Last chance to get pulled into The Undertow

Vickie and Tom Brosy

By Niki Price

For the TODAY

The colors on SW 51st Street, in Lincoln City’s Taft District, are striking. The azure blue of the sky, the slate gray of the water as it flows out through the jaws of Siletz Bay, the inky black eyes of the curious harbor seals — and the bright-pink exterior of Eleanor’s Undertow restaurant, a fixture here for the past 43 years.

But this seaside neighborhood will soon lose some of its lustre. The crew at Eleanor’s will be scooping their last ice cream cones and handing over their last hot dogs, as they prepare to close the doors on January 1.

If you know Lincoln City, you know Eleanor’s Undertow. It’s the cafe with the mermaid fountain, the candy cane signposts and the giant chocolate chip cookies. Eleanor’s is the place you stopped on your best-ever beach day, for hot dogs and chowder. It’s the ice cream parlor with the piano in the corner, where everyone dresses up for the Fourth of July, and where the menu was spelled out in plastic letters on an illuminated Pepsi sign. It’s that cozy place crammed full of stories, from the shipwreck that beached young Granny to the pre-war festival that crowned Eleanor Kramer the Queen of the Red Head Roundup.

In a moment when a “clean, modern aesthetic” means that everyone’s favorite color is a neutral and every restaurant bathroom looks like the next, the Undertow has endured as a paragon of pink personality. The ‘Tow wasn’t designed. It clearly just grew, organically, bit by bit and year by year, with photographs and thank you cards, hand-painted murals and little presents sent by customers from around the globe. Like Eleanor herself, who lived her entire life in Lincoln County before she passed away in 2016, the Undertow is pure Oregon Coast: strong, smiling, a little bit quirky, and ready to serve in (almost) any weather. 

Eleanor was a Lincoln County fixture, from her days growing up on the family’s homestead, to being a member of the 1940 graduating class at Taft High School (one of the school’s first), to participating in the inaugural “Red Head Roundup” in Taft, to helping found and lead the Bay Area Merchants Association, to being a major spearhead for Lincoln City’s Taft Urban Renewal Project, among many other activities. She got her start in the restaurant business in 1975, working for Mo Niemi at her namesake restaurant at the end of SW 51st Street. According to the legend, Mo’s Restaurant didn’t offer food to go — and Eleanor saw an opportunity. In 1980, she leased a corner of Bailey’s Moorage, just across 51st, and launched “Eleanor’s Undertow Takeout Restaurant.”

Eleanor Kramer

For decades Eleanor shared the business with Roy Koback, her husband Herman’s World War II buddy, and her mother Raychel, as well as their daughter and son-in-law, Vickie and Tom Brosy, family members including granddaughter Raychel who started working at the register at the age of nine, and generations of friends and family members, serving behind the counter and pitching in during holiday weekends. Generations of Oregonians have concluded that trips to the beach weren’t complete unless they included stops at The ‘Tow for ice cream, Granny’s 1/4-pound chocolate chip cookies, cobbler, hot dogs, taffy and chit chat. In an homage to the building’s bait-and-tackle days, for many years the Undertow also rented crab pots, sold bait and issued shellfish licenses.

Eleanor and Herman passed away seven years ago, then Roy two years later. Three years ago, the COVID-19 restrictions changed the experience a bit, as they did everywhere. The Undertow closed its indoor seating in 2020 and began exclusively selling through a walk-up window. In one of countless “pandemic silver linings,” Tom and Vickie realized the format change helped speed customer service and allowed them to serve more hungry beachgoers than they could before.

For the past three years, the Undertow has operated just as it did in the beginning: devoted exclusively to take-out, through a window facing the bay. They’ve worked hard to keep the Undertow from going under. But there are some financial currents you just can’t fight.

“The owners of the property have decided to go another direction,” said Tom. “And our lease will come to an end at the end of February.”

For now, the Eleanor’s Undertow family is cataloguing memorabilia and working on plans for a possible sale in the weeks to come. Artwork, tables, display cabinets, a player piano, restaurant equipment — and likely quite a few mermaids — will soon find new homes, as Tom and Vickie prepare for the move in February.

“We wish to express our sincere gratitude to our many customers and friends for their loyalty and friendship for the past 43 years,” the couple wrote in a recent letter to the editor. “We have loved seeing your smiling faces and hearing your great compliments and stories throughout the years as we’ve come to know each generation. Your patronage and friendship over the years have been overwhelming. We will genuinely miss seeing our fabulous customers and sharing our family history along with our local heritage as we served up all those scoops and smiles! Who knows...perhaps in the future we’ll be able to have a small version of ‘Eleanor’s Undertow’ in this area, enabling us to continue our awesome family legacy offering our delicious treats. We do want to keep in touch with our clientele: contact us at eleanorsundertow@gmail.com.”

Eleanor’s Undertow will be serving its beachy goodness through the walk-up window at 869 SW 51st Street now through close of business Monday, Jan. 1.