At this Carmel pub, an Oscar winner’s star is fading

There are three types of people you’ll find enjoying a meal or a drink during a weekend rush at Carmel’s famed Hog’s Breath Inn: Those who are there because of Clint Eastwood. Those who are there in spite of Clint Eastwood. And those who don’t know or don’t care much about Clint Eastwood at all.

The Hog’s Breath Inn quietly opened as a restaurant and watering hole on San Carlos Street, then one of Carmel’s less-traveled thoroughfares, in the early 1970s.

The San Francisco-born actor and business partners Walter Becker and Paul Lippman furnished the nondescript location with a small, whitewashed dining room and an open patio set off by several brick fireplaces to help keep diners warm through the frequent all-day fog. They even added a tiny brown shack in the back that acted as the bar, complete with a taxidermy boar’s head to preside over it all.

‘Finger pointing and whispers’

For that first decade, the Hog’s Breath Inn was mostly known as locals’ spot and a place that Eastwood himself, a Carmel resident, would go to unwind when he was not on a movie set.

“To the uninformed, there is the usual fan-to-movie-star reaction when Eastwood parks his Mercedes 300 SEL in front of the restaurant and ventures in,” the Sacramento Bee wrote in 1979. “There are requests for autographs on cocktail napkins, snapshots from Instamatics, finger pointing and whispers and offers of free drinks.”

“When Clint’s not working, he’s usually here three or four times a week,” Hog’s Breath Inn’s then-manager Dan Tobin told the Bee. “He comes here to relax and to visit with friends.”

For a decade-plus, Eastwood was more often spotted as a patron at the restaurant than as someone working behind the scenes, leaving the day-to-day to other employees. In the mid-1980s, however, he assumed a greater role on the operations side, one that led him to become Carmel’s mayor.

Eastwood, who owned the building that houses Hog’s Breath Inn, wanted to expand the structure’s footprint into a bigger office and retail complex. (Part of the charm of the Hog’s Breath Inn that remains today is patrons have to recognize the brown-shingle facade of the Eastwood Building and find their way down a narrow alley to the restaurant itself.)

The actor didn’t get his way with the town’s planning commission on the building’s expansion, so he ran for the city’s highest office in 1986 — and won, causing some to speculate whether the actor had grander political aspirations. The blueprint for that career leap had already been established by the current commander-in-chief, Ronald Reagan.

“Clint Eastwood, elected mayor of this fashionable seaside village, received a congratulatory call Wednesday from another actor turned politician — President Reagan,” UPI reported the day after Eastwood’s landslide win. “‘What’s an actor who appeared in a movie with a monkey doing in politics?’ Eastwood said the president told him in reference to the movie ‘Every Which Way But Loose.’ An orangutan had a top role in ‘Every Which Way but Loose’ while Reagan, when he was an actor, starred with a monkey in ‘Bedtime for Bonzo.’”

Monkey business aside, Eastwood soon proved to be adept at the position — especially when it came to expanding his own personal holdings in the town.

“Eastwood sued Carmel over its refusal to let him put up his building, but he finally came to terms with the city out of court,” Newsday reported in 1986. “He will be allowed to build, but he had to agree to changes in the building plans. So, Harry-fashion, Eastwood decided to take the bureaucracy into his own hands.”

“Oh, he wanted the position and to make changes to the code, and he got it,” longtime Carmel resident and retailer Dee Borsella told SFGATE. “He pushed it along. He got exactly what he wanted — exactly what he wanted. And frankly, they were so starstruck, he could’ve done anything. It was embarrassing.”

Eastwood expands Carmel empire while holding office

But expanding the Eastwood Building wasn’t the actor’s only big move in Carmel while he held office. In 1986, Mission Ranch, a former dairy farm that had been converted into a bed-and-breakfast, was under threat of development.

Eastwood, according to a December 1986 article in the Los Angeles Times, “settled the issues himself this week–decisively and finally–in a way most other politicians can only dream of. He bought the place.”

True to his word, Mission Ranch was rehabilitated and restored, though never redeveloped, and remains a restaurant with a handful of outbuildings for guests and is used mostly for weddings and events.

But it didn’t take long for Eastwood to draw criticism, especially in the local media. And by the time he had to decide whether to run for re-election in 1988, his political career had run its course.

