The dessert course put this corner on the map — plated the island way, on banana leaves, under warm light, at the end of a long table. But the Harbor Menu is the whole food chain of the waterfront, and it starts long before dinner.
It starts at dawn in the fish market, in crushed ice and pink mist. It runs through the old sardine cannery, the tugboat galley, and the bait shack where the fish stories begin, and it ends at the end of the pier, with a seafood boil steaming on newspaper and nowhere else to be. Bring an appetite and mind your footwear — all along this wharf, somebody is collecting it.
Catch-of-the-day crates on crushed ice, a brass fishmonger's scale, the cannery's sardine tins stacked and ready, and the first pot already steaming as the fleet comes in through the mist. Original harbor artwork, in the house style.
The Menu starts before sunrise: a yellow rain slicker over a striped dress, wooden crates, a fishmonger's scale, fresh oysters and a Bloody Mary for the early trade. Haggle too hard over the morning catch and the gruff fishmonger may hide your rain boots in an ice crate and haggle back until the price — denominated partly in laughter — is met.
Down the wharf stands the 1940s sardine cannery: stacks of vintage tins, a cannery time clock, a conveyor scale, and fried calamari with whiskey sours after shift. The blustering foreman docks work shoes for slacking and runs a very personal efficiency inspection beside the packing table, clipboard and all.
At the end of the pier, newspaper covers the picnic tables and the seafood boil steams in a great pot — corn, crab legs, a frozen strawberry margarita sweating beside it. Lose the crab-cracking contest and the jolly chowder cook collects your flip-flops, plus a little extra, as the waves applaud under the boards.
The working harbor eats too: a cramped steel galley, an enamel coffee pot, corned beef hash and spiked hot coffee served under a brass porthole showing harbor water. The captain stows flip-flops 'for safety' before deck duty and finds the mop a better use — the galley runs on laughter and very little legroom.
The ramshackle dockside shack where the Menu's fish stories begin: an open tackle box, rods along the wall, a hand-painted bait sign, fried fish sandwiches and ice-cold beer. Returns are negotiable — one customer's flip-flops were traded for a bucket of bait, final sale, no appeals, the deal closed the owner's way.