Bluewater Grill Marks a Milestone With Its 30th Anniversary

With a deep commitment to hospitality, sustainable seafood and innovative seasonal dishes, Bluewater Grill founders Rick Staunton and Jimmy Ulcickas seem to have found the recipe for success. 

The small family of restaurants – which started in Newport Beach’s Cannery Village and now includes seven locations spread across coastal California, Catalina Island, Temecula and Phoenix – marked its 30th anniversary this year. One of the eatery’s slogans is “Come In, Get Hooked,” and it appears to be working as Bluewater Grill celebrates three decades with a loyal customer base and longtime employees. 

“We’re thrilled to be able to continue doing what we’re doing and keep spreading the joy to our customers,” Staunton said, noting that the restaurant’s longevity is a testament to the dedication of its workers.

In honor of the milestone, Staunton and Ulcickas released a cookbook earlier this year. “Flavors from the Shore: Nostalgic Seafood Recipes Celebrating Our Coasts & Waterways” features the founders’ favorite recipes divided by region and interspersed with personal stories related to fishing and seafood experiences. 

And, to keep the party going, customers new and old are encouraged to come try the popular Second Tuesday Tastings, which offer a special menu each month. A few tasting days remain this year, with entrees ranging from lobster pot pie to a whole California spiny lobster, each served with chowder or salad and paired with wine. 

Primarily a neighborhood restaurant infused with local personality in the decor and menu at each location, Bluewater Grill stands out in part by catering to its clientele. The key, Ulcickas said, is “consistency over time, hospitality, knowing our guests by their first name and taking care of them.” The goal was never to be the fanciest place in town. “We never aspired to be that. That’s not our gig,” Staunton added. “We just want to be the best quality and value in town.”

The establishment is also known for some unique programs. For example, fishermen can bring in their fresh catch and have it prepared in their favorite style, served with a full spread of sides – something offered since the restaurant opened. 

“It’s not about making money on that one experience. It’s about creating memories for people. And that’s not just with the Cook Your Catch. It’s with everything we do,” said Ulcickas, noting that multigenerational families often dine there, with longtime customers now bringing their kids or even their grandkids.

Bluewater Grill also has long operated its own boat, the Pilikia, for harpooning swordfish, although that’s currently on hiatus due to high diesel prices. But the boat led to a mission rooted in sustainability. 

“Rick’s father-in-law started as a harpoon fisherman,” Ulcickas explained. “He had a harpoon swordfish boat, which is the sustainable way to catch swordfish, and that sort of bled over into everything we do.”

A Reel Opportunity

The original Bluewater Grill opened in 1996 on Lido Peninsula in Newport, taking over the former Delaney’s restaurant site, which was previously home to the Sea Shanty.

Before this venture, Staunton had already been friends with Ulcickas for a while. “Jimmy was dating a good friend of my wife and we would have dinner together,” Staunton recalled. 

And, when Staunton needed help with a Mexican restaurant he had opened down in Del Mar, he turned to Ulcickas, a seasoned restaurant operator, for advice. 

“I had an operational partner that basically broke down shortly after I opened the restaurant, and I was ‘the money guy’ … (having been) a barrister, a trial attorney, in Sydney …. I was left running this small restaurant by myself, knowing absolutely nothing about it,” Staunton said. 

“Jim and I would have dinner with the girls and, him being the expert, I’d keep picking his brain. And he was kind enough to walk me through the intricacies of the operation and accounting and everything that involved from soup to nuts. So over a period of time, with Jimmy’s help, I got to learn the restaurant business firsthand the hard way …, so that was a blessing without a doubt.”

When the opportunity arose to take over the Delaney’s site in Newport, Staunton was interested, but had just moved from Laguna Beach to Rancho Santa Fe to be closer to his San Diego restaurant. He asked Ulcickas to work together on the Newport eatery. 

“Of course, the natural thing to do was to twist Jimmy’s arm and say, ‘Join me, partner up and run the restaurant,’ ” Staunton recalled. “So, after a lot of cajoling and arm twisting, Jimmy jumped on board and, 30 years later, we’re still here and talking to each other.”

“It didn’t take a lot of arm twisting,” Ulcickas added. “I was all in.” 

Reflecting back on the mid-1990s in Newport, Staunton said there wasn’t really a go-to seafood place in town.   

“The seafood restaurants that were on the beach or on the water, they were really focusing on the tourists – turn and burn them – and not focusing on the regular customers who were in the neighborhood, where your bread and butter (comes from),” Staunton said. “And our philosophy has always been: Let’s concentrate on our locals, our neighbors, and if we can win them over and make them converts, then the rest will just fall into place after that. And that’s essentially what’s happened in all our locations.”

