Despite Its Outstanding Chili and Palms, the ‘Best’ Cafe in the World

May Have to Close After 25 Years

Cigar-chomping Art Coopman, 75, opened his Twin Palms Cafe in Westminster 25 years ago selling hamburgers, home-made chili and cold beer, and nothing has changed since.

Especially the chili. “My customers tell me it’s the best chili in the world,” said Coopman, who came from Belgium in 1925. “I don’t give the recipe to no one.”

Customer Jack Schubel of Stanton, downing a beer, stopped short of calling it world-class chili but said, “It’s the best in town.”

Coopman, who shops daily for fresh hamburger meat at a nearby supermarket for his 11 a.m.-to-7 p.m. business (closed Sundays), chimed in: “You tell everyone we have the best hamburgers and cheeseburgers in the world.” After 3 p.m. he mostly sells beer, “the coldest in the world,” he boasted.

He also sells hot dogs, meat loaf, chili, potato salad his sister makes, and bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches, “the best in the world,” he said. It’s also his complete menu.

He caters to much of the same small crowd, selling about 40 hamburgers each day, and that’s good because he only has four tables, a bar with 12 stools and a pool table. That’s it.

What he doesn’t have is a lease. “I never had a lease in all that time,” he said. “I just pay the rent and keep opening. If they kick me out, they kick me out. Sometimes I wish they’d close me.”

Coopman said the land and building he rents on a month-to-month basis is up for sale.

Longtime customer Walter Gove of Westminster, who was drinking a cold brew at the bar, said he threw beer bottles through the windows of Coopman’s first cafe a block away to celebrate the move to the Twin Palms 25 years ago. He doesn’t like the idea of another closing. “This is like family here,” he said. “Now he’s getting kids of his older customers.”

The likable Coopman feels everyone is his friend. “In all those years we only had to call the police twice,” he said. “Nobody’s a stranger in this place. You come here once, you always come back.”

Coopman said he named the business after the two tall palm trees that frame his business. “They’re the tallest in Orange County and maybe in the world,” he said.

And the pickled eggs in a five-gallon jar? “They’re the best in the world,” he said. His meat loaf, too.

After Carlos Romo, 18, of Brea, was named National Youth of the Year by the Boys Club of America, President Reagan invited him to the Oval Office, prompting a less-than-shy Romo to ask, “Mr. President, would you mind if I sat in your chair?” Romo said the President, not shy himself, replied, “Go ahead, and do some of the work while you’re at it.”

Five years ago on Oct. 14, the family threw a big celebration for the 70th wedding anniversary of Bessie Hubbs, 92, and Albert Hubbs, 93, of Leisure World in Laguna Hills, but this year their 75th anniversary gathering will be for the immediate family.

“Five years ago I talked about how couples should never neglect each other, their friends and children, and nothing has really changed since then,” said Bessie, who continues to spend much of her time cooking for her husband and others in the retirement community.

She says they are still living “a perfectly normal life, but it seems people these days are rushing, rushing, rushing. We shouldn’t be doing that.”

Lesley Vleerick, 33, of Anaheim, a competitive hog caller for 10 years, won third place at the Los Angeles County Fair but pledged, “Next year will be my year.” She also said she wouldn’t mind getting married “but no one wants to marry a hog caller.”

Acknowledgments--Edward R. Roberts, recently retired superintendent of Central County Regional Occupational Program in Garden Grove, was selected over candidates from across the nation for the Career Excellence Award by Ohio State University’s National Center for Research in Vocational Education.