What year was the Pastime opened?
The Pastime was opened as the Pastime in 1945. Before that, it was a corner grocery store named Alesi’s Grocery. The owners of the grocery, in the years prior to 1945, slowly started to phase out the grocery store and turned it into a lounge with a small snack bar and renamed it in 1945 as the Pastime. One of the biggest draws to the newly opened lounge was that it was only one of a very few places in Baton Rouge that had air conditioning. The snack bar kept growing and eventually the focus of the Pastime went from a pure lounge to a restaurant with a full bar.
