Alice's Restaurant

Alice's Restaurant

SUNDAY BIDE

William Schiffman

It’s a little bit of heaven right here on earth—at least to those who ease a week’s worth of aggravation with a weekend of high-speed, backroad motorcycle racing. It’s known to San Francisco Bay area cognoscenti simply as Alice’s Restaurant.

During the week, the locals and a handful of station wagons jammed with sweaty tourists looking for the beach may lurch off Highway 35 into Alice’s for lunch. But on any sunny weekend the parking lot, the handful of tables indoors and out and even the lot across the street are jammed with scores of motorcycles of every size, shape and state of repair. The riders are there, too, arms waving, helmets rolling and tales of heroism and prowess being told a mile a minute—or faster.

The bench racing is familiar. It sounds the same in any biker’s hangout anywhere in the country, making allowances for accents and intelligence.

“I could have taken that corner a lot faster if I didn’t have to dodge that ground squirrel.”

Or—“Did you see that chump in the blue Chevy doing the speed limit right in the middle of that 100 mile-per-hour turn just past the green fence?”

And then there’s the ever-popular “I could have passed you in that last turn, but my plugs are a little out of shape.”

But even if the talk is cheap, the road itself is a racer’s dream, with dozens of turns from 30 mph downhill bends to 100 mph-plus sweepers. It connects Highway 280 about 20 mi. south of San Francisco and a string of tiny backwoods communities, ending in the beachfront paradise of Santa Cruz.

But unless you like scenery—or feel the need to double our beloved national speed limit and grind your $80 tires bald in an afternoon—there are better ways to get from here to there.

And that’s one of the nice things about the road to Alice’s, which blends a number of seductive features which make it one of the most popular places for Northern California’s street racers to meet. Hardly anyone else uses it.

To get there you peel off 280 at the Highway 35 exit southbound from San Francisco and follow the signs to Half Moon Bay until you get to the 35 turnoff.

The first section is a series of tight Sturns you can take at 50 mph, or more, as long as your ground clearance can take it and you know a good shoe repair shop. Pipes, pegs and boots are the losers in an effort to make time along the uphill section.

The road then breaks into the open, with a series of long, top-gear, high-speed straights. But the speedy stuff doesn’t last long, and soon you have to brake hard for a righthander which takes you beneath an evergreen jungle and into several miles of tighter pavement with brilliant sunshine flickering through the trees and into your eyes, an added complication to an already difficult section.

After a pit stop at Alice’s you can follow the road south, which leads you into miles of high-speed corners after about a mile of tight turns. The speedometer needle buzzing against the peg on your governmentapproved 85 mph speedo is the only distraction as you try to dodge the occasional squirrels, ground and motorized.

Or you can head west, dipping beneath the trees again, along a level road snaking towards the coast. Well-banked and challenging, it finally exits into rolling hills and the fastest part of the ride, with mile-long sweeping curves right up to the Pacific Ocean.

On a good day, when the weather cooperates and the traffic is using some other road, the racing is sharp. Clumps of bikes banked to the limit and with engines straining near redline, blare past wheel to wheel.

But it’s the road itself that makes the riding so good. The surface is in excellent condition, especially when you consider the infamous “Winter of ’81,” which flooded much of the area and dumped mudslides across the pavement in many spots. There are some bumps, but for the most part it is clean, unmarred by potholes ahd rough enough to provide a firm grip for the sticky tires that most riders prefer, despite the fact that they melt like butter at high speeds on warm summer days.

Another plus is the lack of police patrols. Although an occasional San Mateo County sheriffs prowl car or California Highway Patrol “CHIP”-cycle cruises by, there rarely is a traffic stop, and the only real problem, cops say, is a disproportionate number of bikes getting stuffed into the scenery.

“We have very few problems for the number of people up there,” said Sgt. Kirn McHenry, a San Mateo County deputy. “There have been no formal outcries from the locals, no crime problem . . . There have been, over the years, a number of collisions, a few fatalities in and around the area. But the bikers don’t create any other problems. They are a cross-section of the community, with some nice folks, some average and some not so nice.”

Ralph Anderson, a public affairs officer for the CHP, agreed that collisions are the biggest problem the riders cause. “We don’t consider them a major source of trouble,” he said.

And then there is Alice’s itself. The ramshackle restaurant, with its leaning porch and Porta-Potty “facilities,” is not a threat to Maxim’s, but the food is good, the parking lot is spacious—and it’s the only game in town, anyhow. The location makes it a convenient place to meet your friends, have breakfast or lunch and gas up for another assault on the highway.

It's Gone From a Song of Protest to a Core of Motorcycling

Rick Rogers, who owns the place with his mother, bought it to get the gas station that is attached. But he likes the bikers who flock to his restaurant on weekends, and can’t recall any problems they have caused.

Rogers, who used to ride a Norton and still does some dirt biking, says he is familiar with the problems riders face and is happy to provide sustenance in an area free of police harassment.

“I didn’t buy it because I’m a biker, but the bikers don’t cause me any trouble at all,” he said. “Some people are scared by the bikers, but we have old folks who step right over the bikes and use our porch.”

Although the road itself is responsible for attracting mostly canyon types, a typical Sunday afternoon will see such diverse sights as hairy individuals astride disreputable choppers, spectacular customs, and a middle-aged woman in full leathers wheeling a beautiful white BMW R100RS. It’s also a great place to see the latest machinery. The first Honda 750 Sabre I saw appeared not in a local Honda shop, but in Alice’s parking lot.

The racing crowd usually is the most interesting. In addition to the clapped-out RDs droning past by the dozens and the clean Japanese 750s and 1000s, with blaring exhausts, $150 shocks and stubby bars, there always are a handful of slick European racers and the latest trickery from the Orient.

Bikes like the rare Ducati 900SS, the Moto Guzzi LeMans and various permutations of Laverda, Benelli, and even an occasional MV Agusta can be seen flitting beneath the trees.

Regulars say you rarely see an accident, although the road does little to help you

avoid such mishaps, despite the fine surface. It ripples in and out of shaded areas, alternately blinding you and dropping the light level to resemble the inside of a closet.

And because it is near the ocean and the Bay area’s famous fog, areas beneath trees often take hours to dry after the sun burns off the soggy mist and treacherous slick spots can be found in the middle of tight corners, leaving some riders flailing at the bars to catch a fearsome drift and others sliding down the road on the seat of their pants.

A lot of riders who frequent Alice’s head there directly from the legendary Sunday Morning Ride, which still begins around dawn at a gas station just south of San Francisco and follows fog-shrouded Highway 1 at breakneck speed to the tiny town of Pt. Reyes Station and back.

If they haven’t had enough after 80 mi. of serious racing along the coast, they’ll get their fill—in more ways than one—at Alice’s Restaurant.