DANA POINT, CALIFORNIA – Much of the time, the best seafood comes from fancy-china kinds of places, serving fresh catch on white tablecloths (at exorbitant prices.)
One restaurant in Dana Point, California, though, proves that amazing seafood can pop up in a casual, family-friendly environment. It might even be served on paper plates!
Jon’s Fish Market is a fantastic seafood spot located at the Dana Point Harbor. I visited with my family after going on a whale watch. We sat at an outdoor table with views of the water.
Jon’s Fish Market is operated by Shala O’Keefe. When we arrived, she came to our table and warmly greeted us, as well as moving around to multiple other tables to make sure guests felt welcome.
That was all despite the fact that the day earlier she had seriously injured her leg while climbing up to put a Santa hat on top of a big taxidermy animal inside the restaurant. Crutches didn’t seem to dampen O’Keefe’s spirits at all.
She told us about how there really was a “Jon” behind Jon’s Fish Market. In this case, the original proprietor was O’Keefe’s father Jon Mansur, an avid fisherman who started the restaurant in Dana Point. O’Keefe joked that the “S” in “Jon’s” was a nod to her mother Sharon, who also helped operate the restaurant.
The importance of family (and this family’s legacy) is immediately obvious at Jon’s. There’s clearly a history to the restaurant that O’Keefe is working hard to preserve.
O’Keefe has a deep background in the fish-selling business herself, which she brings to her work at Jon’s Fish Market.
The restaurant genuinely is a market. Inside, you’ll find a big display case filled with extremely fresh cuts of locally caught fish, as well as select fish that O’Keefe has sourced from around the world.
Locals often stop by to grab a few fillets to cook at home, but the availability of excellent fresh fish in this market setting ultimately evolved into the current restaurant.
There’s even a giant tank of live spiny lobsters inside Jon’s. O’Keefe helped my son put on giant rubber gloves, reach into the tank, grab a lobster, and hold it up for a photo!
She even showed us how you can calm the lobsters down by gently petting their backs. All that lobster interaction, though, didn’t dampen our appetite for—well, lobster.
To start our meal at Jon’s Fish Market, O’Keefe brought out a big plate of hot-smoked salmon and a shrimp cocktail.
As a dish, shrimp cocktail lives or dies by the quality of the shrimp. In this case, the quality was impeccable—these were some of the best cocktail shrimp I’ve ever had.
The hot-smoked salmon was amazing, too. For somebody who usually eats cold-smoked lox—and has even declared myself a smoked fish influencer—the thick cut of hot-smoked salmon was a new experience.
It had a deep, rich, smoky flavor, with the smoke perfectly cutting the fattiness of the salmon. Again, the quality of the fish was immediately apparent here. Slightly sweet, the cut of fish was perfectly fork-tender and seemed to melt in your mouth as you ate it.
We then moved on to the main dishes (Visit Dana Point and Jon’s Fish Market hosted us for our meal so we could try it out—thanks!).
Jon’s Fish Market is known locally for their fish and chips. You can have any of the fish fried up, but we opted to go with the classic cod as well as a local whitefish.
As with most items on the menu, Jon’s Fish Market adds minimal seasoning, opting instead to let the quality of the fish speak for itself.
O’Keefe told us that tourists sometimes don’t like their fish and chips because it’s too classic and simple a preparation—they want tons of malt vinegar, beer batter, and lots of salt!
Instead, the fish and chips at Jon’s Fish Market are simple and beautifully executed. Although it was nice to try a local fish, I found that the traditional cod version was the best.
Having visited with the market’s lobsters, we felt we also needed to sample one. The spiny lobster arrived already cut open, giving easy access to the meat.
As someone who has spent plenty of time laboriously cracking open lobsters on the East Coast, I appreciated the simplicity of the grilled preparation. The meat was excellent, dipped in drawn butter with a bit of salt.
We also tried a simple cut of grilled fish. It was good, but not my favorite item on the menu.
As we ate, O’Keefe sat with us like a member of our party and told us about how the market routinely wins fish and chips competitions. We all ended up leaving with Jon’s Fish Market sweatshirts, which everyone in my family has been wearing almost continuously since our visit.
We also learned that a quirk of the local food and building codes accounts for the casual vibe at Jon’s Fish Market.
Because of the vintage infrastructure, the restaurant isn’t able to install an industrial dishwasher. That means they need to serve their fish on paper plates.
The result is that the feel of Jon’s Fish Market is deceptively casual, and it belies the excellent, world-class quality of the fish.
With fish this good, Jon’s Fish Market could almost certainly gut their current restaurant, put in the requisite tables with white tablecloths, embrace a fancy vibe, and charge three times as much for their food.
The “paper plates only” permit rule, though, means that won’t happen. It probably wouldn’t fit with O’Keefe’s overall inclination either. This is a family restaurant, started by a family, and still in that family a generation later.
The end result is that you can get the kind of fish you might find at an uber-upscale, impossible-to-get-into restaurant in LA—but here in Dana Point, you can eat it with your kids at a big picnic table outside, with the owner as your host.
That’s a unique experience, and it made Jon’s Fish Market stand out as one of the best meals of our trip. It’s proof that a welcoming spirit, an obsession with quality, and simple preparations go an incredibly long way toward making amazing food—no white tablecloths required.
Address: 34665 Golden Lantern, Dana Point, CA 92629 (949) 496-2807
