The first thing you saw was the sign: an arc of three fish fashioned from red neon, blinking from left to right. Centered in blue neon just below: “Reel Inn,” the name of the invitingly ramshackle seafood restaurant it marked for 36 years.
You saw the sign rising along the Pacific Coast Highway at the edge of Los Angeles because you had just gone surfing. Or because you were making the crawl home from work, or visiting the city for the first time, or taking advantage of the pro bono therapy offered by a head-clearing drive along California’s most famous roadway.
Whatever the circumstances, there was the neon, there was the Reel Inn. Some days you stopped in for a platter of fish and chips, a pitcher of pilsner in a room chockablock with maritime esoterica, tangles of Christmas lights, and red-and-white-checked tablecloths. On others, you drove on past, grinning at the handwritten puns posted daily on a board under the main sign: “In Cod We Trust.” “Salmon and Garfunkel.” “Don’t Bass Me By.”
The sign largely survived the fires that began ripping through Los Angeles on Tuesday, January 7, 2025. The rest of the Reel Inn did not. I learned that it had burned down shortly after evacuating from where I was living in Topanga Canyon, which cuts through the Santa Monica Mountains just behind the restaurant in Malibu. Both areas are adjacent to the Pacific Palisades, where the first and largest blaze had broken out that morning. My exit plan had been to drive down to PCH and head north, away from the fire, but I was turned around by a wall of flames blocking the road. I should have known then that the Reel Inn, a mainstay of my diet and occasional prop to my sanity, had already been leveled. But some combination of terror and denial prevented me from metabolizing the idea until 20 minutes later, when I was safe in the Valley and a mobile alert from a local fire safety coalition lit up my phone: Reel Inn – Gone. Those three words marked the first of many moments when shock and fear were joined by grief and mourning.
“To line up inside to order on any given day was to be immersed in how LA is actually experienced, rather than how it’s packaged for television: a group of cops, a family of tourists, a roadwork crew on break, friends running into each other, someone famous, someone still wearing a wetsuit.”
In this I am hardly alone. The loss of the Reel Inn is today one chapter in the terrible story of unfathomable damages that will reshape the city over the years to come: of lives, of homes, of businesses, of two entire neighborhoods bookending Los Angeles on east and west. It is also among the most collectively felt. In a town famous for its sprawl and lack of cohesion, a place where so much of life unfolds in
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