Once upon a time in Los Angeles, there stood a toad-shaped restaurant called The Toed Inn. The restaurant opened in 1929 and offered casual outdoor seating at a small bar on the side of the toad's body. The toad has an adorable frown on his face, and has his head tilted upwards at the sky as if he's in an "I'm not speaking to anyone right now" type of mood.
If more restaurants were still shaped like cool things today, I'd eat out much more often. The Toed Inn is a perfect example of a time when restaurants in America leaned into kitsch and novelty to attract travelers and families during the golden age of the automobile. Sadly, this architectural gem closed down in 1953.
From Forgottenmadness_la on Instagram:
"When Santa Monica Canyon was devastated by the flood of 1938, the restaurant was badly damaged and partially buried by mud (Slides 4-6), leading the restaurant to close for nearly a year. Then, in January of 1939, McGinn had the frog moved to 12008 Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood, near Saltair Avenue, using accordion-style doors to replace its damaged front walls (Slide 7).
At some point before 1944, McGinn sold the restaurant to Benjamin Rosenfeld, who reconstructed the front facade and added the neon under the frog's mouth (as seen in Slides 1 & 8). Rosenfeld had considerably better luck with the place, getting it featured in the Saturday Evening Post in 1946, and earning it a reputation for making "positively the BEST steaks, barbecue meats, and fried chicken in town," per the West LA Independent in 1948.
By the 1950s, motorists turned on programmatic architecture, viewing it more as a deterrent than a draw, so Rosenfeld closed the Toed Inn in 1953, tearing it down to replace it with Ben's Restaurant (Slide 9) which ran 15 more years."
