Every neighborhood in Los Angeles has cherished restaurants that are community treasures, exuding the character of the place in which they sit. You can usually find locals at all times of the day in these places. Los Angeles also has restaurants that are iconic symbols to which visitors flock. The Reel Inn, on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, was both.
For 36 years, Teddy and Andy Leonard have owned and run the fish shack known for its expansive yet simple menu and warm welcome. We lost the Reel Inn as the Palisades Fire tore through homes and businesses on its way down to the ocean. Teddy and Andy share their memories of the beloved restaurant.
Teddy Leonard: Hi. Teddy Leonard. I am the co-owner, with my husband, Andy Leonard, of the Reel Inn.
Andy Leonard: I'm Andy Leonard, and I am the co-owner of the restaurant, with Teddy. The origins of the Reel Inn, the building has been there for a number of years, and the reality is that there has been a seafood restaurant on that location for 100 years. It obviously hasn't been the Reel Inn, but there have been various restaurants there. The first one was started by a Greek fishing family, so the precedent for there to be a seafood restaurant is there. The Reel Inn came in in a period where there had been nothing there. The building was there but nothing was open. And in 1986, the corporation was formed. I came in, probably full bore in '90 or '91 and owned all of it. And it's been like that with very little change since then.
Teddy Leonard: Well, didn't you start it with the tacos and beer and just opened from lunch? And then the surfers would come in, and there wasn't really much of a restaurant there. That came later.
Andy Leonard: When I was shown the Reel Inn to purchase and did so, it had a dirt parking lot, no liquor license, didn't take credit cards, wasn't open for lunch, only had a very small deck out the back. There were no no gardens. It was more on the lemonade stand end of things than the big restaurant at the beach for your family. And it had a surf crowd that came in the evening. I think we opened at 5, at that point, and closed at 8:30 or something. It was pretty primitive and pretty basic.
I tried for years to keep something on the menu that you could eat, whether it be a catfish dinner with potatoes and coleslaw or equivalent, fish and chips and a Corona for under 10 bucks. That was my goal. Think of it as a glorified lunch truck, and you've probably got it.
PCH, in that exact Topanga Beach area, went through a massive change in the '60s and '70s, because there was a row of houses actually on the sand, directly across the street from the Reel Inn that was the Gidget Goes Hawaiian surf band, don't let your daughter go down there after dark, six boys renting a house with guitars and beach buggies. I mean, it was the cover of a Beach Boys album in your mind. And there was the Reel Inn, there was a sushi restaurant, at that point, in our parking lot, sort of a little farther down. And there was the Topanga Ranch Market, which was a Quonset hut with a big rainbow painted on the front that would sell you a bottle of champagne and a picnic basket with sandwiches in it, so you could go across the street to the beach.
In one of those big storms, all of the houses disappeared on the beach, so you basically had a lifeguard station, some sand, and then a set of stairs to bring you up to PCH, where there was a parking lot, and the Reel Inn was across the street. 21 years ago, state parks bought the property, and the quid pro quo of them closing the real estate deal was that the relocation company eliminated 52 houses that were behind the Reel Inn and several of the businesses that were next door to the Reel Inn. So there was a massive purge of that community on PCH, and it got very quiet again and became sort of a drive-by location.
Teddy Leonard: I became involved 20 years ago when Andy and I got together in 2005. We became more of a family hub, since I was involved.
Andy Leonard: There were very few Little League teams coming in for team dinners, in the early days. It was much rougher and more primitive than that. Under Teddy's auspices, we got checkered tablecloths, and we got families and became much more civilized.
Teddy Leonard: The outside of the restaurant is very indicative of where Andy grew up. It's very much an East Coast fish shack. Dark brown and then you have the neon sign with the jumping fish, and underneath it was the chalkboard where each day, the crew would get to pick what pun they would use from a list that we pretty much okayed.
Andy Leonard: There's a list of single-spaced puns. There's six or seven pages stuck together over the years. You know, "Salmon and Delilah," "Wu Tang clams."
Teddy Leonard: When LeBron James came to play in Los Angeles, the crew came up with "Leprawn James." What were some of the other ones that were fun?
Andy Leonard: There's too many to remember.
Teddy Leonard: Yes, "Salmon Enchanted Evening."
Andy Leonard: "Salmon Enchanted Evening." I always like that one.
Teddy Leonard: And "Seas The Day."
Andy Leonard: We had these guys in Porsches that were screenwriters coming by and calling us furiously, giving us four or five things they had just come up with on the way to Wilshire or Burbank to do their work. And the deal was that they would get a free dinner out of it, if we put one of theirs up. Some of theirs were brilliant but some of them were half a paragraph long, so we could use... but the neighborhood was involved in the effort, let's put it that way.
