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<\/p>\nFor nearly a century, Pea Soup Andersen\u2019s served millions of bowls of steaming nourishment to generations of road-trippers traveling through California\u2019s Central Coast, helping put the small town of Buellton on the map.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t just the food. In a roadside culture of corporate hamburgers and gas station minimarts, the ubiquitous billboards and small-time charms of Pea Soup Andersen\u2019s provided a great distraction for commuters and family vacationers.<\/p>\n
But the landmark that created many memories is experiencing a humiliating end.<\/p>\n
The Scandinavia-inspired restaurant abruptly closed in 2024, with locals and visitors mourning the loss of the roadside institution with its kitschy gift shop and parking-lot mascots Hap-Pea and Pea-Wee. <\/p>\n
Then vandals started attacking the empty restaurant.<\/p>\n
The defacement of the storied restaurant ranged from ketchup and mustard sprayed across the dining room to thieves pillaging the building for its copper wires and pipes, destroying artifacts that locals had hoped to preserve in the process. <\/p>\n
The vandalism became such a problem that city officials last week voted to raze a section of the building even though a new project for the site is not yet in the works. It is not clear when the demolition will begin. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe public safety concerns reached a point where we just couldn\u2019t wait anymore,\u201d City Manager Scott Wolfe told The Times in an interview this week. He\u2019s afraid, he said, of \u201cwaking up one morning to a call from the police department saying someone had died in the building or that it had burned to the ground.\u201d <\/p>\n
City leaders have faced urgent, yet somewhat competing, priorities: addressing safety concerns at the vacant restaurant and preserving a piece of the city\u2019s history. <\/p>\n
In 1924, Denmark-born chef Anton Andersen and his wife, Juliette, purchased a plot of land \u2014 formerly a horse and cattle ranch and dairy farm \u2014 to start their roadside restaurant. The eatery was called Andersen\u2019s Electric Cafe in honor of the couple\u2019s prized possession, an electric stove. <\/p>\n
By 1928, the couple decided to build a hotel and dining room to expand their popular cafe, which they renamed the Bueltmore \u2014 a play on words in honor of Anton\u2019s experience helping open the Los Angeles Biltmore. <\/p>\n
Juliette, who was from France, created several of the restaurant\u2019s most popular dishes, including the famed split pea soup. As demand for the green goodness increased, the couple eventually proclaimed the restaurant \u201cThe Home of Split Pea Soup,\u201d a slogan it carried for decades. The couple\u2019s son took over the business and, in 1947, renamed it \u201cPea Soup Andersen\u2019s.\u201d <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The sign in front of Andersen\u2019s in 2009. <\/p>\n
(George Rose \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n
For years, the business, located on Highway 246 near the 101 Freeway, attracted traveling salesmen, truck drivers, tourists and those looking for a place to stop for a meal between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It was so successful that then-owner Vince Evans opened a second location in Santa Nella in 1976. That restaurant is still operating. <\/p>\n
But the Buellton location\u2019s business declined, and it shuttered abruptly in January 2024. Developer Ed St. George purchased the three-acre property for $4.95 million several months later.<\/p>\n
Wolfe moved to the city in 2019 and can\u2019t recall ever seeing the restaurant\u2019s parking lot more than about one-third full. When he\u2019d visit for a meal, he never had to wait, and the restaurant was never bustling as it had been decades earlier.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there was a general decline,\u201d he said. \u201cI mean, how many people these days say, \u2018I really wish I had a bowl of pea soup\u2019? Times have changed, tastes have changed, and it was something from a past era.\u201d<\/p>\n
When the restaurant hit the market in 2020, Wolfe said he came up with the idea to designate the eatery as a historic landmark. It was a way, he said, to help give the City Council some ability to review what\u2019s eventually built on the site. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we didn\u2019t want was a very traffic-intensive, non-unique, cookie-cutter kind of development there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Last week, the City Council voted unanimously to strip the site of the city\u2019s local historic designation, allowing much of the former restaurant to be demolished. The city plans to store several artifacts from the building that have historical significance or hold community importance, including the rooftop signage and the blue stained-glass windows that, for years, greeted customers driving up to the restaurant. <\/p>\n
Under the plan approved by the council, the original Bueltmore Hotel portion of the property \u2014 a section identified as being eligible for listing on the state\u2019s historic registry \u2014 will remain standing. <\/p>\n
But much of what officials wanted to preserve from the site has already been destroyed or stolen. <\/p>\n
Thieves stripped every inch of copper from the site, including the copper countertop officials had hoped to preserve and the copper cladding on the booths. Recently, a thief with a hacksaw destroyed the 1930s-era light fixtures to access the copper wiring, Wolfe said.<\/p>\n
The problems started soon after the restaurant closed. <\/p>\n
First there was the group that discovered \u2014 and emptied \u2014 mustard and ketchup bottles all over the restaurant. Then, Wolfe said, people started sleeping inside the eatery. <\/p>\n
The overnight stays were briefly interrupted when the property owner began allowing the local sheriff department\u2019s SWAT team to use the building for training. \u201cThey were surprised one morning when the doors were blown off the hinges,\u201d Wolfe said. <\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Exterior signage welcomes guests to the Buellton location of Pea Soup Andersen\u2019s in 2017.<\/p>\n
(Stephanie Breijo \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
\u201cBut over time, they would come back,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
The owner has put up fences, boarded up windows and doors and tried to barricade the building, but with so many entrances, it\u2019s proved a challenge to secure.<\/p>\n
Curiosity about the state of the building got the better of Councilmember John Sanchez, who said he visited the site before the July 9 meeting. <\/p>\n
\u201cI appreciate the expedience,\u201d Sanchez told staff during the meeting. \u201cI actually went in there today. I trespassed. The door was kicked down.\u201d<\/p>\n
The closed restaurant has also attracted urban explorers who take videos of the interiors of shuttered sites and post them online. Earlier this year, officials in Orange County faced a similar problem when people broke into the closed Westminster Mall to tag empty storefronts and film the abandoned spaces for posterity or purported signs of paranormal activity. <\/p>\n
Much like the Westminster Mall, the interior of Pea Soup Andersen\u2019s is now a sea of broken glass. At one point, someone started a fire inside the building. <\/p>\n
At night, people have gone into the restaurant, seemingly with impunity, due to the size of the site and the secluded nature of the area, Wolfe said.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce you\u2019re in the building, no one can hear you, and you can go to town with your hacksaws and your wire cutters and everything else,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s just no way to stop it.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For nearly a century, Pea Soup Andersen\u2019s served millions of bowls of steaming nourishment to generations of road-trippers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":403392,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[4188,387,7,9,8,1409,2798,59351,133656,63,23339,159189,22273,161821,3231,8041,161822,72],"class_list":["post-403391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-building","tag-business","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-city","tag-couple","tag-dining-room","tag-eatery","tag-los-angeles-times","tag-many-people","tag-pea-soup-andersen","tag-problem","tag-roadside-restaurant","tag-site","tag-thief","tag-wolfe","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403391\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/403392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}