Mutiny bar point pleasant plus#
Mutiny bar point pleasant series#

Mutiny bar point pleasant series#

The restaurant hand-presses its burger patties and has switched from frozen to fresh fish as part of a series of small and labor-intensive changes meant to draw more attention to the tiny, odd restaurant in the water. The namesake original recipe has been tweaked and tightened, and now diners show up just for dishes like the double clam chowder, a chowder-filled bowl with fried clams on top. The Chowder Barge has cleaned up its menu, too, crafting a fine balance of flavor and novelty. She - along with her eldest son Kraig, whose nickname is “The Rev” - has put in countless hours of maintenance and upkeep, scrubbing the beast from bow to stern. Olsen has taken to the ship and its funky ways, helping the business to flourish in recent years. The building is rumored to have been a kitchen for the 1935 classic film Mutiny on the Bounty I was born in Wilmington, raised in San Pedro, my family is filled with longshoremen. “Ultimately, I felt honored that he trusted me. So did she really trade the bike for the barge? “We’ll leave that to the unsolved mysteries of history,” says Olsen, who doesn’t mind adding a little more lore to the storied space. “Zack really wanted my custom motorcycle in exchange,” says Olsen, laughing as she describes the Harley-Davidson, painted with a root beer float-hued metallic finish, that she built by hand herself.

That’s not to say the former owners were willing to just give the place away. “They really got the Barge to where it is now,” says Olsen, “but it just exhausted them.” Three years later, she went from manager to owner. Bored with her job prospects at the time, Olsen asked if she could help run the Chowder Barge, despite never having worked in hospitality before.

In a flow of serendipitous events, Zack Connor and Susie Richman (friends of Olsen, and longtime customers themselves) scooped up the place in 2010 on a kind of pre-retirement whim. And the food was horrible.” The floating restaurant. It smelled god awful people were still smoking in here. “When I got here as a customer, it was horrible,” she adds. Leeward Marina owner moved it permanently here in 1988.” “It used to sit within the city limits of Long Beach, and then it was in limbo for years,” says Olsen, “likely around Terminal Island or San Pedro. The resilience of the Chowder Barge is not lost on current owner Nyla Olsen, who was a customer long before she ran the joint. For decades, the barge has faced, well, mutiny from the wheels of time and the port’s ever-changing facade (including new technologies at the ports and multimillion-dollar waterside redevelopment), to say nothing of the hyperlimited space and aging infrastructure. The truth is, formal documentation is hard to come by at the Chowder Barge, which may (or may not) have just celebrated its 100th birthday.ĭespite the barge’s storied and potentially apocryphal past, one thing remains clear: Although the floating restaurant’s charm is at least partially tied up in all of that speculative history, the real beauty of the place lies in the fact that it still exists at all. At some point during the Mutiny filming, the interior was renovated and turned into a working restaurant, acting as a cafeteria for film crew - or so the various legends go. In its decades of service, the floating facility is said to have been used to traffic lumber from the ports and to move equipment and people during the filming of the 1935 classic Mutiny on the Bounty starring Clark Gable. The truth is, the Chowder Barge wasn’t meant to be a restaurant at all, let alone one of the harbor area’s most enduring small businesses.

Mutiny bar point pleasant plus#

There are bowls of it, of course, but you’ll also find burgers covered in it, plus sides of the stuff used as a dipping sauce for french fries. This is the Chowder Barge in Wilmington, Greater LA’s only floating restaurant and home to some of the most inventive uses of clam chowder possible. Obscured by passing trucks, the clatter of port noise, and an overhead train, the bobbing rig promises precisely one thing to unsure newcomers and longtime regulars alike: a lot of clam chowder. Floating just offshore in the coastal waters between San Pedro and Long Beach, there is a barge.