Pacific Dining Car

From the outside, it's the antithesis of flash: Score a point for Pacific Dining Car.

Seen from Wilshire Boulevard, this place, which opened in 1990, has always seemed so forbidding: a concrete bunker with no way to peer inside. I admit I passed it by for years for that very reason. Step up to the entrance, though, and there is a bit of ornament: opaque windows framed in metal to suggest a railroad car. At the original downtown, which opened in 1921, and where the booths are favorites with politicos and stockbrokers, the interior replicates a railroad dining car, but here it's just an exterior suggestion.