Alfie's Fish & Chips

Alfie's Fish & Chips
Restaurant information
Established	December 21, 1969 (1969-12-21)
Owners	Mike and Nellie Sewall
Previous owners	Jack and Margaret Cairney Colleen Staffel
Food type	Fish and chips, seafood
Location	610 North H Street, Lompoc, California, United States

Alfie's Fish & Chips is a fish and chips restaurant in Lompoc, California, United States. It opened on December 21, 1969, as an early franchise of a Texas-based restaurant chain of the same name, whose parent corporation went bankrupt in 1972. The chain's surviving restaurants continued as independent family businesses, and after the original location in Texas City, Texas, closed in January 2019, the Lompoc restaurant became the last remaining Alfie's.

History

Chain

The Alfie's Fish & Chips chain was based in Texas, and its first restaurant operated on Palmer Highway in Texas City, near Galveston. By the restaurant's own account, the chain franchised hundreds of locations within a few years of its founding, an expansion it describes as too rapid, and the parent corporation went bankrupt in 1972. The individual restaurants then became independently owned and operated.

The number of surviving locations declined over the following decades, and at the beginning of 2019 only the Texas City and Lompoc restaurants remained. The Texas City restaurant closed in January 2019; it had posted a sign during the preceding holiday season stating that it was temporarily closed for maintenance and repairs, but it did not reopen.

Lompoc restaurant

The Lompoc restaurant opened on December 21, 1969, in a purpose-built storefront in the Northside Shopping Center at 1036 North H Street, with a grand opening ceremony that featured bagpipers. Its founders, Jack and Margaret Cairney, were a Scottish couple. The restaurant was among the chain's earliest franchises; the Lompoc Record reported it as the 21st in the chain, while the restaurant itself numbers it as store No. 27. The Cairneys later passed the business to their daughter, Colleen Staffel, who sold it to Mike and Nellie Sewall in 2001.

The restaurant operated for fifty years in its original 1,400 sq ft (130 m²) space, drawing most of its business from takeout orders. In 2019, with the lease on the original space expiring, the Sewalls relocated the restaurant a few blocks down North H Street to a roughly 2,300 sq ft (210 m²) building at 610 North H Street that had housed the restaurant Scratch Kitchen until that August. The move was completed in November 2019, shortly before the restaurant's fiftieth anniversary, and the larger building allowed the addition of a full kitchen and a pub-style bar serving beer and wine, including imported English beers. The owners retained the restaurant's English decorations, some dating to 1969, including a red telephone box and shelves of imported British groceries such as mushy peas and McVitie's biscuits.

The restaurant closed twice during COVID-19 pandemic restrictions in 2020. It marked its 53rd anniversary with a Lompoc Valley Chamber of Commerce ribbon-cutting ceremony in December 2022.

Menu

The menu centers on English-style fish and chips made with battered, rather than breaded, Alaska pollock, served with thick-cut chips, hush puppies, and coleslaw, with malt vinegar and HP Sauce stocked on the tables. Other items include shrimp, scallops, clam chowder, calamari, a deep-fried Twinkie dessert, and catfish, which the owners say is popular with military customers from nearby Vandenberg Air Force Base. The restaurant's mascot, Alfie, is depicted as an Englishman wearing a bowler hat and scarf, and the Sewalls voice the restaurant's radio advertisements, with Mike Sewall performing an English accent. A group of British expatriates known as the English Ladies has met monthly at the restaurant since its opening.