![]() Navy commissioned the hotel as a convalescent facility for wounded servicemen, more than 18,000 of whom recuperated there through the end of the war. ![]() ![]() One of Santa Cruz’s signature sites at the time was the grand Casa del Rey Hotel on Beach Street, known for its ballroom and cocktail lounge Il Trocadero. The government’s heavy hand also extended to price controls and even to wartime commandeering. Her story begins in the 1940s, at the height of World War II, when restaurateurs in Santa Cruz had to face food rationing due to shortages of staples, and government-mandated travel restrictions, which limited tourism. Such was the story in Santa Cruz County, which gave Pollock a handy framework to write about defunct restaurants. Postwar SceneĪs the 20th century progressed, many restaurants became emblematic of certain eras: burger joints and drive-ins in the 1950s, tiki themes in the ’60s, vegetarian places in the ’70s, sushi bars in the ’80s, etc. I emailed, did some sleuthing, you name it.”įrom 78 interviews of restaurant owners, managers, chefs, bartenders, line cooks, wait staff, and loyal customers, Pollock produced a portrait of 194 extinct restaurants in Santa Cruz County, from the landmark Davenport Cash Store to the Pronto Pup Drive-In in Watsonville, and all points in between. “I sat down in people’s living rooms, was on the telephone for hours. “I wanted to do a kind of Studs Terkel Working oral-history point of view,” she says, referring to Terkel’s classic 1974 book. At the table with her is a box filled with old menus and matchbooks from her collection that revive names that make for an incantation of the past for any Santa Cruz old-timer: the Ship Ahoy, Spivey’s Five Spot, Malio’s, the Tea Cup. “I am just the person to write this book,” she says, at a table by the window at Gilda’s on the Wharf, one of Santa Cruz’s best-known old-line family restaurants. Since then, she has become an avid collector and archivist of Santa Cruz’s restaurant culture and has maintained an online bookstore called The Cook’s Bookcase () that specializes in books on cooking and wine. She’s lived in the area for 45 years and worked as the first female bartender at the fabled family restaurant Adolph’s in the 1980s. Pollock herself is part of that glorious history. To memorialize them properly, long-gone restaurants need writers like Santa Cruz’s Liz Pollock, who brings back many of the half-forgotten names of the local landscape in her new book The Lost Restaurants of Santa Cruz County. They are totems of nostalgia and evoke strong memories of bygone eras. Still, often because of their ephemeral nature, restaurants occupy a unique space in popular memory and in the history and personality of the cities they represent. The restaurant industry has a famously high mortality rate (most independent, non-chain restaurants don’t make it to their first anniversary). And old movies and songs never seem to go away. Obsolete products get re-marketed for their retro appeal. ![]() Defunct sports teams get memorialized with throwback jerseys. ![]()
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