Point Arena Restaurant Copes With Electricity Shutoff

When server Victoria Flores greets customers at the Pier Chowder House and Tap Room, she presents them with a special “Power Outage Menu.”

The smoke fans in the hood over the grill use more electricity than their backup generators can manage, so they’ve had to decommission it and instead rely on their gas-powered appliances.

“We can only do fried food and stuff from the flattop stove, like tacos and quesadillas,” Flores says. “Our menu is usually three pages long and we've limited it to one page.”

They've had to limit their hours until the sun goes down at 6 p.m. The walk-in fridge and freezer use all the power from the generator, so there are no lights in the front of the house, or the back. The kitchen staff is cooking under a single lantern.

“It's a pretty drastic change,” Flores says.

The power went out throughout Mendocino County on Saturday, as part of Pacific Gas & Electric’s planned electricity shutoffs. Amid dry, windy weather conditions and wildfires already burning in parts of Northern California, the utility cut power in an attempt to prevent sparking additional fires, leaving almost 1 million customers without power, including 38,000 in Mendocino County.

For more than four days, the tiny coastal city of Point Arena, about three hours north of San Francisco, was in the dark. Until early Thursday, Main Street was a ghost town, with businesses closed and barely a car parked on the street.

“It’s a burden on everybody,” said Paul Andersen, administrative assistant at Point Arena’s city hall. “There’s been a lot of food loss. The co-op lost food, the school district lost food.”

The Chowder House was one of two restaurants that managed to stay open on generator power.

“We have two, a small one and a big one,” Flores says, 3500 watts and 5500 watts, “but the big one is not being friendly with us.”

Instead of their usual four soups, they only have one. There’s no power over the bar, so no draft beer. The soda machine is out, too, so there’s only bottled beer, canned ginger ale and water.

All the drinks are served in plastic cups and the food comes in red and white paper trays, because the city asked them to keep their water usage down, too.

“All the waste water from that restaurant goes into a lift station at the pier,” Andersen explains. “That station pumps it to the wastewater plant, but when the power's out, it doesn’t pump.”

Overall, customers have been really patient and understanding, Flores says. But even though they’re better off than if they had shut down completely, they’re still taking a hit to the bottom line.

“We’ve been extremely slow,” she says. With internet and cell service down, “nobody wants to come out because they don’t know if anything’s open.”