A Whale of a Restaurant Guide
; or, eating and drinking at Moby Dick's through the ages
People love to name things after Moby-Dick, whether it’s coffee shops, cartoon characters, pizza joints, or fictional pets. In fact, my own three-legged cat is named Captain, most often assumed to be named for Ahab though, given that he’s missing a front leg, is really more of a Captain Boomer.
More than anything, though, people love to name restaurants and bars after Moby-Dick. Back when I lived in the Washington, D.C. area, I was a frequent customer at Moby Dick House of Kebob, a restaurant chain serving Persian cuisine. First opened in 1987 as Moby’s Luncheonette, the reason behind its name seems to have been lost to time. Per one account, it took its name from a similar restaurant in pre-revolution Tehran that catered to U.S. Embassy staff. Elsewhere, the story was that one of his business partners was reading Moby-Dick when they opened the original location. (Neither explanation has anything to do with Fedallah).
And although it was before my time here in the Twin Cities, anyone with an interest in local history and/or heavy drinking is well-acquainted with Moby Dick’s on Hennepin Ave, a bar remembered for being “the poster child for vice in downtown Minneapolis” in the 1970s, and “a symbol of the area’s crime, disorder, and immorality.” A reporter for the Minneapolis Star braved the Sailortown-esque lair in 1978 and found a scene straight out of a Tom Waits song.
Pudgy matrons in dashikis, flirtatious girls in ruffled dresses, bearded youths with shoulder length hair, old men in pork pies and pulled coats, hot shots posing in white summer suits and hats next to bankers in stolid grey mingle in the low-ceilinged main room. Flamboyant glitter-rockers and sinister-looking super flies, everyday folks in jeans and sport shirts . . . By mid evening, the air in Moby’s windowless rooms is as dense as 800 smoking guests can make it. It is sodden with cigarettes, women’s heavy perfumes, patchouli from a smattering of long-haired youths, and whiffs of marijuana from the men’s room.
This all led me to wonder: what was the first restaurant/bar named for Moby-Dick? The infamous Minneapolis bar opened in 1971, sixteen years before Moby’s Luncheonette. But how far back did this go? Or rather, how soon after the book was published in 1851 did someone think to borrow the name?
My goal wasn’t to catalog every restaurant and bar named Moby Dick. While keeping an eye out for interesting stories, I only needed to find one establishment opened earlier than the last in order to keep moving backwards in time. I was also only looking for places actually named “Moby Dick” or some minor variation thereof. Ahab, Starbuck, et al. have inspired a few names, but from what I found not nearly to the extent (or with the history) that the white whale has.
Just to get the ball rolling, here are a few stops to add to your next cross-country North American road trip, all of which are open as of August 2024.
Moby Dick’s Oyster Bar & Grill in West Haven, CT, opened in 2022
Moby Dick Inn in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, opened in 1982
Moby Dick Motel/Variety Store in Old Orchard Beach, ME, opened in 1977
Moby Dick’s Bar and Grill in Sewaren, NJ, opened in 1973
Moby Dick Restaurant on Stearns Wharf in Santa Barbara, CA, opened in 1965
Ah, what the heck. Here’s a Google map of just about every currently-operating place across the US and Canada named after Moby-Dick, and in this case I’ll allow Pequod’s Pizza if only to help plug the whale-sized hole in the midwest. A static screenshot:
And now for some history…
Moby Dick (San Francisco, CA) — established 1979
Even though we aren’t quite moving back in time yet, no “Guide to Bars named Moby Dick” would be complete with mentioning Moby Dick in San Francisco’s Castro neghborhood, one of the oldest gay bars in the city. Opened in 1979, the bar is pretty universally described as being laid back, “a local favorite but not as a cruise bar,” according to TimeOut.com. “Moby Dick is where you go to have a couple drinks with your crew in a no-pressure environment.”
