Astro Family Restaurant
Built in 1959, Conrad’s Family Restaurant in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles was designed by the renowned architectural firm of Louis Armet and Eldon Davis. In 1974, Conrad’s was taken over by Peter Metsos and renamed Astro Family Restaurant. According the architectural historian Alan Hess, the prolific firm of Armet and Davis “established Coffee Shop Modern as a major popular modern style.” Although Armet and Davis’ Los Angeles coffee shops such as Norms La Cienega, Pann’s and Mel’s are iconic today, they were widely criticized by contemporaries. Astro Family Restaurant is a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument. In the LAHCM application it states that it is “an excellent example of a Googie coffee shop building with distinctive features of the style of which only a handful of intact examples remain.”
Los Angeles, Los Angeles County
Photographer: John Bare