‘Sleepy Eyed Dave’ Letchworth was a seminal figure in South Bay dining
Dave Letchworth (right) and long time partner Rafael Solorzano at their Lou E Luey’s Baja Seafood Grill on the International Boardwalk in 2004. Photo
David “Sleepy Eyed Dave” Letchworth was a central figure in the South Bay bar and restaurant business, dating back to the Pier 52 and Schlumpfelder’s bars he owned in downtown Hermosa Beach in the early 1970s. He passed away March 7, at age 78, just five weeks after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
In addition to owning several bars, his restaurants over the past five decades included Pancho & Wong’s, Lou E Luey’s Baja Seafood Grill and Delzano’s by the Sea in King Harbor, and Lunada Bayhouse and Alfredo Garcias in Palos Verdes. The Redondo Beach Chamber of Commerce named him Man of the Year in 1986.
Letchworth grew up on a 300-acre farm outside of Nashville, a childhood, he said in a 2004 Easy Reader interview, that prepared him well for the long hours and variety of skills required of a restaurant owner.
At 22, he and a buddy decided to drive to Florida, by way of Hermosa. His buddy had a cousin in Hermosa. She was the model who ran out of the ocean in the Zest soap commercial, he said.
Letchworth moved into an apartment on Rosecrans Avenue in Manhattan Beach, across the street from The Hatch Cover, a bar famous for it jazz-stocked jukebox. Everyone in the bar had a nickname. Letchworth’s was “Sleepy Eyed Dave.”
One day Tom Wadman, the owner, asked Letchworth if he’d bartend Thursday nights. Letchworth said he didn’t know anything about bartending.
“Tom said to me, ‘Jesus Christ, Sleepy, all you have to do is pull beers, BS with the customers and feed goldfish to Sick’em.’”
Sick’em was the piranha that lived in the aquarium above the back bar.
“I was coordinated with my hands and loved people and was learning to tend bar from real pros,” Letchworth said of his ‘60s days in Manhattan Beach’s North End.
Letchworth is survived by his two children, Kelly Heimdahl and David Jr., and grandchildren, Christopher, Courtney, Kari, Savannah and Jake. A memorial service will be held Sunday, May 7, at 1:30 p.m. at the former Pancho and Wong restaurant, 239 N. Harbor Dr. Redondo Beach.
Dave and Rafael’s Place
(Editor’s note: The following story originally appeared in the January 22, 2004 edition of Easy Reader.)
During the last days of the Waterfront restaurant in King Harbor, its young chef Rafael Solorzano said to his general manager David Letchworth, “Boss, someday we’ve got to do a something together.”
“Absolutely,” Letchworth responded. The exchange wasn’t simply a courteous goodbye.
“I’m a person who eats to live, and not someone who lives to eat. But I was so impressed with Rafael’s cooking that I found myself coming to work early just to sample his daily specials,” Letchworth said.
Letchworth was equally impressed with Rafael’s work ethic.
“Everything at the Waterfront was COD. When there wasn’t enough money in the safe to pay for a delivery. Rafael would go to his ATM, not knowing if he’d ever be paid back. In over 30 years of restaurant work I’d never seen an employee do that,” Letchworth said.
“When I came to this country,” Solorzano said in explanation of his dedication, “I tried carpentry and plumbing. But cooking was my passion from the time I was a child. I was born to be a chef.”
He began peeling potatoes when he was seven years old for his dad, who ran chuck wagons on ranches in his native Jalisco.
In Letchworth, Solorzano saw an experienced front-of-the-house man to complement his kitchen skills.
“I never liked the front of the house. My heart is in making people happy with my cooking,” Solorzano said.
Last August, the veteran general manager and gifted young chef pooled their modest resources to put together, arguably, the most ambitious menu in the most unpretentious location in King Harbor. Letchworth’s and Solorzano’s Lou E Luey’s Baja Seafood Grill occupies the last stall on the International Boardwalk between Naja’s, a bar famous for its 100 beers on tap, and the stairwell leading to the parking garage.
A rapid rise
After Waterfront closed in 1998, Solorzano helped open Senor Fred’s in Sherman Oaks. Owner Andre Guerrero had recognized Solorzano’s talent when Guerrero was the chef at Alice’s restaurant on the Malibu pier and Solorzano was his 16-year-old kitchen helper. When Guerrero left Alice’s in the early 1990s, the 26-year-old Solorzano became the Malibu landmark’s head chef.
At Senor Fred’s he won acclaim for a menu featuring upscale Mexican food, a concept that seemed obvious enough to him, but surprised even veteran food critics.
During a dinner for the Los Angeles Restaurant Writers Association, Los Angeles Times reviewer Barbara Hanson and renowned Mexican cookbook writer Diana Kennedy asked where he got the idea to put New York steak and salmon on a Mexican menu.
“People think Mexican cooking has to be lower class because Mexico is a poor country. In Mexico, you never cook just the chicken breasts. You cook the whole chicken. Butasked.
For someone who came to Los Angeles from Guadalajara when he was 15, and dropped out of Hamilton High School when he was 17, Solorzano had every reason to be content as chef at one of Los Angeles’s hottest new restaurants.
