The Harbor Grill

For thirty-eight years a low building at the edge of Dana Point Harbor served mesquite-grilled fish to people who had walked up from the docks. The Harbor Grill opened in 1984 and closed at the end of September 2022. This site is an archive of it.

What this was

The Harbor Grill was a seafood house on the water in Dana Point, California, roughly midway between Los Angeles and San Diego and just south of Laguna Beach. It was family-run for its entire life. Its own site put the proposition plainly enough that it never needed changing in three decades: fresh seafood, cooked over wood, in a room with a view of masts.

The kitchen's method was regional rather than fussy. The same fillet might arrive Cajun-blackened, glazed with miso, sat in a Madras curry broth, or rubbed with Caribbean spice and dressed with a tequila and tomato salsa. The restaurant described this as Pacific, New England and Cajun renditions of familiar fish, and it meant it — the menu ran a working tour of American and Pacific-Rim seafood cookery without ever leaving the one grill.

The shape of a week

Lunch ran daily from 11:30am. Dinner began at 4:30pm and ran to half past nine. Sunday belonged to the Champagne Breakfast, served from mid-morning until two. Thursday was Oyster Day, when half a dozen came at a fixed price in any of six preparations. In the evenings a pianist played. Those four fixed points held steady across the archive from the late 1990s to the last captures in 2022.

• Opened — 1984, in Dana Point Harbor
• Closed — 30 September 2022, after 38 years
• Run by — proprietors John, Wanda and Keegan Hicks
• Cooked by — Angel Fabian, executive chef, who joined the kitchen in 1986
• Known for — the mesquite grill, Thursday oysters, Sunday champagne breakfast, and a carrot cake locals talked about

Why it closed

Dana Point Harbor entered a long redevelopment cycle in the early 2020s, and the buildings along the marina came down with it. The family were offered a place in the rebuilt harbour and decided against it. John and Wanda Hicks retired; their son Keegan, who had run the floor and built the wine list, moved his family out of state. There is no second Harbor Grill and there was never intended to be one. It ended where it started, which is a cleaner ending than most restaurants get.

What is kept here

The restaurant's own pages recorded a surprising amount, and most of it survives. This archive keeps:

• The menus — lunch and dinner in full, as they stood, with the archived prices left on them
• Oyster Night — the six preparations, the wines poured alongside, and the Hemingway passage the restaurant printed at the top of the page
• The Sunday Champagne Breakfast — a Southern California institution the Grill kept going for decades
• Wines and spirits — the martini list, the margaritas and the shape of the cellar
• The herb garden — a real bed of basil, tarragon, cilantro, sage and rosemary that fed the stocks and sauces
• The mesquite grill — how the kitchen actually cooked
• Dana Point Harbor — the harbour the restaurant belonged to, described as the Grill described it
• The family who ran it

A note on the harbour

The Harbor Grill was never only a restaurant; it was a harbour tenant, and its pages spent as much space on Dana Point Harbor as on its own kitchen. The harbour sits in a cove closed on one side by cliffs and on the other by open Pacific, with two marinas inside a jetty a mile and a half long. Tall ships, a sailing association, sportfishing fleets, a shipyard and a small run of shops all shared the same water. Grey whales pass offshore between December and March, and the town has built a festival around them — NOAA publishes viewing guidelines for anyone going out to look.

The place is older than the restaurant by a long way. The point is named for Richard Henry Dana Jr., who described this stretch of coast in Two Years Before the Mast after working the hide trade off these bluffs in the 1830s. Everything since — the jetty, the marinas, the redevelopment that finally took the restaurant's building — has happened in that same cove.

Reading the archive

Everything on these pages is written in the past tense because all of it is past. Prices are the prices that were printed on the menu at the time and are kept for the record, not as a guide to anything. Contact details, booking links and gift-card pages have not been carried over; a closed restaurant should not appear to be taking orders. What remains is the part worth keeping — a working description of how one harbour kitchen cooked fish for thirty-eight years.