It has to be one of the few restaurants still used for motion pictures, weddings and fundraisers even though it stopped serving food four decades ago. But, then, few have settings like the Fred Harvey Restaurant at L.A.'s Union Station.
It's a wondrous time capsule from the mid-20th century, with a three-story-high ceiling, black, red and brown floor tiles in the pattern of a Navajo rug, high-backed lunch booths and an Art Deco bar with bubble glass.
Until recently, though, the Fred Harvey was one of Los Angeles' most forgotten landmarks.
Opened in 1939, it closed in 1967 and was largely inactive until a few years ago when the train station's new owners, the ProLogis company, hired Hollywood Locations to rent it out for private events at $5,000 a day.
"That's where Steve Buscemi was thrown over the rail," said Locations manager Jeff Cooper, referring to a scene that was shot on the second floor for the 2005 movie "The Island." "You should have seen the dummy they used for him. It was so realistic you'd ask it for an autograph."
Several political candidates, including Barack Obama, have speechified there.
"He stood right in front of the long bar and talked to everyone for an hour," Cooper said.
Business is good, but it can be hectic.
"I had one woman who was calling five or six times a week about the arrangements for her wedding," Cooper said. "One day she called and said, 'Jeff, you've got to let me come over. The napkin guy is here.' I said, 'You have a napkin guy?' "
These days, the Fred Harvey is a restaurant in name only. Meals are catered, and the kitchen, with its green tile walls, is devoid of ovens.
The cost of bringing the building's ventilation system and other features up to code has been deemed prohibitively expensive by the current owners.
But at least it avoided the wrecking ball and visitors can see the interior on Los Angeles Conservancy's tours.
Meanwhile, the upscale Traxx restaurant in the station's main concourse, north of the Harvey, is open to the public.
There was a time when restaurants and railroads were not compatible, points out author Lesley Poling-Kempes.
In the 1860s and 1870s, greasy spoons sprouted up at rail stops in the West and offered gut-wrenching fare.
"Eggs were shipped 'fresh' from back East, preserved in lime," she wrote in her book, "Harvey Girls: The Women Who Opened the West." Other delicacies might have included "a chicken stew of prairie dogs," chops as tough as "whipcord," biscuits made with "plenty of alkali" and coffee that "was fresh once a week."
