Permanently closed.
The words blare at me, bolded atop a red line. I had typed “Moonshadows Restaurant” into the search bar, already aware of its fate. But I hadn’t prepared myself for the reality of it. If you were to look up those words, you’d get a menu, a website, an array of breathtaking pictures amid an orange sunset. And, a red bar. Permanently closed. My eyes filled in a way I hadn’t expected. I remembered my grandfather.
Ipa passed away in 2021. He was 80 years old, something he prided himself on; no male member of his family had ever reached 80. On his birthday, about two months before his passing, he exclaimed to us, “I’m 80! I’m good to go now.” I laughed. No one else did. I was thirteen.
We called my grandfather Ipa. The title came into fruition before I was born, when my cousin Maddie, seven years older than I am, called our grandmother “Gima.” My grandfather found himself so enchanted with his wife’s new nickname he proclaimed he’d give one to himself, and out of the blue came “Ipa.” He liked the sound of it.
He was a true eccentric. He ate Milano cookies with his cereal, kept paperclips in his shirt pockets, and was the foodiest foodie I’ve ever met. That man had paper maps dedicated to his favorite restaurants, categorized by meal. When I was a toddler, I spent every Saturday at Gima and Ipa’s house, and the day would always finish with a visit to an elegantly eccentric restaurant. Then we’d go to Toppings, the frozen yogurt place in the Pacific Palisades. They knew me there; one time I poured the entire container of sprinkles in my yogurt.
I’ll never go to Toppings again, because none of it’s left. But that’s a different story.
Moonshadows was a family member. When Maddie, the first and oldest grandchild, the joy of the family, was seven years old, she and my grandparents were regulars at the place.
Imagine this girl with pinkish plump cheeks, pigtailed, dressed in petite corduroy overalls. That was Mads. The servers knew her; they’d tie aprons around her waist, press a notepad and pen into her tiny hands and parade her around table to table. Little Mads would scribble down strangers’ orders, enchanting her customers, and sometimes, she’d even fill their water cups.
Maddie grew up, and then I was seven. I was a child lacking in desire for warm layers, so my mother draped her Balinese shawls over my ruffled long sleeves, shielding me from the coast’s winds. She tucked my fingers into purple woolen gloves, and always kept a tiny pair of socks stowed in her purse, under the impression I’d spill water on my feet. She was right.
I was never as talkative as Maddie. I’d shyly hide behind my parents as they ordered the plainest pasta for me; I wasn’t fascinated with taking people’s orders so much as I was with ordering. In those days, I identified as a mermaid, and I refused to eat any fish, scallop, or octopus leg. They felt like family! Once, my dad tricked me, convincing me the tentacle was a French fry (it was a damn good French fry). I loved thrusting my bony arm into the misty air to hail a nearby waiter’s attention, at the ready with an empty glass. In came the iced water and I would watch with wonder as a circle of condensation formed on the wooden table. I dipped my nail into my water glass and drew designs on the table, the way I did at the concrete edging of my friend’s pool.
Moonshadows was our family dinner table. Moonshadows was Ipa’s child, his favorite restaurant among many, where he took Gima out to dinner. Moonshadows was an ocean wave, a soundwave of sassy seagulls and bloated seals waltzing on the breeze. Moonshadows was my fourteenth birthday, the day Facebook crashed, the day a lightning storm danced on the horizon, and Moonshadows was my seventeenth birthday, when I accidentally set a cloth napkin on fire. That fire, I poured my water on it and all was well. Only my bemused parents noticed.
Everyone noticed this one. The whole building disintegrated like a starfish corpse on a particularly rocky day on the waves.
I found myself strolling through Pine Tree Circle recently, shouldering a tote bag and an N-95 mask wrapped hideously around my head. The Love Stage, Topanga Homegrown, Pebbles, Moona Star. Ex-Abuelita’s. Canyon Bistro, home of our fish-and-chips takeouts when none of us is in the mood for cooking. Endless Color, which used to be Rocco’s, where us Topanga Elementary kids congregated in the booths, where little Nutcracker ballerinas celebrated with hat-shaped ice and melty pizza after the opening Friday night performance. It’s a wooden town ensconced in brush, yet it stands, and the restaurant by the water did not.
Really, it’s just a restaurant. I miss it. But it’s just a restaurant.
When we discovered Moonshadows’s fate, we were evacuated in Encino with my aunt’s family, and my grandmother, a now ex-resident of the Palisades. We all fell quiet when we heard the news. Of course it burned down. It was always going to burn down. It was a seaside restaurant on the water in Malibu, and the flames from the Palisades flew far enough to reach this dear spot. To me, it felt like another part of Ipa on this earth had died. Another fleeting remnant of someone who used to live here, who did his taxes, who voted and pressed the I Voted sticker proudly onto his shirt pocket, who shooed away any form of distraction from his breakfast cereal as to prevent soggy muesli, who called himself “The Water Man” and ensured my hydration as a young girl. My childhood years, my preteen years, felt so real. But they don’t anymore and neither does he.
Time will propel us forward, and we’ll love other restaurants. Gima will find traces of Ipa in her memories and in his old collection of “Love Is…” cartoons. Maddie will bring a future child to another beautiful structure, which may or may not burn down in another freak disaster.
The PCH drive will become reborn, the tide will pull away the ash, and the cliffs will one day hide any hint of charredness, and be covered in new growth, sourgrass, sprouts, chaparral. It will burn again, as it always does, and then it will grow again. Over and over and over. Maybe Moonshadows will stand again one day. Maybe it won’t. One day, years into the future, another structure will stand in its place. Or maybe it won’t. Ghosts of where the walls used to be, where the wooden tables used to support dainty glasses and ceramic dishes, where humans used to feel hungry and bloated, will remain for those who wish to see them. Because the truth is, we are entrenched in ghosts. Whoever used to live in my own house, they stood exactly where I stand in another time. We live among ghosts. Memories. Rubble.
The Palisades, Malibu, Tuna Canyon, it’s all ghosts, now. It was always going to be. Goodbye, Moonshadows. I’m sorry about that cloth napkin.
Daphne Huffman is a junior in high school and an aspiring writer. Her heart belongs to the sights and sounds of Topanga Canyon, where she lives with her parents and cats. Photo is from the Moonshadows Malibu website.
RED ROCK ROAD
In 1993
A fire burned
Red Rock Road.
Joyce and I walked there
After it burned,
Because, she said,
She wanted to paint it later.
There wasn’t a single leaf
That wasn’t black.
Black trees.
Black ground.
Black.
Everything.
Black.
I went home
And threw up.
We later heard the arsonist
Had been a child molester
And had done to this once lush,
Green and innocent road,
This road once so richly lined
With sturdy oaks
And tiny, big, all kinds of flowers,
What my grandfather so many years before
Had done to me –
Robbed it of its light, beauty,
Innocence and grace.
Then in the spring
My friend Linnea
Asked me if I wanted
To take a walk with her
Up Red Rock Road.
I went reluctantly,
The sight of innocence defiled
Still weighty in my brain.
But now we saw the miracle,
The new growth, the endless vines
Rich with outrageous flowers
White, white,
Flower after flower
White open faces,
White,
Whole hillsides of them
Born out of the black.
Jane Marla Robbins, a Finalist for a CAPS Grant in Poetry from the National Endowment of the Arts, is the author of the bestselling Poems of the Laughing Buddha; DOGS IN TOPANGA 2000-2018; and CAFÉ MIMOSA IN TOPANGA (winner, South California Book Publicists Poetry Award). You can see and hear her read from all three books on YouTube.
