Vegas Neon

PAUL HULTMAN - RESTAURATEUR

(By his daughter Isis)

My Dad, Paul Hultman (former Executive Vice-President of Uncle John's Pancake house, before that he was a sales rep for Dorman Restaurant Supplies after serving in the Pacific in WWII) had long wanted to be his own boss, so he bought five Biff's Restaurants from his friend Tiny Naylor in 1964 (I was 9 years old at the time and we lived in Santa Barbara, Ca.). Dad wanted to change the restaurant name to Cee's but See's Candies put an immediate stop to that by threatening legal action. Then he was going to name them PEBS (stands for the partners: Paul, his wife-to-be Ella she was manager of Blum's in San Francisco and then in Northridge, I'm not sure who the B was and the S was for Dick Sawtelle), I think my Dad was able to use PEBS on the corporation name, not sure. So, my dad had to keep the name Biff's for the restaurants because it would be too costly to change it.

The locations were: Hollywood (his moneymaker), Long Beach (money loser and too far away to drive from my Dad's home in Northridge), Reseda 18134 Sherman Way (eventually became a main moneymaker), Burbank, and 7th and Alvarado in Los Angeles. Later, as the restaurants became more successful, he got rid of Long Beach location and opened up a Biff's in Encino, and Santa Monica on 3rd and Wilshire in 1975. He was happy with the clean and new Santa Monica location, was able to design from the ground up, he chose a color-scheme of rich creams and browns which were, at the time, a modern departure from the yellows and reds of a typical Denny's-type coffee shop, and the Santa Monica Biff's was successful from the start. His competition was Zucky's a few blocks up Wilshire Blvd. His landlord at 3rd and Wilshire was an older man who lived in a penthouse on the top floor of that buiding which is no longer there. I met him once and he seemed like a nice man and he and my dad laughed and joked (when you're a kid you remember nice adults). Now, in 2010, the entire building at 3rd and Wilshire is long gone and a high-rise is in it's place.

I just did some internet research and I've come up with a Biff's Northridge location at 17018 Devonshire. At the moment, I can't picture in my mind exactly which restaurant it was.

All the Biff's were clean and had very good food. My favorite was Hollywood because of family memories there and because Hollywood is Hollywood. Reseda second. Being offspring of the boss, I could eat anything I wanted, but I almost always wanted the same thing: Patty Melt on rye with grilled onions, and a milkshake. Later on, I lived a couple blocks away from the 3rd and Wilshire Santa Monica Biff's but had become a vegetarian by then so the food, although high quality for coffee shop food, wasn't overly appealing to me.

My father passed away suddenly at age 59 in 1979. My step-mother Ella ran the restaurants until she became ill and had to disolve them aprox 1992 or 1993. Their young son inherited what was left of the business but I'm not sure if there are any Biff's remaining in L.A.

BIFF'S IN MOVIES AND TV:

The Biff's on 7th and Alvarado Streets across from MacArthur Park was in the 1965 movie "A Patch of Blue" starring Sidney Poitier, Shelley Winters and Elizabeth Hartman. I found a clip on Youtube and in the scene Sidney Poitier is teaching the blind Selena how to walk across a busy street by herself. You can see 3 Biff's signs in the background starting at aprox 3:50 in the clip. A Patch of Blue was released Dec. 10, 1965 (I turned 10 yrs old that day which verifies my childhood memory of timelines).

When my Dad was working all day at the 7th and Alvarado Biff's, on visits, my little brother and I would go across the street and walk around in MacArthur Park all by ourselves, it was a normal safe park in 1965. As of June 2010, the building is a Western Union check cashing business with Langer's Restaurant across the street according to a panaramic photo on Google Maps.

The "Adam-12" TV show was filmed in the Hollywood Biff's aprox 1965. I haven’t found which episodes yet.

My Dad's been gone a long time (Jan 1979). He never talked about the war or his history. But he was funny as hell with kids, always playing and having fun and taking movies. He loved amusement parks, roller coasters, games, boating, having fun. Occasionally he'd make spaghetti or a yellow mix cake with chocolate frosting and we'd eat it warm with a cold glass of milk. Mixes were a novelty in the Sixties - moving forward, the latest convenience.

My Dad, Paul Hultman, was born 9/9/1919 in Worchester, Mass. son of concert pianist, Paul Hultman, and grandson of a famous Swedish singer, J.A. Hultman (both were ministers which is probably why my Dad never went to church). The family moved to Pasadena, California when my Dad was a toddler. I've put two and two together on my own and realized my father grew up in the Depression, son of a concert pianist who really should have tried to work in Hollywood movies but was too proud. His parents had been extremely well off before the Depression - one of their honeymoon gifts had been a Dusenberg. I'm guessing Dad decided staying close to food was a safe bet in hard times, and when he went into the Army for WWII he gravitated to the food section.

He met my mother in Australia, they went back and forth from Australia to America twice (once six weeks by ship - my mother kept the lovely menu. She found the menu fifty-plus years later and felt seasick just reading it.) and finally settled in Hollywood. Then he got job as a salesman for Dorman's Restaurant Supply and moved to Bakersfield for the job, and then Santa Barbara. A few years later he became executive Vice-President of Uncle John's Pancake House. He travelled by plane a lot with that job. We were always meeting him at Santa Barbara's pretty airport. Those were in the days of expense accounts and he always had a different new car in the driveway. We also grew up with restaurant supplies: nice thick plates and cups, a comfy dark red booth around the formica kitchen table.

Aprox 1962 occasionally our whole family would have breakfast at the Santa Barbara Uncle John's Pancake House on the weekend. It was new and very popular, busy, noisy, thick coffee cups always with a red lipstick ring, thick signature plates, smoking at the table, I remember mostly a light yellow in the colors. My siblings poured gooey maple syrup on their pancakes and gobbled up maple bearclaws. I felt nauseous from the sensory overload and ate plain pancakes with butter and was relieved when we left.

It was fun visiting Dad in L.A. In the Sixties he drove a baby blue Lincoln Continental. In the Seventies he drove a Cadillac. His day was spent visiting the restaurants. There was a trusted cook who made the best bread pudding, his own recipe. When my Dad was getting the new Encino Biff's ready for opening and the staff were scraping years of grease off the kitchen grill, a woman walked up to our booth and Dad hired her on the spot in less than a minute. She left and I was kind of amazed and asked him about it, he said he could tell she was a good waitress.

He took my brother and I to a restaurant supply convention in L.A. and he was like a kid in a candy store looking at the latest in French Fry cookers. I was supremely bored. When I was 23 I asked my Dad what exactly he did for Uncle John's Pancake House when he was travelling during the Sixties. He said he flew all over the country looking for locations for new restaurants. I know he went to the Miami area. He sent us back an alligator egg which hatched and became "Allie." And he must have gone to New Orleans because he came back loving Dixieland music and steamboats. I believe one trip was to Michigan where he slipped on the ice and hurt his back, but decades later I heard it really was a heart attack which might have been the catalyst for Dad to become his own boss and buy Biff's. P

Eventually my Dad must have sold 7th and Alvarado Biff's. I don't remember going to it after 1965. The Google panaramic photo was good. As he improved the businesses, he opened newer more comfortable locations nearer the San Fernando Valley, which at that time, was residential and relatively crime free. If he was still alive today, his restaurants would be in Westlake and Thousand Oaks and he'd probably live there too.

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