The Velvet Turtle Sign

Once a popular chain of fine dining restaurants, all that remains of the Velvet Turtle today is a single sign in Downtown Los Angeles.

The Velvet Turtle: A Sign of the Times

Once upon a time, starting around 1965, the Velvet Turtle was a beloved fine dining destination famous for its cold cucumber soup and beef wellington. In its heyday, it had 21 locations spread across California in Los Angeles, Fresno, Torrance, Redondo Beach, Menlo Park, and more.

The owner, Wally Botello, sold the chain in the early 1970s when he moved to Palm Desert (where he opened Wally’s Desert Turtle — dude liked turtles, apparently).

The Velvet Turtle’s Demise

After Botello sold, the chain was owned by the Saga Corporation, which was purchased by the Marriott Corporation in 1986. Marriott wasted no time selling the whole Velvet Turtle chain to a private equity firm who then did what private equity firms do best — they ran it into the ground in just a few years. Its demise, however, was blamed on the increasing popularity of casual dining that started in the 1990s.

The Downtown location of the Velvet Turtle closed up in the early 1990s, but the building it once occupied wasn’t torn down until March 2014. What was once a popular dining destination at the corner of Ord and Hill is now a vacant lot, wrapped in dark green shadecloth and overgrown with weeds.

The Velvet Turtle is for the Birds

In 2016 the corner was slated to be the home of a new seven-story mixed-use high-rise with apartments, ground-floor retail, and underground parking developed by Avant Development, but that all seems to have stalled. So who knows when this vacant lot might be developed into something the community needs.

But until then, it’s a good place to feed pigeons, though, if you’re into that sort of thing.

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Velvet Turtle Sign

• Corner of Hill St & Ord St, Chinatown
• GPS Coordinates: 34.060694, -118.240450 [ Google Maps ]
• what3words: ///asserts.debit.novel

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