Pershing Square Restaurant from “Friends with Benefits”

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Though most of my stalking adventures consist of copious amounts of time spent tracking down locations from movies and television shows and then heading out to see those sites in person, it does happen on occasion that a locale I have previously visited pops up unexpectedly in a production.  When this occurs, it thrills me to no end.  Such was the case with Pershing Square, a brasserie situated just outside of Grand Central Station in New York.  My family and I had dined at the glass-fronted eatery numerous times throughout the years during our many trips to the Big Apple.  In fact, we grabbed coffee there upon first meeting our friend Owen, of the When Write Is Wrong blog, in person back in 2009.  So when the restaurant was featured in a scene in 2011’s Friends with Benefits, I was floored.  While I had failed to take many photos of the place during our past meals there, I amended that during my recent trip to New York with the Grim Cheaper.

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Pershing Square restaurant is situated on 42nd Street underneath the Park Avenue Viaduct, an elevated roadway which was constructed from 1917 to 1919 in order to provide an express thoroughfare for automobiles traveling on Park Avenue.  The Beaux Arts-style span stretches from 40th to 46th Streets and the area beneath where it crosses over 42nd is known as Pershing Square.  The name came about due to a failed city plan to build a public plaza in honor of World War I General John J. Pershing on an adjacent plot of land located at the southwest corner of 42nd and Park.  The project went awry, though, and in 1920 the property was sold to a developer who constructed an office building on the site.  Despite the change in plans, the area continued to be known as Pershing Square.

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The space that now houses Pershing Square restaurant, which is tucked into one of the viaduct’s three French-inspired archways, was originally an open air expanse utilized as a barn for trolleys.  In 1939, as part of that year’s World’s Fair, the area was enclosed with a wall of bronze and glass and transformed into a tourist information center, which would remain in place for many years.

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By 1989, when the Grand Central Partnership started making plans for an $8-million renovation of the viaduct, the tourist center site was vacant.  As part of the revamp, the GCP set out to demolish the space and turn it into a restaurant.  The project took several years to come to fruition, but Pershing Square finally opened to the public in the fall of 1999.

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The eatery, which evokes hints of both London and Paris with its stylized crimson décor, was established by restaurateur Michael “Buzzy” O’Keefe, of The Water Club and The River Café fame.

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Pershing Square won The Municipal Art Society of New York’s Preservation Award the same year it opened.

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The brasserie, which has the feel of a glamorous train car from yesteryear and also boasts a fabulous bakery/espresso bar, quickly became one of my family’s favorite NYC dining spots.  Though a bit pricey, the food is fabulous and the ambiance charming, and we find ourselves returning there time and time again.

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In Friends with Benefits, Pershing Square is where (spoiler alert!) Dylan (Justin Timberlake) takes Jamie (Mila Kunis) for their first official date after professing his love to her via a massive flash mob in Grand Central Station set to Semisonic’s (not Third Eye Blind’s) 1998 hit “Closing Time.”

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In the scene, Dylan and Jamie sit in the very front of the eatery.

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In reality, though, there is no seating in that area of Pershing Square.

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As you can see above and below, that section of the restaurant serves as a sort of waiting area.

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During New York’s warmer months, Pershing Square operates an outdoor café situated on its west side.  That café was featured in a battle scene in the 2012 film The Avengers.

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The front of Pershing Square was also shown briefly in the scene.

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For more stalking fun, follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Los Angeles magazine and Discover Los Angeles.

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Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: Pershing Square, from Friends with Benefits, is located at 90 East 42nd Street in New York’s Midtown East neighborhood.  You can visit the eatery’s official website here.

