Legends, lore in Half Moon Bay
Drive south on Highway 1. When you reach Half Moon Bay, keep your eye out for Magellan Avenue. The small byway is easy to miss — and the watering hole at its terminus, the Miramar Beach Restaurant, would be easy to overlook: small and pink, engulfed by muddy pools of sand this time of year, it doesn’t quite strike the pose of the hulking oceanfront inns that surround it.
Being just barely off the beaten path was exactly how Maymie Cowley, its onetime owner, liked it.
Redheaded and strongwilled, Cowley ran this place from 1918 to 1955. Records indicate the roadhouse went by many other names — the Ocean Beach Hotel, Ocean Beach Tavern, Ocean View Cafe, El Granada. What’s clear is that it was the most fun place to be on this stretch of the Pacific coastline: a
purveyor of alcohol during Prohibition, a port for rum runners and a bordello.
“Madam Cowley was definitely the boss,” says Gabe Whelan, the restaurant’s current owner. “She got into knife fights at other bars, so you can just imagine what this place was like.”
San Mateo County was a hub of activity during Prohibition, allegedly with the highest density of bars in the U.S. during those years. The Aug. 20, 1926, edition of The Chronicle lists Maymie Cowley’s El Granada among 14 Bay Area “resorts” suspected of selling liquor.
In that era of temperance, the roadhouse was raided several times. The restaurant still contains secret compartments, of the “push this cabinet and it becomes a revolving door” variety. In 1924, The Chronicle reported a “battle of knives” in which roadhouse employee Daniel McIsaac faced off against an undercover agent working for California’s Prohibition director and an apparently vigilante “Prohibition informer.” According to The Chronicle, the three were “drinking freely” and ultimately “were cut in several places, but only superficially.”
Upstairs were 10 small rooms, each with a sink, toilet, hat rack (very important) and bell system, which apparently enabled a sort of room service from the kitchen downstairs. (The rooms have since been converted to offices.) There’s no evidence of a password requirement, but misspelled menu items on the facade of the restaurant — “scollops,” “prongs” — served as an invitation to interested clients. “The misspellings were a signal to potential johns that prostitutes were available inside,” says general manager Sheri Lewis, who has worked at the Miramar since 1990.
Madam Cowley herself lived in those diminutive quarters for about 40 years. She moved across the hill around 1955, after a burglar broke into her bedroom and attacked her. “Woman, 80, Fights Burglar in Room Over Her Tavern,” read The Chronicle’s headline. That night, she had retired from the bar to her room in the early hours of the morning — a night owl even at 80 — and found a man, his face masked with a handkerchief, standing by her bed. He shot a gun at the wall, broke Cowley’s glasses, choked her and stole $75 from her cigar box, leaving her with, according to the paper, “nose and shoulder injuries.”
That may have been the end of Madam Cowley’s tenure at the Miramar — and it’s unclear what sort of business she had been running in the two decades since repeal, when at least one (but certainly not both) of her establishment’s two revenue sources had become much less illicit.
Today, the Miramar is owned by Mark Jamplis and Gabe Whelan, whose Whelan Capital Management — a major investor in Popeye’s and Timbuk2 bags — bought the restaurant out of bankruptcy in 1990.
The property’s history was not on Whelan’s mind then; “it was more about a financial opportunity,” he admits. “There was zero around here when we got into this deal — no homes, no businesses,” Whelan says of Half Moon Bay 27 years ago. It took Whelan six years to persuade the Coastal Commission to approve a patio expansion; he doubts they would approve it today.
Miramar may not feel like it did under Cowley’s tutelage, but its endearing kitschiness nevertheless transports to a bygone era. A Sun Chief slot machine (25 cents to play) still stands in display; framed photographs of the Cowley era dot the walls like paintings in a museum. The restaurant’s palette of stained glass, dark wood and white tablecloths — against the backdrop of live piano by local musician Terry Disley (Thursday through Sunday) — may not suggest Prohibition, but they seem to recall a different time in the life of Half Moon Bay: more staid, less flashy.
The contemporary fad for “Prohibition-era” libations — borne out in full force in San Francisco’s precious, craft cocktail bars — has been lost on Miramar, which instead offers piña coladas, lemon drops and margaritas. Martinis come in flavors like “Chocolate-Tini,” “Washington Apple-Tini” and “Miramar Pomegranate-Tini.” Many drinks are blue.
But hey, the Bay Area loves its tiki drinks. And we certainly have a fondness for old-school, hopelessly unfashionable seafood dishes like crab and shrimp Louie, oysters Rockefeller or chilled seafood cocktail — a few of the Miramar’s specialties.
Prohibition, after all, has become something of a fetish for San Francisco’s drink culture. You can sneak into Wilson & Wilson or Marianne’s, or participate in the immersive theater experience of “Speakeasy.” Heck, just order Speakeasy brewery’s Prohibition Ale. At bars like Devil’s Acre and Local Edition, you can pay upwards of $15 for a drink that tastes like it might have been repurposed from the medicine cabinet.
Or you can go to the Miramar, sit by a firepit on the patio, order a Blue Pacific and some fried calamari with tartar sauce and imagine the redheaded madam welcoming the rum runners into her harbor.