Really committing to the bit, Moby Dick is also notable for its oak-finished boat decking bar, boat deck style benches, and a 250-gallon saltwater fish tank above the bar. The owners also branched out with a record label called Moby Dick Records which was said to have created the “Moby Dick Sound” in disco and which had more hits on the 1979-1989 Top 200 list than any other label. Sadly, the endeavor lasted just five years after seven of its ten employees died of complications related to AIDS.
On a more upbeat note, the bar also sponsors several softball teams, including “The Moby Dick C-Men” and the “Moby Dick Whalers.”
Moby Dick Cocktail Lounge (Ellsworth, ME) — established 1972
I own a few souvenir matchbooks of places named after Moby-Dick, one of which is from the Moby Dick Cocktail Lounge located inside the long-gone Holiday Inn of Ellsworth, Maine. Opened in December 1972, the hotel was just inland from Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, and was reported to have a “nautical flavor” and featured a “magnificent white whale” behind the bar. True to its era, the walls were covered in brown velvet.
The Moby Dick Cocktail Lounge had live music and dancing seven nights a week on a portable dance floor. (Ahab was sure to enjoy at least one of the bands in the rotating lineup, named “Bitter Joy.”)
By the late 1970s, the lounge had become a full-on disco open until 1:00 AM — just the spot for some Midnight, Forecastle action. Not bad for a town with a permanent population of about 5,000 people at the time. The white whale even got a bit of a disco makeover and, it seems, dentures?
The lounge closed in 1985, reimagined as “Oliver’s Restaurant and Lounge” in honor of the town’s namesake, founding father and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Ellsworth.
Moby Dick Restaurant (Norwood, NJ) — established 1968
Moby Dick House of Kabob isn’t the only chain (or should I say pod) of restaurants named for the book. In 1968, Constantinos “Gus” Kiaffis opened the first of three Moby Dick Restaurant’s in in Norwood, New Jersey, with a strong emphasis on seafood and, as per usual, a nautical theme. Each location had whaling tchotchkes on the walls such as ship wheels and whale guns — even if the Pequod had neither.
One review from the Bergen County Record found the restaurant a little too seafood centric, in that waitresses netted your selected fish straight from a tank in the middle of the dining room. His appetite, he wrote, was “somewhat tempered by the sight of a waitress walking briskly to the kitchen, nonchalantly swinging a net in which a hefty trout was frantically flaying about.”
Kiaffas, an immigrant from Athens, Greece, went on to establish two more outposts of the restaurant in Highlands, NJ and Nyack, NY, but the chain seems to have shut down sometime in the 1980s. Perhaps they couldn’t compete with the slightly cheaper Captain Hanks Restaurant and Lounge just down the road, who was also using the “whale of a…” slogan.
Moby Dick Seafood (Belmar, NJ) — established 1960
Moby Dick Seafood in Belmar, NJ takes us back to the beginning of 1960s, when Mr. and Mrs. Richard V. Friedel opened a seafood restaurant on the Jersey Shore. Like just about every other establishment on the list, it seems like the restaurant used the “A whale of a…” tagline, in this case “of a seafood place.”
It’s worth noting in terms of the name he chose for his restaurant, Richard Friedel was apparently better known as “Dick.” And notable just for its own sake is that he later opened another diner in Belmar which he named “The Kwickee Dickee.”
Moby Dick’s (Sacramento, CA) — established 1957
For about seven years from the late 1950s into the early 1960s, seafood lovers in Sacramento, CA could dine at Moby Dick’s at 2751 Fulton Ave. The interior was decorated in the requisite “marine motif” and made the specious claim that “If it swims you can find it at Moby Dick's.” (Presumably this excluded serving those forbidden by international treaties, like whales, and also, y’know, humans.)
The most notable thing about this incarnation of Moby Dick’s was an incident in 1957 in which a large, white automobile (automobyle?) smashed into the side of the restaurant. The notice of the crash in the Sacramento Bee failed to note the irony.