The Daily Grill at LAX from “Friends With Benefits”

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While watching Friends With Benefits this past July, I just about fell out of my theatre seat when I realized that one of the flick’s more pivotal scenes had been filmed at the Daily Grill restaurant inside of the Tom Bradley International Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport – an eatery that I am very familiar with.  As I have mentioned previously on this blog, my best friend, Robin, lives in Switzerland and comes to visit me just about once a year.  He always flies in and out of LAX and every time we take him to the airport for his return flight, we grab one final cocktail together at the Daily Grill.  The eatery long ago came to be known as “the sad restaurant” in my family’s lexicon, as, knowing that the hour to say good-bye is near, we are all invariably in tears by the time the check arrives.  Flash forward to this past November when, as I mentioned three weeks ago in my post about The Grill on Main in La Quinta, Robin’s mom, Doina, who is my mom’s best friend, flew out to America to surprise my mom on her 60th birthday.  At the end of her eight-day visit, we made our regular pilgrimage to the Daily Grill (that is me and Doina pictured above), which I was extremely excited about as it meant that I could finally blog about the place.

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The Daily Grill at LAX, which opened its doors in January 1997, is actually the largest full-service airport restaurant in the entire United States (it measures 8,300 square feet!!!) and features a full bar, a private dining room, and what are easily the best chicken strips I have ever eaten in my entire life!  In fact, on this particular visit, we ordered three servings of them (!!!!) as we could just not seem to get enough.  Best of all, unlike other airport eateries where a single slice of take-out pizza can cost upwards of $7, the Daily Grill is very reasonably priced.  (On a random side-note – while doing research for today’s post, I discovered that there are SEVEN Starbucks stores located inside of LAX!  SEVEN!  According to the Expect Delays travel blog, Starbucks outposts can be found inside of Terminals 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8!  Now, that’s my kind of place!  Winking smile)

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In Friends With Benefits, the Daily Grill appeared in the scene in which Dylan (aka Justin Timberlake) and his father, Mr. Harper (aka Richard Jenkins), grab a bite to eat – sans pants – shortly after Mr. Harper arrives at what is supposedly Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey.  It is actually pretty ironic that the Daily Grill masqueraded as an East Coast location in the flick, as Friends With Benefits poked quite a bit of fun at movies that try to pull one over on their audience by having locales in Los Angeles stand in for those in New York.

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In the scene, Dylan and Mr. Harper dine in the northeastern-most section of the restaurant in the area overlooking the ticketing counters.

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That area is pictured above.

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And I, of course, just had to pose for a pic in the spot where Dylan and Mr. Harper sat in the flick.  Smile

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Our super-nice waitress answered all of my silly little questions about the filming of Friends With Benefits and even informed us that the filmmakers had covered over one of the Daily Grill’s overhead lights during the shoot and had forgotten to uncover it afterwards.  As you can see above, it is still covered over today!  So incredibly cool!

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According to the Friends With Benefits production notes, the scene in which Jamie (aka Mila Kunis) hops on a baggage carousel and starts handing out luggage to various travelers was also shot at LAX, although I am unsure of exactly where.

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Our waitress also informed us that a scene from the 2005 flick Rumor Has It involving my girl Jen Aniston had been filmed on the escalators located just outside of the Daily Grill, which I could NOT have been more excited about.  Our waitress was working during the time the scene was filmed and said she watched Jen ride up and down those escalators for pretty much an entire day!  How incredibly cool is that?  I would have absolutely DIED!

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The escalators have been remodeled since the time Rumor Has It was filmed and no longer have palm trees planted in between them, but otherwise look much the same as they did onscreen.

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And I, of course, just had to pose for a pic in the spot where my girl stood in the movie.  Smile

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: The Daily Grill, from Friends With Benefits, is located at 380 World Way in Los Angeles, on the Mezzanine Level of the Tom Bradley International Terminal inside of the Los Angeles International Airport.  It is located outside of the security checkpoint, so you do not have to be traveling to dine there.  You can visit the restaurant’s official website here.

