenta is about bringing a legend and its people back from the brink, for both the public and a few employees alike, she sees herself and East Los Tacos as the biggest beneficiaries.
“I know it's going to be helping them, but if anything, it has helped us a lot more,” she says. “It really does because as a company, you want to have those types of employees. It's really hard to find the right people to want to do the right thing for your business. Unfortunately, a lot of people clock in and clock out. These people are doing this because they like it and they want to see it grow. And as a business owner, that's the best you can ask for.”
East Los Pantry @ East Los Tacos~ opens at 7 AM— 2 PM at 4500 E. Cesar E. Chavez Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90022
