About The Harbor Grill

Since 1984, proprietors John, Wanda and Keegan Hicks welcomed guests and took particular pride in the friendliness of the staff and the quality of the food. That sentence stood near the top of the restaurant's own About page for most of its life, and it turned out to be an accurate summary of the whole enterprise.

A restaurant in the middle of a marina

The Harbor Grill sat in the heart of Dana Point Marina, midway between Los Angeles and San Diego. It built a reputation on the freshness and variety of its seafood and on the warmth of its room, and it served lunch, dinner and a Sunday Champagne Breakfast for the whole of its run.

The cooking was deliberately promiscuous about tradition. On any given evening the kitchen offered fish treated in Southwestern, Pacific Rim, Caribbean, Cajun and Mediterranean styles, often within a few lines of each other on the same page. A guest could order Chilean seabass in a smoked tomato broth or the same fish under a Southwestern black bean sauce with guacamole and pico de gallo, and neither was a novelty item — both simply lived on the menu.

With a reasonably priced menu, premium cocktails and a long wine list, the Grill became a favourite with locals and a destination for visitors, who the restaurant said were made to feel like regulars on their first visit. Guests could take the dining room, where a pianist played each evening, or the garden terrace, where the view of harbour sails encouraged people to sit for a while. Both rooms did steady business for three decades.

Behind the grill

Keegan Hicks — managing partner

Keegan Hicks graduated with a degree in resort restaurant management and broadened his culinary and cultural education by travelling widely, which the restaurant credited as the origin of his interest in wine and in hospitality generally. As managing partner he oversaw the daily running of the restaurant and chose the wines. The Grill's list was his project, and the note the site kept about his approach is a good one: he was always conscious of passing on value, quality and diversity when he brought in something new. That is an unusual thing for a harbour restaurant to bother with, and it showed in the list.

Angel Fabian — executive chef

Angel Fabian began his career with The Harbor Grill in 1986, two years after it opened, and stayed. He sharpened his technique at a Napa Valley culinary school, and he travelled extensively in South America, where the discoveries he brought home worked their way onto the menu. His sauces, salsas and flavoured broths carried Latin American, Asian, Southwestern and Mediterranean influences, and they are the reason the menu reads the way it does — the fish was local and simply grilled, and then the plate went somewhere.

John and Wanda Hicks — proprietors

John and Wanda Hicks opened the restaurant in 1984 and ran it with their son for more than thirty-five years. One dish on the archived dinner menu is listed as John's Mesquite Grilled Fish Burger, which is about as much personal branding as the family ever went in for.

What the restaurant said about itself

Restaurants make claims, and this archive keeps the ones the Grill made rather than adding new ones. Its own pages described it as an annual diners'-choice award winner and said it had been voted the best seafood restaurant in Dana Point by locals. Those were the restaurant's statements about itself and are recorded here as such.

The claim easiest to verify is the smallest one. The Harbor Grill's carrot cake was, in the restaurant's own words, a legendary favourite with locals and guests, and it kept company on the dessert list with a chocolate blackout cake made fresh daily, a mocha mud pie and a key lime pie. Enough people mentioned that carrot cake in enough places over enough years that it is fair to call it the house's signature.

Method, briefly

Guests could watch the chef work a fillet over the mesquite wood grill from the room. The menu invited people to build on the plate with a selection of vibrant salsas, chutneys or spice rubs, which meant a single grilled fish could be finished half a dozen ways. Stocks and sauces were made in house and drew on the restaurant's own herb garden. There is more on the grill itself and on the regional preparations under how the kitchen cooked.

The end

Dana Point Harbor began a comprehensive redevelopment in the early 2020s that took in the marina buildings the restaurant occupied. The family explored taking a place in the rebuilt harbour and decided not to. John and Wanda retired; Keegan and his family moved out of state. The restaurant served its last lunches and dinners through September 2022 and closed at the end of the month.

No successor opened. The name was not sold on and the recipes did not reappear elsewhere. For a restaurant that spent thirty-eight years in one room on one stretch of water, that is a coherent way to finish.

Elsewhere in this archive

The menus carry the fullest picture of what the kitchen actually did. Oyster Night and the Sunday Champagne Breakfast were the two fixed rituals of the week. Dana Point Harbor describes the water the restaurant sat on, which its own pages always treated as part of the offer.