Joe Jost’s Is Still a Cut Above Most Bars

Wally Joyner has just parked one, rapping a home run over the right field fence at Boston’s Fenway Park during the second game of the American League Championship series and sending the lunchtime bar crowd into a table-thumping frenzy, but the boys in the back room hardly look up.

While the cheers explode on the other side of the door, they continue to poke balls gingerly around on the snooker table, not missing a stroke, playing a delicate and defensive variation of the game called golf.

This is, after all, lunchtime, and they are the lunchtime golf crowd, and this is Joe Jost’s, the tavern-goer’s never-never land. Getting too worked up about something as transitory as the American League playoffs would be bad form in a bar where time stopped somewhere around 1935.

‘We Don’t Change’

In understanding the enduring appeal of Joe Jost’s, at age 62 the oldest bar in Long Beach, it helps to know that the invoice for the first delivery of beer to the place after the repeal of Prohibition is still kept behind the bar. It also helps to know that the man who delivered the suds is still a customer.

“We’re sort of an enigma here,” said Ken Buck, 36, who manages the place. “We don’t change. And people nowadays appreciate that. They like a feeling of permanence. This is a place where your grandfather probably took your father and your father took you and someday you’re going to take your own son.”

Buck has a feel for such things. He is the grandson of the founder, the Hungarian immigrant for whom the tavern is named. His mother and uncle own it. It has been a family business since the beginning.

Joe Jost’s originally was a barber shop where Joe, then a barber, began serving sandwiches and root beer to his patrons during the Prohibition years. After the repeal of Prohibition, he started serving beer in hefty schooner glasses. But health department regulations forced a choice: Either cut hair or serve food and beer. Joe hung up the shears forever.

Aged Familiarity

Today, Joe Jost’s wears a rich patina of aged familiarity. The floor is worn smooth in places, particularly around the pool tables and in front of the taps, where generations of regulars have paced. The dark brown wood of the booths has been etched with initials, refinished and etched again. The wooden bar rail hasn’t had a splinter in it in decades. The original facing barber mirrors and the gas steam tables remain in use.

The place is often filled with customers who are drawn by the heady smell of a three-item order that is called for this way: “Gimme a schooner, a special and an egg.” The schooner is 20 ounces of the house draft, a special is a Joe’s Special Sandwich (Polish sausage on rye with pickle, Swiss and mustard), and an egg is pickled on the premises, aged for a week and served up on a bed of pretzels with jalapeno peppers. The entire order costs $3.25.

In a typical month, Buck said, Joe Jost’s will sell about 20,000 schooners, 12,000 eggs and 10,000 sandwiches.

While the tavern has been, throughout the years, a mostly male enclave, now businesswomen are regular customers. At the two peak business periods each day--lunchtime and after work--men and women in business suits often sit at tables sharing a schooner with workers in baseball caps or with retirees who have made Joe Jost’s a daily stop.

“We get families in here on the weekends constantly,” commented Dan Smith, 25, who has tended bar here for four years. “That’s probably the nicest thing, being able to bring your kids here. I think in four years I’ve seen two fights here and they didn’t come to anything. The place has character. “

Ken Buck opened a second Joe Jost’s in 1979 in downtown Long Beach at the corner of Pine Avenue and 5th Street, designed mainly to cater to the lunchtime crowd. While he says it has been successful, there still is an unspoken assumption among most Long Beach natives that when one speaks of Joe Jost’s one means the little brown bar just off the corner of Anaheim Street and Temple Avenue. The one with the root beer sign still over the door. The one that will probably be there when Wally Joyner’s grandson is knocking them over the right field fence at Fenway.

“You walk down this street 10 years from now,” Buck said, “and everything’s going to be different except us. People come here and put their finger down on the table and they say, ‘I’m home again.’ ”

Joe Jost’s , 2803 E. Anaheim, Long Beach. (213) 439-5446.