Post #404601 by dmhontheweb on Wed, Aug 27, 2008 9:33 PM

I remember the Kapu Kai because I grew up in Claremont in the 1960s and it was a memorable landmark--memorable enough for me to do a Google search a few decades later and stumble into this website.

The exterior was illuminated at night and looked quite impressive. The postcard picture hardly does it justice. I only actually ate there once, in about 1966 or 1967, when I was about 10 or 11 years old. There was a car show there of some kind one night that I attended with my parents.

Anyway, the thing that made me remember the Kapu Kai was the WATERFALLS! Nobody here has said anything about the WATERFALLS. Now to explain the waterfalls. A section of the exterior facade was covered with rocks (probably lava-type rocks) from ground to roof and water came cascading down from the roof over all the rocks. It was all dramatically illuminated and was absolutely the most spectacular thing I had ever seen in my short life. Maybe the waterfall part was only few yards wide, but to my kid-sized sense of scale it seemed huge. After the place was abandoned we drove past it many times while travelling along Foothill Blvd. and it made me glum to see the wreckage and know that I would never see those waterfalls again.

Next I will let my brother know there are people on the internet still talking about the Kapu Kai--he'll be as astonished as I was.