“In recent weeks, Eastwood has been accused in letters to the editors of the Carmel Pine Cone, a weekly, and daily Peninsula Herald of showing more concern for business development than the environment,” McClatchy News Service reported in February 1988 in the wake of Eastwood’s announcement that he would not seek a second term.

Short honeymoon as mayor

More than just the town had soured on Eastwood. In August of that year, the Hog’s Breath Inn temporarily closed down due to health code violations.

Tom Updike of the Monterey County Health Department said at the time the “cause of the shutdown was filth, a crowded kitchen, inadequate refrigeration and ‘numerous’ other health code violations,” the Pacific Daily News reported in August 1988.

While the restaurant eventually reopened, Eastwood turned away from life as an elected official in Carmel and redoubled his efforts in Hollywood, especially as a director, going on one of the more prolific runs of all time in the ensuing three decades. From 1988 to 2021 he acted in 19 feature films and directed more than two dozen movies, often producing, and even composing. Oscar-winning or Oscar-nominated films that help define his post-mayoral career include “Unforgiven,” “Million Dollar Baby,” “Mystic River” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.”

His interests elsewhere, Eastwood sold his share of the Hog’s Breath Inn to friend and local restaurateur Kaiser Morcus, who reopened the town favorite at the same location in 2000.

Morcus died in July, but his restaurant group still runs the restaurant today. He opened a second spot in La Quinta near Palm Springs in 2004, though that outpost closed in 2014.

‘The drinks are that good’

The original Hog’s Breath Inn is still thriving, thanks in part to the generous patio area, which boasted not a single empty seat on a recent Saturday afternoon. For those who can find their way, the spot still draws a diverse crowd of locals and visitors who stop by for various reasons.

“We’re here because we’ve got a little gathering in the area,” Modesto resident Kevin Crane told SFGATE while enjoying a cocktail inside the bar. “For some of us, this is the place. Even if Clint isn’t here, that’s OK — he’s right there on the wall.”

Hao Lin, Irwin Nguyen and Andy Tran, longtime friends who are spread out in the Bay Area and Orange County, decided to meet up on the Central Coast. They said they didn’t know about Eastwood’s connection with the restaurant prior to finding it, but instead were lured in to sample a few of the house specialty drinks that they’d read about online.

“We did a little search, and it looks like this is the place,” Lin said.

“It didn’t let us down,” Nguyen said.

“Far from it,” Tran said, adding that the trio often looks for the better cocktail destinations on their journeys together and the Hog’s Breath Inn was an immediate entry into the top tier.

“We’d read good things, but this place is pretty special,” he continued, noting their position at the bar, sitting around an oversized round table in front of a cozy fire, didn’t hurt. “We decided on one drink, but now it looks like we’ll stay a little longer.”

As for Eastwood, did they know about the actor’s connection to the establishment?

“No,” Lin said, laughing. “But now we do. Either way, that doesn’t make a huge difference. We’ll come back. The drinks are that good.”

As for me that afternoon, I enjoyed the Dirty Harry Burger, a staple since the restaurant’s origins. It’s a brisket and chuck patty served on a toasted ciabatta roll. When cut in half, it makes more than ample portions for two. The burger came out on the rare side and was garnished with some of the freshest greens and veggies I’ve had in a while. Even though I wasn’t able to stay and have a drink with my newfound acquaintances at the bar, the combination of the burger and the nearby fire on the patio was intoxicating.

As I was about to finish, I asked my server if Eastwood, 93, ever stopped by. He shrugged, “I think he keeps a pretty low profile now.”

The last time I saw Eastwood there was in February 2014, after the power had gone out on a stormy Super Bowl Sunday in the downtown Carmel cabin where we were staying.

My partner and I took a stroll in an attempt to find a place where we could warm up and enjoy a hot meal. After a short walk, we discovered the lights still on at the Hog’s Breath. For nearly an hour, we were the only occupants of the restaurant’s dining room, until we were joined by Eastwood and a companion. As if to punctuate the already surreal moment, he sat right beneath an oversized image of himself as the Stranger in “High Plains Drifter” and ate by the glow of candlelight. Though I — after repeated requests from my partner — resisted the urge to ruin the moment by asking for a photo or an autograph, on the way out, I gave a little wave as he continued to eat.

The interaction reminded me of the taciturn star’s quip about the name of the restaurant being meant to “keep people away.”

After a half-century, he’s yet to succeed.