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Los Angeles Times
15-05-2025
- Los Angeles Times
At the world-famous Madonna Inn, let them eat pink cake
The signage is pink, the rooms are pink, and the rose-patterned carpet is pink. But none are as quintessentially pink — or recognizable — as the long, hand-peeled ribbons of custom-dyed white chocolate atop the pink Champagne cake at the Madonna Inn. The Central Coast's quirkiest landmark is famous for its 110 candy-colored guest rooms themed to the likes of cavemen, carousels and pioneer America, but this maze-like, kaleidoscopic lair of chroma and whimsy is also home to some of the most iconic food on the Central Coast. Husband-and-wife team Alex and Phyllis Madonna opened their white wooden hotel with only a dozen rooms on Christmas Eve in 1958. Through the years more rooms would debut, along with additional wings to meet the demand. In 1960 they began construction on the main structure, which now houses a steakhouse, a copper-and-wood-accented cafe, a bakery, a cocktail bar, a wine cellar, a food-focused gift shop and a dance floor, in addition to private-events spaces adorned with gold, stained glass and, of course, plenty of pink. 'Our inn may not suit everyone's taste, but from the number of pleased guests we've had from practically every country in the world ... we feel that we have contributed to the joy of traveling,' the late Alex Madonna once wrote to The Times. At the Madonna Inn nearly everything is made on-site, and what isn't is often sourced from nearby specialists. San Luis Obispo's long-running Cattaneo Bros. makes the linguica sausage that's served as an appetizer at Alex Madonna's Gold Rush Steak House and a filling for the Copper Cafe's omelet. Some of the fish is caught from the nearby coast. Castoro Cellars' local San Miguel facility makes the hotel's house-brand wines. At the Silver Bar guests swivel on pink-and-wood stools to sip vacation-perfect cocktails such as the signature Pink Cloud, which comes topped with whipped cream and the motel's ubiquitous house-dyed pink sugar. Monstrously thick wedges of cake make their way from the bakery to nearly every table at every restaurant, while whole cakes rest in bright pink cardboard boxes, lids only half-closed at an angle and taped to the sides — a testament to the size of these famous baked goods. And no cake is as famous here as the pink Champagne cake. It's a bit of a misnomer; there's no pink Champagne in the cake at all. Bakery manager Margie Peau says it was served during the hotel's 'Champagne hour' and the name stuck. Since its inception roughly 50 years ago, the recipe remains nearly identical and closely guarded. Layers of springy, fluffy white cake are surrounded by a butter-yellow Bavarian cream and whipped cream, all frosted and coated in shards and ribbons of custom-dyed pink chocolate and a dusting of confectioner's sugar, a textural, creamy delight. Last year musician Kacey Musgraves swooned over 'the layers and ruffles of [her] favorite pink Champagne cake' in her song 'Dinner With Friends.' Dozens of copycat recipes are spread around TikTok, Instagram, personal blogs and publications such as America's Test Kitchen. Everyone wants a taste, with some guests driving hours for the treat. 'I think it's just so unique,' Peau says. 'We have a lot of people who came as children, and now they come back as adults and they're just kind of in awe of it. Nothing has changed; it's like going back in time. They're getting the same cake that they got when they were little kids, and now they're bringing their grandkids and they're getting the same cake.' They come in all shapes, sizes and colors: full sheet cakes, half-size cakes, round cakes and wedding cakes, single layers, double layers and more. Peau once weighed a 12-inch German chocolate cake, which rang in at 25 pounds. Eleven people comprise the bakery team, and they make hundreds of cakes throughout the week for slices — 80 on weekdays, 100 on weekends. They churn out as many as 65 cake orders each day for weekend pickup, plus additional cakes for events held on-site. 'We always have an extra stash of cakes that we can sell whole when people are like, 'Oh shoot, I forgot to reserve my cake for my kid's birthday' or something like that,' Peau says. (But to be safe, place your whole-cake order online at least 48 hours in advance, or three weeks out during the summertime peak.) The work begins at 4 a.m. when the first shift arrives at the pint-size bakery, with most working around a small center table. 'It's tiny!' Peau says. 'It was for a couple people; it was definitely not for this volume back then. We are always in each other's space for sure, but we like each other a lot back there.' During the holidays the bakery can feel even more cramped as it cranks out seasonal additions, such as 1,600 mini cupcakes and muffins for Easter and Mother's Day brunch and hundreds of additional pies for Thanksgiving and Christmas. The bakery team whips up nine flavors of pie, plus danishes, eclairs, giant cinnamon rolls, cream puffs and cupcakes, all of which gleam from their wood-and-glass cases at a corner of the Copper Cafe. Once they sell out for the day, they're done. Its tandem restaurant, the Copper Cafe, is where locals often stop by for breakfast: copious corned beef hashes, cheesy linguica omelets, fruit-topped Belgian waffles and other Americana set to the clatter and clang of a busy diner. This one just happens to have a roaring fireplace at one end. Just beyond the bakery and the Copper Cafe is the inn's culinary crown jewel: the ornate Alex Madonna's Gold Rush Steak House, a red-pink-gold dreamscape of a restaurant decorated with a 28-foot-tall golden faux tree at the center of its dining room, cherubs, candlestick lights and seasonal decor hanging from its sprawling branches. Beto Zamacona started as a dishwasher at the Madonna Inn when he was barely 18 years old. After 25 years, he's now the head chef at the steakhouse. According to Zamacona, the inn's popularity exploded over the last five years. Pre-pandemic busy nights were Friday to Sunday; now, he says, they're busy Thursday to Monday, and sometimes serve 300 guests at the steakhouse alone. Fifteen years ago, he cooked for only 35 to 50 guests on weeknights. 