Venice Beach Unoriginals

An embedded report from two Venice Beach food stands trapped in a state of total war

On the south side of the Venice Beach boardwalk, just past the pickleball courts, there’s a lovely place where foodie dreams go to die. 

Mermaid Cafe and Oceanfront Kitchen x Poki-Poki cheerfully sell every trendy food known to man and algorithm - smashburgers, fried Oreos, acai bowls, teriyaki, churros, sushi, Korean and American corn dogs, Frito pies, tostilocos, elote, fried chicken. I’ll stop there, but just imagine the most chaotic collection of calories you can. 

These stands are the only food options around on this section of the boardwalk, and on a hot summer day they get packed. Their screaming neon aesthetic and massive word-salad menus were so similar that I believed them to be the pick up and order windows of the same restaurant.

But one day I heard Sam, one of the owners of Mermaid Cafe, shouting a bold claim into a megaphone.

“Come to the Mermaid Cafe, home of the original smashburger! Why would you go to the next door when it’s such a small, expensive burger? This side is the original and the other one is fake, nasty and a copy!”

I took a closer look at both businesses - to me, equally loud, fluorescent farts at all things seasonal and artisanal. There was so much signage and branding that I could’ve been looking at anywhere between one and seven restaurants. The menus resembled a lightly categorized list of the most popular 150 foods in California. 

It became clear to me that what I mistook for a single restaurant was actually two restaurants trapped in an extended game of plagiarizing brinkmanship. This was no intellectual property dispute or philosophical debate about originality. This was an ancient, proud, foolish tradition practiced by mostly men since time immemorial known as a pissing contest. 

And Sam is all too eager for battle. Through Mermaid Cafe’s public address system, he alternately heckles and cajoles anyone who wanders over to his competitor’s stand through the loudspeaker.

“Papa, next time get five fried Oreos for five bucks! Why would you pay 10 dollars for three pieces? Why, why, why? Why would you shoot yourself in the foot?”

He strikes such a wounded, yet tyrannically jovial tone that he’s hard to ignore.  He stands around five foot seven, but his high fives and handshakes leave my hand aching. His eyes swivel restlessly as we talk, and when he spots a customer nearing his competitor, he rushes over to talk them out of it. 

His sense of grievance is so vast that thirty minutes pass before I manage to ask a question. Sometimes he shoots out of his seat to emote his points with his entire body and he veers from tears of laughter to tears of frustration with alarming speed. Basically, Sam says he didn’t start it, and he isn’t going to lay down without a fight

“You think you’re going to have the upper hand? You’re not going to have the upper hand. Stop!” he said, slamming his fist into his palm. “You’re going to put up that witch? You know what? I’m going to cover your witch. Because it’s a war.”

The witch he’s referring to is a lit sign with an illustration of a blonde woman in pink heart-shaped sunglasses eating a burger. Sam’s lit sign depicts a mermaid with a burger in her hand, and I can’t help but notice it happens to overlap Oceanfront Kitchen’s sign. 

Sam won’t pretend that that was an accident. But if I must know, the chain of aggressions and recriminations go back years. It’s a conflict with multiple flashpoints and no single instigating event. 

But the funnel cakes, for Sam, were a declaration of war. When he started the stand in 2013, his neighbor was Jody Maroni’s Sausage Kingdom, and he claims there were relatively few desserts available in the vicinity. He established a funnel cake business complemented by a selection of sweets like smoothies, shakes, slushies and boba. When Oceanfront Kitchen began to offer a similar selection of desserts, Sam felt like he had to respond.

“In my book, every smoothie you sell, that’s my smoothie,” Sam said. “Every slushie you sell. That’s my slushie!”

So he added smash burgers, pizza, and pretty much everything else to his menu, including vegan options.  Neon signs and colorful graphics with trendy offerings cover practically every square inch of the food stand. When management at Oceanfront Kitchen increased the height of their menu sign, Sam went bigger.

One stand started placing sandwich board ads on the boardwalk, so the other stand added them too. One side started to advertise their ice cream with enlarged plastic facsimiles, so the other stand acquired them in the same size and number. 

The fiercer the competition between both businesses got, the more closely the chairs, tables and signs were pushed together. All of which made it the harder for customers to tell the difference between them.

According to Sam, both parties have tried and failed to work things out multiple times. The owner of Oceanfront Kitchen never returned my messages or phone calls. Lawyers have been involved, but neither party has filed a case. The police are apparently tired of coming out. 

Is there a crime here, or is this is just the classic American competitive spirit at work? The customers are definitely winning. Sam sells a cheeseburger for $3.99, which is around what McDonald’s charges. The chairs and tables pushed together make it easier for families and large parties to sit together. Both menus have way more options now, and if you like variety, I challenge you to find a place with more of it.

And after four years, the pissing contest has reached a a somewhat peaceful state of total war.  

It helps that both stands have employees that predate the current businesses. At Mermaid, Roberto, who has worked at food stands along Venice Boardwalk his whole life, dutifully participates in the rivalry. But I could tell he was more focused on the Dodgers game. 

A post on Oceanfront Kitchen’s instagram accuses Mermaid Cafe of being the copy. But most of the employees I’ve met at Oceanfront just listen to Sam’s loudspeaker antics and laugh. 

“Nah, we don’t even trip over that guy,” one guy said, his eyes unfocused and staring through me to the undoubtedly cooler things he’s going to spend his time and paycheck on. 

As for Sam, he cracked up when I told him I thought both stands were the same restaurant. They’ve been at odds for nearly four years now, which I guess is more than enough time to have a sense of humor about it.

I used to find these food stands’ perpetually crowded state as a painful testament to the power of the lowest common denominator. But as usual, taking yourself that seriously blinds you to some important things 

In a way, Mermaid Cafe slash Oceanfront Kitchen x Poki-Poki, formerly known as Seaside Grill and Jody Maroni’s Sausage Kingdom, is a pretty honest reflection of the economics of the modern day Venice Beach boardwalk. The massive menus aren’t any single person’s decision. Tourists from around the state and world dominate this market with their stereotypical expectations. If a business doesn’t cater to that, another business will. 

That’s true up and down the boardwalk, whether you’re selling t-shirts with edgy slogans, Dragonball Z hoodies or Logan Paul energy drinks. Sometimes it feels as if there is no business model left beyond what’s profitable or appealing in the moment. Nothing reason to express anything beyond “here” and “beach.” So many copies of copies that I start to question if there ever was an original.

But if you walk up and down the boardwalk, you might still see Harry Perry rollerblading and shredding his guitar. A bunch of Jamaican guys still thrust “free” reggae cds into your hands and get upset when you won’t pay.

The latest outdoor sports trend is some game called teqball, which is like if you played ping pong with a soccer ball and didn’t care how stupid you look. Surfers at the breakwater and fishers on the pier, mostly Mexicans, Central Americans and Filipinos catching reef sharks. Once, I saw an old guy in a beret drop three roses off of the pier, and he watched them until they sank out of sight, tears streaming down his face.

There’s a weekend basketball league with a colorful announcer that assigns mocking nicknames to the white guys that are doing too much - usually something like baby Luka or Yung Dirk. The Festival of Chariots, a Hare Krishna parade, feast and festival with elaborate floats, materializes in August every year like a recurring hallucination. There’s a wild, weird tradition of freedom here that for better or for worse, refuses to die.

Searching for a meaningful narrative in it all only causes the person searching to look stupid. In this case, that’s me.