Joe Jost's, Long Beach (1924): a hundred years of pickled eggs, pretzels, and the Joe's Special

There is a bar on Anaheim Street in Long Beach that has been doing more or less the same thing since the year 1924, and the thing it does is this: pour a cheap, cold beer; sell you a pickled egg, a fistful of pretzels, and a couple of hot yellow peppers to go with it; and, if you’re hungry, build you a Joe’s Special — a homemade all-beef sausage, split lengthwise and stuffed with a dill pickle spear, laid on soft rye with yellow mustard and a slice of Swiss. Joe Jost’s (2803 E Anaheim St) is one of the oldest continuously operated taverns west of the Mississippi, and its whole identity is that it never updated ^[1][2].

A barber shop that became a bar

The founder, Joe Jost — a Hungarian immigrant — had a business going by 1920 (originally on Main Street in Newport Beach), and in 1924 he landed at the Anaheim Street address in Long Beach’s Zaferia district. It wasn’t a bar yet: in the Prohibition years it was a barber shop that also offered billiards and poker — a neighborhood men’s hangout that happened to cut hair. When Prohibition was repealed at the end of 1933, beer went on, and so did the Joe’s Special sandwiches, and the place became the tavern it has been ever since ^[1][2]. The barber-shop-to-bar origin is part of why the room still feels the way it does — long, plain, built around the pool tables, not a “concept” so much as a hundred-year-old habit.

Pickled eggs, pretzels, peanuts

The food at Joe Jost’s is short, weird, and load-bearing. The pickled eggs have been a staple since the mid-1930s; the bar goes through something like 450 of them a day, served with fresh-cracked black pepper, a handful of pretzels, and hot yellow peppers on the side — that’s the ritual, that’s the order half the room is making ^[2][3]. There are also Marmion’s jumbo Virginia peanuts, a brand that traces back to 1907 — the kind of detail that survives at a place that never rotates its menu. And there’s the Joe’s Special itself: not a Polish sausage on a bun, exactly, but a house-made all-beef link cut open and packed with a pickle, on rye with mustard and Swiss — a sandwich that exists nowhere else and has existed here, basically unchanged, since the FDR administration ^[1][2][3].

A hundred years, no reinvention

In August 2024 Joe Jost’s turned 100 — and the way it got there is the point. It didn’t pivot to craft cocktails, it didn’t get a “refresh,” it didn’t become a brand. It stayed a dim, plain bar where the beer is cheap, the eggs are pickled, and the sandwich is the sandwich ^[4]. For most of its life it was run within the founding family — by Joe Jost’s grandson, Ken Buck, a lifelong Long Beach resident — and a generational ownership transition was reported around the centennial; the new owner is described as a Long Beach native and former Joe Jost’s employee, which is about as in-keeping as a handoff can be ^[5]. (Founder should pin the current ownership before publish.)

Why it’s in the directory

Joe Jost’s belongs here as a Long Beach legacy-bar / “still doing it” entry — the bar equivalent of the kind of origin-and-longevity notes we keep for Yard House (Long Beach, 1996), Bay Cities (the Godmother, ~100 years), or Philippe vs. Cole’s on the French dip: a place whose value is its age and its refusal to change. It sits naturally alongside the Yard House Long Beach origin piece and the broader Long Beach map (the neighborhood-long-beach topic), and it pairs thematically with the city’s other century-old food institutions. The page should carry: founded Long Beach, 1924 (Joe Jost, Hungarian immigrant; barber-shop-with-billiards origin; beer from 1933); the Joe’s Special (house all-beef sausage + dill pickle spear, rye, mustard, Swiss); the pickled-egg + pretzel + hot-pepper ritual (~450 eggs/day, since the mid-1930s); Marmion’s peanuts; the 100th anniversary, August 2024; and the family-then-former-employee ownership line (verify).

Draft — Search session, 2026-05-12. Sourced from joejosts.com, Long Beach Post, L.A. Taco, Sun Newspapers, and Longbeachize. Confirmed: address 2803 E Anaheim St, Long Beach; founded 1924 (1920 Newport Beach origin; founder Joe Jost, Hungarian immigrant); barber-shop-with-billiards-and-poker beginning; beer service from Prohibition repeal in late 1933; Joe’s Special composition; pickled eggs since the mid-1930s (~450/day) served with pretzels and hot peppers; Marmion’s jumbo Virginia peanuts; 100th anniversary August 2024; “one of the oldest continuously operated taverns west of the Mississippi” (used in the press, not adjudicated). STILL TO CONFIRM before publish: the current ownership (long held by grandson Ken Buck; a 2024 sale to a former employee was reported — confirm who runs it now and whether the family is still involved); the exact ZIP for the Anaheim St address; whether founder Joe Jost’s nationality should be sourced more firmly than “Hungarian immigrant” as stated in the press.

Founder review before publish: confirm the current ownership and the founder bio, harden citations (the joejosts.com history page plus one strong outside profile), and decide whether to keep the “oldest tavern west of the Mississippi” claim as-press-quoted or soften it.