Why The Rooftop matters.
The Rooftop is an elevated hotel bar where Downtown's vertical urban character meets open-air dining, fire-lit gathering spaces and a twelfth-floor perch created through the reinvention of a nearly century-old Flower Street hotel.
Set atop The Wayfarer Downtown LA along Flower Street near 8th Street and just steps from FIGat7th, the bar rises above a dense corridor of office towers, hotels and entertainment buildings between the Financial District and South Park. An open-air terrace stretches lengthwise across the roof, arranging dining tables, lounge furniture and planted areas against broad views of the surrounding skyline. Fire pits create concentrated gathering points across the exposed deck as the bar anchors food and cocktail service within the same outdoor field. Sunset changes the room through the city itself, shifting the terrace from bright afternoon exposure toward illuminated towers and firelight as evening settles across downtown. The result is a rooftop whose height, open perimeter and changing relationship with the skyline turn the uppermost level of The Wayfarer into a distinctly urban extension of the hotel below.
What defines The Rooftop.
The Rooftop is best known as the open-air culmination of Pacifica Hotels' transformation of the former Ritz Milner Hotel into The Wayfarer Downtown LA. Pacifica purchased the property in 2016 after decades of hotel use at the Flower Street site, and the Ritz Milner closed in August 2017 as the redevelopment advanced. The project stripped a 12-story building approaching its centennial into a substantially reworked hospitality property, reducing the former 180-room configuration to 156 rooms divided between private accommodations and shared rooms. Rockefeller Kempel Architects and The Gettys Group provided design services for the remodel, including restoration work on the ground-floor exterior and façade. Planning drawings by Rockefeller Partners Architects had already embedded food, alcohol and entertainment throughout multiple levels, placing a café and commercial kitchen at street level, a basement bar and lounge below and DJ or live-entertainment space above the lobby. Pacifica opened The Wayfarer Downtown LA in February 2020 as the second property carrying the Wayfarer name after Santa Barbara, with executive chef Francis Dimitrius overseeing an unusually broad opening food program. The Rooftop occupied the highest public level of that system, joining Gaslighter Social Club, a communal self-cooking concept called The Kitchen and basement bar Lilly Rose as four distinct hospitality environments inside one building. Its opening configuration combined an open-air bar with lounge seating, bartop tables and fire pits overlooking the Financial District. The hotel subsequently joined Hilton's Tapestry Collection, and The Rooftop continued as one of its principal public venues with executive chef Victor Morales attached to the restaurant program. The 5,328-square-foot roof now accommodates as many as 175 people during full buyouts, preserving the large outdoor gathering function established when Pacifica reopened the building in 2020.
Chile, citrus and smoke provide the kitchen with a recurring flavor structure capable of carrying casual rooftop food from afternoon snacking into a fuller evening meal. Fire-roasted corn establishes that logic at its simplest, concentrating sweetness before chile-lime aioli supplies heat and acidity against the char. Salsa asada applies the same relationship to roasted vegetables, giving house-made tortilla chips a smoky, acidic counterpart and establishing a flavor base that can move naturally toward seafood. Shrimp coctel deepens the progression through citrus, cucumber, avocado and Clamato, shifting chile and acid into a cold preparation where freshness becomes more prominent than char. Richer cooking then draws on those bright components to prevent braised meat and fried potato from becoming heavy, as truffle short-rib fries use crème fraîche and pecorino around deeply savory beef. The kitchen carries its smoke-and-acid style into composed entrées through guajillo, mango, tomatillo and chimichurri, letting fruit or herbs sharpen proteins after grilling. This structure also gives the cocktail program a natural role at the table, since agave spirits and citrus-driven drinks can echo the same roasted, herbal and acidic registers established by the food. Pacifica's private barrel selections extend that relationship toward spirits with greater oak, spice and concentration, giving the bar a route from bright cocktails into slower sipping as daylight fades. Service across the terrace connects those changes to the setting as shareable food, cocktails and stronger pours circulate among tables, fire pits and lounge seating over the course of an evening. The Rooftop builds its dining character through this sustained control of char, chile, acid and richness, creating food and drink sturdy enough for a hotel bar yet responsive to the long outdoor transition from sunlit dinner to nighttime drinking above downtown.
How The Rooftop fits.
The Rooftop works as an evening endpoint for an outing through three nearby institutions that trace Downtown through fashion collecting, landscape architecture and the city's long campaign to build a permanent civic library.
Begin at ASU FIDM Museum, whose origins reach to 1978 when the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising established a nonprofit museum and library as a hands-on resource for students. Betsy Bloomingdale supplied an important early gift of French haute couture, and the collection expanded again in 1985 when the estate of designer Rudi Gernreich transferred his archive to the institution. A dedicated gallery followed in 1993, and curatorial operations expanded in 1997 as holdings passed 10,000 objects; the collection now exceeds 15,000 fashion objects spanning four centuries alongside 200,000 Special Collections artifacts. Continue to Grand Hope Park, the 2.5-acre Lawrence Halprin landscape completed in 1993 as the southern anchor of the Los Angeles Open Space Network. Halprin organized the park as a series of outdoor rooms using lawn, pergolas, fountains and sculpture, then allocated specific opportunities for artists including Lita Albuquerque, Raul Guerrero, Gwynn Murrill, Adrian Saxe and Tony Berlant. Its 53-foot musical clock tower, fountains and integrated artworks emerged from thirteen years of planning and a redevelopment effort intended to give South Park a significant public landscape during the district's rebuilding. Conclude at Los Angeles Central Library, the permanent civic home secured after decades of temporary quarters and prolonged disagreement over where Los Angeles should place its principal library. Voters approved a $2.5 million bond in 1921, and architect Bertram Goodhue developed a grand modern design for the constrained former State Normal School site before his death in 1924 left associate Carleton Winslow to carry construction to completion. The library opened in 1926 with Lee Lawrie sculpture integrated into Goodhue's architecture, then survived demolition threats and devastating 1986 fires before a major restoration and the Tom Bradley Wing expanded the complex in 1993. The progression moves from a student collection transformed into a major fashion resource through Halprin's art-filled experiment in downtown public space and culminates at Goodhue's hard-won civic monument, establishing a design history beneath the skyline encountered from The Rooftop.
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