Every weekend in the early aughts, an elderly couple who wore matching pastel Ralph Lauren sweaters ate breakfast at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Fountain Coffee Room. Ruth Cortez always served them. “I admired the couple because they were just so cute, and they only ate waffles and bacon,” says Cortez. She knew their first names, but not their last. (Calling people “Miss This, Miss That—that would be so robotic.”) After dozens of breakfasts together, the couple told Cortez that she simply had to meet their dear friend. A few Sundays later, that friend showed up. At the restaurant’s entrance, “Nancy Reagan was standing with the Secret Service,” recalls Cortez. “She was a little bitty lady! I was so shocked.” Cortez only learned who the cute couple was when the husband, Armand Deutsch, gave her a copy of his memoir, Me and Bogie; it detailed his career as a movie producer, which led to friendships with Frank Sinatra and the Reagans. But to Cortez, he was just a very nice regular. “When I say ‘nice,’ it’s because you’re respectful towards everybody,” she explains, “not because you give me a $100 tip.”
The Fountain Coffee Room—usually just called the Coffee Shop—is tiny: Nineteen barstools are screwed to the ground around a curved soda fountain counter. Every customer faces the small kitchen space, where a chef and a server or two are packed in with a griddle, a stove, and a prep counter. Cortez, who’s 57, has been there since she was 26. When Dominick Dunne stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel while covering the O.J. Simpson trial, she served him breakfast. When the comedian Jon Lovitz lived at the hotel while shooting a movie, Cortez was there for his post-tennis-lesson snacks. When a CEO who shall remain nameless and his wife were in the midst of a nasty and expensive divorce, Cortez served the wife tuna fish sandwiches and listened to her complain.
“You tell Ruth everything,” says Jennifer Meyer, an L.A.-based jewelry designer who grew up going to the Fountain Coffee Room with her mother. “She’s been there through every big moment in my life. Like, oh my God, I’m pregnant. Oh my God, I eloped. Oh my God, I got divorced. Oh my God, I’m engaged again.” Cortez even served Meyer a plate of silver dollar pancakes a few hours before she gave birth to her now 19-year-old daughter. The Coffee Shop is “like walking into your mom’s living room,” says Meyer. “You sit down, Ruth hands you your iced tea, and she puts out my little bowl of Ruffles dipped in ranch dressing.”
“There’s no secret to being a good server,” says Cortez. “You’ve got to know what’s going on around you, listen to what the guest wants, be accommodating, and smile. Then your job will be easy.” When I went for lunch recently, she said hello and mentioned that there was a special pie, but she didn’t push it. She also didn’t write down my order, because she always remembers what someone wants. Cortez was constantly moving—refilling iced teas, making milkshakes, delivering plates of hash browns—but stopped if a customer wanted to chitchat, which the older woman to my left, picking at a fruit plate alone, certainly did. If Cortez does, actually, have a secret that makes her so good at her job, it’s this ability to be simultaneously friendly and diligent. She doesn’t force you into conversation—she just happens to make for a lovely one.
Before Cortez worked at the Beverly Hills Hotel, she had visited only once, to take a photo with the big green sign that pops out of the palm fronds on Sunset Boulevard. She grew up in Manila, in the Philippines, and studied engineering at a local college. In 1989, she and her family moved to Los Angeles, and she landed a job with Norwegian Cruise Line on a Miami-based ship, first as a cocktail server, then as a cabin stewardess, then as a blackjack dealer in the boat’s casino. After a few years on the ship, she caught up with friends in L.A. who worked in the service industry. They had all applied for openings at the Beverly Hills Hotel, so she decided to go for a housekeeping position. (She assumed that only white people could be servers.) After six rounds of interviews—and after an employee encouraged her to apply to be a waitress—she was hired at the Fountain Coffee Room, where she’d wear a baby pink uniform that matched the color of the hotel.
Her first day was May 25, 1995. Over her time at the restaurant, “the atmosphere hasn’t changed,” says Cortez. “People love it because of the consistency.” Los Angeles is young, and among its relatively few monuments is the Beverly Hills Hotel, which went up in 1912, before Beverly Hills was officially incorporated as a city, when the surrounding land was largely just that. The Fountain Coffee Room, which opened in 1949, still feels like midcentury Hollywood. Take the menu’s “healthy choices” section, which does not include a biohacking Erewhon-type smoothie but, rather, fruit salad with a side of low-fat cottage cheese.
The clientele is consistent too. Cortez estimates that 80 percent of diners are regulars. “I used to go there as a kid, and now I bring my own kids there,” says Nicolas Bijan, who runs another Beverly Hills institution, the House of Bijan, a by-appointment menswear store on Rodeo Drive. The restaurant doesn’t accept reservations, and seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. “Everybody’s always jockeying for a seat,” he explains. And yet Cortez “really makes you feel welcome. Ruthie always makes it a little less intimidating.”
Cortez can’t sneak past the hotel’s lobby without getting recognized. When I walked through it with her, two people immediately yelled her name and stopped her. “She’s the queen of the downstairs coffee shop,” says Jodie Foster, one of Cortez’s many fans. “She’s a stealth ninja at the counter. She quietly makes everything appear and disappear. Every preference is memorized—no fuss, no gush.” Cortez has had requests to write a book, all of which she’s declined. She’s also been offered managerial roles, all of which she’s declined as well. “I don’t want to wear a suit,” she says. “I love wearing an apron.”
Hair and Makeup by Sydney Staehle. Photo Assistant: Patrick Molina.