In general, Ulcickas said, Newport residents might go to a particular restaurant twice a year, maybe once every three months or even once a month, but Bluewater Grill has bucked that trend. “Our locals in Newport, we see them two to three days a week,” he said. 

In addition to their dedication to hospitality and quality food, the founders said, value plays a big part in drawing repeat customers. The casual atmosphere invites guests to order a full entree or simply come in for a cup of chowder and salad or share a plate of oysters with their dining partner and maybe enjoy a glass of wine with the meal. 

“There’s not a lot of restaurants where you can do that and not feel guilty that you’re not ordering a full entree,” Ulcickas said.

Some of the signature dishes include classics like chowder, fish and chips, swordfish — because of the restaurant’s Pilikia harpoon boat — and fresh, hot sourdough bread, which is complimentary for every table. 

Dishes range from crispy calamari to Maryland-style crabcakes, grilled Spanish octopus, ahi tuna poke, Oyster Rockefeller, chilled shrimp cocktail, seared scallops with roasted jalapeno aioli, beer-battered fish and chips, lobster rolls, Alaskan king crab, lobster tail, sushi, blackened swordfish, cedar-plank salmon, walnut-crusted halibut, pan-seared scallops, prawn linguine, San Francisco cioppino, fish tacos, miso-glazed black cod and much more, including a recent Spanish-inspired seafood paella for the fall seasonal special with shrimp, clams, mussels, chorizo and chicken atop Arborio rice with saffron, petite peas and red piquillo peppers. 

Other seasonal dishes include bouillabaisse and cioppino — pitting France versus Italy — at the start of the year; then gumbo, following a kind of New Orleans theme; leading into a local catch for summer, whether that be tuna or swordfish.

Staunton said Bluewater Grill aims to provide a wide variety of high-quality seafood at a reasonable price. “So whether it’s shrimp or a bunch of different types of fish or lobster or oysters or whatever, people can generally find something to their liking on our menu,” he said.

“And I think our signature is that we try and execute the highest quality in every single thing we purchase with intent,” Ulcickas added. “We go right to the suppliers and we find out (where) … the best products are and we work those into our recipes. And we have very tight specs on what we buy and where we buy it from.”

A Sense for Sustainability

Bluewater Grill is committed to only using fish that’s been selected as best choices or good alternatives by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Program or approved by other certifying organizations. For Ulcickas, the reason for sustainable harvesting, whether it’s responsibly farmed or caught in the wild, is clear.

“If we want to ensure our future, you’ve got to make sure that the supply is there in the future,” he said.

Staunton, Ulcickas and others in the Bluewater Grill family are avid boaters and fishermen, so there’s a natural collective interest to help preserve the sea and fish for generations to come. 

“We’ve typically harpooned our own fish for the past 15 years,” Staunton said. “And really the reason for that is because we can harvest the larger fish. We don’t harvest the small fish, so we can respect the fishery that we’re operating out of. And also, it’s a much higher quality fish, because … if you’re getting swordfish on the longline boats, they can be out at sea for weeks on end and it’s all stored up on ice for a long time. 

“We can basically pull it the same day and then … that’s packed in ice and it’s really on the plate within a day or two of being harpooned. So, you know that’s the best way I think you can harvest swordfish.” 

The Pilikia boat, meaning “trouble” in Hawaiian, was custom built in Washington state. Through the use of harpoons and deep-drop buoys – a sustainable method with no bycatch unlike nets and long lines – the boat has supplied Bluewater Grill’s restaurants with direct access to the freshest swordfish during summer seasons. When bringing in a swordfish from the boat, the restaurant’s tradition has been to parade it through the restaurant, past the diners, to demonstrate its freshness – right out of the water. 

Even though Bluewater Grill’s swordfish boat is currently on hiatus, the restaurant buys from fishermen who follow the same responsible practices. 

“We’re very interested in maintaining the sensibility to habitat that we’re fishing and sourcing our fish from,” Staunton said. “All those things are important to us, and it translates to the quality of the plate.”

Bluewater Grill’s other sustainability efforts include taking part in an oyster shell recycling program called Shells for Shorelines. Rather than tossing oyster shells in the trash, restaurants collect and donate them to be repurposed for native oyster restoration projects in Southern California. 

Notably, overharvesting, habitat destruction and water quality degradation have caused California’s oyster reefs to decline by 85%. It might not be widely known, but oysters play a crucial role in maintaining healthy coastal ecosystems by helping to buffer shorelines from erosion caused by waves and storms. They also remove pollutants, which assists with improving water clarity, and provide vital nursery grounds for fish and shellfish, thus promoting biodiversity. 

Local nonprofit Orange County Coastkeeper collects oyster shells from restaurants and takes them to a drying facility where the shells cure in the sun for a year; this process eliminates harmful pathogens and organisms. Then, the shells are used to create critical oyster beds for shell string installations and innovative Living Shorelines, which can help stabilize sediment, reduce flooding threats and boost the ecosystem in other critical ways.

