Engine Co. No. 28

Based on the website alone, Engine Co. No. 28 looked like my kind of restaurant. The restaurant is located in an original Los Angeles Fire Station built around 1913. While the building was renovated, it kept a lot of the original architecture and interior--the floor is paved with the original bricks and the fire station doors still stand. One is hard pressed to find a restaurant in an architectural gem like this in such a new city.

The restaurant is located in Downtown LA, not a place I frequent often, so I was happy to see that although it is near a lot of the sites and in the city, a large portion of it's menu was reasonably priced. I went with a date on a Saturday night before going to the theater. Like a multitude of other restaurants in the area, Engine Co. offers a free shuttle door to door from the restaurant to the Music Center and Staples. This is a really nice perk in the city where parking twice could end up being more than the cost of your dinner.

I made reservations a couple of days in advance and they sounded like they had plenty of room. When we arrived, we felt a little under-dressed at first in jeans and nice tops--but as we walked through the restaurant to our table, I noticed a mix of dress and lots of people were indeed wearing jeans, albeit nice jeans. This is a white tablecloth restaurant, so be sure to dress somewhat appropriately.

The restaurant has a large main room, a small bar area with several two-person tables separated from the main dining room by a six inch frosted glass window on top of the two-person booths, and an upstairs area. It turned out, the restaurant was completely booked that Saturday night and waiters were bustling around as was the valet when we arrived. While I thought this would be a romantic dinner, I was disappointed to be seated in one of the 2-seater booths near the bar. The table itself was fine (although a little low), but at the bar they had two large flat screen TVs playing that night's hot sports events - the baseball playoffs and the USC/Stanford game. Instead of the dinner being romantic and full of conversation, we found ourselves watching the TVs between topics. If you go to the Engine Co. with two and want something more romantic, request a table away from the bar.

Our waiter was very nice when he was at the table. He probably realized right off the bat that we would be his lowest paying customers of the night, and while that might have been true, I would have appreciated a little more receptiveness to our needs. Bread comes free with the meal. It was a little hard on the bottom, but the sourdough was tasty and there was plenty of butter to go around. The soda comes by the bottle without refills, but the iced tea has refills--I think they are free.

The food at Engine Co. is supposed to be made up of recipes from firehouses across the country. For this reason, I was looking forward to trying their chili. We had dinner a little earlier than we our used to, so I didn't need more than just the bowl of chili. For the price, the bowl of chili was a lot smaller than I expected. In the end though, it was plenty. I excepted a hot and firey chili with plenty of beans and peppers. Instead, I got well stewed meat that was incredibly tender in a thick sauce that mildly resembled chili. The flavor was like canned green chilies and there wasn't a hint of spice. I couldn't even eat the whole thing because there was so much meat and the flavor was a little too citrusy for my taste. The chili came with equally flavorless fried bread triangles. I tried stuffing the triangles with the chili and that helped a little but still didn't do the trick.

My date had a cheeseburger which came on sourdough toast. While I didn't taste the burger, it looked like it too could use a little something more. The burger came with a choice of fries, salad, or firehouse chips. Intrigued by the sound of firehouse chips, my date received what looked and tasted like slightly stale Lays potato chips with chili powder and no salt sprinkled on top.

We didn't order dessert because I was so full from all the meat, however, the menu looked delicious. I wish now that I would have been hungry enough to find some goodness food wise from the restaurant via dessert.

I imagine some of the other dishes at Engine Co. are delicious. The fried chicken looked nice, the onion rings looked delicious, and the restaurant had a nice warm feeling like a real firehouse kitchen might. It generally smelled delicious in there and I was disappointed that mine was not.
If someone else was paying and I could order anything I wanted, including dessert, I would go back to Engine Co. No. 28. Until then, I think I'll shy away from the white table-cloth clad restaurants and stick with something a little more my own pace.





Engine Co. No. 28
644 S. Figueroa Street
Los Angeles, CA 90017
Map