Our Rehearsal Dinner at POP Champagne & Dessert Bar

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As I’ve mentioned many times before on this blog, POP Champagne & Dessert Bar in Old Town Pasadena is my very favorite restaurant and, even though I wasn’t even engaged at the time, when I first walked through its front doors over a year and a half ago, I immediately knew it was the place where I wanted to hold the rehearsal dinner for my wedding.  The only problem was that the Grim Cheaper and I had long been planning on getting married in Malibu and having a rehearsal dinner at a restaurant located over fifty miles away from the wedding venue wasn’t exactly the most viable of options.  After the GC finally proposed, though, and we sat down to begin our wedding planning, my mom suggested that we hold the actual wedding rehearsal in the backyard of my parent’s Pasadena home, which is located just about two miles from POP, and an idea was born – our nuptials would be a two-city celebration!  Much to the GC’s chagrin, I had long before decided that all of our wedding guests would be invited to our rehearsal dinner.  Because weddings seem to go by in such a blur and because the vast majority of our guests were from out of town, I did not want the time spent with our closest loved ones to be limited to one short evening.  I was a little worried, though, that our family and friends might be upset over the fact that each night’s festivities would be held in a different city, which would entail everyone having to rent a car AND moving hotel rooms from one night to the other.  As it turned out, though, people absolutely LOVED the idea!  Because most of our family and friends were not from the area, many of them told me afterwards that they loved getting to experience two very different parts of Southern California over the course of our wedding weekend.  YAY!

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Holding the rehearsal in my parents’ backyard actually turned out to be very memorable for my family, because just two weeks after the wedding my mom and dad put their beloved house up for sale  – the same house they had lived in for the better part of a decade.  So, it was nice to make one last and very significant memory there before we had to say good-bye.  And yes, as you can see in the above photographs, during the rehearsal I did wear the Carrie Bradshaw veil that my best friend, Kylee, made for my Sex and the City-themed bachelorette party.

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Because fifty people would be attending, I did not want our rehearsal dinner to be a formal, sit-down event.  I wanted our friends and family to be able to mingle and get to know each other and a formal sit-down dinner would not have been very conducive to that.  So, we asked Kristin and Matt, the owners of POP Champagne Bar, if they could create a cocktail party-type atmosphere for us and they ended up pulling it off beautifully!  In fact, they couldn’t have facilitated it better had I given them a roadmap!  They wound up giving us the entire front portion of the restaurant and had several different groupings of tables and chairs set up for people if they wanted to sit down, while servers walked around with tray-passed food.  There was also a buffet table set up with wine and champagne and a sampling of the food so that guests could also help themselves.  The evening turned out perfect!  Not only did the GC and I get to walk around and talk to all of our closest friends, but most of our guests also spent the evening mingling and speaking with different groups of people, so, by the time the wedding rolled around, everyone had really gotten know each other, which was so incredibly cool!  And while I realize that it is a (large) added expense, if you can swing it, I honestly cannot more highly recommend inviting all of your guests to the rehearsal dinner.  Doing so made our special day that much more memorable.

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Not to mention the food was ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE – and almost unbelievably reasonably priced.  There are several different special events menu choices available at POP and we chose the most expensive one, which was only $12 per person!  Included in that price were seven different menu items of our choosing.  We ended up picking the deviled eggs with chive truffle, bacon onion, and blue cheese flavoring (my favorite), POPcorn chicken (pictured above to the right), chorizo and Anaheim chili meatballs, sliders with three different toppings including bacon-gorgonzola mayonnaise, Pasilla chili-chorizo, and goat cheese & date (the GC’s favorite), the flatbread pizza du jour, wild mushroom and goat cheese bruschetta, and olive, mushroom, and sun-dried tomato flavored tapenade crostini (pictured above to the left).  And there was no shortage of food!  Amazingly enough, after two and a half hours of being there, Matt informed us that we hadn’t even eaten fifty percent of the food we had paid for!  LOL  For dessert we picked the three-item menu at $6 per person which included chocolate-covered strawberries, a trio of homemade cookies, and the house-made churros served with three different dipping sauces – spiced warm chocolate, Dulce de leche, and creamy strawberry.  Because the bottles of wine and champagne offered at POP are all on the pricier side, Matt offered to special order some lower-priced options for our rehearsal dinner.  We told him the amount we wanted to spend per bottle and gave him free reign to choose the brands he thought best and he ended up picking out some spectacular options for us.  So not only was the party absolutely fabulous – all of our guests were raving about both the atmosphere and the food – but it was also completely affordable!  And while not yet a filming location (although it was almost chosen to be in the soon-to-be released No Strings Attached movie, which would have been just about the coolest thing ever!), POP has become something of a celebrity hangout as of late. Such stars as Mila Kunis, Denzel Washington, Marc Curry, and The Bachelor’s Jason Mesnick and Molly Malaney have all been spotted there and ’80s pop star Tiffany even threw herself a birthday party at the restaurant! Love it!

