Down the Coast with Dana Parsons

Alice Gustafson saw one family-owned cafe tumble into the sea 20 years ago, so a little rent skirmish with Huntington Beach City Hall shouldn’t be that big a deal. But when you’re 77 and you’ve run your own Breakfast in the Park cafe since 1980, well, who wants to fight?

“My intention is to stay here till 2010,” she says of the quaint restaurant that sits in the city’s Central Park and is a habitat for ducks from the lake and customers’ dogs. “Then I’ll be 80 years old. I thought that would be a good retirement age. Everybody wants us here. Hardly a day goes by that someone doesn’t thank me for being here.”

Gustafson, whose late husband John operated the End Cafe before a 1988 winter storm took it and part of the Huntington Beach Pier into the Pacific Ocean, pays “rent” to the city as part of a sliding tax on her sales. The increase the city wants, she says, would double her monthly payment. “I can’t do it,” she says.

I can’t be objective about this fight, having long ago sworn devotion to her cafe’s big, fat cinnamon rolls. Gustafson owns the business, but the city owns the building and says she’s been getting a sweetheart deal for too long.

Gustafson disagrees. So is this the end?

“I don’t expect to leave,” she says. “I’m confident we can work it out.”

Photo: Los Angeles Times

 

Comments

[Lena Kennedy]

Why should Alice's Breakfast in the Park get a sweetheart deal from the city? This is prime parkland, and I am suprised that the city let a restaurant be built in the middle of it. Have you noticed they only accept cash? I wonder why.

Alice's is in need of a though cleaning and update- unless you like cobwebbs with you cinnamon roll and your coffee in a chipped cup.