'It's getting insane,' he says. Reservations often book up weeks in advance, especially for weekend dining; it's not uncommon to spot guests feasting on the steak dinners with gold-jacketed baked potatoes at the nearby bar or cafe, which serve as overflow seating. Zamacona grills hand-cut steaks Santa Maria-style over a red-oak live fire, from behind stained-glass rose window panels. Given its proximity to the Central Valley, the restaurant's vegetables are almost always locally grown. He and his team cook rib-eyes, swordfish steaks, prime rib dinners, lamb chops, fried chicken, generous shrimp cocktails and more — most of which have been served there for decades — plus monthly specials that Zamacona creates under the guidance of the head chef of the entire property, Jacqui Burns. The steakhouse also caters events, and Zamacona says he's cooked up to 850 filets of steak for a single party. At Christmas and Thanksgiving, the steakhouse serves at least 1,400 people each day. There's attention to detail and kitsch in everything here. Decorating the dining room each season takes two to three weeks: bunnies and multicolored paper Easter eggs in spring, pastel pumpkins and cartoonish scarecrows in fall, Santas and twinkling lights and faux-snowy trees toward the end of the year. 'There's something magical when you walk in there,' says server Jamie Jorgensen. 'You look around and you're just like, 'Wow, who thought of this?'' She began working at the steakhouse in 2013, where she met and fell in love with Zamacona. They married four years later, and still work in the restaurant together. Jorgensen regularly serves a mix of locals and tourists, including repeat customers she recognizes from years past. Some come to dinner in dress that's themed to their rooms, others in midcentury glamour. One couple, she says, travels from Oregon twice a year, dining in the steakhouse every night of their weeklong visits. Like her husband, Jorgensen didn't foresee working at the steakhouse for so long — but she certainly hoped she would. It is, she says, unlike anywhere else. 'It's really difficult to walk in there and be in a bad mood,' she says. 'I always tell people you have to stop at least one time and check it off your bucket list.… If you want to see some people dolled up on a weekend, come on over to Madonna because we have the glitter and the sparkle and the rhinestone.'
New York Times
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Broadway's Debacles Live On at Joe Allen's ‘Flop Wall'
Good morning. It's Monday. Today we'll look at a wall of posters in a Manhattan restaurant that spotlights failed Broadway shows. We'll also get details on a state senator who wants to take away Tesla's right to operate five dealerships in New York. There's a place where Broadway flops live on: a wall at the restaurant Joe Allen in the theater district that is lined with posters of duds and disasters. 'Everyone remembers the hits,' Joe Allen's website says, 'but we revel in the flops.' My colleague Sarah Bahr, who revels in both, writes about what it takes to make the flop wall: Donald Margulies, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of the 2000 drama 'Dinner With Friends,' has a spot on the wall. But it's not that play that earned him that place. It's a show almost no one has heard of, a comedy called 'What's Wrong With This Picture?' that starred Faith Prince. It opened on Broadway on Dec. 8, 1994, and ran for just 12 performances. A poster for that production is one of the more than 50 posters for little-known Broadway shows featured on what is known as the 'flop wall,' the brick wall opposite the bar at Joe Allen. Among them are 'Doctor Zhivago,' which ran for 23 performances a decade ago, and 'Moose Murders,' which closed the same night it opened in 1983. 'Sometimes having a life in the theater is electrifying, and sometimes it is electrocuting,' Margulies said after a rehearsal for his latest play, 'Lunar Eclipse,' which is set to begin performances Off Broadway next month. The first poster at Joe Allen went up in 1965, a few months after the restaurant opened. It was for the musical 'Kelly,' about a daredevil busboy who claimed to have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and survived. The cast gave it to the restaurant's eponymous owner. They asked him to hang it as a joke, said the restaurant's longtime manager, Mary Hattman. Since Allen's death in 2021 at age 87, she has been in charge of deciding on new additions. The rule was once that a production had to have cost at least $500,000 and run for less than a week, Mr. Allen told The New York Times in 2011. Nowadays, Hattman said, there are no formal criteria. It's often a matter of how public the flop was, she said. For instance, the 2004 production of 'Dracula, the Musical' starring Tom Hewitt ran for 157 