By Chloe Coventry

*The Long Wait is a letter series celebrating our favorite gathering places, in support of raising proceeds for the 86Fund.*

Created by Fyrn in San Francisco.

Photo by Alex Clarke, Always Exploring

February 23, 2021

In a pre-pandemic world one of the first things a parent of a newborn might have looked forward to, in terms of returning to their pre-child life-style, would be going back out to eat. Wearing or pushing a sleeping newborn to an outdoor café and enjoying a cocktail with an equally exhausted co-parent is one of life’s little heroic pleasures: wresting a vestige of one’s old life from the iron fists of new parenthood. However, when you have more than one child and one of them is an accident-prone biohazard (aka a toddler) and the other one is a newborn, the number of restaurants to enjoy that Friday night cocktail diminishes greatly. If you have a dog you want to bring along, the number shrinks still.

So it’s been with a low-grade but enduring melancholy that my partner and two young sons and I have witnessed the long-term pandemic closure (minus take-out) of our favorite restaurant, The Luggage Room pizzeria in Pasadena’s old town.  Not a bastion of culinary invention, The Luggage Room nonetheless served fare that always made us feel like we were having a bit of a special occasion. The pizza’s lovely charred, chewy, sour-ish crust, straight out of the woodfired oven, topped with farmers market produce, or avocados and lemon zest, or house-made sausage, as well as silky deviled eggs served with Pete’s hot sauce, and maybe a 1903 ale from the local Craftsman Brewing Company left us all, toddler included, aglow and fulfilled. Good food for those of us whose foodie spirits had been euthanized by the underdeveloped palettes of our offspring.

But what we miss the most about our favorite restaurant is what everyone now misses the most about eating out; namely, the occasion of it, the conversation, the aesthetic – the overall ambiance. This our favorite restaurant had – has – in spades. The Luggage Room’s adjacent sister restaurant Le Grande Orange inhabits Pasadena’s 1930s-era Santa Fe train station, period details intact. That station’s luggage room was turned into the pizzeria, and both abut a working metro station. A transit stop might not seem like an inviting place to dine, but with kids any distraction is a good thing. Across the open park from The Luggage Room looms an elaborate hundred-year-old Mediterranean-revival apartment building called Castle Green (it’s rumored that Tim Burton had a pied-a-terre there). I’d often daydream about living in one of Castle Green’s turret apartments while my children sat in awed silence watching the electric trains slide in and out of view from across the courtyard.

Of course The Luggage Room wasn’t perfect, it was a little bougie maybe, a little pricey. Those things certainly don’t matter to us now, as we long for a return to our salubrious evenings there. I remember one particular night several autumns back, as we sat at an outside table, candles just being lit, with the setting sun leaving the sky awash in lavender and orange. The cackling parrots feasting in the park’s old fruit trees and the bustle of the restaurant’s Friday night lulled the newborn to sleep while the toddler happily colored. My partner and I reveled in an Old-Fashioned or two, and in the knowledge that there would be no dishes or regular bedtime routine that night. We viewed, through the glimmer and glow of a night out, who we used to be and who we would once again become. We were afloat for one moment in a bubble of pleasure and satiation, our desire for connection fed, and with a blooming sense of gratitude for our surroundings and full bellies, for our partnership and healthy children, for our great good fortune.

Chloe Coventry

Chloe Coventry is a musician and (lapsed) academic living with her family in the foothills outside Los Angeles.

The Luggage Room is open for business in Pasadena, CA.

If this letter stirred memories of an experience you've had at The Luggage Room, share it with us in the comments.

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