Our new mission: To drive a cocktail peanut around the world

Chez Jay’s Restaurant – a dim dive-bar on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica – has established a reputation over the years as a place where Hollywood stars can blend in with workaday beer drinkers and canoodle in relative privacy. For the past four decades, the sawdust-covered floor of the dive-bar has seen the likes of Marlon Brando, Johnny Carson, Julia Roberts, Kevin Spacey, Cher, and Madonna. Lee Marvin once rode a motorcycle through the front door and ordered a drink. Quentin Tarantino has rehearsed actors in the back room; Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have worked on scripts in the front. Michelle Pfeiffer and David E. Kelly had their first date there. Angie Dickinson once waited tables at Chez Jay’s (legend has it that she stole away early whenever John F. Kennedy was in town), and the Pentagon Papers were reportedly leaked to the press in the dim environs of the bar.

But Chez Jay’s crowning achievement may well be the fact that it is home to the most well-traveled bar-snack in history – a cocktail peanut that astronaut Alan Shepherd took to the moon some thirty years ago. What had started as a joke when Shepherd came in for a drink one day ended when the astronaut brought the peanut back a few months later and declared it had gone into space with him (it used to be on open display at Chez Jay’s, until Steve McQueen nearly ate it in the 1970’s). Some years later, undersea explorer Ralph White (who has collaborated with movie director James Cameron on several documentary projects) took a Chez Jay’s peanut deep under the waters of the North Atlantic, and – with the help of the robotic arms on his diving capsule – placed it on the wrecked deck of the Titanic.

Now, thanks to our new friendship with Chez Jay’s owner Jay Fiondella, our Land Rover expedition will be taking a third cocktail peanut around the world.

This arrangement arises from a meeting we had in the restaurant with a potential sponsor several weeks ago. The sponsor-meeting itself never panned out, but – with our expedition Land Rovers lined up in the Chez Jay’s parking lot – we made lots of new southern California friends, including Ralph White and Jay Fiondella.

Interested in our Parkinson’s Disease cause as much as the expedition itself, Jay treated us to dinner and took us on a tour of his restaurant. Once a Cosmo “Bachelor of the Month” (back in the 1960’s), Jay is now white-haired and a bit stooped, but he spoke of his restaurant with ribald humor and a wry grin. “I’ve run this place for 44 years,” he told us. “About everything has happened in here. Once someone had this idea to bring an elephant in here as a promotional stunt. The damn thing put a dent in the bar and shit all over the floor.”

Jay took us to the curtained-off “table ten”, home to several high-profile trysts over the years (among other things, it’s the reputed spot where Linda Ronstadt hooked up with then-governor Jerry Brown).

“Warren Beatty used to spend a lot of time at table ten,” Jay told us, pulling the curtains back to show us the semi-private booth. “One time he got a ‘Lewinsky’ in there – back before it was called a Lewinsky. That was how he got the idea for the under-the-table scene in “Shampoo”. You can check if you don’t believe me – I think the floor is still sticky.”

Jay chuckled and continued on to the VIP room behind the kitchen, and showed us a video reel of his restaurant featured on shows like “Hard Copy” and “Extra”. An HBO special on the “Rat Pack” mentioned Chez Jay’s as a favored Santa Monica hangout for Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr. back in the sixties. Also included on the reel was a clip of a much younger Jay with Soupy Sales on “What’s My Line”, and his short stint as a cowboy on a now-defunct TV series called “Wells Fargo” (“I’ve tasted the dust of Texas for the last time,” a black-bearded Jay intones before heading off to rob a bank in Amity, Kansas).

It was in this VIP room (referred to by “Entertainment Tonight” as the “hanky-panky room”) that Jay presented us with our “expedition peanut”. Ralph White showed up for the occasion, said a few words about his own cocktail peanut adventure, and invited us to drop in on James Cameron’s studios when we’re in Baja.

We all ate a fine steak dinner, drank a bit too much booze, and compared travel notes -- but it was Jay himself who had the best line of the evening.

“Thanks to you guys,” he told us, “my nuts will have been everywhere.”

Aye. And we can only hope Jay’s nuts will still be intact when we return to California next year.

Help support our cause: Drive Around the World aims to raise money for Parkinson’s Disease research by taking four certified pre-owned Land Rover Discoverys around the globe following lines of longitude. Readers are encouraged to pledge small amounts of money per expedition-mile via a pledge form that can be found on our Parkinson’s page by clicking here. Everyone making a pledge of $10 or more to raise money for the Parkinson’s Institute will be put in a raffle to win an expedition-style Land Rover.