Frozen in Time : Mystery, Romance Flow From Legendary Kitchen Abandoned 28 Years Ago

Chairs are stacked on the tables. Toothpicks and silverware are set out. Red and white checkered tablecloths are folded up next to menus waiting to be passed out to patrons. It has been that way for 28 years.

The Original Spanish Kitchen, a popular restaurant for nearly three decades at 7373 Beverly Blvd., closed abruptly in 1961 and has been the source of mystery and rumor ever since. Television shows have labeled it haunted. A “Lou Grant” episode based a murder mystery on the shuttered restaurant. Magazine stories tell of a shoot-out that took place inside.

Wonderful legends all--but none of them true. The truth is that this decaying building has simply frozen in time a moment of happier days in a love story of an elderly woman who has shut herself off from the world, much like her restaurant.

There are a few undisputed facts: In the summer of 1961, the owner locked the doors, put up a “Closed for Vacation” sign, placed salt shakers and napkins on each table and never opened the restaurant again. Today, a peek through the broken, rose-glazed windows shows the silverware laid out under cobwebbed chandeliers and faded paintings of caballeros hanging above two dusty ice boxes.

“The building sits there like a ghost of a human tragedy,” said Rick Rosen, a Los Angeles historian who, over the years, has heard most of the tales. “People have been fascinated by it for decades,” said Rosen, who, until recently, worked for the Los Angeles Conservancy.

One version of the legend, Rosen said, is that the restaurant represented the lifelong dream of a young couple, but it never opened because the husband was murdered inside and the wife, who has since died, asked in her will that the restaurant be left undisturbed until the killer was caught.

Such tales are fueled in part by the family’s unwillingness to speak about the restaurant and by the reclusiveness of the founder’s wife, Pearl Caretto, who is very much alive.

Pearl and Johnny Caretto’s dream was to open a branch of the Original Spanish Kitchen in downtown Los Angeles, which opened in 1926 with Johnny Caretto as a partner. When the doors of the Westside restaurant opened in 1932, it became an instant success. Deluxe dinners cost $1.25. Johnny was always there--often showing Mexican-born cook Frank Acuna his secret recipes at the grill behind the bar. Merrill Cozzens, who worked there as a waiter from the day it opened until it closed nearly three decades later, remembers it all.

“It wasn’t a fancy place, but it wasn’t a diner,” Cozzens, 79, recalled in a recent interview. “People came because Johnny made them feel at home. Big stars of the day--Bob Hope, Van Johnson, Buster Keaton, Howard Keel, Linda Darnell and John and Lionel Barrymore--made it their regular hangout.

“Mary Pickford had her special booth in a corner by the door, and she was always friendly to anyone who asked for autographs,” said Cozzens, who is now retired and lives with his wife, Frances, in Burbank. “Sometimes she’d hand Johnny a recipe and he’d add it to the menu.”

No shoot-out ever happened at the restaurant, Cozzens insisted. The most dramatic incident he could recall was when two Los Angeles police detectives decided to duke it out in the back alley. They left their guns on the bar, and a dishwasher stole both guns and fled to Mexico, he said.

Cozzens recalled that he met his future wife at the restaurant and that Caretto gave him extra time off for a honeymoon. “He knew about true love. He was very devoted to Pearl,” Cozzens said.

The Carettos lived upstairs in an apartment. Pearl Caretto was a dancer. Cozzens recalled that she would come downstairs and greet guests and watch Johnny at the grill for hours.

And so the restaurant thrived for 27 years. But then Johnny was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Pearl closed the Original Spanish Kitchen to take care of him, expecting he would return soon. He died in 1967 in a rest home.

Pearl never reopened the restaurant. Neighborhood business owners said she lived upstairs for years, depending on them to bring her food and medicine. They would leave packages at the door. She would see no one. In 1980, the building was vandalized, and she moved.

“She just wants to be left alone,” said Caretto’s daughter, Pat Arnold of Sun Lakes, Ariz. “It’s her property, it’s her life. She asked me never to talk about the restaurant to anyone, and I’ve kept that promise all my life.”

Pearl Caretto is listed as the sole owner of the property, and she pays taxes on it every year. One real estate broker, Guy Doeh of West Los Angeles Realty, estimates the 4,000-square-foot building and the lot it occupies are worth at least $1 million.

Brian Bobrosky, who owns the upholstery shop next door, said he has agreed to board up broken windows and chase away vandals for the quiet woman he has known since he was a child. He said he is asked an average of twice a week about the closed restaurant.

“It’s like keeping an old Buick in your back yard,” Bobrosky said. “Some people say it should be fixed, some people say you should sell it. Whose business is it? If you want it to sit there and rust, that’s your choice. That’s her choice.”

The neon sign on the front of the building is broken. The balcony hanging over the front archway is rusting. The outside is papered with movie posters, and the pillars are splattered with cryptic graffiti.

Although he acknowledged that it is not a historic building in any conventional sense, historian Rosen said he hopes a way might be found to leave the restaurant undisturbed. “If you restore this building, it loses the poignant reason that makes it so interesting,” he said. “It’s a personal heartache that is displayed publicly, a moment in time that has been captured. Every time I pass it, I’m glad it’s still there.”

Pearl Caretto now lives in an apartment in another part of Los Angeles. Her hair is white, her skin smooth, and she still has the dazzling blue eyes remembered by past patrons.

“It’s been 10 years since a reporter has found me,” she said to the visitor at her door one day recently. She then answered questions for more than an hour through her barred window.

“I’m really not what they say, you know, a hermit and all. It’s just hard for me to talk about that, even now.”

Caretto chatted about the importance of eyesight, crime in Los Angeles and the Dodgers. She never watches television but listens to the radio and reads the paper. She talked about caring for one person--always.

“There isn’t much love in marriage these days, is there?” she asked distantly. “There’s so much divorce. Isn’t it sad how so many people never find their one true love? And always, always it ends in heartbreak, you’ll see.”

Was she talking about her and Johnny? She wouldn’t say.

“I-I don’t want to be pestered any more,” she said. “There is no mystery in that place. I’d just as soon bulldoze it down and be done with it.”

Yet, at the place now called the “Old” Spanish Kitchen, the grill is ready to be fired, but customers will never know the magical recipes that died with Johnny Caretto.

“There’s no story here,” Pearl Caretto said.

But she smiled as she closed her window. “Maybe someday I’ll write a book.”