The Sunset Strip is dying.
I’ve never habituated the place, though I’ve often driven down it in the daytime on the way to somewhere else. I haven’t done it in a while. Probably a lot less business for the “Sunset pigs” that Joni Mitchell sung about in her song California.
Back in the 1990s, my ex- (formerly Twitter) wife and I hit a couple of the “Taste of LA” festivals, held on some fairground or other near the beach. The early ones charged an entrance fee that was bearable, and then you could go around to any or all of the booths set up by the participating restaurants and sample their cuisine free of charge. The idea was to get people interested enough in the restaurants to attract more customers. We lived in the Inland Empire, but did come down to LA for the theater scene, and good restaurants were always on our radar. So Taste of LA was initially a really great event for us – I specifically recall being wowed by Spago, and subsequently dining there more than once (it isn’t on the Strip anymore). But the event seemed to lose steam, as I recall. The entry fee never went away, but the ever diminishing number of restaurants participating started charging for their samples. I think we stopped going after the third year. I can only imagine that it didn’t have the ROI they thought it might. Now I can see how the shift in the economy that the strip eateries and bars serviced could be so devastating.