There are places you go because they’re beautiful, places you go because they’re famous, and places you go because somebody at work says, “You’ve never been to the Penny Bar?” The Penny Bar in McKittrick, California, was firmly in that third category.

Sitting along Highway 33 in the middle of Kern County oil country, the old McKittrick Hotel had been serving oilmen, ranchers, travelers, and assorted desert wanderers in one form or another since the late 1800s. The business descended from the Headquarters Hotel and Saloon, originally built by Armando Bandattini in 1898. Fire destroyed it in 1903, it was rebuilt, and the building was reconstructed again in 1929. For generations it functioned as one of McKittrick’s social centers.

Then Mike and Annie Moore arrived and made the place considerably stranger.

The Moores had previously run a pest-control business in Eureka before returning to McKittrick around 1999. Annie collected pennies, and Mike had apparently made the sort of marital promise a man makes without fully understanding the scope of the project: someday, he would cover a bar with her pennies. Annie eventually clarified that she did not mean merely the top of the bar. She meant the bar. All of it.

So Mike went to work.

Over roughly six years, more than a million pennies found their way onto the bar, walls, floor, doors, pool table, television, signs and practically every other surface capable of holding glue. Different shades of circulated and newer pennies were even used to create words and designs. With more than $10,000 in actual currency permanently attached to the place, the Penny Bar became one of those wonderfully unnecessary roadside attractions that Kern County seems uniquely qualified to produce.

But those of us familiar with the place knew it had another, less-advertised name:

The Flytrap.

During a McKittrick summer, eating lunch there could occasionally become an aerobic activity. One hand worked the fork while the other maintained a defensive perimeter around your plate. The flies were persistent, numerous and apparently unimpressed by personal boundaries.

The irony was magnificent.

Mike Moore—the man presiding over this summertime insect convention—had spent years in the pest-control business.

You could not have written it better.

Here was a former professional exterminator serving rib-eyes to oilfield hands while flies conducted low-level strafing runs over the dining room. Somewhere along the way, “Penny Bar” became “Flytrap” among patrons who understood that a proper nickname is usually bestowed with equal parts affection and abuse.

And people kept coming.

The food had a reputation of its own. Mike was known for rib-eye steaks, while the café became a regular lunch stop for workers coming in from the surrounding oilfields. During good times in the patch, the place could fill rapidly with boots, hard hats, field trucks outside and conversations about wells, rigs, production and whatever had gone wrong that morning.

The Penny Bar eventually became known well beyond McKittrick. Newspapers, travel writers and television programs covered it, including Huell Howser’s California’s Gold. Visitors came from around the country—and beyond—to see what happens when one woman collects pennies and one husband takes a promise much too literally.

Mike died in 2020, and the Penny Bar later closed. In 2024, portions of the famous penny-covered interior and exterior were removed for preservation at the Kern County Museum, where plans have called for incorporating the bar into a future oil-history exhibit.

That seems appropriate.

Because the Penny Bar was never really about pennies. It was about McKittrick—a tiny oil town where somebody could glue a million coins to a building, serve a damned good steak, tolerate a few thousand uninvited summertime guests with wings, and somehow turn the whole thing into a Kern County institution.

The Penny Bar. The Flytrap.

Mostly real history.

And absolutely Kern County.