Moby Dick (Wantagh, NY) — established 1948
Searching newspapers for the phrase “Moby Dick” in the 1950s floods you with results about the 1956 Gregory Peck film. Luckily, I was able to skip past all of that when I found yet another ‘Whale of a Restaurant’ opened around 1948 in Wantagh, New York.
The restaurant specialized in 1940s specialties such as Crab Meat ala Dewey and Lobster Thermidor, but also offered the “famous” Moby Dick Salad. But it wasn’t just a seafood/banquet hall, it was also a bowling alley with 10 alleys. Melville, the one-time pinsetter at a bowling alley in Honolulu, would surely be proud.
Moby Dick Cocktail Lounge (Seaside Heights, NJ) —established c. 1938
Going back even farther, starting around 1938 you could grab a drink at Moby Dick’s Cocktail Lounge on the Seaside Heights, New Jersey boardwalk, alongside the merry-go-round, soda fountain, and penny arcade.
I say “starting” in 1938 because I couldn’t find any information about this bar aside from this single ad from that year, by which point it was allegedly already “famous.”
In 1952, the Asbury Park Press reported that Anthony Mazza, owner of the Moby Dick Inn at 918 Boulevard (yes, “Boulevard” is somehow the name of the street), sold his liquor license to another set of owners who changed the name. That said, I couldn’t confirm whether the Moby Dick Cocktail Lounge and the Moby Dick Inn were actually one in the same place.
Nevertheless, the white whale returned to the boardwalk in 2004 in the form of an amusement park ride, one of those swinging platforms that flings you around as if tossed from a whaleboat. The ride is still there today for anyone interested in a modern Nantucket sleigh ride.
All too appropriately, Moby Dick had one of the worst safety records of all amusement park rides in New Jersey from 2015-2017 according to an investigation by NJ Advance Media. The ride accounted by most of the pier’s seven safety incidents in that period, with visitors reporting “electric shocks to their feet and elbows" and a “tingling feeling” after stepping onto the platform by the seats.
Moby Dick Tea Room/White Whale Inn (Nantucket, MA) — established c. 1927
Even though a seaside cocktail lounge from the late 1930s seemed pretty early, it still wasn’t the very first. That honor goes to the Moby Dick Tea Room, opened by Frederic C. Howe — where else? — on the island of Nantucket. And aside from being the pioneer in white whale-themed drinking establishments, it had the most interesting backstory of them all.
Frederic C. Howe was a lawyer, activist, political advisee/appointee, and a politician, serving on both the Cleveland City Council and briefly in the Ohio Senate. But Howe is best-remembered today as a leading progressive reformer in the early 20th century, advocating on behalf of the poor in areas such as tax reform, urban renewal, strengthening democratic institutions and consumers rights, and promoting immigration. He was frequently charged with being a communist, which he denied, but even among friends he was considered too much of an idealist to find his place in government.
All the while, Howe and his wife spent their summers on Nantucket, in the village of Siasconset (known as ‘Sconset to locals) on the southeastern end of the island away from the relatively more bustling port at the north end. After buying a home in ‘Sconset in 1912, Howe started collecting more and more properties with the goal of creating a summer destination for progressive thinkers to come together for lectures, debates, workshops, music, and dancing.
“I would have a herd of my own--for along with my desire for personal freedom was a need for people—people who also wanted to escape other herds and be themselves…. There I planned that we would dine, talk, and have music and dances, intimately, informally, as if we were around a fireside. We would have a little world of our own, bounded on four sides by the sea, unconditioned by any other herd than our own; and we would invite people to share it with us who had something to say about the things we were interested in."
In 1920, Howe converted a former livery stable into a meeting hall, naming it the Tavern-on-the-Moors. After a trial run in 1921 featuring lectures from local Nantucketers, the following September Howe launched what came to be known as The School of Opinion, inviting writers, academics, and politicians to speak and emphasizing open dialogue among all guests.
