No more Cinecon Anti-Banquets: Taix Restaurant in Echo Park closes

[Richard M Roberts]

Very sad news for Los Angeles and Glendale Diners as the legendary french restaurant Taix's in Echo Park closes on March 29th. This of course was the location of the Cinecon Anti-Banquets that Phil Carli and I hosted for a number of years. It was a simply wonderful restaurant that had been in business since 1927 and had been at it's current location since 1962, serving top-flight French cuisine at a still-affordable price and did so without any pomposity or pretension, all diners were welcomed with kindness and top-notch service, and returning diners were treated like family.

The food was simply some of the best one could have in California, and the restaurant itself was a wonderful combination of class and genuine old-world comfort, and the place was huge, I continued to find more interesting banquet and private rooms in the place each time I went, and of course the one with the beautiful mural on the back wall that we held the anti-banquet at was a wonderful place to eat, drink, and talk vintage movies.

Taix's was so wonderfully accommodating that one year on a Sunday night, our anti-banquet was having so much fun and conviviality that we had only managed to wrap up sometime after the midnight hour, and it wasn't until we were leaving that we realized that the restaurant had actually closed at 9:00 pm. Yet no one had said anything to us, and our waiter had continued to look after and serve us, and when we found out and felt terrible about it assured us it was fine, we were so much enjoying ourselves he didn't want to impose. Rest assured we tipped him well.

Here is a pretty good article about the closing and the restaurant itself:

https://la.eater.com/restaurant-closing ... rk-closing

The restaurant building is being levelled so they can build another large office/luxury apartment building we can really do without, and though there is a promise that a smaller, scaled-down version of Taix will probably return within that complex, you know it will not be the same, and another clinging bit of an earlier era worth living in has been made way for this era which is not. Fuck progress, fuck greed, fuck the two-legged animal who never understands what it loses until it has lost it.

RICHARD M ROBERTS