Java Man and Ocean Diner Have New Owners. The Crews Behind the Counter Are the Same.

The October 8 A La Carte column in Easy Reader opens with a photo of two men behind a counter, surrounded by jars of coffee and tea. They are Nick Herrera and Daniel Nava of Java Man. The caption explains why they are in the paper. The South Bay Hospitality Group has taken over Java Man and Ocean Diner, and "customers were relieved to learn the crews remain the same."

That relief makes sense once you count the years. When Easy Reader's Kevin Cody wrote about Java Man last November, Herrera and Nava had each worked there for 27 years. Jesus "Chuey" Garcia had been there for 19. Cody also described how Hermosans who want to impress out-of-town guests skip the upscale dining rooms. They take them to Java Man for coffee and a morning glory muffin, where Nick, Chuey or Daniel greets them by name. A change of owner at a place like that raises an obvious worry. This time, the buyer's own record answers it.

Two Rooms One Man Built Over Four Decades

Rick Hankus had two restaurants on opposite edges of town, both built around routine.

The diner came first. In 1986, with a friend's backing, Hankus bought Granny's Diner on Aviation Boulevard and renamed it Ocean Diner. He kept the chef, Emigdio Nunez, who continued running the kitchen. Hankus loved big bands and Broadway musicals, so he piped in 1940s music and hung framed World War II front pages next to old toasters and waffle irons. When customers praised the "'50s theme," he corrected them. The menu's motto is "Just like eating at mom's… only better." It runs from biscuits and gravy, meatloaf and Boston cream pie to stir-fried tofu and an oatmeal crème brûlée with caramelized brown sugar.

Java Man opened in 1992, the same year Starbucks went public. It sits in a little red 1929 beach cottage on upper Pier Avenue. The inside is broken into small, semi-private rooms. Hankus pictured it as a beatnik coffeehouse in the spirit of Hermosa's Insomniac in the 1950s. When wifi arrived in 2000, it quietly became a shared workspace that cost the price of a coffee and a muffin.

The cottage outlasted plenty of competition. Cody noted last year that the Starbucks down the street and both Starbucks up the street had recently closed, while Java Man kept winning the Easy Reader Best of the Beach coffee shop vote. Hankus said his toughest year was 2010. That year the city removed street parking on Pier Avenue for a redesign that was supposed to take a few months and took nearly a year. The finished project added the parkette where Java Man customers now drink their coffee in the sun.

So the two places the new owners inherited are built on long tenures, not on a concept.

The New Owners Call These Places Dinosaurs

Brian Eldridge and Patrick Mescall met in 2007 as bartenders at Salt Creek Grill in El Segundo. Their company has a clear thesis, and Easy Reader's 2025 profile of the pair, "Tiki Town," puts it in their own words.

"They're like our dinosaurs, that we just keep alive, keep going, keep growing." Brian Eldridge, South Bay Hospitality Group

The places they've collected match that line. In 2017 they opened Paddy O'Brien's Irish Pub in Redondo Beach, in a pub that had been O'Hearns for decades. Next came the Torrance Tavern, the Hula Hula Room, the Bounty Room and the Sly Fox in Lawndale. Many of these bars hold a grandfathered "48 license," a California liquor license that lets a bar serve alcohol without serving food and is no longer issued to new businesses. "That's why we save them before they disappear," Eldridge told the paper.

Mescall summed up the approach this way. "We love the little community gathering places where it's really the stamp of the neighborhood. They go away often in Southern California. And they don't come back once they're gone."

Up to now, that strategy mostly applied to bars. Java Man and Ocean Diner take it into breakfast, and the group has already done that once.

Eat At Joe's Is the Preview

In August 2024, Eldridge and Mescall took over Eat At Joe's at 400 Pacific Coast Highway in Redondo Beach. It had opened in 1969, and they became only its third owners. Easy Reader's report that November, "Eat at Joe's in Redondo Beach gets third owner in 55 years," laid out what stayed. All 20 employees stayed. Manny was at the grill in his 42nd year. The diner kept its 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. hours and its John Wayne Special. "Our job is to keep it on its tracks," Mescall said.

Two years later, Richard Foss checked in. His October 2026 column says the group has run Eat At Joe's for more than a year, "and if you hadn't noticed because they mostly left everything the same, that's a good sign."

Here is how the precedent compares with the two Hermosa rooms, using the most recent published details for each.

There's another reason the Joe's comparison holds. Ocean Diner's crew has its own long tenures. Martin Rodriquez, Jose Rodriquez and Jame Avila had worked alongside Hankus for more than two decades. The group's track record is with exactly this kind of staff.

Same Owners at Both Ends of Pier Avenue

This purchase also changes Hermosa's map. Java Man sits at 157 Pier Ave. Down the same street, at 73 Pier Ave. on Pier Plaza, the group opened Tiki Kai on November 5, 2025. Reservations were full for the first two weeks. Tiki Kai is the group's biggest project to date. It has a 14-foot wooden door designed by Peter Asmar of Asmar Studios, interior wood carvings by Tony "Tiki Tony" Murphy, and a menu from chef Calvin Holladay that includes Macadamia Mahi Mahi and Huli Huli Chicken.

Tiki Kai was built new and tied to the chef-driven dining that has been spreading through downtown. Java Man and Ocean Diner go the other way. They are older than almost everything around them and valued for staying put. So a single local group now runs the newest dinner room on Pier Plaza, the coffee cottage up the hill and the diner on Aviation. "We decided that the South Bay is our playground," Mescall said when Tiki Kai opened.

The group also has ties to Hermosa's older establishments. Eldridge and Mescall call Hilary Condren and Christina Mishef, the owners of Hermosa's Bottle Inn, their mentors. Mishef "never forgets to send flowers to one of our openings," Mescall said.

What to Look for on the Next Visit

Foss's column didn't give a transfer date, and it didn't mention any changes to hours or menus. It's worth checking current hours before an early run. If the Eat At Joe's pattern holds, the details that made these rooms what they are should still be there.

• At Java Man: morning glory muffins, the small semi-private rooms inside the cottage, and seats in the Pier Avenue parkette.
• At Ocean Diner: the house coffee, which Cody described as a freshly roasted blend of Kenyan, Sumatran and Colombian beans rather than standard diner drip, under the old menu line "High octane is our middle name."
• On the walls: whether the World War II front pages, old toasters and waffle irons Hankus hung, and the 1940s music he piped in, are still part of the room.
• Behind the counter: the names Hankus's regulars already know. The October 2026 report says those crews are still in place.

Hankus's own community habits may be harder to carry forward. For more than a dozen years, he ran the kitchen for the Mama Liz Thanksgiving Dinner at the Hermosa Kiwanis Club, where volunteers served 400 to 600 turkey dinners. Service clubs knew him as an easy yes when a fundraiser needed coffee and pastries. No report so far says whether the new owners will carry on those traditions this Thanksgiving.

At Witek Lewin Group, we pay attention to the places that hold a neighborhood's daily rhythm, from a 1929 coffee cottage to a 1940s-themed diner, because those details shape what a home there is really like. If you're thinking about a move to or within the South Bay and want a team that knows its morning institutions as well as its listings, Contact Us.