A little nip and tuck for those saggy seats

Something was wrong.

The booths seemed to have more spring. The upholstery had the stand-up scratchiness that distinguishes new mohair from an old railroad car seat. You could read the sports scores by the bright light coming from sparkling, etched-glass lampshades. The silverware matched the bud vase. Worse, there was a fresh rose in it.

I wandered around a bit. The bar was missing its old high stools! Instead there were these cozy-confessional curtained booths and a shiny clean bar top.

There was nothing threadbare. No sense of wear. No saggy depressions in the seats.

By the time I asked, deep down I already knew: The 83-year-old Pacific Dining Car has had a face-lift.

It wasn’t easy. The venerable downtown steakhouse is a 24-hour workaholic that hasn’t closed. Ever.

But over the past year, room by room, procedure by procedure, stealthy crews worked the graveyard shift and the between-meal downtimes. They laid in tartan carpeting, striped window coverings, tasseled plaid valances and the plush, cut-velvet armchairs. Customers stepped around the crews and watched the work, just like they did in 1984, the last time the downtown dowager was remodeled.

“You could say that every surface that the customer sees and feels -- except the original wood in the original room -- every surface was re-covered,” says Wes Idol III, the company president and fourth generation of the family owners.

In Hollywood they call that an extreme makeover, and this one is shocking, but not for its stealth.

They dared to change an icon. Though it’s been “freshened,” “had a little work” or whatever euphemism you choose, the strange fact remains: You can still recognize the place!

It’s still the Dining Car, though they’ve ripped up the red rugs and rearranged the wing chairs. They spent $2 million to mess with success. And you know what they got?

An icon that doesn’t make you cringe at its attempt to be hip, cool, young, trendy, perfect and, the impossible -- ageless.

You wish that when Hollywood icons get the itch to update, they’d just rip up the carpeting too. Instead, they head to oblivion, to the surgeon.

Now beauty queens like Melanie Griffith, Beverly Johnson, Farrah Fawcett, Mary Tyler Moore, Tina Louise and Meg Ryan look more like their drag queen imitators.

The men -- Burt Reynolds, Mickey Rourke, Michael Jackson and Michael Douglas -- look so tight, you fear for their stitches when they sneeze.

Even Cher isn’t Cher anymore: She’s her own caricature. Change too much of a symbol’s symbolism and you get an original whose look-alike looks more like the original. Authenticity vanishes.

Meanwhile, the Dining Car’s new, old-fashioned Victorian-era elegance is like a nice new suit on a proper English gentleman, not hip-huggers on a senior citizen.

It’s even kind of ironic that the granddaddy of steakhouses is hipper than ever, exactly because it’s still an old-fashioned steakhouse where the lawyers, judges, cops, hipsters, freaks and proper gentlemen converge for a meal.

All around town, new palaces of beef are trying to evoke the retro, Rat Pack patina that has naturally accumulated there after more than 30,300 straight days of lighting the mesquite fires.

It looks old.

And for once in L.A., old is the new new.

Valli Herman can be reached at valli.herman@latimes.com.