Though the days are shrinking, Indian summer can send the temperature up past ninety, burning all the clouds out of the sky. These are days when lunching by the bay seems the coolest option. Between the refineries, the parks, the estates threatening to slip off the cliffs, and the docks, you can still find a couple places to eat a burger while you stare out at the water. Just don’t order the clam chowder.
“I like to go to the Seabreeze Cafe for a burger and a Bud,” wrote one reader when I asked for hole-in-the-wall tips last winter. A prefab trailer dwarfed by the warehouses that surround it, this Oakland Marina cafe is invisible unless you know where to look. Once you go up the narrow ramp and through a sliding glass door, you’ll find a funky, dim interior cluttered with racks and crates. Every table comes with salt and pepper shakers and California lottery forms. Order and pay at the window to the kitchen (or if both members of the couple that own the restaurant are there, you might get brusque table service). Pass the drinks cooler and the shelves of scraggly potted plants to the back deck.
“Welcome to Oakland’s best-kept secret,” announces the menu, which describes its location as “Oakland’s Riviera.” Our Riviera is a lovely spot to get a tan, far from the Jackie O sunglasses and swollen bellies spilling over Speedos at the original Côte d’Azur. To your left are the Oakland hills; to your right, ancient warehouses and docked sailboats. On a warm, cloudless day my friends and I sip our sodas while squinting at the almost-vacant dock, where a mallard-decoy family bobs.
The older Chinese-American couple who run Seabreeze have added chow mein and pepper beef over rice to the burgers and melts you’d expect. I get a General Chicken, battered chicken chunks that have stuck together in the fryer. The mass is napped with a garlicky, sweet-tart glaze kicky with chiles. A green salad fills up the plate. My friend Cy looks over the menu and decides we need to order a bowl of clam chowder to eat on the water. After one bite of the jellied white muck, she declares that Campbell’s is better. Redeeming the soup is a decent club sandwich, crisp and meaty, with OK fries. My anonymous reader’s tip proves to be the best option. Our burger may show up well-done instead of medium, but it’s not a bad one: well-seasoned, juicy, and stacked high with fixings.
There’s no dockside dining at Oakland’s Pier 29 Waterfront Restaurant, we discover after we arrive, only a glassed-in patio, which we share with fifteen empty tables and a couple silently splitting a bowl of clam chowder as they stare out the windows. Outside, the estuary between Oakland and Alameda glows jade-green in the sunlight, and cars speed across the Park Street Bridge above. A small tugboat is moored against the side of the restaurant. The violins dive into “Close to You” as our shrimp louie salad arrives.
I feel like I’ve stepped into one of the seafood restaurants to which my parents would take my sister and me on our family trips to the East Coast. In fact, the 35-year-old restaurant does date from that era. Pier 29 Restaurant’s nautical theme greets you at the door when you pull at the ship’s wheel to enter. On the wood-paneled walls over our heads, a shellacked marlin arcs down toward us. The long, low-ceilinged restaurant spans the waterfront, and all the tables along the bank of windows in the main room are occupied by two-martini business lunchers and people in their seventies.
Although our friendly server is much younger than the clientele, she’s clearly used to serving an older crowd. She coos over the photos that my friend has brought of her brand-new niece and patiently returns several times before Julie and I finally turn our attention to the menu.
The lunch section alone includes a page of sandwiches, a page of seafood specials, and then a larger section for pastas and meats. On our shrimp louie salad, poached bay shrimp have been scattered across iceberg lettuce, sliced canned beets, pitted black olives, and pink tomatoes. A ramekin of equally pink Thousand Island dressing comes alongside, and we drizzle it sparingly over the salad, but it doesn’t improve either the appearance or the taste. The Dungeness crab melt isn’t much more than picked fresh crabmeat mixed with mayo and broiled with cheese on top (watch out for the bits of shell that escaped detection). I score with an admirable club sandwich — crispy bacon, crisp lettuce, three layers of toasted bread — with spiced, breaded potato wedges.
Near the end of the meal, a quartet of diners climbs down through a door onto a small ledge just below us, then hops into the tugboat. We finish our sandwiches as we watch the boat slowly maneuver under the arch of the Park Street Bridge before puttering upstream.
It’s hard to think of one Seabreeze without conjuring up its other, more famous namesake in Berkeley. The Sea Breeze Market, which Bob Pickens built in 1979 out of trailers and shipping containers, is familiar to anyone who’s ever driven on I-80 or Frontage Road. Two friends and I take a break from a Marina bike tour to stop at the market for sandwiches one breezy, clear Saturday afternoon. You can see San Francisco’s skyline as you traverse the new bike bridge that arches over the freeway, but the bay disappears by the time you descend to the market. But sitting at one of the weathered wooden tables that surround the market and deli, you know the water isn’t far away.
