Five menus ran at The Harbor Grill: lunch, dinner, the Sunday Champagne Breakfast, the oyster list and the drinks list. They shared a spine — the same grill, the same fish, the same house sauces — and differed mostly in portion, price and time of day.
These are archived menus. The Harbor Grill closed on 30 September 2022. Prices shown throughout are those printed on the menus at the time and are kept for the record only.
Served nightly from 4:30pm to 9:30pm. The longest of the menus, running from appetisers through soups, salads, burgers, seafood specials, seafood pastas, house specialities, meat, harbour favourites and tacos, and closing with a three-course prix-fixe.
Daily from 11:30am to 4:30pm. Substantially the dinner menu at lunch pricing, with a sandwich section in place of the evening's meat specials.
Mid-morning until two o'clock, every Sunday. Breakfast plates and a short list of morning drinks, including the bottomless glass of champagne the restaurant was known for.
Six preparations, raw and cooked, with wines chosen to sit beside them. In later years this ran as Thursday Oyster Day at a fixed half-dozen price, all day and all night.
Martinis, margaritas, signature cocktails and beers, then a wine list organised by style — whites and reds by the glass, half bottles, bubbles, and varietal sections through to the heavier reds.
The standing offers that ran alongside the printed menus: the daily prix-fixe, Thursday oysters, and one dish that carried a donation attached to it.
The dinner menu opened with a horizontal index of its own sections — appetisers, soups, salads, burgers, seafood specials, seafood pastas, our specialities, meat specials, harbour favourites, tacos, the three-course prix-fixe and beverages — which tells you something about its length. It was a big menu for a room that size, and it stayed big.
The core of it was the seafood specials section, where a dozen and a half fish dishes ran down the page. Every one came with sautéed vegetables and a choice of hand-cut chips, garlic mashed potatoes or rice pilaf. That single line did a lot of work: it meant the kitchen could put out a long fish list without a long list of sides, and it kept the plates consistent.
Around that core sat the sections that made the restaurant workable for a harbour crowd. There were six burgers. There were three tacos with rice pilaf. There was fish and chips and there was fried calamari. A family off a boat and a table ordering Australian lobster tail could eat from the same menu without either feeling out of place, which is harder to design than it looks.
The fish list moved across the Pacific and beyond it: mahi mahi, white seabass from New Zealand, Chilean seabass, Alaskan halibut, Pacific swordfish, salmon, ahi tuna, sea scallops, Dungeness crab, prawns, clams and oysters, plus a red rainbow trout for anyone who wanted something freshwater. Australian lobster tail sat at the top of the page at market price. Most of these species have public profiles in the NOAA Fisheries species directory, which is the closest thing to a reference library for what a menu like this was actually made of.
Handling on this scale is unglamorous and decisive, and the standards a kitchen of this kind worked to are set out in the FDA's guidance on selecting and serving seafood. A harbour restaurant lives or dies on that discipline, and thirty-eight years is a reasonable proxy for having got it right.
The prices kept in this archive are from the printed menus of the early 2010s. They are a period document. A grilled salmon at $26.95 and a three-course prix-fixe at $33 place the restaurant precisely where it saw itself — not cheap, not a special-occasion room, a place you could reasonably eat at on a Tuesday. Reading them back is the fastest way to understand what kind of restaurant this was.