Walk the boardwalk past Johnson Pier on a Saturday morning and you will still find the harbor doing what it has always done. Commercial salmon boats came back out this spring after three straight years of fishery closures, the first real season back for the fleet that works out of here. Dogs and their owners packed the lot in May for Hounds in the Harbor, the dog show fundraiser that used to be called Paws in the Park. What you will not find, if you go looking for a crab benedict, is Ketch Harbor Pub. The lights are off, the locks have been changed, and the building that housed it for nearly fifty years is sitting in the middle of a leasing process most residents have only half-followed through scattered agenda items and local reporting.
The story people tell each other is simple: a beloved restaurant closed. The actual story is more useful to understand if you live here, because it explains something about how this harbor works, and it tells you what to expect from the space next.
Joanne Franklin opened her restaurant in Princeton-by-the-Sea in 1975 with two tables and her kids running the register. The dishes came from her own recipes, shaped by her Italian and Portuguese grandmothers. For 48 years, Ketch Joanne Restaurant and Harbor Bar was the kind of place where the same halibut and chips order and the same Dungeness crab benedict came out the same way for three generations of harbor regulars. That kind of continuity is not something a new operator can simply purchase. It has to be rebuilt, and rebuilding it takes exactly the kind of patient, low-margin operation that a seasonal harbor economy makes difficult to sustain.
The Franklin family closed the restaurant in August 2023, after most of that year had already been lost to renovations tied to a 2018 accessibility lawsuit. They sold their lease, along with a business partner's, to a new ownership group: Pelagic Hospitality Group, led by David and Mishelle Westendorf, who also run Jettywave Distillery at the harbor. The group behind Pelagic was assembled from roughly 15 local residents, including a PE teacher, a firefighter, a Mavericks surfer, and a chef, all buying into the idea that the Ketch name and menu were worth reviving rather than replacing.
Ketch Harbor Pub reopened on December 6, 2023, under executive chef Eduardo Coronel, previously of Rio Grill in Carmel. The new menu kept about 40 percent of the old classics, based on a survey the group ran with former Ketch Joanne patrons, and used the rest to experiment with dishes like mezcal-cured salmon benedict alongside the halibut and chips longtime diners expected.
That was only phase one. Pelagic held three separate leases in the same building and planned to fill all three: Ketch Harbor Pub for the harbor-regular crowd, an upscale Pelagic Harbor Grill for visitors looking for a coastal fine-dining experience, and a Pelagic Fish Market meant to sell fresh catch directly from local commercial fishers seven days a week. The fish market idea mattered beyond the menu. It was designed to give the harbor's working fleet, which has absorbed years of delayed and cancelled salmon seasons, a direct retail outlet for their catch.
The ambition was real. The execution ran into a problem that has nothing to do with food quality and everything to do with the economics of leasing three adjoining storefronts from a public agency at once.
By March 2026, Pelagic had stopped paying full rent, according to reporting on the dispute, with the shortfall building since the prior September. The San Mateo County Harbor District, which owns the building and leases it to operators, eventually issued an eviction notice demanding more than $155,000 in unpaid back rent. Mishelle Westendorf, managing the business while her husband was seriously ill, had asked the district to lower the $20,500 monthly rent to $12,500 during the crisis. The district, citing its own budget constraints, did not agree. Sixteen staff members walked out the Saturday the notice was served, and the community response split along familiar lines: some saw a landlord finally enforcing a contract, others saw an agency prioritizing revenue over a business in genuine crisis.
By late May 2026, the Harbor District had changed the locks and moved into a major cleanup of the vacated space, according to local reporting, clearing the way for a new leasing process.
Here is the detail worth sitting with: the district's own estimate of what the vacancy is costing it, about $20,500 a month, is the exact figure Pelagic used to pay in rent. The vacancy is not a hypothetical loss dressed up for a staff report. It is the same check the district used to cash, simply not arriving anymore.
This is not the first time the Harbor District has tried to solve the problem of this building. Back in 2021, the board was already exploring a full rebuild: replacing the existing 7,512 square foot single-story structure with a two-story, roughly 17,900 square foot building holding seven tenant spaces and about 9,440 square feet of outdoor dining and plaza space, at an estimated cost of $6 million. By the summer of 2024, a scaled-down version of that plan still carried a $1.4 million design bill and would have required relocating tenants during construction, on the heels of roughly $1 million the Ketch side had already put into its own renovation. That plan drew visible pushback at a Midcoast Community Council meeting, and it never moved to construction.
So when the same building came open again in 2026, the district did not try to find one operator willing to take on the whole space the way Pelagic had. On June 4, 2026, it issued three distinct RFPs for what it calls Tenant Row: a Restaurant and Bar Lease, a Retail Cafe Lease, and a Cafe and Optional Seafood Market Lease, each covering a separate parcel. By late June, Harbor District staff had walked six potential lessees through the building as part of the advertised tours for Parcels 1, 2, and 3.
Splitting the space three ways spreads the district's risk across three separate businesses instead of betting the entire building on one group's ability to run three concepts at once, which is precisely the bet that did not survive fifteen months. It also keeps the seafood market idea alive as an option rather than a requirement, which matters for a harbor whose commercial fleet just got its salmon season back after three straight years of closures and still needs buyers close to the dock.
As of this writing, the district has not announced a selected tenant for any of the three parcels. The tours happened in late June, the RFPs remain the operative documents, and the building sits mid-transition, cleaned out but not yet reoccupied. Harbor Commission meetings run on the third Wednesday of each month and are open to the public, in person or remotely, which is the most direct way to hear when a lease is actually signed rather than waiting for it to show up as a surprise the next time you walk the pier.
The harbor itself has not paused for any of this. The commercial salmon boats are back out. The dog show fundraiser still packed the lot in May. What changes, and what residents are right to be curious about, is which three businesses end up filling those storefronts, and whether the district's decision to split the risk three ways turns out to be the fix that a decade of bigger, more expensive plans never quite managed.
If you are the kind of person who wants to know what is actually happening in this neighborhood before it shows up in a listing description somewhere down the line, that is the kind of detail The Serdy Team tracks as a matter of course. We live and work this stretch of coast, and when you are ready for more than harbor gossip, whether that is understanding what a home near Pillar Point is actually worth or just talking through what is changing in El Granada, reach out and request a complimentary home valuation.
Compass
42 Cabrillo Hwy N
Half Moon Bay, CA 94019
CA DRE# 01493170
The Serdy Team