Say goodbye to Broadway

Here's how most customer/waiter exchanges have gone since the day the Broadway Deli opened:

Customer: I'm ready to order.

Waiter: I'll get that right after my audition.

When the Broadway Deli opened in Santa Monica 20 years ago, it was an immediate hit. Huge room, coffee cups you could swim in, louder than loud, New York feel, upscale and baby-friendly (during weekend brunch, the back wall was a Peg Perego stroller parking lot).

You'd run into people you knew in real life as well as people you knew from television, movies and sports. The waitstaff was made up of actors on the prowl for anyone who could help them launch their careers, the same as at many restaurants but more so here because of the location and clientele. If your waiter had, say, Dustin Hoffman in your section the same time you were there, you could forget about seeing him or her until Dusty paid his check and left the building, hopefully with their headshot and resume in hand.

The layout of the Deli was completely conducive to lousy service. A single long row of booths ran from the front to the back of the restaurant, as did a single long counter with the exposed kitchen behind it. Instead of losing two counter seats and a booth in the middle to make access to the tables and chairs in the main dining room easy, to put in your order and serve it waiters had to go all the way around the restaurant.

Still, the experience was fun. The booths were big, and it was a great place to meet someone for lunch or dinner then go for a stroll on the Third St. Promenade after.

I'm talking about the Deli in the past tense because it looks like that's what it's going to be soon. The landlord wants to raise their rent from $55,000 a month to $100,000 a month. But of course, that's just the cover story. What they really want is to subdivide the space and have a new restaurant facing the promenade and a retail store in the other space facing Broadway. And collect two rents instead of one.

The Deli's lease is up in May, then they're on month-to-month for 90 days after that. But it looks like they're going to be forced - and that's just what it is - to close. It's a tough economy to pay almost double that kind of rent.

When it does close, it'll take a lot of memories with it.

Hank Azaria telling my wife and I how cute our newborn son was. Mike Tyson in the last booth giving me the evil tattooed eye as I walked past him. Walking in with Brooke "man is she tall" Sheilds. Catching John Mahoney on the way out to tell him how much I admired his work, not on Frasier but in Barton Fink. My wife and I trying to figure out who the old man was, then realizing it was John Cleese. Having lunch with our friends Josh and Angela when Elliott Gould was seated with a woman at the table behind us. I said, "Who's the woman with Elliott Gould?" Josh said, "The woman? Who the hell's Elliott Gould?" just loud enough for him to hear and shoot us an extremely nasty look. The day I was meeting someone for lunch, looking particularly writerly with my black-framed glasses and composition notebook in my hand, and an agent from William Morris gave me his card and said to call him. Exchanging smiles with, yes, Dustin Hoffman as he was going in and I was leaving. Taking my son to dinner there on his first birthday for a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Telling the waitress my wife was pregnant with our second child before we'd told any family members (although as often as I ate there, I considered the waiters family). Sitting at the table next to Harold Ramis and his wife while our kids and theirs played together. Not to mention the countless meals and meetings, both personal and business I've had there over the years.

If I told you there was this really loud, expensive restaurant with pretty good food and really bad service, I'm sure you wouldn't be in a hurry to eat there.

But there is. And you should. Because if you've never been to the Deli, in a hurry is how you'll have to go to experience it before it's gone.