Tempest Brews Over Tearoom’s Closure

It was a cultural institution, a luxurious dining room where one could find the real little old lady of Pasadena on any given afternoon.

It was a place locked in a time warp of brass chandeliers, white table linens and good manners. A place where tea and an occasional cocktail were served while fashion models strutted on the catwalk that ran through the center of the room.

It was a place, in short, where one went to be seen.

But on Saturday, the old Bullock’s Tearoom--in what is now Macy’s--brewed its last cup, quietly packed away its china and put up its green and pink paneled screens for good. It is one of the latest Pasadena institutions, following such establishments as Maldonado’s and the Chronicle, to bow to modern competitors.

And its absence is more than missed, it’s annoying.

“Now there’s no place to eat around here,” said Audrey Henderson, 70, a Pasadena resident who had stopped by the tearoom for lunch Thursday.

“The tearoom is closed?” asked a disappointed Lorene Ozsvath, 69, who has been coming to the restaurant since 1956 and was counting on the chicken Marsala for lunch. “My girlfriends and I love to come here.”

As Ozsvath spoke, a small crowd of women would-be diners began to form at the tearoom’s door in the juniors sportswear section of Macy’s. Many of them came in pairs, hoping to catch up on conversation over the restaurant’s traditional American cuisine.

Willi Gross, 76, said she drove from Temple City to meet seven friends. “We have an 80-year-old lady with us, now where are we going to go?” she asked.

Gross, who had been a regular at the tearoom since it opened in the late 1940s, said that in a town filled with restaurants, the ambience and elegance of the department store’s cafe was unmatched. Elsa Aguirre, 45, agreed and told Gross, “It was one of the reasons I came to shop here.”

Gross and Aguirre were not alone, but they weren’t enough, said Henry Yamada of Yamada Enterprises, which took over the tearoom two years ago when Bullock’s merged with Macy’s. The Garden restaurant, which Yamada Enterprises runs in Macy’s Westwood store, will stay open.

“We hated to give it up,” Yamada said of the Pasadena establishment. “But it had seen its better days.”

Indeed it had, said Gross, mourning what she believes was the last vestige of class in the South Lake district. “Now the elevator lights [in Macy’s] don’t even work.”

Although perturbed, Gross said she understood the restaurant’s closure.

“It was . . . just filled every day,” she said, peeking past the paneled screens to take a last look at the peach walls and green carpet of yesteryear. “Toward the end it wasn’t as filled anymore because all the little old ladies were dying off.”

Some regulars, warned ahead of time, were spared lunch-hour disappointment and inconvenience.

“I was just about to write our monthly newsletter when our waitress Donna called to say they were closing,” said Marie Koenig, 78, president of the Pasadena Republican Women Federated, which used the uncrowded dining room as a meeting hall on the fourth Monday of each month for the last six years. “I just feel terrible about it. I’ve been living in Pasadena for 40 years and any time we go there, we eat upstairs. They have my favorite, Bombay Gin.”

A spokeswoman for Macy’s West said the company hopes to lure another restaurant to the spot, but it is unclear whether the replacement would be quite as tony.

“I think the tearoom had become much more expensive to run than the revenue it could produce,” said Pasadena City Councilman William E. Thomson Jr., adding that he hopes its replacement will “maintain the sophisticated nature of the avenue.”

In recent years, upscale stores such as Gary Lund clothing have been replaced by large national retailers such as the Good Guys, Blockbuster and Ross Dress-for-Less.

A Robinsons department store in the city gave way to Target. And many in the city are holding their breaths to see if a less-than-classy establishment replaces the tearoom.

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Macy’s has plans to turn its large parking lot on the corner of Del Mar and South Lake avenues into a multiplex theater, Gelson’s store and series of small stores, officials said. But as of yet, no one knows what will replace the tearoom.

“I hope it is something of equal elegance to this place,” said Ozsvath. “It was a place you would bring an out-of-town guest.”

The food was good, especially the “popovers,” but one of the major draws was the restaurant’s lunchtime fashion shows, said Margo Salsbury, 53, who enjoyed taking her daughter to the tearoom while she was growing up.

“They had petites, and we liked it because we’re short,” Salsbury said. “I appreciate the fact that they had mature ladies” model clothing. By the end, the tearoom’s modeling staff had dwindled to one. Linda Riemers, “a tad over 50,” spent 30 years on the floor. And when she twirled her last St. John black evening skirt Saturday, she said she went numb.

“It was like I’d lost a good friend. During my time I’d become very close to the customers. Over the years we were like a family,” she said. “The closure is monumental in this community.”