I’m just about to dig into a hearty lunch with my wife Diane at Paluca Trattoria on Old Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey when she sighs and asks: “Where are my girls?”
She means Madeline, Celeste and Jane, the gal pals at the center of “Big Little Lies.” In the crazy-popular HBO series, these women – played by Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Shailene Woodley – meet regularly over coffee at this harbor-side spot to dish some juicy gossip. But today, the “girls” are nowhere to be found.
“I guess I’ll have to be a cheap substitute,” I offer.
If you’re a fan of “Big Little Lies,” which launches its second season on June 9, you’re likely not only addicted to the show’s scandalous intrigue and A-list cast, but its enchanting scenery. In fact, the series is so perfectly immersed in Monterey and the surrounding area that it’s difficult to imagine the action unfolding anywhere else.
But the subversive novel that inspired the show is actually set in a fictional Australian town called Pirriwee. It was there that Aussie author Liane Moriarty spun her tale about a group of “sleek and skinny” women who “take their mothering so seriously.” When screenwriter David E. Kelley set out to adapt Moriarty’s page-turner for television, he shifted things to Monterey, largely because of what he calls its “hypnotic beauty.”
“Aesthetically,” he said, “we were looking to draw the audience in and say, ‘I want to go there on vacation.'”
And so they have. Ashley Tedesco, who runs Paluca Trattoria with her husband Sal, claims she has met numerous travelers — many of them from outside the U.S. — who come to the area specifically because they’ve fallen in love with the show’s picture-perfect images of Pacific Coast beaches and Big Sur’s towering Bixby Creek Bridge.
Paluca Trattoria, a rustic Italian eatery that became a coffee shop on the show, has benefitted. In fact, so many fans arrived at the wharf wanting to replicate the coffee-fortified chat sessions of “Big Little Lies” that Ashley and Sal were forced to buy a bigger espresso machine to handle the demand.
“We weren’t prepared at first for the onslaught,” she says of the visitors who descended on Monterey shortly after the show’s Season 1 run. “We thought it would be a little blip — that it would be over in a week or so. But the show has a broad reach, and we’re starting to see an uptick again now that Season 2 is about to start.”
If you’re looking to form your own “Big Little Lies” tour, the wharf is a great place to start. From there, may we suggest a relaxing drive — without texting — along Ocean View Boulevard. This lovely stretch of road is where, early in “Big Little Lies,” Madeline nearly rear-ends a car and proceeds to accost a clueless teen for driving while on her cell phone.
Ocean View Boulevard is bracketed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Lovers Point in Pacific Grove. The former is visited by Jane and her son Ziggy and is a great way to come face-to-face with marine life without leaving dry land. The latter is where mom and son enjoy a shoreline picnic. The charming little Lovers Point park, a popular site for kayakers, surfers and scuba divers, provides an awesome view of the bay. We’re told that it will also appear in Season 2 of “Big Little Lies.”
On our tour, Lovers Point offered some welcome chill-out time after logging a good workout on the hiking trails of Garrapata State Beach Park, where the rugged coastline vistas are more astounding around every bend. It’s there — just south of Carmel — that the “Big Little Lies” cameras captured so many of those scenes of meaty waves crashing against jagged rocks, as if to symbolize the turbulence of the characters’ lives.
Other “Big Little Lies” sites include Point Lobos State Natural Reserve, Del Monte Beach (See Jane run!) and historic Colton Hall, where the women squabble over Madeline’s controversial production of “Avenue Q.”
But if you’re looking to find those fabulous mansions featured in the show, you may be out of luck. Only Celeste’s home, with its spacious deck overlooking the Pacific, is in the area — Carmel Highlands — and “Big Little Lies” producers have strived to keep the exact location a secret. As for the other fabulous homes, they’re in Malibu.
Consider that big little lie to be a case of “artistic license.”
