Beachwood Opens Brewery and Second Restaurant Today

The average Saturday night wait for a table at Beachwood BBQ on Main Street runs about an hour and half.

Maybe it’s because of the menu, which features rarities such as venison chili, alligator and tasso stew and wild boar meatloaf.

Maybe it’s the restaurant’s beer selection, which earned it a place in Beer Advocate magazine’s list of Top 5 Beer Bars in the world.

It could also be the personal attention lavished by owners Gabe Gordon and his wife Lena Perelman who know their regulars by name and even use their customer’s trophies as handles for the beer taps.

Finally, it could be the skill of the chef, Gordon, whose creativity drove him to such mad heights that he once tried his hand at anchovy ice cream.

But the answer doesn’t matter because the prolonged wait at Beachwood BBQ could soon come to an end with today’s opening of a second Beachwood location in downtown Long Beach. The new location is three times as large and features the same menu, but the big change will be the addition of a brewery. With most of their existing customers coming from Long Beach, Gordon hopes the new Long Beach restaurant will draw some customers from the Seal Beach location and shave off some of the wait time

“I am a customer, too, and waiting an hour and a half for a table is just too long,” said Gordon. “I am super-flattered, but I miss the people who stopped coming in because of the wait. Some of them are people who’d been coming in since we first opened (in 2006), and I miss seeing them.”

Despite Beachwood’s popularity, Gordon says he still walks into work every day expecting to see empty tables as if his success were just a dream.

It’s a dream that began well before the restaurant opened. Gordon was a fine dining chef in places such as The Four Seasons, Blue Palms, The Music Box Theatre and Savoury’s.

“I was never good at working for people,” Gordon said. “I made a lot of people a lot of money – people got real successful on my food.”

Gordon always knew he wanted to own his own restaurant, and one day he and Perelman were ready to do it.

“We had never been to Seal Beach before. We saw this place, and we just felt like, ‘this is it.’ The stars aligned,” Perelman said. “We opened it with the goal of creating a restaurant that we would want to go.”

For Gordon, that meant a menu staring southern food.

“I have always dug southern cooking,” he said. “It’s America’s only indigenous cuisine.”

Gordon has strong opinions about food, and his epicurean philosophy shines through in menu items such as the tater tot casserole, an appetizer consisting of “porcini dusted tater tots cooked in duck fat and topped with smoked cheese curds and duck gravy” and in the buffalo sloppy joe’s.

“I wanted to take the pretentiousness out of fine dining,” he said. “Why should wild game only be served at nice restaurants? And why should everyone else eat processed meat?”

The menu at Beachwood changes every few months, a painfully slow pace said Gordon, who likes to experiment.

Gordon experiments with molecular gastronomy, a process that involves finding new ways to work with familiar foods by playing with textures. It was this process that led him to the ill-fated anchovy ice cream. He was attempting a play on a nicoise salad, replicating the salad’s combination of tastes with unexpected textures.

“I had it down. I was so close right up until the anchovy ice cream,” he said. “It was awful. But you should fail kind of often. You have to experiment.”

One experiment that bore immediate success was Beachwood’s emphasis on beer. The restaurant originally opened with nine tables and 10 taps. The beer menu is constantly changing, and it occupies its own blackboard wall visible 24 hours a day via the Beachwood Hop Cam.

It seemed natural to open a brewery with the expanded Long Beach location, said Perelman. Once again, Perelman and Gordon weren’t afraid to take risks. Instead if hiring professional brewmaster to work for them, they partnered with Julian Shrago, who made his name as a homebrewer. Shrago is an aerospace engineer with a passion for beer. About 15 years ago, he began brewing beer and winning contests such as America’s Finest City Homebrew Championship and the National Homebrew Competition.

By going into business with Shrago as a co-owner instead of an employee, Gordon said he found someone who is as passionate about his craft and invested in the business as he is.

In addition to aerospace work, Shrago is a musician, and his approach to brewing marries his creative side with his technical skills.

“You have to be creative and flexible, but you need to stay as technically focused as you can,” he said.

Shrago’s proudest brew or his “baby” is the Melrose IPA, which will be available shortly. The new location will feature 36 taps, and there are still several tap handle spots open for customers to bring in their baseball, football, soccer or bowling trophies to be immortalized.

Beachwood BBQ Brewery is at 210 E 3rd St. in Long Beach.