Bluewater Grill in Newport Beach was the first restaurant to sign up for the full-time Shells for Shorelines recycling program and is the only restaurant to have participated since the beginning in 2024. Bluewater Grill’s Newport location typically recycles 50 to 70 pounds of oyster shells a week, which adds up to 2,000 to 3,000 pounds of oyster shells per year, and also takes part in OC Coastkeeper’s shell string program, incubating baby oysters from the dock in front of the restaurant for OC Coastkeeper. 

Evolving With the Times

One of the secrets to the restaurant’s success is its willingness to change, ebbing and flowing like the tides. 

“We haven’t stayed static,” Staunton said. “We’ve continued to evolve the concept to follow where the customers and where the dining market was.” 

That includes the menu, the plates, the decor and more. Over 30 years, the flagship Newport location – a favorite with its patio and dock-and-dine option – has been renovated three times, most recently in 2022. 

“Bear in mind, with Newport being our first restaurant, we had a very different style back then,” Staunton said. “It was a more classic seafood house, sort of East Coast look, and lots of teak and dark wood and what have you …. A lot of brass. Everything’s changed dramatically since then. So our last go-round, we significantly lightened it up … made it more contemporary and a better feel for our customers. And I think we’ve done a good job without getting too fancy. We still want to be approachable.”

Ulcickas describes it as upscale, coastal and casual. “More driftwood tones than, you know, dark wood and brass tones,” he said. 

Bluewater Grill has also ventured into its own line of spirits. At least a decade ago, it introduced High Spot Beer, made for the restaurant by award-winning brewmaster Meg Gill, co-founder of Golden Road Brewery. The restaurants have three beers on tap, with names inspired by famous Southern California fishing spots. 

The beer lineup includes 289 Blonde, named after the remote 289 Fathom High Spot east of San Clemente Island, which offers rewards for fisherman willing to make the trip; 152 Amber, named for the 152 High Spot that’s situated 12 miles off the east end of Catalina Island and known for swordfish and marlin; and 14 Mile Pale Ale, named for the 14-mile Bank High Spot halfway between Newport Harbor and Catalina Island, a unique current upwelling that attracts rock cod, marlin, tuna and dorado in the summer. In addition to serving the beer for drinking, some is even used to make the restaurant’s beer-battered fish. 

About four years ago, the eatery also launched its own exclusive rum brand: Catalina Rum Co., which produces rum that’s exclusively bottled for Bluewater Grill by the award-winning R6 Distillery in El Segundo. In tribute to Catalina’s rum-running history, the bottle labels feature harbor scenes based on vintage posters that depict boats and seaplanes used to smuggle rum off the island. With both Jamaican white rum, made from sugar cane, and dark rum, made with molasses from Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, it’s available to purchase by the bottle in about 10 or 15 grocery stores. The rum is also used by the restaurant to mix its mojito, painkiller and Captain’s Mai Tai cocktails. 

In fact, that mai tai recipe is also included in the cocktail section of Bluewater Grill’s cookbook, which leads into the seafood recipes categorized by regions of the country and globe.

“And I would say 80% or 90% of those recipes have been on our menus at one point in time,” Ulcickas said. “And then there’s probably 10% to 20% that are from our childhood, or from Rick’s experience in Australia with a fish pie or my experience back East with baked stuffed lobster – those types of things. 

“So we have a connection to pretty much every single area that the book is from, and recipes that are popular in that area – whether we visited there on a regular basis or just vacationed there. I mean, my memories and I know Rick’s memories of traveling around the world, and then certainly Sydney Harbor, you know, experiencing barramundi or, for me, pompano in Florida or soft shell crab in Maryland, those types of things. There’s an emotional connection there to all of it.” 

Ulcickas mentioned his introduction in the cookbook, where he refers to a poignant moment in the Disney movie “Ratatouille.”

“I talk about the French food critic in the ‘Ratatouille’ movie where he puts a bite of ratatouille in his mouth and he gets this flashback of his childhood,” Ulcickas said. “And that’s what these relationships with food are about: emotional connection to memories of family and friends and experiences from the past.”

So whether guests are trying the dishes on the menu at Bluewater Grill locations, making them at home or coming in for special dining events called Second Tuesday Tastings, they can connect to these flavors. The tasting events, offered for the past 25 years, are a kind of movable feast celebrating the culinary delicacies from different regions for a tour of classic seafood experiences across the country over the course of a year. 

And Bluewater Grill’s flavors will soon be arriving to another location, with a restaurant planned in Long Beach, widening the net for this family of restaurants to let more local diners come in and get hooked.

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