Loyal customers toast Petaluma’s Mister McGoo’s on final weekend

Mister McGoo’s, a Petaluma institution since President Lyndon B. Johnson’s first full term in office, kicked off a final weekend at its current location Friday with a rocking party featuring live music and more than a few tears.

People who were kids when the restaurant opened in 1965 returned with their own children to join in the festivities, which were equal measure celebration and funeral wake. Regulars started sidling up to the bar in the early afternoon, sipping cocktails from plastic cups because the dish washing machine has been dismantled.

“This is really sad,” said Dave Cristiani, who wasn’t referring to his vodka and 7-Up. He said he met his wife at Mister McGoo’s more than 30 years ago when she worked at the Petaluma Boulevard North joint as a part-time waitress. She was too ill Friday to join him.

Patti Healy, who showed up to help clean, said she hosted most of her four kids’ parties at McGoo’s. She then proceeded to list the occasions: baptisms, first Holy Communions, birthdays, Christmas.

“It’s the end of an era for Petaluma,” said Healy, whose sister, Jackie Cotter, has been a waitress at the restaurant since 2003.

McGoo’s is closing Sunday night, the victim of a landlord-tenant dispute and by some measure the passage of time. “Family-style” restaurants emphasize comfort food over top-end cuisine, a feat that can be harder to pull off in an age of celebrity chefs and online review sites such as Yelp, which gives McGoo’s a middling three-star rating.

Bob McGaughey, who founded the restaurant he bequeathed with his childhood nickname, acknowledged the restaurant’s food “wasn’t the best, but it was always good.”

It had to be, otherwise McGoo’s could not have lasted as long as it has.

“I was looking to make it 50 hours,” Bob said, contrasting those early days with the restaurant’s long run.

In 2000, he turned over the helm to his son, Tony. Appropriately enough, the dominant feature in the restaurant’s foyer is a large photograph of Tony, his two brothers and Bob and Bobbi McGaughey taken at Tony’s wedding.

Melissa Steele of Sebastopol, whose grandmother used to help out in the kitchen at McGoo’s, said the restaurant was so busy on Easter in 2000 that she jumped in to help bus tables. That turned into a job on the weekends.

“I have always been thankful for the opportunity the McGaugheys gave me,” said Steele, who is 30 now and employed as an administrative professional.

This weekend culminates an extraordinarily busy month for the family, who were notified by landlord Cindy Machado of Petaluma that they had a month to vacate the building.

Bob McGaughey said Machado is the daughter of the woman who first leased him the building in 1965. But recent differences over needed repairs and upgrades to the site, and who should pay for them, apparently are at the root of the dispute leading to the restaurant’s closure.

“It’s breaking our hearts, because we would have liked to have seen it go on,” Bobbi McGaughey said.

Reached by phone Friday, Machado declined comment.

Tony McGaughey, who is hoping to re open McGoo’s in another location, said he’s been too busy trying to clear out of the current building to explore other options. That’s on top of hosting this weekend’s final blowout.

Today’s line up includes a potluck and DJ. On Sunday, the bar will open as usual at 2 p.m. and remain open until the McGaugheys close one final time at midnight.

On Friday afternoon prior to the nighttime crush of partygoers, kids cleared out the banquet room as Billy Joel’s “It’s Still Rock and Roll To Me” blared on a portable stereo. The kids sported black T-shirts noting the restaurant’s 50th Anniversary and the phrase, “We’ll Be Back.”

At the bar, 93-year-old World War II veteran Cliff Stowe sipped a beer.

“You lose a lot about the history of Petaluma when something like this goes away,” Stowe said.

You can reach Staff Writer Derek Moore at 521-5336 or derek.moore@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @deadlinederek.