The Lido Buffet Tea Room – a 165-seat cafeteria-style lunchroom – was located at the northwest corner of the top floor of Robinson's department store in Fashion Island, Newport Beach from the 1960s into the 1980s. Its good food, amazing views, and association with time spent with my mom are why I remember it. Combining the tools of history with fuzzy nostalgia, the following tale of the Lido Buffet is just one small example from the golden age of department store restaurants.
The Lido Buffet Tea Room opened along with the store, which in turn opened along with the rest of the Fashion Island shopping center in September 1967. It was Robinson's second Orange County store, following the one that opened at Anaheim Plaza in 1963.
Robinson’s was the largest of the fifty-six stores in The Irvine Company’s posh new Fashion Island shopping center, and was 225,000 square feet on three floors. The store was designed by William Pereira, who'd also provided the architectural designs for the nearby University of California, Irvine and the master plan for the entire Irvine Ranch. The store’s façade featured an eighty-foot wall of enormous bronze bells by artist Tom Van Sant, which were declared “the world’s largest windchimes.” (Rumor has it that the facade was inspired by the Shangri La temple set in Frank Capra's 1937 movie, "Lost Horizon.")
Pereira’s design would be used for a number of Robinson’s stores in that era, as the retail chain looked to separate itself from the pack. Architect Bruce Allen Kopytek of the Department Store Museum blog writes that Robinson's "trio of late 1960s stores located in Santa Barbara, Newport Beach, and San Diego took innovation" of department store architecture to a new level, "wholly rejecting the 'department-store-as-box' concept, and housing Robinson’s in a highly sculptural composition of cantilevered masses, interspersed with tile-roofed colonnades and a bell-tower and carillon as a focal point."
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| Illustration of the soon-to-open Fashion Island Robinson's, from an ad in Orange County Illustrated magazine, Sept. 1967 |
Jeff Qualey, who worked at the Aramis counter in Robinson’s men’s fragrance department throughout the 1980s, remembers, “It was a great place to work. It was a good store. It was top tier, like Neiman Marcus, with outstanding merchandise and employees. They treated their employees well. Patti Farmer was feisty but an excellent store manager.”
Other employees viewed it differently, including eminent Orange County writer Jim Washburn, who worked there one summer as a janitor and "learned that if there's anything worse than working for the rich, it was working for the people who work for the rich. Boy, did the Robinson's sales staff put on airs."
Another former employee, commenting at the Department Store Museum blog, claimed, “I think I still have welts where [Patti Farmer] used to hit me, or at least lung cancer from having been forced to sit directly across from her in meetings while she blew … cigarette smoke in my face.”
But whatever happened behind the scenes, the customer experience remained pleasant.
Most of the department stores in Fashion Island had a restaurant of some kind in the early years. Buffums had the Franciscan Room, Neiman-Marcus had the Zodiac Room, and even Penney’s (later replaced by Atrium Court) had a coffee shop. (This was back before people thought “coffee shop” meant something like Starbucks.)
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| Windows of the former Lido Buffet visible on top floor in this Sept. 2024 photo. |
Growing up in Orange County in the 1970s and ’80s, my family lived less than a nine-mile drive from four major malls, of which Fashion Island was the schmanciest. (Their slogan around 1982 was “Fashion Island: A Class Distinction.”) We went to all four malls occasionally, depending on what we were shopping for. And when a trip to Fashion Island overlapped lunchtime, we’d inevitably eat at Robinson's. It was good and, despite store’s high-end reputation, affordable.
A 1981 ad in the Los Angeles Times succinctly described the Lido Buffet as offering "Cafeteria style dining overlooking Newport Center and the ocean. Selections include sandwiches, soups and salads." The menu was large and was very similar to the menus of tea rooms in other Robinson’s stores.
The Lido was home to charity events, special brunches, seasonal staff breakfasts, holiday events for children, backgammon classes, and regular fashion shows. But I remember none of that.
"The restaurant was just beyond the women's department and had young women modeling clothing while you ate your lunch," remembered my mother, Susan Jepsen.
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| Robinson's logo from 1967. The chain begain as the Boston Dry Goods Store, opened in Los Angeles by Joseph Winchester Robinson in 1883. It was later renamed the J. W. Robinson Co. |
The models would stop at each table and say something like, “I’m wearing [name and brand of dress] and you can buy this in the _____ department on the second floor.”
"You and I had lunch at Robinson’s many times when you were very young,” said my mom, “and you had no idea what those women were doing, drifting around the dining room. When they came by our table, you'd tell them what was good to order for lunch. At first, I was embarrassed, but everyone seemed to enjoy it.
“You were much more interested in the view of the ocean out the windows and watching the sailboats cruise through the harbor. I told you, 'When you're older, you'll want to come here just to see the models.’ You asked why, and I said, ‘Oh, you'll find out someday.’”
So I don’t remember the models. But I do have some other hazy memories of the restaurant. First of all, it did indeed have a remarkable panoramic view of Newport Beach, Newport Harbor, the Pacific, and Catalina Island. (I confirmed this recently by sneaking into what used to be the Lido.) Unlike the sit-down restaurants in some Robinson’s stores and in other store chains, this one was run cafeteria-style. But the overall high-end vibe remained.