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: POP Champagne & Dessert Bar is located at 33 East Union Street in Old Town Pasadena.  You can visit the restaurant’s official website here.

The “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” Apartment Building

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A couple of weeks ago, fellow stalker Owen set out upon a mission to try to track down the Spanish-style apartment building where Peter Bretter (aka Jason Segal) lived in the 2008 romantic comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall.  He emailed a few screen captures of the building to me and to the rest of “the team” – aka Mike, from MovieShotsLA, and Chas, from ItsFilmedThere – and, while my first instinct was that the dwelling was located somewhere in Hollywood, most likely in the same neighborhood as Brenda Leigh Johnson’s duplex from The Closer, I just couldn’t seem to locate it.  Thankfully though, Owen also called upon master stalker Gary, curator of the Seeing Stars website, who ended up tracking the place down.  Thank you, Gary!  As it turns out my instincts were way off – the building was not located in Hollywood as I had originally thought, but a few miles northeast of it in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles.  So, last weekend, after what had amounted to a more-than-month-long hiatus due to my dad’s illness, I finally, finally resumed my stalking habit and dragged my fiancé out to Los Feliz to see the Forgetting Sarah Marshall apartment.  YAY!

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Because the vast majority of Forgetting Sarah Marshall was filmed on location at Oahu’s Turtle Bay Resort, Peter’s building is actually only featured in a few scenes in the movie, most notably the scene in which Peter’s step-brother Brian (aka Bill Hader) stops by the apartment after Peter’s landlord reports seeing smoke coming out of his unit.

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And I am very happy to report that Peter’s building looks almost EXACTLY the same in person as it did onscreen in the movie. 

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In fact, the only difference I noticed was the color of the front door, which was white in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but is now painted a light green.  The building is SUPER cute – and super colorful – in person and is located in an adorable little neighborhood.  I highly recommend stalking it!

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   On a side note – A few months ago, while my fiancé and I were trying to decide where to go for our upcoming honeymoon, I, of course, made mention of the Turtle Bay Resort, which, besides Forgetting Sarah Marshall, has also been featured in episodes of Murder, She Wrote and the reality series The Big Break and was used as the main location in the 2004 series North Shore, which starred Brenda Walsh herself, Shannen Doherty.  Sadly though, my fiancé immediately put the kibosh on that one as he had no desire to honeymoon in Oahu, which has the stigma of being known as Hawaii’s most crowded island.  All was not lost, though, as we ended up booking a week at my girl Jen Aniston’s favorite vacation spot – Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.  🙂  I SO wanted to stay at her favorite resort there – One&Only Palmilla, which also just so happens to be the the site of Spencer and Heidi’s November 2008 elopement – but unfortunately, rooms there START at $1,000 per night.  Yes, you read that right – the lowest priced room at One&Only Palmilla is $1,000 per night!  Not kidding!  Don’t worry, though, we will OF COURSE be stopping by there to grab a bite to eat at some point during the honeymoon.  Fellow stalker David asked me a few weeks ago if I would be stalking on my honeymoon.  And my answer to that question is OF COURSE!  I mean, don’t you know me at all by now?  😉

Big THANK YOU to Gary from Seeing Stars for finding this location!

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  🙂

Stalk It: The Forgetting Sarah Marshall apartment building is located at 1973 Palmerston Place in Los Feliz.