The hook
In a Delta river town, you can eat dinner in a 1931 bar under the mounted heads of some three hundred big-game animals, one of them an elephant with a thirteen-foot trunk.
01Why it's worth it
Foster's Bighorn is what a Prohibition bootlegger did with his money. Bill Foster ran moonshine, then spent the fortune on eight hunting trips to Africa and ten to the far north through the 1920s and '30s, and came home with more than three hundred trophies. In 1931 he opened a bar in Rio Vista to hang them in, and they're all still there: rows of antelope and deer, a giraffe running up the wall, hippo, rhino, lion, and a full elephant head mounted in 1952, said to be one of the largest mammal trophies anywhere. The work was done by the Jonas Brothers, the most respected museum taxidermists of their day. By any modern measure it's a monument to a kind of hunting nobody defends now, and it's also one of the strangest rooms in California, a working restaurant where six hundred glass eyes watch you eat. Go in and take it as the uneasy piece of history it is.
02How to experience it
It's on Main Street in downtown Rio Vista, a couple of blocks off the Sacramento River, about an hour and a quarter from the Bay. It's a real bar and restaurant, so come for a meal or a drink rather than just a look. It pairs with a Delta drive down Highway 160 and the town of Locke.