The classic LA restaurant where people can't stop staring at table 31 - SFGATE

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If you do, be warned: People will be gawking at you while you devour the restaurant’s signature prime rib. But then again, if you sit there, you might be inspired to create the next revolution in family entertainment. After all, it happened to Walt Disney in that very spot.

One of the oldest restaurants in Los Angeles, the Tam O’Shanter has been serving Scottish and English pub fare on Los Feliz Boulevard since 1922. Just a year later, in October 1923, Roy and Walt Disney leased their first office for “The Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio” in the same Los Feliz neighborhood; what’s now Walt Disney Studios remained close by in Silver Lake until 1940, when the company relocated to its current headquarters in Burbank.

Scotch rarebit at the Tam O'Shanter.

Julie Tremaine

In the early days, back when the fledgling studio was sketching out a cartoon mouse and releasing an animated short about him sailing down a river — “Steamboat Willie” was released in 1928 — operations were lean. The small company didn’t have its own cafeteria. Most days, Disney and his animators would end up at the Tam O’Shanter for lunch. They ate there so frequently in the late 1920s and early 1930s that they called the restaurant “the Disney Studios commissary.”

Today, a plaque on their regular table reads, “This was a favorite spot of Walt Disney and his Imagineers.” Disney had famously simple tastes in food and would usually order burgers. But the restaurant, opened by brothers-in-law Lawrence Frank, founder of Lawry’s restaurants, and Walter Van de Kamp, founder of Van de Kamps Holland-Dutch Bakeries, is famous for its prime rib. The Scottish steakhouse is a neighborhood restaurant for me, too: When I go, I can’t resist the spicy Scotch rarebit cheese dip, made with Scottish ale and served with grilled bread, or the toad in the hole, which is filet and vegetables in Guinness gravy, served on top of a savory Dutch baby pastry. The Tam O’Shanter also has over 200 different bottles of whisky, especially, of course, Scotch.

The table has been memorialized with a plaque and Disney artwork.

Julie Tremaine

At table 31, there are also time-worn doodles in the wood: a stegosaurus and a Tyrannosaurus rex standing in front of a volcano. They look like they might have been early concepts for the Primeval World section of the Disneyland Railroad — and very well could have been.

Legend has it Disney animators and Imagineers sketched dinosaurs into table 31, like this Tyrannosaurus rex.

Julie Tremaine

Above the table is an original piece of artwork from Walt Disney Imagineering, given to the restaurant in 2022 to celebrate its 100th anniversary. It features Mickey Mouse in a traditional Scottish getup, complete with bagpipes and kilt, standing in front of a wall of images including Sleeping Beauty castle, defunct Disneyland attractions, iconic park scenes, and a photo of Walt Disney with Lawrence Frank and architect and set designer Harry Oliver, who designed the restaurant.

The interior of the restaurant looks like a Scottish storybook cottage.

Julie Tremaine

The original photograph hangs in the restaurant’s lobby, along with an original sketch of Disney characters in Scottish regalia drawn by Imagineer John Hench and signed to Frank by “Walt Disney and staff, 1958.”

In addition to table 31 — which has a cocktail named after it, made with rye and jasmine — Disney enjoyed the patio, which he once requested be covered over so he could enjoy it all year long. “A lot of that early Disney animation work was done on cocktail napkins sitting around on the patio," Lawry’s President Tiffany Stith told the Los Angeles Conservancy.

An original illustration by Disney illustrator and Imagineer John Hench, gifted to the Tam in 1958.

Julie Tremaine

Even from the outside, it’s clear that the restaurant has at least a little something to do with Disney. If you didn’t know better, you might guess that the restaurant was inspired by “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” but really, it’s the other way around.

Walt Disney was known to be a fan of the “storybook” architectural style popular in Los Angeles in the 1920s, which Harry Oliver employed in his design of the restaurant. Disney enjoyed it so much that he built his own home in the hills of Los Feliz in the same style. That house, built in 1932, looks as much like a fairytale cottage as the Tam does, and it shares many architectural details, like soaring turrets, exposed dark-wood beams and a white plaster exterior. When it first opened, the restaurant even had a thatched roof, just like the cottage in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” which premiered in 1937 and was released widely in 1938.

Walt Disney's storybook-inspired home in Los Angeles.

Julie Tremaine

In 1921, Ben Sherman designed the Snow White Cottages in the storybook style, which are still standing near the former Hyperion Avenue location of Walt Disney Studios. Many of the first animators for the studio, including Claude Coats, lived in them. It’s hard to imagine that those animators weren’t thinking of their fairytale-inspired homes — and of the place they’d be heading for lunch that day — when they were working on “Snow White,” Disney's first feature-length film. It came from a storybook, and if legends are to be believed, it was drawn inside a storybook-inspired restaurant, too.

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The classic LA restaurant where people can't stop staring at table 31 - SFGATE

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