Fare Turnaround Is Fair Play

The fact that business landmarks sometimes play musical chairs and trade places with other familiar landmarks can be somewhat disconcerting to a debonair man about town who should know his way around.

Fred Crane, KFAC’s jovial program host and AM program director, chuckles to think that recently on his way to work he absentmindedly drove clear across town to Marie Callender’s new restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard.

“I should have known better . . . the station had moved to Hollywood more than a year ago. I’m really not addicted to pies,” Crane quipped, “but a 20-year habit is hard to break.”

Twenty years is how long KFAC, the classical AM/FM music station, occupied the site in Museum Square that is now the restaurant.

Crane is actually quite taken with the new Marie Callender facility but it amuses him to think that for 20 years he had his turntable where he now waits his turn for a table. And no longer are Beethoven’s 9th, Ravel’s “Bolero” or Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” up on shelves where he can reach them. Sweeter rhapsodies in the form of coconut cream and lemon meringue pies have replaced them.

“But here’s a twist,” Crane continued, tuning back to real estate. “KFAC now occupies the very same spot as another famous eatery, Patsy D’Amore’s Villa Capri, which existed for so many years at the corner of McCadden Place and Yucca Street.

In the 1950s, Villa Capri became a Hollywood landmark and a favored dining spot of celebrities, notably Frank Sinatra, who was the godfather of one of D’Amore’s sons and frequently sang at the bar.

Having followed his father and grandfather in the restaurant business, Pasquale D’Amore opened the city’s first pizza house on Cahuenga Boulevard in 1940. He once told an interviewer with understandable pride, “I started all this Italian food jazz. Before my place, no one knew anything but spaghetti and lasagna.”

According to Crane, Brahms, Bach and Beethoven appear to be adjusting well to the old spaghetti kitchen but, he added, “I wouldn’t be surprised if there are still one or two resident cockroaches around looking for the pasta.

“I still yearn for that acrid smell of the La Brea pitch bubbling in the parking lot on a hot summer day,” Crane said with a touch of nostalgia for the familiar Wilshire location.

He added, “Turnaround is fair play, as long as it’s fare for both the ear and palate.”