Well, we’re very happy that the Montara Bistro opened.  In my opinion, good food, nice people and they’re expanding both their menu and their hours.  And Kevin Stokes has told us a little about the plans for a restaurant in what used to be the Outrigger. 

Now I see that the old site for Cafe Gibraltar in Montara is soon to become another restaurant?  The signs on the window say “restaurant opening soon:  Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner”.  The rumor mill has it that it is either owned or managed by the same folks who run Gazos Street Grill south of HMB.  Has anyone else heard anything?

Is our little town finally becoming a *real* little town? :)

Mike

Mike, yes it’s great to have all these eating choices now! I’m curious though, what would you like to see added to Montara to make it a *real* little town? I vote for a proper bar, just like the Outrigger used to be. :-)

Montara won’t be a propertown until it has its own Popeye’s Chicken.

Gentlemen, what we are facing is a fried chicken gap!

—Darin

Yes the folks from “Gazos Grill” next to Gazos creek Beach south of Pescadero on the coast Have done a great job with that retaurant, they should do well in Montara..

Jeff

Hey, back when the Chart House/Outrigger was Frank Torres (“the largest cement block building on the coast between San Francisco and Santa Cruz”—I always wondered who bothered to determine that), we had a highly improper beer bar on Montara’s Main Street—The Montara Inn. Could be a bit crude, dirty, and a bucket of blood at times; but for decades it was our local “pub”. The annual pool tournaments and the occasional building-shaking dances were local theater not to be missed. A few doors away was another, smaller beer bar in a little building that also housed several generations of small restaurants—one name I recall was the Ace of Cups. There was also a bar downstairs at Frank Torres, but I don’t recall locals hanging out there—more of a dinner house scene.

In Moss Beach, the bar in Dan’s also had a strong local flavor and following until not so many years ago.

Carl May

Carl May - 13 May 2007 04:04 AM

a highly improper beer bar on Montara’s Main Street—The Montara Inn. Could be a bit crude, dirty, and a bucket of blood at times; but for decades it was our local “pub”.

Do tell more Carl, sounds like it was a wild place! Does anyone have any photos of the place when it existed?

Kevin

Kevin,

There are probably some photos of the exterior—it is the building on the West side of Main Street at the top of the hill, next to the apartments. After the bar closed, Susan Hayward had a dance school there for a while and a fancy pajama place was one of the other businesses after that. Don’t know what it is now. In older photos, if you find them, you’ll see a gas pump out front. Harold and Norma Detrick owned the place. (And before the bar business, they had a mink farm up on Acacia Street [if I remember correctly] in the North part of town.)

Can’t tell stories and still protect the guilty. The last few years of existence for the Montara Inn were not its best, and several of its neighbors were happy to see it close. But for local funk, the place could not be beat. Montara and Moss Beach had their own community vibes in those not-so-distant days, and no one had any illusion that they were northern appendages of Half Moon Bay.

Carl May

Regarding local color, Carl, I wonder if you ever frequented a place called Gabe’s Lighthouse on Pearl in Moss Beach (Near Etheldore & Cypress & Hwy One. I saw the old sign in a place that was for sale there many years ago and one “old Realtor” told me the building had once been a bar with a pool table etc. Was that “before your time”? Dan’s was stil up and running as a restaurant when I moved here in 1988. I never went to the bar but as I recall, you had to pass through it to get to the dining room.

-Cid Young
Moss Beach

Know the building but don’t believe the Lighthouse was still open when I got here in ‘74. The place has been made over into a residence, hasn’t it.

Nye’s Reef in Moss Beach was still semi-open for a beer for some time after I arrived—if you didn’t mind sitting in the half inch of rock dust that covered everything.

There are residents with much more time in coastal purgatory than I, including some old-timers who have lived here all their lives. If you meet them and draw them out a bit, they’ll impart some of the flavor of the place before the greedseeds decided it would be good for their wallets to try to push slurbia all over the coastal terrace.

Carl May

Carl, Thanks for the info.

Regarding suburbia….at least I pride myself in living in a FAST FOOD FREE ZONE (From just outside Linda Mar all the way to Half Moon Bay) Thankfully the only restaurants between the Linda Mar Blvd. light and the Hwy One San Mateo Road light are non-chain establishments. It would make me really sad to see a Taco Bell or a 7-11 suddenly pop up in between…but probably there will be something like that at Harbor Village for the tourists.

-Cid Young

Moss Beach

Something off the Dollar Menu may be all the tourons can afford after they pay for gasoline to take a drive along the coast.

Carl May

I’ve renamed this topic “Montara restaurants”, so that we can continue the conversation even though the original question has been answered.

Topic should be Coastside Restaurants!

REGARDING Chez Shea (Half Moon Bay).
  YUMMY - chilpotle meatball sandwiches!

Cid, feel free to start a topic about a specific restaurant, community, or type of food.

It sort of eased into being last weekend. Does anyone have comments on the new 7th Street (Cafe? Restaurant? I forget what the sign says) in Montara? Can one get quick, light breakfasts there in addition to big-deal sitdown meals?

Carl May

I think it’s open now although I have not I have visited it yet, I’ll post a comment as soon as I have sampled some food. Anyone else actually eaten there yet?

Kevin

With everyone so concerned about all these restauraunts,  does anybody still stay home and cook? or is home cooking becoming a lost art?

Kevin Stokes - 31 May 2007 10:58 PM

I think it’s open now although I have not I have visited it yet, I’ll post a comment as soon as I have sampled some food. Anyone else actually eaten there yet?
Kevin

We ate dinner there the first week they were open. Friendly place, but they’re still building out the interior. We had
- calamari (tender, but the accompanying cocktail & tartar sauces seemed pretty ordinary)
- a caesar salad with atlantic salmon (really excellent, exceptional. The salmon, from a wholesaler in HMB, was moist and fresh and perfectly done. Really good.)
- a chicken sandwich with teriyaki grilled pineapple (flavorful) and fries, and a
- large portion of apple pie a la mode (comforting down-home goodness).

They serve breakfast and lunch, but the dinner entrees, which we did not have, run $20. They’ll have to substantially upgrade the interior and the service to get those prices, but it was fun to be there with the place barely open. If the entrees are as good as the salmon caesar we had, it’ll be a popular place.