performances — the only show on the wall to reach triple digits — but was notorious. Ben Brantley, then the chief theater critic for The Times, called it 'bad and boring.' Margulies is not the only writer of some renown to make an appearance: Stephen Sondheim is represented by 'Merrily We Roll Along,' a 1981 musical that deconstructs the unraveling of a three-way friendship. Though it initially ran for just 16 performances, it has become a much-loved show in the decades since. A 2023 revival that starred Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez and Daniel Radcliffe won four Tony Awards. The most recent poster added was for 'Face Value,' a 1993 comedy by David Henry Hwang. Hwang asked that it be put up last year when 'Yellow Face,' his semi-autobiographical play about staging 'Face Value,' ran on Broadway. It's unusual for a show to be added retroactively, Hattman said, though it does happen on occasion, as with the 1957 musical comedy 'Copper and Brass,' whose monthlong run came and went before the restaurant opened. Most of the flops on the wall are from the 1970s and '80s, when a shift in tastes away from musicals, rising production costs and economic instability spelled curtains for many shows. Now, with greater awareness of the financial risks and a focus on spectacle and adaptations, shows that actually make it to Broadway almost never close before opening night. The last to do so, excluding productions affected by the pandemic, was 'Bobbi Boland' in 2003, about a former beauty pageant queen. It has been nearly a decade since a contemporary show was added. There has been no shortage of candidates, among them the campy 'Diana, the Musical,' Andrew Lloyd Webber's baffling 'Bad Cinderella' and Elton John's over-the-top 'Tammy Faye.' But the restaurant does not add posters on its own, Hattman said; all requests originate with the cast, the writers or the producers of a flop. Allen told The Times in 2011 that he was glad to function as an unofficial documentarian for an industry in which it's easier to make a killing than a living. 'Sometimes there's a bit of anger in the beginning when you put the poster up,' he said then. 'But it becomes some kind of badge of heroism over time.' Expect sunny skies with a high in the mid-70s. In the evening, it will be mostly clear with a low of 55 degrees. In effect until May 26 (Memorial Day). The latest New York news New York considers a move to shut down Tesla dealerships Elon Musk's alliance with President Trump has prompted Democratic lawmakers in Albany to propose taking away Tesla's power to sell its cars directly to consumers. State Senator Patricia Fahy, a Democrat whose district includes Albany, is one of several state lawmakers pushing to revoke a legislative waiver that has allowed Tesla to operate five dealerships in New York rather than sell through dealer franchises, as other carmakers do. Fahy, who once supported Tesla's right to open its own dealerships in the state, says the company no longer deserves favorable treatment and wants it to forfeit the five licenses. Musk, who is Tesla's chief executive and has led the Department of Government Efficiency in Washington, is 'part of an administration that is killing all the grant funding for electric vehicle infrastructure, killing wind energy, killing anything that might address climate change,' Fahy said. 'Why should we give them a monopoly?' My colleague Benjamin Oreskes says that Fahy has become so disenchanted with Tesla since Musk started DOGE that she has taken part in demonstrations about a planned Tesla dealership in Colonie, N.Y., an Albany suburb. Tesla did not respond to requests for comment. Musk, in a social media post that he later deleted, criticized New York's efforts against Tesla, writing that it was 'improper for lawmakers to target a single person or company.' (Last week, as Tesla announced that its profits had dropped 71 percent, he said that he planned to start spending less time in Washington.) Lost and found Dear Diary: I recently went to the Lost and Found at Grand Central, a musty office tucked in a subterranean corner of the terminal. I explained to the man there that I was looking for my bright orange AirPods case, which I had left on a train about a month before. He disappeared and then returned with a bin of at least 100 AirPods cases, each one carefully bagged and tagged. We looked through them together, one by one. A young woman appeared at the counter. She said she was looking for her purse. Another employee disappeared into the back. 'I've been here four times since Tuesday to see if it's shown up,' the woman told me, an air of desperation in her voice. She ticked off some of the important things in the purse: her wallet, a favorite lipstick, a deodorant she loved. I told her about my missing AirPods case. We stood there looking forlorn together. The employee helping her emerged from the back. He was holding a purse. Her face lit up. 'Oh my god!' she said. 'I can't believe it!' She threw her arms around me, and we hugged. By then, the man helping me had gotten to the bottom of the bin of AirPods cases. Mine wasn't there. 'I'm sorry you didn't get your case back,' the young woman said. 'Well, I'm really glad they found your purse,' I replied. 'Thanks!' she said, running off to a train. 'If it's any consolation, they didn't find my gloves.' — Jennifer Bleyer Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Natasha Cornelissen and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@ Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