Sea Breeze Market has won Best of the East Bay mentions again and again for its sandwiches and seafood. You order at the counter, pay at the cashier, and wait for your name to be called over the loudspeaker. The station at the other end of the market sells espresso drinks and smoothies. In between the two is a small, well-stocked produce market.
The refrigerator case at the deli counter stocks prepared dishes such as ribs and fried chicken, which to me — and this is at upscale delis as well — always look a little too much like leftovers, as well as a half-dozen salads sold by the pint. The counterperson weighs out a half-pint of a shrimp-pasta salad for us, and it’s better than I expect: al dente shells, sweet bay shrimp, and the finest mince of onion, celery, and herbs bound together with a lemony mayonnaise.
The two thick, white-fleshed fillets of catfish pressed between two halves of a sourdough round in my friend’s catfish sandwich have just the thinnest layer of batter around them, enough to keep the moisture in. The battered, pounded beef cutlet in my chicken-fried steak sandwich doesn’t have quite the same meaty flavor as other versions I’ve tried, but the meat is hot and tender, and the tomatoes atop it glow bright red.
There’s a lot of the South in the menu, but also, as befits a fish shack, a little East Coast, too. My California- and India-born companions have never eaten fried clam strips before, and they poke at the cornmeal-crusted nuggets a little dubiously. To me they’re crispy and oily and good, especially dunked into chunky tartar sauce. The only flaw in our meal is a matter of personal preference — I’ve never liked the floury blandness of the crinkle-cut freezer-to-fryer fries that come with our meals. I reward myself with a few extra clams for not finishing my heap of french fries.
My friends and I slump in our seats to capture as much sun as we can while we let the food digest. Then we ride northwest to the Albany Knob, to bike along the narrow paths through fragrant wild fennel forests.
To get to The Galley, take the Western Avenue exit off 580 West (near Point Richmond). Then drive out Western a couple of miles as it wends its way along the coast, passing the East Brother Lighthouse and the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. Turn right up the road leading to the Point San Pablo Yacht Harbor and bump and jostle your way over and around a few hills until you descend to the harbor club. The blue-and-white two-story building on the shore end of the pier is the Galley.
Though the view from the road is spectacular, once you get down to the dock it’s impossible to see past the masts of the 25-footers and the high walls of the houseboats out to the ocean. But on an eighty-degree day, there’s nothing better than sipping a mug of icy soda at one of the plastic tables outside.
According to the online magazine BayCrossings.com, the stumps on the water west of the yacht harbor are the ruins of Point San Pablo’s whaling station, active from 1956 to 1971. The Galley first opened in the 1920s, but its fortunes declined with the harbor, and it closed two years ago. Jim and Lisa Hearn bought the whole harbor at a distress sale shortly afterward, kicked out the meth dealers, removed the rusting abandoned barges, and renovated the restaurant. They reopened the Galley two months ago.
Except for the sky and the waiter with wraparound glasses and bleached-out dreadlets, you could be in New England. A low, W-shaped linoleum countertop with swivel stools snakes around the room, and a few stills from Blood Alley, filmed at the harbor, mark the walls. The waiter runs the place in the day, and the tiny kitchen in back is staffed by a lone short-order cook. There are laminated menus, but you’ll get all the same information spelled out in press-on letters on placards above the kitchen.
Diner-style breakfasts, with everything from eggs to bacon, are the order of the day, along with salads, sandwiches, and burgers. But this doesn’t mean you get greasy diner fare — someone here believes in California cuisine. My half-pound burger, grilled just the way I like it, is topped not just with Swiss cheese but deep red summer tomatoes, a thick cross-section of red onion, and mixed greens. My friend’s vegetable salad, like Venus, floats to the table on a giant plastic scallop shell. The fresh cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, black olives, and hard-boiled eggs are all freshly cut. Once again, Californians prove they can’t make clam chowder. It’s gloopy and bland, and the Saltines we crumble over the top can’t save it.
As we eat, a Siamese cat with enormous teeth nuzzles our toes before settling in between our legs, sleepily waiting for scraps to fall. A salty type baits his rod with fish eggs and then lazily monitors the line while he ashes cigarette after cigarette into the water, not far from the floating gas station. The sun and the bobbing boats make everything slow down. We talk slower. We chew slower. We rub our palms against our mugs, collecting the icy drops that condense along their sides.
