Specials

Alongside the printed menus The Harbor Grill ran three standing offers. Two were commercial and one was not, and the third is the most interesting thing on this page.

The daily three-course prix-fixe

The restaurant offered a prix-fixe every day at $33 for one item from each of three courses. Its own invitation was to indulge in our daily prix-fixe menu, and it ran at both lunch and dinner.

First — soup or salad

• Cup of New England clam chowder
• Cup of chilled gazpacho
• Green salad

Second — the entrée

• Grilled mahi mahi with Caribbean spice rub and tequila tomato salsa
• Grilled mahi mahi with mango chutney barbecue baste
• Harbor Grill cobb salad, with grilled shrimp, Dungeness crab meat or grilled chicken breast

Third — dessert

From the house list, where the carrot cake lived alongside the chocolate blackout cake made fresh daily, the mocha mud pie and the key lime pie.

The pricing tells you what the offer was for. Ordering the same mahi mahi à la carte off the dinner menu cost $24.95 on its own; a cup of chowder was $6.95 and dessert would take the table past forty dollars. At $33 the prix-fixe was a genuine saving rather than a menu-engineering trick, and it steered guests toward two dishes the kitchen could produce quickly and consistently. That is how a prix-fixe is supposed to work and it is not how most of them do.

Thursday Oyster Day

In the restaurant's later years Thursday became a fixture: half a dozen oysters for $10.95, in any of six preparations, all day and all night. The About page carried it as a standing sign-off — and remember, every Thursday is our special Oyster Day — and it sat on the front of the site through the final era.

Six preparations at a fixed half-dozen price is an unusually generous version of an oyster promotion. Most restaurants running one restrict it to raw, on the half shell, because that requires no kitchen time. The Grill let the price apply across the whole list, including the baked Rockefeller and casino, the Thai steamed basket and the grilled Louisiana barbecued — all of which occupy a station. The full list is on the oyster page.

The scallops with the donation

One line on the archived dinner menu is unlike anything else on it. The grilled sea scallops with red Thai curry sauce, at $28.95, carried a parenthetical note: it was a marine corps special, and one dollar from every order went to a support group for a Marine regiment.

Dana Point sits a short distance up the coast from a major Marine Corps installation, and the connection between the base and the surrounding towns is an old one. A dollar per plate is a small amount of money, and the restaurant made no display of it — the note is set in lower case inside brackets, halfway down a long list of fish, where most guests would never have noticed it. It ran that way for years.

Of everything preserved in this archive, that bracket is the detail that says most about how the place was run. A family restaurant on a harbour, quietly attaching a donation to one dish and not mentioning it anywhere else on the site.

What was not a special

Two things the restaurant never discounted are worth noting for the record. The Sunday Champagne Breakfast was priced as itself and never bundled. And the market-price items — the Australian lobster tail, chiefly — stayed at market, which for a harbour restaurant with a reputation to protect is the correct and slightly unglamorous answer.

The rest of the card is on the menus, and the species behind it are catalogued in the NOAA Fisheries species directory.