The Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks, California, site of the November 7, 2018 shooting of 12 people, has been around for a long time in various iterations. In Thousand Oaks, a bedroom community 40 miles from Los Angeles, where everything is torn down and rebuilt on a regular basis, it is virtually unheard of for a restaurant or the building it is housed in to continue for decades. Yet Borderline Bar & Grill’s building, with its exterior look and interior dimensions, are the same as it had been three decades ago in the form of a restaurant called Charley Brown’s.
Charley Brown’s: Dark Steakhouse
The Charley Brown’s Restaurant, located at 99 Rolling Oaks Drive in Thousand Oaks, was a vast, single-room hall with a high open ceiling. Like the other Southern California Charley Brown’s Restaurants, it was a dimly lit steakhouse that revolved around a ponderous Olde English theme, heavy on the wood and brass. At one end of every Charley Brown’s, in large letters: “Work is the curse of the drinking classes,” a quote attributed to Oscar Wilde.
Food was equally heavy. A May 6, 1976 article describes
langostinos marina, $4.95, and the filet tips Stroganoff, $5.25. They were gourmet all the way, prepared to individual order in the spotless exhibition kitchen. The langostinos were tiny baby lobster tails prepared with butter, onions, fresh mushroom slices and green peppers, tipped with rich bearnaise sauce.
In a 1996 article about the closing of the Woodland Hills Charley Brown’s, restaurant industry analyst Janet Lowder said, “They’ve been on a downhill course for quite some time. They’re a dark steakhouse. They didn’t change with the times.”
One of the earliest Charley Brown’s (above) located in Marina Del Rey gives a good indication of the “vast hall” style of these restaurants’ architecture.