Teddy Leonard: It was very casual. We had celebrities standing in line with surfers standing in line with construction workers with policemen. You had everybody, all walks of life, coming through. And it was everybody's place. Everybody that has posted online on our Instagram, it was their place. And reading some of those comments, it's been so emotional for us, because we had a much greater impact on people's lives than we had any idea. It hit us that we weren't the only ones that lost the Reel Inn, the community lost an important place, a home for them as well.
And there was one an Instagram user put up when they heard that the Reel had... they had a picture of our sign that said, "Here Today, Gone To Mahi," and that was sort of their goodbye to us.
Andy Leonard: When the fire broke out, I was on the phone with one of the managers and watching the cameras, and we were discussing the fire, which was upwind in the Palisades in the brush, where we've seen fire before. This was not an unprecedented event, like lordy, it's it's fire. We've had the napkins on the Reel Inn's patio catch on fire and then have everything reorganized and be open for lunch the next day. Fires can be put out. They cannot be put out with this kind of wind.
That was the topic of the conversation the other day, which was, "Boy, it's really blowing." And we saw smoke. I saw smoke on the cameras then saw smoke from inside the restaurant. She said, "This doesn't look good. There's a lot of smoke." And then on the camera into the parking lot, trotted about six of the firefighters with their yellow jackets and their breather tanks on and they immediately came around the entrance to the restaurant, which was downwind, and knocked down part of the fence.
I'm guessing, I didn't see it but I'm guessing they went around the back of the restaurant to shut off the gas line. I flipped over to another camera on the other side of the building, and there was probably seven foot high flames above the fence that surrounds the back garden. The next thing I knew, the tablecloths burst into flames on the picnic tables on the patio, and that was the last thing I saw because the system went down.
We have a remarkable staff in that one or two of them have been there longer than I have. We had one of the cooks on the couch here in our rental house, our Airbnb, yesterday, who announced that he had been there in that very brief window when the previous owner had had it. So he, by definition, had been working there longer than I had, which was 36 years and change ago. Then there was a long discussion amongst these three gentlemen as to who had been there longer. We had to write it down, because there were several of them that were over 30 years.
Teddy Leonard: We've gone down the list, and there are nine employees that have been with the restaurant over 20 years, and we have 22 employees.
They have been loyal. They saw us through COVID. During COVID, they tried to give us back their paychecks because they were concerned about us staying open.
When this happened, the first phone call we got from the crew was the head of the crew said, "How can we help you?" And I said, "I have to hang up. I can't talk right now," because I started crying so hard. I said, "No, we're going to help you." So we started this GoFundMe for the crew, to give them a cushion until they either can get another job or we are able to find a location. We don't know what's coming but this money will see them through a couple of months of not working
We have had over 2,000 people donate money to help our crew. From Italy, the UK, Germany, France, Ireland. It's been overwhelming, people telling us that our restaurant was their place, even people who don't live in the Los Angeles area, that it was the first place they went. They have offered to come help us rebuild the restaurant. We've had offers to help shovel up the debris. We've had offers to take our employees and give them jobs until we can rebuild. It has been literally overwhelming to where I have to stop. I can't watch the Instagram account for more than a few minutes because I just get too emotional. I'm just, I'm overwhelmed, aren't you?
Andy Leonard: Yeah, we spent most of our time not concentrating on how we could make the most people globally the happiest and make ourselves beloved to them. We were trying to get the food on the plates and get people happy and keep the kids from banging the flats of their hands on the aquarium. I mean, we were in the nuts and bolts of it, and trying to keep a very old restaurant together physically. And sort of the punctuation of the fire finishing the restaurant, not just being closed for COVID or being closed for a couple of weeks because they've closed Topanga Canyon Boulevard or PCH or there's a rock in the middle of the boulevard, and it's going to be two weeks till you can get to the restaurant, not that kind of stuff. This is it. I mean, the restaurant is done for at least a year, maybe multiple years, maybe forever.
We just weren't ready to take that two steps back and go, "Wow, look what just happened in the last 36 years. Look what we did." And our people out in the street, through the glory of the internet, have provided us with the teary moments of silence where Teddy and I just look at each other and go, Oh, lordy. I had no idea that we were that important to people. It's just one after another. We get these emails of, "You are our favorite place. Every summer, when we came there, you were the first place we went from the airport." We didn't know that. "And every time one of our kids graduated from school, we would take their whole class to the Reel Inn for a big meal, a big cookout." We didn't know that. We weren't tracking that end of it. But to see it all at once is humbling.
Teddy Leonard: Yeah.