Curbside & Takeout

In 2020 The Harbor Grill added a page to its site that it had never needed in thirty-six years of trading. Curbside pickup and takeout ran alongside indoor and patio dining, every day from half past eleven in the morning until nine at night.

What changed, and what did not

The message on the front of the site in 2020 was short and slightly breathless: the restaurant was open for indoor and patio dining, curbside and takeout orders, every day from 11:30am to 9:00pm. Three modes of service where there had previously been one.

Two things are worth noting about that line. The first is the hours: 11:30am to 9:00pm, continuous. The restaurant's long-standing pattern had been lunch to 4:30pm, a gap, then dinner from 4:30pm to 9:30pm — two distinct services with two distinct menus. Collapsing them into one uninterrupted stretch is what a kitchen does when it stops knowing when people will arrive.

The second is that the menus stayed. The Grill did not shrink to a burger-and-chips takeaway card, which is what a lot of restaurants did. Fish and chips, calamari, tacos, burgers and the chowder travel perfectly well, and so, at a push, does a grilled fillet with rice pilaf. The kitchen kept cooking what it had always cooked and simply put more of it in boxes.

Seafood in a box

Takeaway is unkind to seafood and it is honest to say so. A piece of fish off a mesquite grill is at its best about ninety seconds later; the char softens in a covered container and the smoke turns muted. Fried food suffers worse — batter that was crisp at the pass is compromised by the time it reaches a car park. The dishes that survive the trip are the wet ones and the cold ones: chowder and gumbo travel beautifully, ceviche and the raw-bar plates are unaffected, tacos are designed for it, and étouffée arguably improves.

There is also a handling dimension that does not disappear because the food left the building. Seafood held for transport is subject to the same temperature and time discipline as seafood carried to a table, and the federal baseline is set out in the FDA's guidance on handling seafood. For a restaurant that had built four decades of reputation on freshness, getting this wrong at the kerb would have been an expensive way to end.

The advantage of a harbour

The Grill had one structural asset through this period that most restaurants did not: outdoor space that was already the nicer half of the restaurant. The garden terrace was not an emergency measure bolted onto a pavement — it was the room people had been asking for since 1984, with the view of the masts. When outdoor dining became the only dining, the Harbor Grill had a proper one waiting.

The harbour helped in the other direction too. A marina car park is close to the ideal kerbside pickup environment: generous, low-traffic, and full of people who were going to be at the water anyway. Dana Point Harbor absorbed the change more gracefully than a high street would have.

The last chapter

The curbside page belongs to the final stretch of the restaurant's life. The site kept it live through 2021 and into 2022, alongside the reinstated dining-room hours and the Sunday Champagne Breakfast — which by then opened at ten rather than nine. Two years later the harbour redevelopment reached the building, the family declined a place in the new one, and the restaurant closed at the end of September 2022 after thirty-eight years.

It is a modest page to have preserved. But it is the only part of the archive that shows the restaurant adapting to something rather than simply continuing, and for that reason it is worth keeping.