LOUIS LOUDAS “Louie” was born Feb. 14, 1894 in Greece and died Nov. 1978 in Seldovia, Alaska. He owned the Coffee Cup Café. Louie could speak English, but very broken English, with a heavy accent.
Andy Anderson tells a story of going into the Coffee Cup Café when he was a real young guy just getting to Seldovia. Walked in one night, had dinner, and said, oh, he would love a bowl of ice cream. Oh, ice cream sounded good.
He said, “I’d like a bowl of chocolate ice cream, Louie. Top off the dinner.” And Louie said”We no gotta chocolate. We gotta vanilla.”
“Well, I really wanted chocolate.” “Well, we gotta vanilla.” So Andy said, “Okay, I’ll take vanilla.”
As Andy was enjoying his vanilla ice cream, a guy came in, sat down, and looked at Andy’s ice cream, and said, “Well, that looks good. Louie, I’d like a bowl of ice cream.”
“Whaddaya want?” He said, “I want chocolate.” Louie goes back and gets him chocolate ice cream.
So Andy says, “Well, Louie, I wanted the chocolate.” Louie just said, “Well, if you don’t like it, keepa go.”
John Gruber says “Louie sold what there was – if he had steaks that he needed to sell that day and you went in, you had steaks. You might want hamburger. You might want chicken. But when Louie wanted to sell you steaks, you had steaks. If you didn’t like it, there’s the door.
So he was that kind of a crusty old guy, but people loved him.
And it was interesting because if you sat at the bar, you could look at the kitchen and then there was a door right to the right, and the bar – open bar was right there.
So they could go behind the bar and there was always an open door between the Linwood Bar and the restaurant.
It was just another one of those unique Seldovia little places that had a little jukebox in it and a little horseshoe bar with probably, I don’t know, maybe a dozen stools around it or so. It wasn’t much. But it was a popular place.”