The Original Pantry Is Coming Back Nov. 19, Coleslaw and All

Hope the Mission is reviving the 1924 diner at Ninth and Figueroa with returning union workers, and its profits will fund homeless services.

The new operators of the Original Pantry Cafe tore out the old floor, put down the same kind of floor and painted the walls the colors they already were.

That's the plan for the 1924 diner at Ninth and Figueroa in downtown L.A., which reopens Nov. 19 under Hope the Mission, a nonprofit that will send the Pantry's net profit to its homeless shelters and meal programs, the Daily Trojan reported Friday. The Pantry has been closed since March 2025, and the Los Angeles Times also reported Friday that it's coming back this month. Put Nov. 19 on the calendar. It's the rare comeback where the pitch is that nothing new happened.

Well, almost nothing. The work mostly went into new kitchen equipment and HVAC, the Daily Trojan reported, while founder and CEO Ken Craft said the old pictures went back up on the walls. Anybody who ate there before, he said, will walk into the same look and the same feel.

A little caution comes with the date. The Pantry shut on March 2, 2025, amid a labor dispute while the property was being sold, and since then it has missed a Dec. 31 reopening, then an April 1 date, then a promise of "in May," according to the diner's Wikipedia history. This time the staff is hired, the chef has a menu and the donors' names are already on the wall.

The staff is the part that's hard to fake. The Pantry agreed to hire from Unite Here Local 11, the hospitality workers' union, and 14 of the roughly 50 people hired worked there before it closed, the Daily Trojan reported; the union told the Los Angeles Times that 13 of the 21 staffers at the time of the closing will return. "Some of the people that are coming back have worked here 50 years," general manager Kenneth Small told the Daily Trojan.

Nobody has eaten from the new kitchen yet, so the case for going is the menu's promise. Executive chef Daniel Hur kept the coleslaw, the potatoes and the breakfast standbys close to how they were, and looked for spots to add texture and acidity. His worry, he told the Daily Trojan, was "how do we maintain the integrity of what the pantry was, but at the same time, not try to kind of rehash the past." My order is the one a century of regulars would make: pancakes, the potatoes on the side and the coleslaw that comes with everything.

The money behind the sameness came from neighbors, not the nonprofit's budget, Craft said. Donors gave between $5,000 and $350,000, and their names are on plaques hanging in the dining room. The profit flows back to an operation the Daily Trojan says runs 35 shelters with 3,300 beds and serves 10,000 meals a day. "We don't give up on people and we don't give up on things," Craft said.

The things include the Pantry's oldest legend. By its own telling, the diner never shut its doors, even in 1950, when a freeway off-ramp forced a move to Figueroa: lunch went out at the old address, dinner at the new one, same day. The pandemic ended its round-the-clock hours, and Craft said the goal is to work back toward 24/7 once the place is established.

He's also cooking up some new lore. On USC vs. UCLA game days, Craft wants students in school gear to pile in and see whose side can eat more pancakes. As he told the Daily Trojan, "the winning school, we're going to hang their jersey in the corner for the next 365 days."

Source: dailytrojan.com, retrieved November 6, 2026. Other sources: Wikipedia.