For nearly a century, Pea Soup Andersen’s served millions of bowls of steaming nourishment to generations of road-trippers traveling through California’s Central Coast, helping put the small town of Buellton on the map.
It wasn’t just the food. In a roadside culture of corporate hamburgers and gas station minimarts, the ubiquitous billboards and small-time charms of Pea Soup Andersen’s provided a great distraction for commuters and family vacationers.
But the landmark that created many memories is experiencing a humiliating end.
The Scandinavia-inspired restaurant abruptly closed in 2024, with locals and visitors mourning the loss of the roadside institution with its kitschy gift shop and parking-lot mascots Hap-Pea and Pea-Wee.
Then vandals started attacking the empty restaurant.
The defacement of the storied restaurant ranged from ketchup and mustard sprayed across the dining room to thieves pillaging the building for its copper wires and pipes, destroying artifacts that locals had hoped to preserve in the process.
The vandalism became such a problem that city officials last week voted to raze a section of the building even though a new project for the site is not yet in the works. It is not clear when the demolition will begin.
“The public safety concerns reached a point where we just couldn’t wait anymore,” City Manager Scott Wolfe told The Times in an interview this week. He’s afraid, he said, of “waking up one morning to a call from the police department saying someone had died in the building or that it had burned to the ground.”
City leaders have faced urgent, yet somewhat competing, priorities: addressing safety concerns at the vacant restaurant and preserving a piece of the city’s history.
In 1924, Denmark-born chef Anton Andersen and his wife, Juliette, purchased a plot of land — formerly a horse and cattle ranch and dairy farm — to start their roadside restaurant. The eatery was called Andersen’s Electric Cafe in honor of the couple’s prized possession, an electric stove.
By 1928, the couple decided to build a hotel and dining room to expand their popular cafe, which they renamed the Bueltmore — a play on words in honor of Anton’s experience helping open the Los Angeles Biltmore.
Juliette, who was from France, created several of the restaurant’s most popular dishes, including the famed split pea soup. As demand for the green goodness increased, the couple eventually proclaimed the restaurant “The Home of Split Pea Soup,” a slogan it carried for decades. The couple’s son took over the business and, in 1947, renamed it “Pea Soup Andersen’s.”
For years, the business, located on Highway 246 near the 101 Freeway, attracted traveling salesmen, truck drivers, tourists and those looking for a place to stop for a meal between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It was so successful that then-owner Vince Evans opened a second location in Santa Nella in 1976. That restaurant is still operating.
But the Buellton location’s business declined, and it shuttered abruptly in January 2024. Developer Ed St. George purchased the three-acre property for $4.95 million several months later.
Wolfe moved to the city in 2019 and can’t recall ever seeing the restaurant’s parking lot more than about one-third full. When he’d visit for a meal, he never had to wait, and the restaurant was never bustling as it had been decades earlier.
“I think there was a general decline,” he said. “I mean, how many people these days say, ‘I really wish I had a bowl of pea soup’? Times have changed, tastes have changed, and it was something from a past era.”
When the restaurant hit the market in 2020, Wolfe said he came up with the idea to designate the eatery as a historic landmark. It was a way, he said, to help give the City Council some ability to review what’s eventually built on the site.
“What we didn’t want was a very traffic-intensive, non-unique, cookie-cutter kind of development there,” he said.
Last week, the City Council voted unanimously to strip the site of the city’s local historic designation, allowing much of the former restaurant to be demolished. The city plans to store several artifacts from the building that have historical significance or hold community importance, including the rooftop signage and the blue stained-glass windows that, for years, greeted customers driving up to the restaurant.
Under the plan approved by the council, the original Bueltmore Hotel portion of the property — a section identified as being eligible for listing on the state’s historic registry — will remain standing.
But much of what officials wanted to preserve from the site has already been destroyed or stolen.
Thieves stripped every inch of copper from the site, including the copper countertop officials had hoped to preserve and the copper cladding on the booths. Recently, a thief with a hacksaw destroyed the 1930s-era light fixtures to access the copper wiring, Wolfe said.
The problems started soon after the restaurant closed.
First there was the group that discovered — and emptied — mustard and ketchup bottles all over the restaurant. Then, Wolfe said, people started sleeping inside the eatery.
The overnight stays were briefly interrupted when the property owner began allowing the local sheriff department’s SWAT team to use the building for training. “They were surprised one morning when the doors were blown off the hinges,” Wolfe said.
“But over time, they would come back,” he said.
The owner has put up fences, boarded up windows and doors and tried to barricade the building, but with so many entrances, it’s proved a challenge to secure.
Curiosity about the state of the building got the better of Councilmember John Sanchez, who said he visited the site before the July 9 meeting.
“I appreciate the expedience,” Sanchez told staff during the meeting. “I actually went in there today. I trespassed. The door was kicked down.”
The closed restaurant has also attracted urban explorers who take videos of the interiors of shuttered sites and post them online. Earlier this year, officials in Orange County faced a similar problem when people broke into the closed Westminster Mall to tag empty storefronts and film the abandoned spaces for posterity or purported signs of paranormal activity.
Much like the Westminster Mall, the interior of Pea Soup Andersen’s is now a sea of broken glass. At one point, someone started a fire inside the building.
At night, people have gone into the restaurant, seemingly with impunity, due to the size of the site and the secluded nature of the area, Wolfe said.
“Once you’re in the building, no one can hear you, and you can go to town with your hacksaws and your wire cutters and everything else,” he said. “There’s just no way to stop it.”
The post It was a California roadside icon. Then, vandals wrecked it. The sad end for Pea Soup Andersen’s appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