What is termed the first school of opinion in the United States will open on Nantucket island at Siasconset, on September 3. According to the initial announcement, this island in the Atlantic during that month will be the mecca for liberal thinkers and speakers from every section of the country. […]
Some of the speakers and conference conductors will be: Frank P. Walsh, former chairman of the national war labor board; Prof. James Harvey Robinson of the New School for Social Research of New York; Alvin Johnson and Robert Morse Lovett of the New Republic; Albert Jay Nock of the Freeman; Dr. Edward Hiram Reede of Washington; Dr. E. E. Slosson, formerly of the Independent; William C. Bullitt, member of the American commission at the Paris peace conference, and President Wilson’s emissary to Russia; … Everett Dean Martin of the People's Institute; Roger W. Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties union; Miss Louise Brown of Vassar […]
"The teaching will be informal and open discussion will prevail," says the prospectus. "Emphasis will bo laid on history, economics, politics, labor, international affairs. There will be discussions also of art, the drama, literature,, and new developments, of science, especially as they relate to social progress and individual life. "The aim will be 'to stimulate thought rather than to impart facts; to awaken questions rather than to stabilize opinions; to query many things and to open up others. Questions will be asked rather than answered."
The morning lectures were attended by as many as 300 people, with speakers "seated in a gayly painted chair, in a large raftered room with windows open on four sides to moors and sea.” These events were followed by an hour on the beach, wrote the New York Times, with the afternoon for tennis, golf, tramping parties, and conferences and more discussions in the evening. Guests not only colonized the town’s hotels, but stayed in Howe’s various cottages surrounding the Tavern, altogether creating a kind of summer camp environment.
Howe’s positivity notwithstanding, the school proved divisive among locals, many of whom were deeply suspicious of the school’s political leanings and, true to New England high society, suspicious of strongly held opinions at all. A few days after its 1922 session began, the Baltimore Evening Sun published an article titled “Siasconset’s All Het Up Over ‘School of Opinion: Advent of Crowd with Pinkish Tinge Resented by Conservatives of Island’s Summer Colony,” writing:
“Our dear old lady from Hartford, Conn., who spends her summers here, announced that she was suspicious of opinions in general and schools of opinion in particular. The word opinion is thus coming to take on the characteristics of a taboo. In ‘Sconset the people don’t have opinions.”
Another complaint was lodged in the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, "We don't want this sort of thing here, and we don't intend to have it. We believe that Mr. Howe is trying to set up a sort of Socialist Chautauqua on the island!” Nevertheless, the school persisted and complaints trailed off after the first few summers, and Howe’s school returned year after year with new guest lecturers for the next thirteen years, likely ending with the 1935 session.
So what does this have to do with Moby Dick? Two things, actually. Most relevantly, Howe must have realized the business opportunity of having hundreds of guests each night who would want to continue their discussions over food and drinks. In 1927, he purchased the town’s abandoned train station, once part of the Nantucket Railroad which had linked Nantucket to Siasconset from 1881 to 1917 before being scrapped for parts during World War I.
With some “suitable and artistic fixin’s,” the station became the Moby Dick Tea Room, an outpost of Tavern-on-the-Moors. The establishment received a liquor license a bit later, in 1933.
When Daily News theater critic Burns Mantle visited ‘Sconset in 1932, he stopped by Tavern-on-the-Moors and ate at what had apparently become the “Moby Dick clam bar and restaurant,” later spending the night at the “White Whale Inn” — perhaps one of Howe’s cottages.
It was a mild night on the moors when we arrived at Nantucket at 8 that evening. A little mist, a little rain and eight miles of shining asphalt stretching away to 'Sconset as straight as the vertebrae of a lobster, if a lobster has a straight vertebrae.
And just to make the finish consistent, we stopped at the White Whale Inn, hard by the Moby Dick clam bar and restaurant, which is all a part of Fred Howe's Tavern-on-the-moors.