But Solorzano has never been content to be comfortable. After Alice’s restaurant closed, he became the banquet chef at the Brentwood Country Club, but stayed there only a year.
“It was a nice job and paid well. But it was like working in a hotel. It was the same thing every day. There was no challenge. I like a more emotional atmosphere,” he said.
When Letchworth called to say he had found a location and offered a 50-50 partnership, Solorzano didn’t hesitate.
“When it’s yours, working seven days a week is worth it, even though it means I don’t have much time to see my wife and child,’ he said.
‘Sleepy-eyed Dave’
Letchworth’s career path, during the 1990s paralleled Solorano’s rapid rise, but in reverse. His 35-year career is legendary in South Bay restaurant circles for spectacular successes, spectacular excesses and spectacular failures.
Letchworth grew up on a 300-acre farm outside of Nashville, a childhood he says, that prepared him well for the long hours and variety of skills required of a restaurant owner.
“On a farm, you’re up before daylight and in after dark, milking cows, slaughtering them, feeding the chickens, tending the crops, and fixing what’s broken,” he said.
In 1956, at the same age that Solorzano immigrated to Los Angeles, though several decades earlier, Letchworth moved with his family to Stockton, where he picked strawberries and cherries and became president of his high school chapter of the Future Farmers of America.
At the first opportunity, he left home. He joined the Navy and spent four years as a ship’s electrician in the South Pacific.
At 22, he and a buddy decided to drive to Florida, by way of Hermosa. His buddy had a cousin in Hermosa. She was the model who ran out of the ocean in the Zest soap commercial.
Letchworth ran out of money in Hermosa and took a job as a repairman with Pacific Telephone. His apartment on Rosecrans Avenue was across the Street from The Hatch Cover, a bar famous for it jazz-stocked jukebox. Everyone in the bar had a nickname. Letchworth’s was “Sleepy Eyed Dave.”
One day Tom Wadman, the owner, asked Letchworth if he’d work Thursday nights behind the bar. Letchworth said he didn’t know anything about bartending.
“Tom said to me, ‘Jesus Christ, Sleepy, all you have to do is pull beers, BS with the customers and feed goldfish to Sick’em.’”
Sick’em was the piranha that lived in the aquarium above the back bar.
From the Hatchcover, Letchworth went to Pancho’s, when it served Chinese food, and then to the Frigate, the hottest bar at the beach. The southern half the Frigate was in Manhattan Beach and the northern half was in El Porto, an unincorporated section of Los Angeles County. Bar brawls were restricted to the unincorporated section because Manhattan police wouldn’t respond to a call from county territory.
“I was coordinated with my hands and loved people and was learning to tend bar from real pros,” Letchworth said of his ‘60s days in the North End. The handsome farm boy made extra money modeling.
“It was a little more wide open then. Neil Diamond, Ike and Tina Turner and Glenn Campbell were regulars at Cisco’s, which was owned by Clint Eastwood, Dickie Smothers, Lee Majors and a Realtor named Bill Haynes. The cover was a dollar. When they tried a $2 cover for Neil Diamond, everyone boycotted and went across the street to Pancho’s, where a scotch and water was 45 cents.
“Big J McNealy was the house band. He’d walk out of Cisco’s blowing his sax and wander into the bar at Panchos. Then he’d go up the street to the Frigate and when he walked back into Cisco’s he’d be right on beat.”
In 1967, Letchworth became a bar owner when he and two buddies purchased the Breakers (now the Manhattan Beach Bar and Grill) and renamed it the Bourbon Bush.
In 1969 he moved south to Hermosa, where he bought Pier 52 on Pier Avenue. One afternoon a band dropped in and demanded the opportunity to audition. Letchworth reluctantly agreed, then watched in amazement as passersby packed his club.
Red, Wilder, Blue became such a success that Letchworth bought the old Hermosa Inn down the street to showcase the band. Coupled with Thursday night turtle races, Schumplefelder’s helped make downtown Hermosa the new South Bay hot spot.
In 1973, Letchworth moved south again, to the King Harbor Marina as general manager of the Red Onion. Once again, the party followed. The term ‘meat market” may well have been coined to describe the Red Onion under Letchworth’s management. By the end of the decade he had risen in the prosperous Red Onion chain to vice president in charge of operations.
Then in 1981, Redondo Beach Marina master lessee Chuck Johnson asked Letchworth to take over the failing Clark’s, which was owned by a group headed by New York Knick Dave Debusschere. Johnson had owned the Frigate in the early ‘60s when Letchworth bartended there. Clark’s came with a 20-year lease and $450,000 in debt.
“I thought the creditors would be happy with 10 cents on the dollar. But when they heard I was taking over they said, ‘We’ll wait. We know you’ll make it a success.’ The creditors were right.
Letchworth spent $150,000 in 40 days remodeling the restaurant into Pancho and Wong’s.
“After seven years with the Red Onion, I knew something about Mexican food, and I knew about Chinese food from my years at Pancho’s,” Letchworth said.
