Kansas City Barbeque – Back and Better Than Ever!

I thought I’d take a little break today from my NYC blogging – and yes, I do have many more Manhattan filming locations to write about 🙂 – to do a little post about an old favorite of mine – Kansas City Barbeque in San Diego, or as it is more commonly known, the Top Gun Bar.  The restaurant, which suffered from a devastating fire on June 26th of last year, recently reopened this past November – just in time to serve up it’s annual free Thanksgiving dinner for active duty military.  And I had yet to stalk the place since it’s grand reopening.  So a few weeks ago, while in San Diego celebrating my best friend’s college graduation, I dragged my boyfriend out for a little post-fire stalking. 

I am happy to report that despite the interior of the restaurant needing to be almost entirely redone due to smoke and fire damage, Kansas City Barbeque still looks pretty much the same as it did in Top Gun.  Some of the changes that were made – the bar area was remodeled and altered slightly, skylights were added to the dining room, the kitchen was entirely rebuilt, and new exterior awnings were installed.  But other than looking a bit shinier and newer, it’s still the same old Kansas City Barbeque we all knew and loved.  🙂  And I am very, very happy to report that much of the Top Gun memorabilia actually survived the fire, including Goose’s piano, which was actually owner Martin Blair’s childhood piano.

Some items that were sadly ruined in June’s fire?  The many autographed headshots of celebs who had frequented KCBBQ in the past.   A few stars were kind enough to send in replacement pics, though, after being contacted by Martin after the fire.  How cool is that??  Brooke Shields, Andre Agassi, Richard Dean Anderson, a few Padres players, and Jerry Lewis all sent in new headshots to be placed on KCBBQ’s new walls.  Ostensibly missing from the headshot wall, though, is Tom Cruise, who was apparently contacted for a new pic, but has yet to send one in.  Personally I think that’s pretty darn crappy, especially since Maverick was the role that made him a star.  But, hey, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because, despite his couch-jumping antics and Pro-Scientology rants, I still believe that deep down Tommy is a really nice guy.  I just can’t help it.  🙂  I am guessing that Tom C. Ruz  is a pretty hard guy to get ahold of and maybe his publicist just isn’t giving him KCBBQ’s message.  So Tommy, if you’re out there, do the right thing and send your headshot to Kansas City Barbeque.  While you’re at it, thrown in one of Katie and Suri, as well.  🙂  Other stars who have frequented the legendary restaurant include Lorenzo Llamas, Dennis Rodman, and Dallas’  Charlene Tilton. 

I highly recommend stalking KCBBQ, even if you are not a Top Gun  fan.  The bar has a great atmosphere and serves us some fabulous food – especially the French fries.  I ate an entire plate of them!  Not kidding.  🙂   

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  🙂

Stalk It:Kansas City Barbeque is located at 610 W. Market Street in Downtown San Diego.

Kansas City Barbeque Is Back In Business – Just In Time For Halloween!

This weekend, I took a little vacay down to San Diego with my family.  Of course, while there I had to do some stalking of the Top Gun Bar, aka Kansas City Barbeque, which sadly has been closed since June 26th of this year due to a major fire.  I was very curious to see what the restaurant looked like since the devastating fire took place and what progress, if any, had been made on the restoration of the property.

I was actually shocked to see that the restaurant actually looked pretty good!  I was expecting complete devastation, but I am happy to report that, from the outside, the place looks pretty much the same as it did before the fire, despite a few scorch marks. 

While we were outside taking photographs, one of the staff members walked over to talk with us.  He really could not have been nicer and he even showed us some photographs and newspaper articles about the fire.  And he gave us the good news that, while the restaurant probably won’t be open for regular business until mid-November, there will be a Halloween party held there on October 31st!  Not only is that great news, but it also allowed me to tie KCBBQ in with my Halloween theme for this month!  🙂 

He told us that the kitchen area, which is located towards the rear of the restaurant and which is where most of the fire damage occurred, has already been entirely rebuilt.  The interior seating area suffered mostly just smoke damage, and sadly much of the Top Gun  memorabilia was lost, including the juke box where Kelly McGillis plays “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” in the closing scene of the movie.  😦  But thankfully Goose’s piano was salvaged, as were most of the candid photographs taken by KCBBQ staff during the filming. 