There was one other curious connection between Howe’s Tavern-on-the-Moors and Moby-Dick, however, which might also help explain how the tea room got its name: one of Howe’s guest speakers at the School of Opinion in 1923 and again in 1924 was Carl Van Doren, an early admirer of Melville who was instrumental to the Melville revival.
Although much of the credit rightly belongs to Raymond Weaver, who wrote an article for The Nation celebrating Melville’s 100th birthday in 1919, Weaver only wrote it at the request of Van Doren, then the magazine’s literary editor. In fact, Weaver recalled that he had barely even heard of Melville when first given the assignment.
“This August,” he said, “is Melville’s centenary,” which did not seem to me a particularly momentous communication. But the vitality of Mr. Van Doren’s enthusiasm disregarded my passivity. I cannot now remember Mr. Van Doren’s words; but I do remember his indignation, his bafflement, at the patronizing neglect into which Melville’s name had fallen. “I simply must have an article on him for the Nation,” he said, “and this is your chance to do a little belated justice to a very great man.”
Weaver quickly read through Melville’s bibliography and wrote “The Centennial of Herman Melville,” published in the August 1919 issue. From there, Weaver became a bit obsessed, writing the first biography of Melville and in the process ‘rediscovered’ the lost manuscript of Billy Budd in the breadbox.
Just four years after Weaver’s article, Van Doren was one of the featured speakers at the School of Opinion, giving three lectures in 1923 on the subject of “Modern Expressions in Literature.” He returned the following summer, speaking on the topic of “Literature, Drama, and the Fine Arts.” There’s no further detail about exactly what the lectures entailed, but I have to imagine that he wouldn’t miss the opportunity to speak about Moby-Dick, a novel which he called a “masterpiece” (and Melville “a hero to literary rebels"), while standing on the island of Nantucket.
Howe’s School of Opinion closed around 1935, but the Moby Dick Inn lived on for many years, taken over by Clem Reynolds in 1938. The inn “had its heyday in the 1940s and ‘50s,” described as having a “large and attractively decorated cocktail room” with the kitchen and dining room on the floor below. Outside were “comfortable chairs overlooking the ocean,” where patrons would await their tables.
While I couldn’t find what was on the menu at the original Moby Dick Tea Room, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle printed one of Reynolds’ recipes in 1951 for Squash Curry Soup, noted for being one of the only dishes on the island that wasn’t beef, lamb, or seafood.
In 1956, the Moby Dick Inn at the old train station succumbed to a fire. Reynolds repurposed whatever could be salvaged for a new Moby Dick Inn, built at the site of the then-defunct Beach House hotel where it operated until 1980. The site is now called The Summer House, a boutique hotel with several restaurants and inns.
So there you have it. Frederic Howe’s tea room was as old of a Moby-Dick-inspired restaurant/bar as I could find. And yet, I wasn’t satisfied! After all that, I still wanted to know: what was the first ever thing of any kind named after Moby-Dick? The history of restaurants and bars might only go as far back as 1927, but could there be something else that goes back even further? More on this search next time.
For now, I’ll leave you with one last image, reprinted in the November 1978 Melville Society Extracts. Behold the logo for the Moby Dip ice cream shop in Margate, New Jersey, which surely would have its place in Chapter 55: Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.
In some ways it’s not even that far off from Cuvier’s illustrations in Histoire Naturelle des Cétacés, of which Ishmael says, “Before showing that picture to any Nantucketer, you had best provide for your summary retreat from Nantucket.”
There is also a series of fast-seafood restaurants in the Louisville area called Moby Dick (A Whale of a Sandwich) which started in 1967. https://www.mobydickrestaurants.com/mobydicklocations
I've only been to Louisville twice but have been to two different locations on those trips.
Excellent idea. Checked out the Moby Dick Restaurants in Australia. There are about 5. Will pinch your idea and write about them one day. Not a lot of history attached though. And many many miles to travel.