Dolphin Restaurant to be demolished due to damage as city plans ‘reimagining’ of end of wharf

After more than 60 years at the end of the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf, the Dolphin Restaurant will be demolished this fall in order to repair several damaged pilings underneath it. At this point, it’s unclear whether the restaurant will be rebuilt or replaced with something else, so fans might have to say goodbye for good to the locally owned diner’s crab cakes Benedict, homemade clam chowder and mesquite-charcoal salmon. 

The damage was caused by a storm surge on Dec. 28 that battered the bay end of the wharf where the Dolphin sits and broke a weak piling, which then damaged several other nearby pilings. Those fell, causing the piling cap – essentially a large wooden beam – previously supported by those pilings to sag, leading to a partial collapse of the decking in that area, Travis Beck, Santa Cruz’s superintendent of parks, told Lookout in January. 

It also damaged the western wall of the Dolphin, creating a crease under the dining room in the restaurant. That end of the wharf, including the sea lion viewing areas, has been closed off to the public since then. 

The City of Santa Cruz owns the wharf and all of the buildings on it, including the Dolphin. It hoped that the restaurant could be saved, but after careful evaluation found that it wasn’t possible. This decision was not taken lightly, said city spokesperson Erika Smart, and was based on the recommendations of consulting engineers, who said repairing the damage to the wharf’s infrastructure while the Dolphin is in place wouldn’t be feasible. 

“Following extensive evaluations from the preeminent coastal engineering firm Moffatt & Nichol, we have determined that the Dolphin Restaurant will need to be demolished before the end of the wharf can be repaired,” Smart said via email. 

The city plans to demolish the restaurant and begin permanent repairs to that end of the wharf this fall. 

The Dolphin was already in need of serious repairs before the storm surge, says David McCormic, the development manager who oversees the wharf, and had been evaluated a number of times over the years. While it hadn’t risen to the level of a public safety issue, the city was discussing a closure to rebuild the restaurant with owner Mark Gilbert when the storm struck. 

“The December event was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back,” McCormic said. 

There’s no guarantee that the Dolphin will be rebuilt. Instead, the city plans to consider input from the community in a “public reimagining process” to brainstorm ideas for how to best use that end of the wharf. 

The city believes that there should be some kind of commercial business in order to bring needed resources to the wharf to help pay for necessary maintenance and repairs, says McCormic, but is open to new ideas as to what that could be – perhaps a fishing charter, restaurant or museum. 

“When we say the Dolphin may or may not be rebuilt, it’s not because we don’t want to or because Mark [Gilbert] isn’t interested, it’s because this process has yet to happen,” McCormic said. “We love the idea of having a cafe, this destination at the end of the wharf. But we really need to have that communication and that discussion with the community.”

The city plans to begin public outreach sometime this summer, he said. 

Gilbert, who owns the Dolphin and two other restaurants on the wharf, was not available for comment Thursday. He has worked on the wharf for his entire adult life, starting as a line cook and dishwasher at his father’s restaurant, Malia’s, in 1980. In 2010, he purchased the restaurant and later reopened it as Firefish Grill. He also owns wharf neighbor Woodies Cafe. 

When Gilbert purchased the Dolphin in 2008, he rebuilt the restaurant, added an outdoor patio and redid the menu, eventually tripling its sales. “I got rid of all the freezers and did fresh fish every day. I put in a live mesquite charcoal grill, because you can’t cook salmon on anything better. I bought a steam kettle and made chowder 30 gallons at a time,” he told Lookout in January following the storm. 

He understood at the time that demolishing the restaurant was a possibility. “That’s the only opportunity you have to fix pilings out here,” Gilbert said. “Your only opportunity is to scrape the building and redo the piling.” 

Community input for that end of the wharf will coincide with other major improvements to the area, like new boat landings and widening the overlook, and creates an opportunity to imagine a variety of uses, from public to commercial to cultural, per McCormic. “All of that becomes possible,” he said. “So there’s really a great opportunity for the end of the wharf to be something really great.”

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