When Café Tropical, the iconic Silver Lake coffeehouse that served locals café cubanos, guava-and-cheese pastries, medianoche sandwiches, and outstanding apple turnovers embedded with sugar that sparkled like diamonds, closed after 48 years in December 2023, many Angelenos mourned—until the good news of its reopening hit in March.
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For those of us in the know, there was another reason to hold Café Tropical close to our hearts: it held a central place in Los Angeles’s recovery community.
A decade ago, when I moved to a garage studio apartment overlooking the 99 Cents Only Store in Silver Lake, I was newly divorced after a 25-year marriage. My kids were away at college, and I was figuring out my life as a single woman in a world I didn’t know very well. I’d raised my sons and daughter in the suburbs of Glendale and La Crescenta-Montrose and felt adrift at my new address near Sunset Junction, then, as now, a hotbed of hipsterdom. I stuck out like the conventional mom I was, but I knew one surefire way to find my place there: go to a meeting.
At that point, I’d long been sober, and the prospect of attending a new recovery meeting didn’t make me nervous, but as I walked east on Sunset toward Café Tropical for a 7 a.m. gathering, I felt like a newborn fawn walking on legs that could barely support me. I passed Millie’s Café as the place ramped up for the day, and then Los Globos, touted on its website as “L.A.’s premier destination for multicultural nightlife,” where detritus of the night before—twisted cigarette packages, condom wrappers, a woman’s shoe—littered the sidewalk.
The back room of Café Tropical, entered not from the main door on Sunset but a side door on Parkman, was a place where the sacred and profane of daily living in the City of Angels came together. It was in this place that countless locals worked to get—and remain—sober.
Meetings took place almost hourly at Tropical: four, five, six meetings a day addressing alcoholism, drug addiction, offering just about every type of recovery group possible. In that back room, I met my new neighbors and friends-to-be. We often bought a coffee before heading to the back room, wanting to support the establishment that supported us. Then we’d find a seat along the wooden benches that surrounded the perimeter, covered in cushions recently spruced in red covers with white piping, or settle onto metal folding chairs.
A meeting might have upward of 40 participants. At some point, an employee would pop in with free, fresh coffee and pastries; the guava rolls were always outstanding. As is expected in a recovery meeting, we’d collect the donations that made us self-supporting through our own contributions, and the treasurer would split the kitty, adding wads of bills into the tip jar for Tropical’s beloved crew.
As I got used to my new life in Silver Lake, I was heartened whenever I drove past the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Parkman Avenue, seeing people leaving or entering the next meeting at Tropical, gathered on the side street, many with cigarettes held to their lips, sharing their struggles, supporting their peers. Those little clumps of humanity gave me the courage I needed to keep going on my own shaky new path.
Every segment of Los Angeles society appeared at one time or another: well-known actors mixed with carpenters, nurses, and plumbers. Waitresses congregated with tech bros. Bartenders talked with attorneys. Students leaned on screenwriters. Thanks to that meeting and the generosity of our hosts, I eventually found my place in Silver Lake and began my new life.
I attended that 7 a.m. meeting for the last time in late 2019, honored to be asked to speak. Then the pandemic hit the next year, just as I moved out of state. When I heard that the café was closing, I called a friend who’d been deeply involved, and she gave the backstory on the meetings during the pandemic.
All meetings had gone online, she said, where they grew and flourished. The 7 a.m. group that had originated at Café Tropical drew online attendance of 90 or more, many of whom sent in donations. Because the groups knew the café was struggling during the pandemic, they returned the generosity that had been given them by the restaurant in earlier years, sending money in gratitude for having hosted them so long. In-person meetings at the café eventually resumed, but by then, they were in a smaller room and happened less frequently. Still, they continued. We all need a place to belong, and Café Tropical was that to so many.
And then came news of the café’s closing, which pummeled so many of us.
But now—happy news!—with Tropical reopened, meetings have again resumed, and Café Tropical has the chance to reinvent itself under new owners. The meetings go on because the ravages of addiction continue, and the blessings and comfort for those of us who find our way through recovery continue to be a necessary balm.
For all I know, a new divorcée may now be living in my old garage apartment on Edgecliffe. If she’s in need of a good meeting—and a really good medianoche sandwich or an exquisite apple turnover, I have a suggestion for her.•
Bernadette Murphy, a native of Los Angeles who now lives in Park City, Utah, is an author and New York Times-bestselling ghostwriter.
