Not Just for Tourists : For Regulars and the Glitterati, Farmers Market Displays a Different Attitude

It’s an old-fashioned broken-in kind of comfort that makes the Farmers Market a great L. A. hangout. It offers the relaxed outdoor ambience that comes from 57 years of mellowing, enough time to work the rough edges off both the furniture and the customers.

The kind of place “you can come to with your scary morning hair,” says one habitue, Bon Appetit executive editor Barbara Fairchild. “You can just do it.”

Though the Market officially begins business weekdays at 9 (10 on Sundays), the gates open an hour or so earlier for the breakfast crowd. By 8:15, dozens of patrons who make this a morning ritual are scattered around open-air tables.

Those who do the Market range from L. A.’s glitterati to neighborhood pensioners. “Somehow they all fit together here,” says Pam Bauman, who works at Thee’s Pie Shop, “while they wouldn’t anywhere else.”

The Market didn’t get its start as an eclectic hangout. It opened during the Depression as a place where farmers would pay 50 cents for a space to park their trucks and sell produce. It’s evolved into an institution with more than 100 stores and two dozen restaurants. It shares with Olvera Street the distinction of being the grandfather of all L. A. shopping malls.

It’s even become a bit trendy to hang out there. Not that the Market would aspire to trendiness; it more or less had it thrust upon it when Charles Myers opened the Kokomo Cafe in 1988. He hired a young staff--self-described as “surly though sexy”--and served “modern food,” modern meaning items like a charbroiled marinated Japanese eggplant sandwich.

“It’s modern,” jokes manager Amy Haberland, “as opposed to day-old.”

In a stroke, the opening of Kokomo changed the diets of what one regular calls the “highly caffeinated though unemployed” screenwriters who would gather in the nearby cappuccino bar. Suddenly, they went from sipping coffee all day to eating huevos rancheros for breakfast and coming back for grilled fish at lunch.

Kokomo has developed a clientele that includes the musicians, artists and agents who couldn’t afford Morton’s, the actors who have that kind of agent and the occasional star--Sofia Coppola, Nicolas Cage, Jennifer Grey, Cheryl Tiegs have all been patrons. The clientele is a radical departure from what had been the core of the Market’s dining business--tourists arriving on buses each afternoon.

There are those regulars whose daily regimen has never been touched by Kokomo’s. For the early Jewish residents, the Market had been one anchor on an axis that ran down Fairfax Avenue from Canter’s Delicatessen.

Midge and Bill Goodman of Park La Brea have been coming to the Market for 25 years, long enough to have a table they consider their own and the rare honor of having their names--not a number--called when their food is ready at Charlie’s.

“It’s more like Europe here,” Midge says. “You sit. You watch some interesting characters.”

Some of the Market’s more colorful characters hang out in the east patio. Again it’s an older crowd, but here you might find people for whom the Market is a stop on the way to the racetrack.

Decades ago the management tried to put a damper on this particular bit of socializing. Earl B. Gilmore (the late owner who holds an unassailable record for hanging out at the Market--he was born, lived and died in 1964 on the grounds) prohibited the sale of the Racing Form to discourage gambling. He also thought it looked bad for shopkeepers to handicap horses while customers waited for service. It’s a ban that continues to this day.

Nearby on the east patio a number of Hollywood directors can often be spotted. Paul Mazursky holds court here. He’s usually the one with eight people at his table--and usually the one doing all the talking. Not 30 feet away, near the flower shop, is where Brian DePalma regularly sits for lunch.

Everyone who comes here has spotted celebrities, though who gets noticed usually divides along age lines. Ask someone young and they’ll tell you they saw John Malkovich, Mickey Rourke or Jodie Foster (who once said in an interview that she wished people would think of her as an average person “who goes to the Farmers Market with her dog”).

Ask someone older and you will learn they once spotted Doris Day, Robert Taylor or Mickey Rooney. One screenwriter swears he was only impressed once. “There was just something about seeing Max von Sydow wandering around the Farmers Market,” he says.

It’s a point of gospel that most of the regulars limit their visits to the quiet time before 10 a.m. and after 4 p.m. Between those hours the market receives a torrent of camera-wielding tourists.

After the tourists go back to their buses, some regulars end the day with a drink at 326, the name and stall number of the Market’s only bar. Again, the restraining hand of Earl B. Gilmore.

The best time to visit is about 5 p.m. The Market closes at 6:30 (later in the summer) and the bar stays open for an hour more. It’s then that shopkeepers mingle with busboys, locals and stray tourists.