Dining Out — series Part 1: A look at the evolution of La Jolla’s restaurant scene

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. ♦