The owners are asking for replacement memorabilia at this time.  They are looking for anything having to do with Top Gun, the military, Kansas City, or flying in general.  You can send any memorabilia you wish to donate to the address listed below.  They ask that you sign and date everything you donate. 

  I am glad to report, too, that through the disaster KCBBQ kept its sense of humor – at one point they even added the letter “D” to the their logo out front so that it read “Kansas City Barbequed”.  LOL  I truly can’t wait for this San Diego (and Hollywood, for that matter) landmark to re-open.  Until that time, if you happen to be in the area on Halloween, be sure to stop by KCBBQ.  Tickets are $20 per person, but include all the alcohol you can drink. 

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  🙂

Stalk It: Kansas City Barbeque is located at 610 W. Market Street in San Diego.  The restaurant will hopefully re-open for regular business in mid-November.  For more information you can visit their website.

Sad Day for Stalkers!

Sad news!!  Tony just posted a comment on my Top Gun Bar post letting me know that a fire destroyed Kansas City Barbeque, aka the Top Gun Bar, this past Thursday afternoon.  This has NOT been a good month for fires and filming locations – first Universal and now this.  😦  At approximately 2:15PM on Thursday, a fire broke out in an open fire pit in the kitchen area and quickly spread throughout the rest of the restaurant.  Even though firefighters had the blaze put out in twenty minutes, most of the restaurant had already been gutted.  The owners of Kansas City Barbeque did manage to save Goose’s piano, as well as some other Top Gun  memorabilia, but most of the restaurant is sadly gone.  They do plan to rebuild, but I can’t help feeling like a piece of movie history has been lost.  😦  Such a sad day for stalkers!! 

You can read the whole story on the fire here and here.  You can also watch a news video which shows footage of the restaurant here.

“Goose, You Big Stud . . . “

No self-respecting stalker can take a trip to San Diego without visiting Kansas City Barbecue, which is more commonly known as the “Top Gun Bar”.  Kansas City Barbeque was actually featured twice in the 1986 Tom Cruise flick.  It first shows up in the scene where Goose and Maverick serenade Kelly McGillis and Meg Ryan with “Great Balls of Fire” and Meg Ryan utters her famous line “Goose, you big stuuuuuud!  Take me to bed now or lose me forever!”  It also appears in the very final scene of the movie, where Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis reunite while “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” plays on the jukebox in the background.  (Yes, that jukebox is still there!)  🙂

Even though Top Gun  was filmed over 20 years ago, fans still flock to the tiny bar on a regular basis.  I’ve even seen huge tour buses pull up out front on occasion.  All of the bartenders there are extremely nice and will tell you all sorts of stories about the filming of the movie.  The place would definitely be considered a dive bar, but it serves up some GREAT food in a super fun atmosphere.  Sitting there, you might wonder how in the heck Kansas City Barbeque wound up in one of the biggest movies of the 80’s.  Apparently, location scouts were out and about searching San Diego for filming locations for Top Gun  and they stopped into Kansas City Barbeque for a cold beer and some lunch.  They ended up loving the place so much, they brought director Tony Scott back there for lunch and he wound up featuring it in the movie.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Goose’s piano and the jukebox can still be found in the Top Gun Bar, although they have been moved from where they stood during filming.  There are tons of photographs and other movie memorabilia located throughout the restaurant – it’s a Top Gun  museum of sorts.   You will for sure recognize it from the movie as soon as you walk in the door and you’ll probably get the urge to sit down at Goose’s piano and play “Great Balls of Fire”.  🙂  Kansas City Barbeque is a super fun place to spend an afternoon or an evening and I highly recommend stalking it!  It has also been voted “Best BBQ in San Diego” for ten years in a row.

