It may be the “worst airport in the world,” but Los Angeles International Airport is home to one of Southern California’s most iconic landmarks: the Theme Building, a spaceship-looking symbol of everything that is right with the city’s use of midcentury design and everything that is wrong with LAX’s planning. For years, the impossible-to-miss building has sat empty, unloved and falling deeper into disrepair — but once upon a time, Disney had a restaurant inside.
Ultimately, Encounter existed for a brief epoch in the Theme Building’s history, though it was certainly a memorable era. The structure was completed in 1961, three decades after the airport opened, and was originally designed to be LAX’s flight control tower. As plans evolved, the building gained traction as a tourist destination, symbolizing the bright future of air travel. “You will have the first airport terminal area specifically designed for the jet age and it may well achieve some of the world-wide renown, some of the international acclaim as — who knows — Disneyland,” Federal Aviation Administration Chairman Najeeb Halaby said at the time. Curiously, the Theme Building’s architects, William Pereira and Charles Luckman, also did the first design of Disneyland (plans that Walt Disney ultimately rejected).
In the 1990s, decades after Disney’s groundbreaking theme park opened in Anaheim, Walt Disney Imagineering took on the ambitious project of redesigning — and by extension, reinvigorating interest in — the restaurant that’s suspended from the Theme Building’s spider-like legs, hanging high above the ground.
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The Walt Disney Company has a long history of projects that don’t quite make sense within its entertainment universe. Case in point: the Queen Mary, the retired ocean liner that’s now a floating hotel in Long Beach. An unlikely late-’80s business deal led to an attempt by Disney to create a Haunted Mansion at sea on the once-opulent behemoth, which was a short-lived flop. Imagineers created prototype rooms that had creepy special effects, but the project was too costly and ultimately thwarted by the city of Long Beach, which did not want Disney to expand its attractions there. The company ended its operational lease in 1992.
Encounter, the famous restaurant at Los Angeles International Airport, is viewed from a parking lot on April 26, 2012, in Los Angeles.
George Rose/Getty Images
Two years later, LAX ended what the LA Times described as “thirty-four years of culinary hegemony” when it expanded its food offerings beyond a single operator, allowing other restaurant companies into its terminals, including Wolfgang Puck. As a showpiece, Disney was brought on to revive the Theme Building’s restaurant.
While Disney would provide the content and design for the space, it was to be run by CA One Services, now Delaware North Companies Travel Hospitality Services, which operates restaurants and shops in many airports.
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Up until that point, LAX’s former food operator, Host International Inc., had run Host International Restaurant in the Theme Building, which touted itself in advertisements as having “continental cuisine” and “classic French service.” But even the ad’s heavy emphasis on free valet parking belied the restaurant’s biggest problem. Even without the barrier of having to get through security to eat there, people weren’t dining there the way they used to when air travel was a novelty, and people would go to the airport just for the thrill of watching planes take off.
Encounter’s Disney touches were supposed to be the antidote to that issue. “The Theme Building’s perennial problem in attracting visitors to its isolated location would be attacked by shuttling patrons to and from the restaurant in a space probe-style van, perhaps with a driver wearing a space alien costume,” the Times wrote in 1994.
Steven A. Miller via Flickr CC 2.0
Disney appointed Imagineer Eddie Sotto to lead the project. “Theme has to go deep,” Sotto once told the LA Times. “It has to be something that’s relevant and exciting to people. I spent weeks putting together 11 hours of music for Encounter. What you were hearing could be a B-side from William Shatner’s space album. Theme has to reward your close inspection at a rich level. That’s why people return.”
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He envisioned the space as “Barbarellagant,” he wrote on his company Sotto Studios’ blog, playing off the Theme Building’s Space Age aesthetic to create a “‘George Jetson meets James Bond’ experience.” The bar would be lined with lava lamps, and drinks would come out of “ray guns” that made sounds as they poured. Guests could pop in on a layover, or families could visit simply for the joy of the otherworldly themed experience. (For an absolutely wild ride back into the internet of 1998, check out the archive of the original Encounter website.)
For its first few years, the restaurant thrived, bringing in customers and mostly rave reviews, even from the New York Times. “Rare is the airport bar that leaves an impression. … Rarer still is the airport bar with the magic to become a destination in its own right,” read its 1997 review.
“Yet that is exactly what has happened at Encounter, a recently remodeled restaurant and lounge that sits like a flying saucer on concrete stilts in the center of Los Angeles International Airport,” the review continued.
Thomas Hawk via Flickr CC 2.0
The menu sourced its inspiration from all over the world, serving Asian-, Italian- and Latin American-inspired foods. That said, not everyone was a fan. The LA Times panned the “dreadful” food as “too ambitious” the same year its New York counterpart raved about it.
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The restaurant caught on with not just travelers but the see-and-be-seen LA set. “With the tried-and-true spots, there is a vibe that is all about the L.A. club scene,” Jay Dynton told the New York Times. “Encounter is that, plus crazy lost tourists from all over the world. It’s like partying at Disneyland.”
Celebrities, especially those with a fondness for aviation, came in droves. Just weeks after its 1996 opening, John Travolta hosted his birthday party at the restaurant. In 1997, Harrison Ford hosted an afterparty for the “Air Force One” premiere there. Quentin Tarantino did the same for “Jackie Brown” that year. James Cameron followed suit with a celebration at Encounter not long after.
“Growing up, everybody’s seen the building, but never been inside,” DJ Senor Amor told the NY Times. “But now that they’ve renovated it, and the inside kind of matches the exterior, there’s no place like it in the world.”
But after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when air travel took a massive blow, the restaurant struggled. It faced another huge setback in 2007, when the Theme Building needed emergency repairs for structural issues; Encounter was closed for eight months.
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The bar at Encounter had lava lamps and “ray guns” that dispensed beverages.
Steven A. Miller via Flickr CC 2.0
The restaurant closed permanently in 2014. “Why is L.A.’s beloved 900 tons of steel topped with 135-foot-tall parabolic arches standing empty? Apparently we just didn’t love it enough,” the LA Times wrote at the time.
“The problem is, it was built when bringing your family out to have dinner and watch the airplanes was a cool thing to do,” L.A. World Airports Executive Director Gina Marie Lindsey said in the story. “Passengers 1777203610 won’t leave the terminals to have dinner there because it’s unpredictable how long it’ll take them to get through security again.”
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No other restaurant took over the space. Even the airport itself sounds bleak when discussing the Theme Building’s next life. An LAX fact sheet on the space released in 2020 had no real plans for its future. “One of the benefits of the new Automated People Mover (APM) train is that it will bring a significant number of airport guests into the vicinity of the Theme Building, greatly increasing the foot traffic nearby,” it said, while noting that the still-delayed transportation system won’t connect to the building directly. Not having anything inside the Theme Building will be an even bigger missed opportunity once the 2028 LA Olympics brings another million-plus people through the city, and by extension, through the airport.
Meanwhile, Disney has leaned into Space Age restaurants since Encounter’s demise. In recent years, EPCOT, Walt Disney World’s technology-forward park, has opened two eateries that evoke the feeling of being in another world. Space 220 brings people up an elevator into “outer space” for dining in the cosmos, and Geo-82 is the park’s new cocktail lounge inside its iconic Spaceship Earth dome.