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Tag: Dovalis 101 Ranch House

  • September 30th in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1971, the following ad ran in the Long Beach Independent for the Ranch House Restaurant.

    The ad offered fine dining and entertainment by Bill Clark, a pianist and organist who sang and played pop hits and Broadway showtunes at various local Long Beach restaurants like The Embers, Alexander’s, Lucy’s, and Hoefly’s.

    The Ranch House Restaurant was once known as the Dovalis 101 Ranch House Cafe, and you can see and learn more about its long history by clicking on this July 20, 1940 post, this December 16, 1941 post on the Dovalis Ranch House Cafe doing its bit for the war effort in the weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack, this May 24, 1963 post about the restaurant’s brief time as The Eddie Bush Mauna Kea, this August 3, 1967 post covering the 101 Ranch House’s Greek period under the Smyrniotis family, and finally this May 6, 1975 post reminding good sons and daughters to make early reservations for Mother’s Day.
    – Michael Dobkins

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  • July 20th in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1940, the Long Beach Independent ran this ad for the Dovalis 101 Ranch House Cafe. We’ve posted 101 Ranch House ads before, but this one is from very early in its history, coming only three weeks after the the restaurant’s grand opening on June 28th.

    The new restaurant was owned by Nick Dovalis, a Greek immigrant who was born in Sparta in the Attika province on Christmas day in 1886. The 1930 census lists Dovalis as having immigrated to the United States in 1924, but other historical records show a Nick Dovalis working in the confectionary trade in the country much earlier. Maybe there was more than one Nick Dovalis working as a confectioner, but it seems unlikely.

    The earliest notice of Nick Dovalis is from 1909 in a brief newspaper story about his selling his half of the Olympia Candy Co. in Austin, Minnesota to his business partner. Next Nick Dovalis shows up in 1913 to marry Ethel Dellert in Iowa, and then Ethel Dovalis shows up in the Muskogee, Oklahoma 1917 city directory married to confectioner Nick Dovalis who later registers for the draft in 1917. Finally in 1922, a Nick Dovalis without an Ethel, is listed in the Long Beach city directory as working at a soda fountain on Pine Avenue.

    Restless Nick Dovalis may not have settled down permanently with Ethel, but he did settle down in Southern California for the rest of his life. At some point in the thirties, he open a Long Beach restaurant named the Olympia (just like the candy company) at Ocean Avenue and American Avenue (now Long Beach Boulevard).

    One intriguing tidbit about this period is that the Coca-Cola company once filed an injunction against Dovalis in 1932 for selling his own soda formula in his shop under the trademarked brand name of Coca-Cola. He was later fined $250 and given a suspended sentence in 1934 for ignoring the injunction against his selling more of his own special “Coca-Cola” mix.

    Dovalis expanded his restaurant empire by opening the Dovalis 101 Ranch House Cafe (one hopes with legitimate brand name sodas) on Pacific Coast Highway at 16th Street. Seal Beach must have agree with him because he bought a home on 13th Street and lived there until his death in 1967. The 101 Ranch House stayed in business until the mid-seventies.

    You can find more posts on the Ranch House and its location by clicking on these links:

    May 6, 1975
    May 24, 1963
    August 3, 1967
    September 30, 1971
    December 16, 1941

    – Michael Dobkins

    Have you enjoyed this and other This Date in Seal Beach History posts?

    If so, please consider making a small donation of a dollar or more to help defray the online subscriptions and other research costs that make this blog possible.

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  • May 24th in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1963, an ad ran in the Long Beach Independent for Seal Beach’s Hawaiian themed restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway.

    No, not Sam’s Seafood. This restaurant was The Eddie Bush Mauna Kea and was located at 1600 Pacific Coast Highway. 

    Readers of this blog might remember that this was the address for the Dovalis 101 Ranch House. The original owner Nick Dovalis launched the restaurant in 1940 as covered in this post.  In late 1963, Bill Smyrniotis and his brothers took over what was now known as the 101 Ranch House and introduced a Greek flair to the menu and live entertainment as recounted in this post.

    But briefly between Dovalis and Smyrniotis, Mr. and Mrs. Don Chandler owned the restaurant with entertainer Eddie Bush, and it was remodeled into Hawaiian themed restaurant. It had three nightly floor shows (except for Mondays) featuring island music by the Wally Palmeira Trio (Wally Palmeira, Ronnie Salci, and George Kainapau), co-owner and then Seal Beach resident Eddie Bush, and two Tahitian dancers.

    Perhaps the location was bad or the restaurant was underfinanced, but the last mention of Eddie Bush Mauna Kea was in early July 1963 — a bare four months after its soft launch on March 1st. By November, Eddie Bush was performing at Mr. C’s on Pacific Coast Highway.

    This is not surprising. Eddie Bush had been a fixture of the Long Beach Hawaiian music scene for years before the ill-fated Mauna Kea, performing mostly at The Hawaiian a few blocks east of the traffic circle. His show biz career spread much wider and including radio, movies, and television. He died in Long Beach in 1969 at age fifty-eight.

    Here’s an Eddie Bush recording from a couple decades before Mauna Kea.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg3SQymlL3k]

    After Eddie Bush and Bill Smyrniotis, there would be a variety of new owners, and the restaurant would come to be known as simply the Ranch House Restaurant for most of the seventies before being renamed Rum Runners. Rum Runners lasted through the eighties before the owners declared bankruptcy in 1989. The building was demolished in May 1992.

    – Michael Dobkins

    Have you enjoyed this and other This Date in Seal Beach History posts?

    If so, please consider making a small donation of a dollar or more to help defray the online subscriptions and other research costs that make this blog possible.

    Donations can be made securely with most major credit cards directly through PayPal. Just click on paypal.me/MichaelDobkins to go to PayPal. Thank you.

    This Date in Seal Beach History also has an online store hosted at Cafepress where you can order shirts, tote bags, stationery, and other gift items imprinted with vintage Seal Beach images. Visit the online store by clicking here.