Eat at Joe’s

Nestled between a tackle shop and a Vietnamese restaurant near the intersection of Anaheim and Temple, Joe Jost’s stands as the last reminder of old Long Beach on a street dense with Asian restaurants. With its red, white and blue canvas awning hanging over the French doors, Joe’s looks out of place in its own neighborhood, but it still packs ‘em in, especially at lunchtime. The roughness of the neighborhood has thinned out the dinner crowd.

“When I was a kid, my parents used to take us here for the 25-cent hot dogs,” says one guy at the bar.

“Well, when I turned 21 back in the ‘60s, my old man brought me here for my first beer, and when my son became legal, I brought him here too,” says the guy next to him.

The point they both make strikes to the core of what Joe’s is all about: cheap eats, beer and family--not necessarily in that order.

Joe Jost opened the business in 1924 as a barber shop, turning it into a tavern nine years later at the end of Prohibition. For a while, he went on doing haircuts in the bar, but when officials ruled that simultaneously cutting hair and serving beer was something of a health risk, Jost eliminated the barber chairs. Nonetheless, Joe’s still has that familiar barber shop feel, and until recently a candy-striped barber’s pole hung by the front door.

The tavern, in the Jost family for three generations, has changed little in that time, from the tiled linoleum floor to the darkly stained wooden booths and tables to the counter and back bar. The walls are thick with pictures: portraits of the first two Josts, photos of such barber shop icons as John Wayne and a 14-point stag, and of customers in their Joe Jost’s T-shirts standing in front of world landmarks (a practice known as Josting).

By all reports, the food hasn’t changed much over the years either. Joe’s cuisine tastes like the kind of stuff you used to get when Dad made lunch--simple, matter-of-fact food, all flavor and no art. The special is a Polish sausage split in half with a dill pickle spear, Swiss cheese, mustard and onions (optional) on rye. The liverwurst and salami sandwiches have this same ham-fisted culinary touch: slabs of meat three quarters of an inch thick laid between two pieces of bread.

No, you don’t have a choice of breads; there’s nothing but rye. The price is right, though: The liverwurst and the salami sandwiches cost a mere $2.05, while the specials ring in at $1.95. Other items include a cheese sandwich and a hot dog, each for less than a buck and a half.

The most popular item on the menu, however, after the frosty schooners of beer, is Joe’s pickled eggs, served with pretzels and pickled chiles under a generous sprinkling of ground black pepper. More than 6 million pickled eggs have been sold here, which works out to better than 250 eggs a day since Joe Sr. started serving food. Ken Buck, the current owner, declines to reveal what he puts in the pickling brine, but if you watch the bartenders preparing the eggs, you’ll see they add a combination of vinegar, pepper juice and turmeric. The eggs are great and, at 60 cents apiece, they’re also the cheapest thing on the menu.

A newer addition to Joe’s cuisine is fresh roasted peanuts in the shell, prepared daily in the antique roaster from the famous Long Beach Peanut Shop formerly run by the Marmion family. Joe’s bought the operation after the store closed but still sells the peanuts under the Marmion label. The jumbo fancy peanuts, better than anything you’ll find at the ballpark, are available in half-pound, one-pound and two-pound bags ($1.25, $2.35 and $4.45 respectively).

And as something new, Joe’s recently started to grind these nuts for use in a peanut butter and honey sandwich. It’s a little grainy, somewhere between creamy and chunk style, but at $1.45, it’s nice and cheap.

Joe Jost’s has been cranking out the same basic food for more than 60 years. As Dad always said: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

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Where to Go:

Joe Jost’s, 2803 E. Anaheim St., Long Beach; (310) 439-5446. Open Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Beer. Parking on street. Cash only. Lunch for two, food only, $5.60 to $9.70.

What to Get:

Joe’s special, pickled eggs, peanut butter and honey sandwich, Marmion fresh roasted peanuts.