Restaurant Has Its Work Cut Out in Sign Spat With Solana Beach

For the past couple of years, the folks at Coast Carbo Station, a Solana Beach eatery popular with local bodybuilders and triathletes, have livened up the sidewalk in front of the place with an amusing gimmick.

Sketched on a piece of plywood is a cartoon of a muscle man and a bikini-clad woman, complete with cutout faces so passers-by can poke their heads in place and pretend they’re a beach bombshell or the second coming of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Solana Beach city officials, however, have failed to get the joke.

Last month, a city code-enforcement officer tagged the restaurant for the portable billboard, saying it violates city sign laws and should be removed. The $100 citation irked the restaurant owners, Kevin Dodson and Charlie Terhune, who have vowed to fight City Hall.

The pair say they plan to argue their case in Vista Municipal Court when the citation goes before a judge in about a month, hoping to show that their humorous plywood cutout should not be hammered down by the law.

“The city’s just flexing their muscles and getting everyone upset,” said Dodson, a weightlifting aficionado who has hardly had time to pump a barbell since opening the busy business three years ago. “I think it’s really stupid. The city is in no way, shape or form showing any good faith or willingness to deal with the business community on this.”

Dodson contends that the plywood piece, which does not bear the restaurant’s name, hardly constitutes a sign. But city officials maintain

that the hand-painted billboard does indeed fit the legal description for sandwich boards and other portable signs, which are forbidden in Solana Beach.

City Atty. Dan Hentschke acknowledges that he enjoys the humor of the plywood cutout, but argues that it conveys “an advertising message” because the buxom beach girl is holding a sandwich platter and the muscle man is balancing a shake on a flexed biceps. Nutritional shakes and deli sandwiches are prominent menu items at Coast Carbo Station.

Moreover, the cutout qualifies as an attention-getting device intended to lure potential patrons to the lunch spot, much like pennants and whirligigs at a used-car lot, he said.

Nonetheless, the attorney said he sees significant room for compromise, suggesting that the billboard might be allowed to stay if the milkshake were eliminated and the sandwich replaced by a beach ball, freeing the billboard of any hint of advertising.

Maybe a Bolt Would Do

Other city officials, meanwhile, have suggested that the sign be bolted to the ground so it qualifies as a permanent fixture.

“I’d like to think we can have a reasonable meeting of the minds,” Hentschke said. “Obviously, the city has an interest in prohibiting the proliferation of sandwich-board signs, which can really clutter up an area and cause problems for pedestrians; but, on the other hand, we don’t really want to infringe on anyone’s freedom of artistic expression.”

The restaurant owners, however, are in no mood for compromise.

Dodson said he and Terhune got the idea for the billboard from a little oyster bar in Atlantic City. Since it was unveiled two years ago, their own sign has become something of a fixture on the landscape along the coast highway.

About a month ago, however, a code-enforcement officer marched into Coast Carbo Station at the height of the lunch hour and, as befuddled employees and patrons looked on, wrote up a ticket for the plywood cutout as well as an illegal banner stretched across the restaurant out front, Dodson said.

Dodson and Terhune were puzzled by the sudden crackdown. It seems that the city, two years after incorporating, finally got around to gearing up its sign enforcement effort, and the result was a rash of tickets and warnings for businesses throughout the community.

What’s the Attraction?

As a show of good faith, Dodson and Terhune pulled in the banner and voluntarily removed a nonconforming pole sign, which they hope to eventually replace with something that meets city standards.

But the restaurant owners flatly refused to pull in the cartoon billboard. As they see it, city officials are stretching things by saying the cutout qualifies as a sign.

“It doesn’t say, ‘We have the coldest beer in town!’ or ‘C’mon in for today’s special!’ ” Dodson said. “How can it be considered an attraction-gathering device?”

He said that any subtle advertising message in the billboard is certainly less flagrant than the wine and beer labels emblazoned on umbrellas at alfresco eateries throughout the region.

Moreover, Dodson is loath to begin altering the cutout, arguing that simply eliminating the shake and sandwich would amount to tampering with the original work of the artist. Bolting it in place, meanwhile, would simply invite vandalism, he said.

Since the beginning, the billboard has been as much an attraction for people who don’t patronize the business as for those who do, he said.

“When people are on vacation--and this is a vacation community--it’s nice to have those little remembrances of your trip,” Dodson said. “A day doesn’t go by that people don’t pose by it or come in and ask us to hold the camera for them.

“Parents hold their babies so the head sticks out from the big guy. We’ve had three or four people send us Christmas cards that they made from here.”

Indeed, he figures the cartoon billboard’s main benefit to his business is in providing his employees with a continual source of amusement as folks pose behind the bulging bodies.

“We have fun watching people enjoy it all day long,” Dodson said. “It’s a riot.”