Michael Cieply has a great piece in today’s NYT on the impending closure of Orso, one of L.A.’s longtime power lunch titans, where boxy pinstripe suits and CLK 320s were in no short supply. The West Third Street institution, which opened more than 20 years ago, is set to close on Nov. 21 (the New York and London locations will remain open).

Of the restaurant’s demise, Cieply writes: “Orso was hurt when the Creative Artists Agency and International Creative Management moved into Century City office towers, shifting the center of gravity for their lunch sessions westward to new hot spots like Craft. And it lost a mainstay when the nearby New Line Cinema — once the biggest house account — cut hundreds of employees in a corporate restructuring.”

Cieply also pointed out what any Angeleno foodie who has ever clutched a pack of Parliament Lights long knew about Orso: a “policy that allowed both the famous and the less so to light up in the privacy of the high-walled patio, even as other places clamped down on tobacco. ‘It was a great place to take actors, because you could smoke outside,’ said a film executive, who did not want to be identified for fear of earning the wrath of less understanding nonsmokers.” —Paul Dexter