Bean Appetit!
Barney’s Beanery: How Route 66 scion is cornering our fast-food market
By Dan O'Heron 09/21/2006
Barney’s Beanery’s alliterative name is an aptly artful advertising aid. People like to hear it and say it, and it sticks in the public mind from first mention.
But I wonder if the name sticks in the craw of competition. Up against what is arguably the biggest menu of fast food in the world, and a bulging book of legends from Hollywood, will chili joints and chicken shacks be filled with empty chairs? Will it be Hermit’s Hammock vs. Barney’s Beanery?
It’s hard to match a 700-item menu, which is printed out like a 12-page tabloid and reads like an aggregate of Bob’s Big Boy, Chile John’s, Chevy’s, IHOP, Hard Rock, Original Tommy’s, Big Mama’s Ribs, Jerry’s Famous Deli and Mom’s Place, not to mention the corner bar and the local pool hall.
It’s hard to keep pace with a place that runs 19 hours every day — a place geared with meandering bars and multiple dining rooms that can serve food and drink to 300 to 500 guests at a time.
Barney’s bustling kitchen offers 80 hamburgers, several yards of foot-long hot dogs, Texas and Asian-hot chicken wings, skyscraping Belgium waffles, Jewish deli sandwiches, Italian pizzas, Greek potatoes, meatloaf, Yankee pot roast, chili bowls rated second only to Chasen’s in “rich and famous” annals, plus omelets scuffing and fajitas hissing in more than 100 pans. At peak hours, the kitchen must look like caps are flying off Cuisinarts.
“We’ve been here for four months and my 12 chefs are almost under control,” says Jackie Duryee, food and beverage manager.
Then there’s a bar with 38 taps on the wall and 200 bottles underneath. If you’re not sure which one to try, just ask bartender Melissa McQueen to pour you something called 17 Days in a Crack House.
Not only are competitors taking on a remarkable food and drink recipe policy — “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it” — they’re facing other traffic on Route 66, the mother road of comfort food.
On days preceding Barney’s opening, it looked like Ken Kesey’s merry bus might have hobbled to a halt with a flat tire in front of the place. Disgorged on the sidewalk was a garage-sale riot of memorabilia, art and artifacts that looked like the forsaken stuff you pick up along the eight states and three time zones of Route 66.
Somehow, it seems, Lisa Bledsoe, Barney’s general manager and “creativity czar,” wrestled the paraphernalia into the building, pushed it around, added 150 TVs plus two giant pull-down projection screens, and conjured a mood you’ll want to be in, a mood of old-school consideration and hip possibility — something roadhouse retro and very active. (Bledsoe’s brother is co-owner David Houston, who, along with partner Avi Fattal, purchased the original Barney’s Beanery in 1999, opened a second in Santa Monica in 2004 and converted his former Q’s Pasadena nightclub into the third.)
“We actually tried to buy the real Kesey bus to restore it, but the deal fell through,” says Bledsoe. But she did manage to pick up and park a real English double-decker in the dining room along with montages and motorcycles, pastiches and posters, beer accessories, baseball cards, motor inn receipts and road maps. Most striking is a map of the contiguous United States, hacksawed and sculpted by Bledsoe from donated license plates. (Donations are accepted, but if you bring in a brass rail for the bar, it’ll hang from the ceiling; they’ll be too busy to polish it.)
When I stepped inside, memories started unwinding like an old roll of color film of halcyon days along the old roads when gas stations and restaurants put up “Rest Room” signs with big letters, when roadhouses were outside city limits and beyond the reach of town councils, where a stranger at the bar could meet a girl later by the water tower.
I looked around Barney’s for the water tower. There’s room. In a few days, a second story will open up for a pool hall. There won’t be any of those coin-operated games they have downstairs but nine elephant-legged dandies. I can already hear the sweet clatter of balls spilling out onto tables from quickly flipped wrists. I hope not to hear the demented choir of video games.
Bledsoe’s setting got me thinking about Barney’s storied past. Since its opening on Route 66 in the 1920s, the Hollywood beanery has served as a melting pot for major celebrities, musicians and artists — the likes of W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn, Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, Charles Bukowski, Ed Kienholz and David Lee Roth — as well as a sand pile for loose ends and Hollywood wannabes like, well, you know.
More recently, a waitress tells me, the favorite roadside customer is Drew Carey and his $100 tips.
I’m told that the $175 champagne brunch in Pasadena was inspired by founder John “Barney” Anthony, who is remembered for loaning money to down-on-their-luck actors. The brunch — a bottle of Dom Perignon next to a wiener — was the irascible Anthony’s way of showing how close a bigwig is to a bum.
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