The Marine Room isn’t near the surf. It’s in it. A massive engineering feat. No place like it in the world. And for decades, it was a family dream that failed and failed and failed until it became a San Diego icon.
“My great-grandfather had this vision of having a wonderful oceanfront restaurant,” Bill Kellogg says. ”He tried to do it, but the windows would break when the water came in. He even tried to put two-by-fours in front of the windows, but that kind of ruined the magic. So it sat unused, and I don’t think my great grandfather ever saw it in operation.”
Bill’s grandfather inherited the flood. Whenever the waves broke the glass and swamped the place, he’d roll up his pants, wade behind the bar, and make cocktails for guests. Seemed hopeless—until WWII broke out.
“As part of the war effort, they invented bulletproof glass,” Bill says. “So now we had glass strong enough to withstand the waves.”
Unable to break the glass, the waves eventually just went through the structure itself. Finally, a team of experts suggested trying gunite, the type of concrete swimming pools are made of. They curved the new gunite wall outwards, to politely refract the waves back to sea.
It worked.
So the Marine Room is essentially a swimming pool with bulletproof windows and a nightly dinner party inside. On big swells, the floor shakes. King tides, the waves crawl the windows. It’s a hell of a show. And family dream that took four generations to realize.
“You just get so much pride being able to keep this place going in such a difficult environment,” says Bill.