Note – my pictures of the Top Gun Bar are extremely old!  I couldn’t find my more recent ones.  But trust me, the bar looks pretty much the same as it did over ten years ago when my pictures were taken.  🙂

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  🙂

Stalk It: Kansas City Barbeque is located at 610 West Market Street in Downtown San Diego, just across the street from Seaport Village.  You can visit the bar’s website here.  After hanging out at the Top Gun Bar head across the street to Seaport Village, a cute little outdoor shopping center right on the water.  Edgewater Grill, located in Seaport Village, is an excellent place for dinner!

Hotel Del Coronado

Ever since I was a little girl, my family has been vacationing at Hotel Del Coronado on the island of Coronado.  Hotel Del is a truly magical place – like no other hotel I have ever seen.  Stepping inside it is literally like stepping back in time a hundred years to a completely different era.  Completed in 1888 for the cost of one million dollars, the Victorian style hotel is one of the oldest and last remaining buildings made entirely of wood.  It’s hard to believe, but not one single nail was used in the building of the hotel, instead the workers used wooden pegs to fasten and secure.  Hotel Del Coronado was named a historical landmark in 1977 and it truly is a marvel to see in person.  The lobby is covered in dark wood paneling and looks like it was taken right out of the set of James Cameron’s Titanic.

The hotel has undergone many changes in the past decade, including a $57 million renovation.  Ironically I preferred the hotel in its pre-renovation days, as many of the original areas of the Del are now gone.  When I was a little girl, the original men’s cigar room was still intact, but it was gutted a few years ago and is now a restaurant.  The lobby piano bar was a favorite of my parents, but it was recently turned into a gift shop.  The hotel’s original dining room, the Crown Room, used to be a magnificent 156 foot long restaurant with 30 foot high arched ceilings made entirely of Oregon Sugar Pine, but it is no longer open to the public and is now only used for special events.  My parents actually threw me a surprise 21st birthday party in the Crown Room, so it holds a special place in my heart.  While the hotel truly is still a magical place, sadly it was much more enchanting in years past. 

Hotel Del is now and has always been a celebrity mecca.  Hundreds of celebrities, dignitaries, authors, and almost every single American president of the past 20 years have all been guests of the hotel.  Thomas Edison, George Burns, Harry Truman, Charlie Chaplin, Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, Lucille Ball, and Frank Sinatra all stayed at the Del at one time or another.  L. Frank Baum, who lived on Coronado, was a frequent guest of the hotel, and it is rumored that the Del was his inspiration for Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz.  He also designed the crown chandeliers that still hang to this day in the Crown Room. 

Countless TV and movie productions have been filmed at the Del – including My Blue Heaven, K-9, Mr. Wrong, The Stunt Man, The Married Virgin, Simon & Simon, Ghosts of California, Baywatch  and, of course, the 1959 Marilyn Monroe classic Some Like It Hot, where it was used extensively as a Miami resort.  Interestingly enough, Billy Wilder chose to shoot Some Like It Hot  at the Del because at the time the hotel was in an economic decline so the owners let him film there for minimal costs.  He also wanted to shoot at a place where Marilyn Monroe could stay on location – due to her numerous on-set antics, he did not want to take the risk of her not showing up to the set due to transporation problems.  The picture to left is of the stage where Marilyn and “the girls” performed their concert in Miami.  Also, the book Bid Time Return, on which the 1980 movie Somewhere In Time  was based, was written about Hotel Del Coronado.  However, producers chose to use the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island in Michigan for the filming of the movie.