You entered the Lido Buffet through a long hallway. Then you’d take a tray from a stack of clean trays (often still damp and warm from the dishwasher), hang a right, and then walk across the room to a cafeteria-style counter. On one side was an array of small pre-made salads, desserts, and sides. The uniformed staff took your entrée order separately. Then you’d walk along the counter with your tray, adding items along the way. And at the end of the counter, the cashier would ring you up. While this happened, your entrée would emerge from the kitchen and was added to your tray. You’d then take your tray out to the dining room and find a place to sit.
The dining area was in two sections – the main dining room with its ocean view, and a second smaller area with a smaller bank of windows that looked out onto the mall.
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| Windows of the smaller dining area are visible in the distance on the upper left in this 1967 illustration of Fashion Island. |
While one wall of the main dining room showcased the Pacific, another wall was adorned with a huge, vibrant blue and green, bas-relief map of the ranchos of Orange County. This was just one of the many large pieces of art with which Robinson’s decorated the store. Although I remember the colors, the map meant nothing to me at the time. I’d dearly love to look on it again with the eyes of an Orange County historian.
I believe the restaurant also had a decorative partition that somewhat hid the “busboys’” workstation from the rest of the dining room. Rolling their carts back and forth from that station was a team of seemingly very elderly (by kid standards) Asian men in matching uniforms and bow ties. They went about their tasks swiftly and with an air of earnestness.
I also remember the food. Of course, as a kid, I had a little different perspective on that. I went through a phase where hot dogs were my favorite thing, and the Lido (which we just called “Robinson’s lunchroom”) had hot dogs on the children’s menu. Better still, the hot dog came with potato chips of an exotic brand (either Laura Scudder’s or Granny Goose, I think) which my family never had at home. Fine dining, indeed!
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| A page from the Panorama City Robinson's lunch room menu, with essentially the same items available as in the Lido Buffet. (Courtesy Denise McKinney) |
A few years later, I came to appreciate something else at the Lido. (No, not the models yet. I was still a kid!) I fell for their Tostada Salad – with a giant fried flour shell, ground beef, lettuce, tomato, cheese, and zesty dressing. It was great, and it was my first exposure to this staple of 1970s cuisine. I still seek a comparable version today.
It’s said the concept of the tostada salad began with the “Ta-cup” -- a tiny version using Fritos as a base -- which was served at Disneyland’s Casa de Fritos starting in the 1960s. The idea spread, was upscaled by replacing the handful of Fritos with a big fried flour tortilla bowl and became widely popular in the 1970s. The Ta-cup also spawned the “taco salad” – which added Catalina or French dressing and substituted of Doritos (which were also invented at Casa de Fritos) and kidney beans in place of the Fritos and refried beans.
I’ve been told by several people that the Lido also had remarkable egg salad sandwiches. In fact, I have yet to find anyone who disliked the food at Robinson’s.
“The employees called it the ‘Lido Barf-ay,” said Qualey. “We were being cheeky, but we loved it. It was a beautiful space and a great restaurant. A lot of employees ate lunch there. In the store’s early years, I think the employees had to eat in a separate lounge adjacent to the dining room, but that rule was gone by the time I arrived around 1981.”
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| Another page from the Panorama City Robinson's lunch room menu. (Courtesy Denise McKinney) |
As good as it was, and although it kept customers in the store longer, Robinson’s did little to promote the Lido Buffet. For many customers, stumbling across it for the first time was a happy surprise. I never remember seeing the place crowded. And with relatively low prices, the restaurant likely wasn’t generating a lot of income for Robinson’s. None of this put the Lido in a good position when sweeping changes came to the store.
Robinson’s parent company, Associated Dry Goods, was taken over by The May Co. in 1986, and in 1993 the Fashion Island Robinson’s joined the rest of the chain in becoming Robinsons-May. By the time the name officially changed, most of the features unique to Robinson’s had already been removed.
“Quality went down when the May Company came in,” said Qualey. “They lost a lot of the top vendors, like Armani and St. John Knits, and a lot of the customers went away as a result. All the artwork, including the bas relief rancho map, was also removed from the store and sold.”
The Lido Buffet was still open in November 1986, but seems to have closed not long after that -- Just about the time I would have started becoming too nervous to talk to those models. The restaurant area was soon walled off and for a short time that space was used as a storage area for store fixtures.
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| The "room with a view" (part of the former Lido Buffet dining room), Sept. 2024. |
But the beautiful view from the windows of the former Lido Buffet eventually convinced store management to turn a large part of the main dining room into a multi-purpose meeting room known simply as "the room with a view." The store used it for staff meetings but also leased it out in the 1990s and early 2000s. And at some point, the rest of the restaurant space was carved into offices for management and hiring.
Federated Department Stores bought May Department Stores in 2005, and the following year the old Robinson’s became a Macy’s. Naturally, even more changes were made to the store and today one must be a bit of an urban archaeologist to find elements of the building’s interior – like a bit of the original floor tile – that hearken back to Robinson’s.
As of 2024, the “room with a view” and Macy’s local corporate offices remain in the old restaurant space, hidden from public view. With most malls failing and the whole brick-and-mortar department store model on its last legs, it’s doubtful we’ll see the likes of the Lido Buffet again.
[Thanks to Jeff Qualey, Alan Hess, Susan Jepsen, Stephanie George, Denise McKinney and Nancy Leckness for their help with this article.]
