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Bigger things ahead for Santa Monica’s Chez Jay

Michael Anderson, right, co-owner of Chez Jay, a dive bar and small restaurant on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, chats with Nick Cuneo, sitting at a table with friends. Just steps from the landmark, the city is building a multi-acre park with picnic tables, hills, playgrounds and two steel observation decks with views of the ocean and the pier.

Michael Anderson, right, co-owner of Chez Jay, a dive bar and small restaurant on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, chats with Nick Cuneo, sitting at a table with friends. Just steps from the landmark, the city is building a multi-acre park with picnic tables, hills, playgrounds and two steel observation decks with views of the ocean and the pier.   (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

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At the bar where a circus elephant and the Rat Pack partied -- not at the same time -- a couple clink martini glasses. Their faces glow in the late-afternoon light pouring through a porthole. At Chez Jay in Santa Monica, where big-name Hollywood wined and dined, it might as well be 1966. But change is coming to the tiny dive bar with the king-size reputation. Read story

A funky original

Customers leave Chez Jay on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. Founder Jay Fiondella set rules to make his place a cozy haven: no unauthorized photographs, no autograph hounds.   (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

If the walls could talk

Table 10 has seen a slew of legendary actors, writers and directors. “The Wild Bunch” was conceived by cowboy stuntmen at Chez Jay in the 1960s, and Lee Marvin is said to have ridden his motorcycle in to order a drink. Another time he shared a bloody Mary at the bar with a pet duckling named Sherman.   (Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times)

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