The Seattle Seahawks lost a key member of the front office to the Minnesota Vikings, as the NFC North team named Nolan Teasley its new general manager. The hire could change the fortunes of both teams in the immediate future.

Teasley will be taking over a Vikings team that isn’t far away from contending. One of the key reasons the team fired former GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah wasn’t that he couldn’t build a collection of talent, but that he didn’t seem to understand how to get the best possible answer at the most important position in sports: Quarterback.

Vikings fans watched as former QB1 in Minnesota, Sam Darnold, signed with the Seahawks last offseason, and then followed that by helping lead his team to a Super Bowl victory. That was Seattle’s second title. Minnesota has never won a Super Bowl.

Minnesota Vikings hire Nolan Teasley from the Seattle Seahawks

Teasley, though, has the experience and, clearly, the ability to create an environment in which a team will thrive. He has been working with general manager John Schneider in Seattle since 2013, and has worked in scouting and been the director of pro personnel. He has most recently served as Schneider’s assistant GM.

Schneider could very well be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame one day after leading the Seahawks to two Super Bowl wins. Still, with teams with two completely different rosters and coaching staffs (Schneider is the only GM to ever do that), Teasley would have learned at the knee of one of the best to ever perform general manager duties.

Nolan Teasley could also be entering a situation where his new team is already poised to make a deep run in the playoffs. Minnesota finished 9-8 last season despite the fact that its quarterback play was among the worst in the NFL. This offseason, the Vikings signed Kyler Murray.

Murray underwhelmed or was injured throughout his career with the Arizona Cardinals, as Seattle Seahawks fans know well due to their favorite team counting on two wins every season against the NFC West brethren, but under the wise direction of Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell, Murray could be coaxed into playing a much better form of football.

As the Minnesota Vikings play in the NFC, and could potentially be a difficult obstacle for the Seahawks to repeat as Super Bowl champions, Teasley is already in a good spot. The issue for Seattle is that Teasley is smart enough to make moves to get Minnesota even better well into the future. A great rivalry between Seattle and the Vikings might be about to start.

This is the first installment in a series of stories on the history of dining out in La Jolla, how it’s changed and how it continues to evolve.

It’s hard to imagine La Jolla without its restaurants, from the lines stretching down the block at The Taco Stand to the iconic views at George’s at the Cove.

But the way La Jollans eat and where has changed dramatically since the area’s founding in the 1800s.

In this first part of the new month-long series “Dining Out,” the La Jolla Light looks at local restaurants from the 1880s (when La Jolla was first developed and settled) to the early 1920s.

“La Jolla had very few people at that time,” according to local historian Carol Olten. “There weren’t a lot of restaurants, as far as we know.”

Olten said she gets information about La Jolla’s earliest days from the diaries of local pioneer Anson Mills.

“He kept track of where he went and what he did … but he did a lot of home cooking,” she said. “So when they went to a restaurant for dinner, it was a big occasion. It was something people mainly did on holidays or … a social occasion.”

One restaurant Mills would go to — believed to be one of the first in La Jolla — was Montezuma Cottage. Olten said it is believed to have opened in 1895 near the intersection of Prospect and Jenner streets.

Mills described the restaurant as a popular eating and gathering spot for locals and tourists, Olten said. He wrote an entry about a Thanksgiving dinner there with about 60 people.

Montezuma Cottage later became known as the Seaside Inn and Ocean View restaurant. It was torn down in 1931.

Culturally, eating at a restaurant was a more formal occasion at the time, Olten said.

“You didn’t go to a restaurant just to hang out with friends like you would today. It was purposeful then,” she said.

Around 1900, a restaurant known as the White Rabbit opened near the corner of Girard Avenue and Prospect Street. In addition to a rooftop garden, it featured a tea room, joining a national trend.

“Tea rooms went with the suffragette movement because in those days, [women] didn’t have a place to gather without an escort, so tea rooms started opening in hotels and women could go there and sit down and have a social tea or lunch,” Olten said. “La Jolla got in on the tail end of that thanks to [Green Dragon Colony founder] Anna Held and [La Jolla philanthropist] Ellen Browning Scripps.”

One of them, called The Cricket, opened in the early 1900s with white tablecloths. Olten said it was near what it is now Eddie V’s restaurant.

“It was originally part of the Green Dragon Colony … and was sold to a British woman named Daisy Mitchell,” she said. “It stayed a tea room for many years, and she kept a guest book that was decorated with reds and greens and had a medieval theme. So it was very British.”

Joining a trend toward more upscale dining, one of La Jolla’s “most well-established and well-known restaurants” opened in 1912 at 1227 Prospect St. The Brown Bear had “stylish, fashionable service and a menu to please the gods,” Olten said.

A house specialty was Welsh rabbit served in a silver chafing dish. The restaurant was in operation until 1941.

Several restaurants opened around 1915, about the same time as the Panama-California Exposition, a world’s fair-type event held in 1915-16 that brought 3.7 million people to San Diego.

One of La Jolla’s new restaurants, the Spindrift Inn, opened in 1916 and was considered a “last stop” out of town.

“Most restaurants at that time were located in the immediate Village area,” Olten said. “The one that was astray would have been the Spindrift Inn [in La Jolla Shores]. This was in the very early days of automobiles, so not very many people had cars, but those that did would … drive their cars and the last stop before you got out of town was Spindrift Inn.”

The Spindrift Inn later became The Marine Room, which still stands.

Olten said the restaurant was operated by the Hannay family for about 20 years. Their “rambunctious” fox terrier, Jiggs, would roam the dining room.

Another Expo-era restaurant was the Dining Car, which operated in an old trolley car parked near Goldfish Point. Dinner was $2 per person. It burned down on Halloween night in 1923.

Next installment: With new hotels being built in La Jolla in the 1920s came new hotel restaurants. But later, World War II would have an impact on La Jollans and San Diegans in general and on where and how they ate. ♦