There are some places I hope will never change. One of those is Casino Bar and Grill, which has been serving ice-cold beer and homestyle food to the small community of Bodega since 1949.
To me, Casino is the perfect bar—a dive-y saloon right off Highway 1. Inside its faded, shingled exterior, this rustic roadhouse is all dark wood, with a misspelled gold leaf placard pointing to the bar’s “Dinning Room.” There’s an ever-present line of aging locals hunched on worn stools along the bar and a communal trough urinal in the men’s bathroom that’s always filled with ice. To soak up the cheap drinks, there are simple lunch options (like tuna melts and hot dogs, served until the grill closes at 4 p.m.) and pop-up dinners hosted by a rotating cast of chefs. For a long time, Casino’s most notable feature was Evelyn Casini, who bought the restaurant with her husband, Art, in 1949, when she was 22. Evelyn stood behind the bar and in front of a narrow flat-top grill for 75 years, cooking up what is one of my favorite burgers in Northern California.
I heard about Casino from a coworker at Chez Panisse and first visited one evening in 2021 after celebrating my birthday with a dozen friends in Bodega Bay. There, I found bikers circled around pool tables, cowboy tunes on the jukebox, and the smell of grease in the air. I made a point of returning every time I drove up the coast. Until I learned that Evelyn Casini had passed away in the fall of 2024, I’d never even considered the possibility that Casino could change. I worried about what would become of her legacy: These historic restaurants close down all the time (some failing to attract enough business, others falling into disrepair) or—perhaps even more tragic—are updated and transformed to the point of becoming unrecognizable.
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Today, Casino is still owned by the Casini family. Brandi Mack, Casini’s granddaughter-in-law, runs the restaurant. A former bookkeeper, Mack says she never intended to take over Casino; she’d worked there for around 11 years when Casini’s health declined, and she naturally took on the role. “No one ever really asked me to step up,” Mack says. “I just started doing it because it needed to be done.”
Mack is practical and ambitious, with plans to upgrade the bones of the bar in ways she hopes might expand its business. I tense a bit as she describes some of the potential renovations: adding more beer taps (there’s only ever been one), redoing the bathroom (replacing the old trough urinal), fixing the unsteady floorboards, and giving the outdoor patio a “facelift.”
Perhaps sensing my apprehension, she tries to reassure me: “I’m going to try to preserve the feel and the look of that bar.” She points to the wallpaper behind the bar as an example: “If I touched that, people would come unglued.” I relax a bit, and she continues: “When I am thinking about changing things, I put the community members in mind. I put Evelyn in mind.” Mack says she also checks with Casini’s children before making adjustments.
Chef Mark Malicki also has concerns about the potential changes at Casino. For over a decade, Malicki operated a weekend pop-up out of Casino’s small kitchen—just two burners, in addition to the flat-top—making California comfort food: Eureka black cod chowder, buttermilk fried shrimp, or peach-blackberry pie with whipped cream. Malicki’s weekend dinners drew lines of hungry regulars and newcomers that sometimes stretched out the front door. I never tasted his food, and sadly, I might never get the chance—Malicki has glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. Last June, a doctor told him he had, at best, 15 months to live. Now spending much of his days at home, Malicki looks back on his time at Casino fondly. “I got to play a really small part in the history of the state,” he says. “It feels nice, you know?”
In 1985, Malicki moved from New York City to Sebastopol, where he spent 13 years cooking at a local vineyard before eventually moving on to Casino. “I drove by that bar for 20 years and never went in it,” Malicki says. “I was like, If I go in there, I’m just gonna get beat up by some redneck. It scared the hell out of me.” It wasn’t until he answered Casino’s Craigslist ad for a cook that he met Casini and realized he’d misjudged the place.
Malicki says Casino is a “community center” where hippies, rednecks, techies, and ranchers can all mingle over a drink or game of pool. In fact, Malicki witnessed only one fight in his time at Casino; it was between fishermen from Crescent City and Bodega Bay. The following day, out of respect for Casini, all the fishermen returned, tools in hand, to fix what they’d damaged.
Malicki left Casino Bar in 2024, when Casini’s health was beginning to decline. “I just thought it was gonna be different without her,” he tells me. And it was different: Touch Tones replaced the jukebox; White Claw joined the menu; occasional concerts and a weekly karaoke night broke Casini’s long kibosh on live music.
Despite these changes, most of what Mack intends to replace at Casino Bar seems to be aimed at making sure the place doesn’t get run into the ground. “You’re dealing with a 150-odd-year-old building,” she says. “While [Evelyn] poured her soul into this place…she did not do a lot of repairs and maintenance.” Mack also seems keenly aware of how small-town bars often help prop up the local economy. “I don’t want this town to become another Tomales when the William Tell closed,” she tells me, referring to the oldest saloon in Marin County that never recovered from a major renovation by new ownership.
Still, in the long term, the future of Casino’s management is unclear. “I don’t see myself dying here,” Mack says. She recalls a joke Casini used to make: “If I die while you’re working, just kick me under the bar and keep on working.”
For now, it’s Mack’s bar, and she’s doing what she can to make sure this special place stays afloat. Some of Mack’s renovations are already underway, with more to come. How much change can a place take before it no longer feels like itself? I’m not sure. Perhaps all that really matters is that Casino continues to be there, ready with cold beer and—if you get there before the grill closes—an extraordinary burger.•
