After many, many, many years — since 1967 (not a misprint) — the Fred Harvey House at Union Station is opening its doors once more to the public as a place to eat and drink. The old restaurant space has been preserved and refurbished, and is now home to the Imperial Western Beer Company and The Streamliner.
The Imperial Western, named after the legendary Southern Pacific train of the 1930s, is a gastropub featuring an on-site brewery and games like pool, shuffleboard and checkers. The menu has po’boy sandwiches, fish tacos, ribs and more. The Streamliner, named for the original “bullet trains,” is a cocktail lounge adjacent to main restaurant where those of legal age can indulge in an adult beverage (responsibly, of course).
The Imperial Western is located on the Alameda Street side (west) of the station and will be open from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. Sunday through Wednesday, 4 p.m. to midnight Thursdays and 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. There are plans to eventually open at noon daily. You can check their Facebook page here for updates on their hours.
If you’d like to see what was on the menu when Harvey House was still in existence, check out this post. And for those of you who’d like to see what the space looked like before Imperial Western moved in, check out this post here for more photos.
Union Station is accessible via Metro Bus, Metro Rail, Metrolink, Amtrak and multiple municipal bus lines. Use the Trip Planner for routes and connections.
Categories: Go Metro
Small correction: the restaurant is on the *south* side of the station, albeit at the western end of the south patio. West of the station is a parking lot.
For the sake of the record the term “Streamliner” as in the train “The Streamliner City of Los Angeles” was a trade name of the Union Pacific Railroad, not the Southern Pacific Co. It was trademarked first by the former Chicago & North Western Ry. (later to become Union Pacific) and used on deluxe trains from Chicago to Omaha, NB. where they would continued onward to either: Los Angeles, St. Louis, Portland-Seattle and Ogden UT. Only “The Streamliner City of San Francisco” continued westward from Ogden, UT, over the tracks of the Southern Pacific Co. This was the only portion of Streamliner Route of which the SP took part. The Southern Pacific Co. had it own deLuxe train between Los Angeles and Chicago, in association with the Rock Island Line. It was called: The “Golden State Limited.” Indeed, it is wonderful to have the ol’ Fred Harvey House back again in a new guise as the Imperial Western Beer Co. “gastropub”. However, the Fred Harvey Restaurant was an operation of yet the third railroad that called at LA Union Station–the Santa Fe Railway. The restaurant is still decorated in the Navajo-style as interpreted by the world renown designer Mary Colter who was employed by the Santa Fe Railway to design hotels and restaurants along it own 2200+ mile route to Chicago. Great as the Streamliners were, the best train, with the best service from Los Angeles to Chicago was in fact the “Santa Fe Super Chief”–called the “Train of the Stars”–because old Hollywood prefered it. See everyone at the “Harvey House” at 4PM this afternoon! Toot! Toot!