“What’s the cheapest food to prepare? Mexican. What’s the second cheapest? Chinese. And they use the same ingredients–lots of rice, vegetables and chicken,” he noted.
“One new thing I learned with Pancho and Wong’s,” he said, “is you can train a Mexican chef to cook Chinese, but you can’t train a Chinese chef to cook Mexican.”
Over the next decade, Letchworth used relentless promotions, ranging from Sing Ho De Mayo Days to cocktail waitress races and ‘60s reunions for the erstwhile Frigate crowd to make Pancho’s and Wong’s one of the South Bay’s most successful restaurant-bars.
Then came the 100-year storm of 1988 that destroyed much of the Redondo Pier and King Harbor, including the Portofino Hotel, Reubens and the Blue Moon Saloon. The storm was followed by a fire that burned down the Redondo Horseshoe pier, taking with it two of the area’s biggest draws, Cattleman’s and Castagnola’s Lobster House.
“The marina looked like a war zone, and news accounts of the fire convinced people that the entire place had burned down. For the next two years my wife and I poured money into the restaurant while waiting for the repairs that the city had promised would be done in a year,” Letchworth said.
The time also coincided with Desert Storm, and the collapse of the South Bay aerospace industry. Even large, long successful restaurants such as the Red Onion, Bobby McGhee’s, the Rusty Pelican and Reubens disappeared from the landscape.
The natural and economic assaults were followed by another, even more tragic disaster. On Labor Day weekend in 1990, a Pancho and Wong’s doorman pushed a customer off the patio. The customer landed on his head and died. Letchworth lost Pancho’s and Wong’s, marshals seized his Redondo Beach home, and he spent the next five years in a haze of litigation.
“For a while there, I just existed. I sold pepper spray and skin care products. I tried to drink all the Vodka Russia produced, but I could never catch up. A doctor told me I was suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome,” he said.
His comeback began in 1996, when he returned to the marina as manager of the Blue Moon Saloon. That job led to work at the neighboring Waterfront (formerly Reubens.), where he met a young chef, whom he embarrassingly mistook for a busboy when they were introduced. Solorzano quickly set the white-haired GM straight.
“Raphael would give me notes about the daily special that I was supposed to write up for the menu. But his notes were so eloquent, I told him to write the menu himself,” Letchworth said.
When Waterfront closed, and Solorzano suggested they open their own restaurant, Letchworth began looking for a location.
What he found wasn’t promising, but it was affordable.
Old acquaintances
Redondo Boardwalk master lessor Gordon McCrae Jr.’s dad was the Redondo Marina’s first master lessor. When McCrae Sr. sold his lease to Chuck Johnston, McCrae Jr. stayed on as marina manager. After Johnston died in the early 1980s, McCrae left the Redondo Marina to become master lessee of the neighboring, but considerably less prestigious, Redondo Boardwalk.
A fundamental rule of restaurants, which Letchworth had come up against more than once, is never pour money into a sinking ship. The location McCrae Jr. offered Letchworth had been home to 30 years of sinking Mexican restaurants.
“We weren’t going to make it on the regular boardwalk clientele,” Letchworth said. So he leafleted neighbors in the 800 condominiums that hover over the marina, between Beryl and Torrance Boulevard.
Lou E Louie was a favorite Pancho and Wong’s customer. Rather than call their restaurant Mexican, Letchworth appended the name with the trendier, more upscale Baja Seafood Grill.
He squeezed in seating for 50 by designing tiny tables and planned to serve the food in baskets so there wouldn’t be dishes to wash. There wasn’t room in the kitchen for a dishwashing machine.
Shortly before opening, Solorzano showed up with a trunk full of fine China.
“He said his food was too good to serve in baskets,” Letchworth said.
“I told Rafael if he’d cook, I’d seat the guests, serve the food, mop the floors and bus the tables. But I don’t do dishes,’” Letchworth said.
The restaurant opened on Aug. 1 and Letchworth did everything he said he’d do. And he washed dishes.
“I’d seat a party of four, then I’d run in the back and wash four plates, and come out with my Hawaiian shirt dripping with sweat to seat the next party,” Letchworth recalled.
That first month, three quarters of the people who walked in walked back out when they learned Lou E Luey’s didn’t have a liquor license.
Their beer and wine license was approved on Labor Day weekend and the following month they were able to afford a professional dishwasher. By the end of the third month their revenue had surpassed the best 12 months ever previously reported at the troubled location.
“Everyone warned us that in November, business on the boardwalk goes into hibernation. But November was our best month and December even better,” Letchworth said.
Many of the condominium neighbors come several nights a week. The most expensive dinner–pan fried pepper crusted New York steak with grilled red onions and mushrooms, served with chipotle garlic mashed potatoes–is $14, roughly half the price it would be at a more prestigious location. Most dinners are $11 or less, including pollo en mole and mole enchiladas, featuring Solorzano’s 20-ingredient recipe for the traditional chili and dark chocolate sauce.
“I get them in the door, Rafael’s food makes sure they come back,” Letchworth said. ER