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Q. What is it supposed to be on the show? A. An upscale restaurant.
Q. Where is it supposed to be on the show? A. Somewhere
in Newport Beach. Q. When did we see it on the show?
We see the Al Forno restaurant again in Episode 23 (of season 2), "The O-Sea", in which Seth had dinner at the restaurant with Star Wars creator George Lucas, to discuss making his comic book, Atomic County, into a movie.
Outside
the restaurant, Julie confronts her with the truth. Charlotte tries to
recruit Julie into the scheme. Q. What is it actually in real life? A. The front
door of a studio building.
A. You can't The restaurant doesn't really exist. Like Charlotte's schemes, this is one of the producer's total scams. What you're really looking at is the front door of a studio building at Raleigh's Manhattan Beach Studios, 1600 Rosecrans Ave, in Manhattan Beach, CA, the same studio where they film the O.C. interiors. They shot this scene in the same spot where they shot the meeting between Kaitlin and Frank in the show's final episode: in front of the main building at the far north end of the studio - on the south side of that building, to be exact, just north of Stage 28. That's close to the corner of Rosecrans Ave and N. Redondo Ave. They just slapped on a sign near the door which reads "Al Forno", added a few potted palms, some flowers, and a lot of sparkle-lights and _voila!_ , the Al Forno restaurant was born. My guess is that someone at the studio got tired of paying big fees to photograph real restaurants (like the Yacht Club and the Lighthouse) and said "To hell with it, let's just slap a sign on the front of our building... think of the savings!" (And the terrible thing is... it worked! It had me fooled for quite a while.) They
also used the same location for Taylor's
fake TV station. (Take
a look at the photos on that TV
station page
and compare them to the photos of Al Forno on this page. Pay particular
attention to what's above the door...) Here is a Bird's Eye view aerial photo showing the exact And here is a map link.
Q. How the heck did you figure out where it was? A. This one had me baffled for quite some time, because I was looking for an actual restaurant. After Googling "Al Forno" and realizing that they had made up the restaurant's name, I still assumed that they had used an actual restaurant building, but had simply changed its moniker. But none of the restaurants I looked at resembled Al Forno. Eventually, I had basically given up finding it. But fortunately,
the producers tend to repeat themselves. And after finding this exact location
for Taylor's fake TV station (as well as two
parking lot scenes that were also shot here), I recognized the unusual
awning over the door, which is tilted upward at a slant and contains several
light panels. I then compared other details in the Al Forno scenes
with the studio building and, naturally, got a perfect match. By
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