Here beside my keyboard as I write is a book of matches from Bar Chelou, the late — and actually really truly great — restaurant adjoining the courtyard of the Pasadena Playhouse on South El Molino Avenue.

It was the latest in at least a dozen eateries there in my almost 40 years of covering the city. (Perhaps it was a dozen more before that.) Except, not being Merrill Shindler, or Erica Wayne, I can only recall for sure from recent years a fascinating Basque iteration, Saso, which, while not as weird and world-class as Chelou, was too good to close down in a flash, just like every other joint that opens in the snakebit location.

And before that, sure, it was a Trejo’s Cantina, which was fine. And before that ...

But Chelou being an artful yet truly fun genius of a place and not being able to hang on in this post-fire restaurant world shows how bad it is out there. Even these matches are filled with art on their tiny cardboard spaces, photos of the Playhouse and its palm trees front and back, and inside in type so tiny I had to pull out a magnifying glass to read it, some kind of poem: “I have no choice but to consider it a phenomenon of interference. Not only does the mind display, in this state, a strange tendency to lose its bearings (as evidenced by the slips ...)”

And that’s all she wrote. But the steak tartare and a dry martini at the bar in the lush front room are no more, which is a crying shame. May it someday soon be something else wonderful to anchor the eats and drinks scene in the heart of the Playhouse Village, especially given the wonderful news this week that the Playhouse has bought back all of its real estate 55 years after a bankruptcy forced the sale of various parts of its campus to various developers, including the restaurant space.

What a brilliant move for Artistic Director Danny Feldman to be able to announce during this centenary year at the Playhouse’s current location, an Elmer Grey-designed rabbit warren of stages and seats and underground dressing rooms and offices towering above and a charming library and the black-box tiny theater to the side named by donor Carol Burnett for her late daughter Carrie Hamilton — all in a Spanish Colonial style.

Ownership of the property is the cherry on top of the sundae that was the Tony Awards in 2023 naming the Playhouse the regional theater of the year for the whole country.

The board members and major donors including Pamela and Brad King, Terri and Jerry Kohl, Bingo and Gino Roncelli and Jane Kaczmarek who made this happen — well, the community and the culture of Southern California can’t thank you enough.

And whenever yet another famous actor who died — the latest was Gene Hackman — is remembered as having gotten his start as a student at the old school of theater arts, it’s a reminder of what could be, even more. Which is why it’s extra-heartening to learn that Feldman has designs on amplifying his current education department to include “people of all ages roaming the campus, learning and participating in shows big and small. He wants to stage master classes, readings, experimental shows and salons,” as the L.A. Times reports.

In our second version of LitFest Pasadena, when we moved the books festival now styled LitFest in the Dena from Central Park to the Playhouse Village, Feldman’s predecessor Sheldon Epps was so generous in allowing us access to Playhouse spaces, including the library and the Hamilton and the courtyard, for our readings and events. It made us feel so part of something culturally larger, part of the continuum of art in the city, a reminder that with its Arroyo Culture of painters and musicians Pasadena was an important California place.

And this return to owning its own campus shows how important the Pasadena Playouse still can be as it moves into its second century.

Wednesday at random

Talking of second acts in American lives, the only good part in the news released Monday that Caltech President Thomas Rosenbaum will be stepping down in June 2026 is that the eminent physicist will stay on as a faculty member when he leaves the presidency. We like it when the scientists recruited to come here and lead the best small technical university in the world then move back into a campus lab — a la David Baltimore — to look deeper into their quantum mechanics and whatnot. We don’t like it when they decamp. Thanks for sticking with us, Tom!

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com