An Ode to the Reel Inn, A Treasured Gathering Place Lost to the LA Fires

Jack Leonard

The first thing you saw was the sign: an arc of three fish fashioned from red neon, blinking from left to right. Centered in blue neon just below: “Reel Inn,” the name of the invitingly ramshackle seafood restaurant it marked for 36 years.

You saw the sign rising along the Pacific Coast Highway at the edge of Los Angeles because you had just gone surfing. Or because you were making the crawl home from work, or visiting the city for the first time, or taking advantage of the pro bono therapy offered by a head-clearing drive along California’s most famous roadway.

Whatever the circumstances, there was the neon, there was the Reel Inn. Some days you stopped in for a platter of fish and chips, a pitcher of pilsner in a room chockablock with maritime esoterica, tangles of Christmas lights, and red-and-white-checked tablecloths. On others, you drove on past, grinning at the handwritten puns posted daily on a board under the main sign: “In Cod We Trust.” “Salmon and Garfunkel.” “Don’t Bass Me By.”

The sign largely survived the fires that began ripping through Los Angeles on Tuesday, January 7, 2025. The rest of the Reel Inn did not. I learned that it had burned down shortly after evacuating from where I was living in Topanga Canyon, which cuts through the Santa Monica Mountains just behind the restaurant in Malibu. Both areas are adjacent to the Pacific Palisades, where the first and largest blaze had broken out that morning. My exit plan had been to drive down to PCH and head north, away from the fire, but I was turned around by a wall of flames blocking the road. I should have known then that the Reel Inn, a mainstay of my diet and occasional prop to my sanity, had already been leveled. But some combination of terror and denial prevented me from metabolizing the idea until 20 minutes later, when I was safe in the Valley and a mobile alert from a local fire safety coalition lit up my phone: Reel Inn – Gone. Those three words marked the first of many moments when shock and fear were joined by grief and mourning.

In this I am hardly alone. The loss of the Reel Inn is today one chapter in the terrible story of unfathomable damages that will reshape the city over the years to come: of lives, of homes, of businesses, of two entire neighborhoods bookending Los Angeles on east and west. It is also among the most collectively felt. In a town famous for its sprawl and lack of cohesion, a place where so much of life unfolds in private silos—in cars, residences, and disparate enclaves separated by extreme topography—the Reel Inn was the sort of spot common in many cities but scarce in this one. Poll the nearly 10 million people who live in Los Angeles County and, for my money, a majority will be familiar with at least the comfort of its funky exterior. To line up inside to order on any given day was to be immersed in how LA is actually experienced, rather than how it’s packaged for television: a group of cops, a family of tourists, a roadwork crew on break, friends running into each other, someone famous, someone still wearing a wetsuit. In a city where it’s easy to feel adrift, the Reel Inn acted not merely as a restaurant but an anchor.

“It was part of the landscape,” said Teddy Leonard, one of its owners, when we spoke this week, two days after she visited the site for the first time since the fires. She’d hoped to recover something of sentimental value. “Nothing,” she told me, describing a grim swath of ash and debris where the restaurant had stood. “Well, nothing except one charred onion and a single bottle of Pacifico that didn’t explode.” She sent a picture of the ash-covered bottle to the beer company, a fitting gesture for a restaurant that understood the value of grit and a good laugh as much as the correct amount of mayo (lots) to make addictive coleslaw. “We’d sold it for 36 years,” she said. “I thought they’d like to know it survived the fire.”

Her husband, Andy, was with her then. The restaurant had been his before it became theirs, first launched in 1986 as a quixotic, semi-accidental lark that took him from working in New York nightclubs to becoming a Californian. “It’s a long story,” he told me, unraveling a saga that somehow involved questionable men from Staten Island, the stock market crash of 1987, his early flirtations with working in LA's rock-and-roll industry, “and a lot of it you can’t print.”

The two hope to rebuild, while being realistic about the hurdles they face. The restaurant sits on land operated by the California State Park system, and its lease had expired just before the blaze, placing them at the entrance to a maze of bureaucracy that will no doubt require years to navigate. However, in visiting the site and seeing that the sign still stands, Andy has begun nursing an idea to offer himself—and the whole of Los Angeles—a dose of immediate solace.

“It is my belief that a person with a lift bucket, a checkbook, and some paint could get the neon restored and the pun board back up without much effort,” he told me, describing the possibility of bringing the now charred sign back to life. “It’s occurred to me to do it myself—for the neighborhood, or really just for a kick in the pants.”

I asked him if he had any puns in mind for such a moment.

“Not yet,” he said. “But we’ll come up with something.”

Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler