Oldest Los Angeles restaurant to close after 117 years

LOS ANGELES – The oldest restaurant in Los Angeles is set to close in the latest blow to the historic dining scene in the City of Angels.

Cole’s French Dip will close on Aug. 3 after 117 years of operation that included prohibition, two world wars and the rise of Hollywood.

The news was first reported by DTLA Weekly and confirmed by USA TODAY in a July 7 visit.

Owner Cedd Moses cited ongoing impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2023 writers and actors strikes as well as rising labor and rent costs in a statement provided to The Los Angeles Times.

“The litany of reasons for closing are not unique to Cole’s alone; they are affecting most independent restaurants in Los Angeles,” Moses said in the statement.

USA TODAY reached out to Pouring With Heart, the parent company of Cole’s which operates other restaurants in California, Colorado and Texas, and did not receive an immediate response.

The restaurant follows in the recent closure of The Original Pantry, which closed in March after 101 years, and the demolition of the Pacific Dining Car the same month.

“By the time the Olympics get here, all these mom and pops will be gone,” Moses said in the statement. “Hopefully it’s a wake up call for the right people to step up and figure out a plan.”

Restaurant intertwined with Los Angeles history

Cole’s was opened by Harry Cole in 1908 in the Pacific Electric Building, once the terminus of the city’s once ubiquitous Red Car trolley line.

“Located near the financial center of the city, the place became a haunt for bankers, attorneys, newspaper types and politicians – as well as more respectable folks,” Steve Harvey of the Los Angeles Times wrote of the restaurant’s early days in 2009.

It closed in 2007 before being purchased by Moses’s 213 Nightlife, which would become Pouring With Heart, in 2008.

The company completed a $1.6 million restoration which focused on keeping the historic environment.

“Too bad Mickey Cohen isn’t around anymore,” Harvey wrote. “One can imagine the mobster admiring the handiwork of the bartenders with their ice picks.”

The Varnish, a speakeasy built in a former storage room, opened in 2009 and would redefine the Los Angeles nightlife scene. The bar, once a haunt of the dean of Los Angeles food writing Jonathan Gold, closed in 2024.

Cole’s claim of French dip invention challenged

It is one of two restaurants in Los Angeles that claims to be the originator of the French dip sandwich. The other, Phillipe the Original, is less than two miles from Cole’s.

Cole’s claims that in 1908, the chef dipped a sandwich in aus-jus to soften it for a customer who had bad gums.

Phillepe’s claims that in 1918, Philippe Mathieu dropped a French roll into a roasting pan filled with juices. The officer took the sandwich and returned the next day with friends to order more.

However, Phillepe’s has offered different versions of its claim, with co-owner Mark Massengill saying on a 2014 episode of “Cheap Eats” that the sandwich was born when in 1917, when Mathieu dropped the roll while making a sandwich for a firefighter.

In 1951, Mathieu told the Los Angeles Times that the police officer story now offered by the restaurant is one half of the tale.

“One day a police officer asked me if I would mind splitting one of these large loaves of French bread and filling it with ‘some of the delicious roast pork,'” Mathieu said.

The dip part came later.

“One day a customer saw some gravy in the bottom of a large pan of roast meat. He asked me if I would mind dipping one side of the French roll in that gravy. I did, and right away five or six others wanted the same,” Mathieu told the Times.

The debate over who invented the French dip – and who makes the better sandwich – has been a long-running part of Los Angeles food culture.

A March 2016 Thrillist deep dive into the origins of the sandwich point toward Mathieu’s 1951 retelling being the likeliest origin story.