Movie memorabilia and photographs used to line the Del’s long hallways and as a little girl I would walk the corridors looking at all of the old time movie photographs, completely mesmerized.  At the time, being at the Del was the closest I ever got to being on a movie set.  Today, the memorabilia has been moved to the Coronado Museum of History and Art, just down the street from the Del.  For a $4 admission fee, you can enter the museum and learn the history of the island and the hotel.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  🙂

Stalk It: Hotel Del Coronado is located at 1500 Orange Avenue on Coronado Island in San Diego.  You can visit the hotel’s website to book a room here.  While at the hotel, be sure to visit the Est. 1888 gift shop – they sell photos and souvenirs from the many movies filmed at the Del.  The Coronado Museum of History and Art is located at 1100 Orange Avenue.  They are open Monday through Friday from 9am to 5pm and Saturdays and Sundays from 10am to 5pm.  You can visit their website here.

Stalking San Diego

Spent this past weekend in Coronado, a small island off the coast of San Diego, with my family to celebrate Father’s Day.  My best friend, who lives nearby, came over to spend the day with me by the hotel pool and when she got there she mentioned that she was a “bit afraid” to tell me that a production crew was filming on the San Diego-Coronado Bridge. LOL  While I didn’t drag her over to the bridge to do some stalking, I thought I’d do a post about past productions that took place there.

The Coronado Bridge, as it is more commonly referred to, is 11,288 feet long and 200 feet high – a height which permits Navy ships harbored at the nearby Naval Station San Diego to safely sail underneath.  The Bridge was built in 1969 and connects the City of San Diego, via the 5 Freeway, to Coronado Island.  It is the third most popular suicide bridge in America, following the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and the Aurora Bridge in Seattle, Washington.  My best friend also shared a very cool, little known bridge fact with me – it floats!  Yes, you read that right!  In the case of a disaster, natural or otherwise, if the Coronado Bridge is destroyed, pieces of it will actually float instead of sinking to the bottom.  It was designed this way so that in the case of a disaster large pieces of the bridge can be towed out of the harbor so that the Naval Station and Navy ships are not blocked in.

The Coronado Bridge is an oft used filming location, mostly for commercials, but it has showed up in a few TV shows.  The bridge was featured each week in the opening credits of the TV show Simon & Simon and it also showed up several times on Veronica Mars, where most notably it was the bridge where Logan’s mother jumped to her death.   While it is sometimes referenced as the bridge used in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, even though that movie was supposed to take place in “Sun” Diego, it was actually filmed almost entirely in Long Beach.  The scene where Will Ferrel and Jack Black get into a fist fight was actually filmed on the Queensway Bridge in Long Beach, not on the Coronado Bridge.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  🙂

Stalk It: The San Diego-Coronado Bridge is located off the 5 Freeway in San Diego County, just past the Downtown San Diego exits.  If you have time, spend the afternoon walking around Coronado – it is an adorable little town. 

“Tower, This is Ghostrider Requesting A Fly-by”

When I was in high school, back before he totally went off his rocker and started jumping on couches, I was head over heels in love with Tom Cruise!  I thought he was the dreamiest!  And I didn’t think there could ever be a better movie than Top Gun!  Still love Top Gun, but I’ve pretty much lost that loving feeling for Tom.

During my college years, when I was just an amateur stalker, one of my friends happened to know the location of Kelly McGillis’ house from Top Gun, so, of course, I had to stalk it!  Since I had yet to meet my boyfriend at that time, I had to drag my parents to this filming location.  The house is located in Oceanside, near San Diego, and is an adorable little beach house.  The citizens of Oceanside have been fighting for years to stop a hotel development company from tearing the house down – so if you are a Top Gun  fan, you better stalk it while you still can!

Paying homage to their San Diego filming location, Maverick’s helmet, dog tags and a few other Top Gun memorabilia items are enshrined in a case at the Hard Rock Cafe,  located just a few miles away in La Jolla.

The restaurant from Top Gun  is also located in San Diego, but I will save that location for a future post.  🙂  

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  🙂

Stalk It:  The Top Gun house is located in Oceanside, about 30 miles north of San Diego, at 102 Pacific Drive, overlooking the beach.  The Hard Rock Cafe – La Jolla can be found at 909 Prospect Avenue, #100, at the corner of Prospect and Fay.