Ask anyone who follows Monterey's restaurant scene what's coming to Old Fisherman's Wharf and they'll tell you about San Pedro Fish Market. The Southern California seafood institution signed a lease for the old Scales Seafood & Steaks space back in 2024. Monterey's mayor, Tyller Williamson, called it a "fantastic addition to the area" in the press release that followed. It's the kind of headline that sticks: a beloved SoCal name, a 17,000-square-foot buildout, a promise to bring the shrimp tray to Northern California.
Here's what that headline missed. Check the company's own page for the Monterey location today and the opening date has quietly moved from 2026 to 2027. Nobody issued a correction. The construction timeline just slid, the way big buildouts on a working harbor often do, and the story that's been repeated across food blogs and press aggregators for two years is now a year behind itself.
Meanwhile, two smaller moves that got a fraction of the coverage are already open, already serving, already part of the wharf's actual daily rhythm. If you live here and you've been waiting on the big name, you've been waiting on the wrong story.
What's actually open right now
| Business | Status as of September 2026 | Location on the wharf |
|---|---|---|
| Kafe Toribashi | Open, soft-launched in 2024 | Former Water + Leaves space, near the end of the wharf |
| Rockfish Harbor Grill | Open, operating since its 2023 redesign | Former Rappa's space, itself once Big Fish Grill |
| San Pedro Fish Market | Under construction, opening pushed to 2027 | Former Scales Seafood & Steaks space |
The pattern here is not subtle once you lay it out. The concepts with the smallest footprint and the least fanfare are the ones actually feeding people. The concept with the biggest footprint and the most fanfare is the one still behind scaffolding.
The ramen counter nobody announced
Kafe Toribashi is easy to miss if you're walking the wharf with tourist eyes, and that's sort of the point. It's tucked into the space that used to be Water + Leaves, close to the water at the quiet end past the sea lions and the working boats. Kevin Choi, who bought the original Toribashi ramen house on Alvarado Street in 2022, opened this smaller spinoff on the wharf as a soft launch that never got a grand reopening moment.
What you get is a DIY ramen bar: touchscreens, a rotating menu of instant-style bowls in flavors like chicken, kimchi, and seafood, and add-ins like a soft-boiled egg, SPAM, or gyoza for a dollar or two each. It's not the twelve-hour tonkotsu broth from the Alvarado Street original. It's something faster and more playful, built for a spot where people are already strolling with a coffee in hand. Choi has also been adding taiyaki, the fish-shaped Japanese cakes, and Marianne's ice cream in eight flavors, plus espresso.
What makes this worth noticing isn't the menu. It's the fact that an independent, Monterey-owned operator took over a defunct café footprint on a stretch of waterfront normally associated with chowder houses and gift shops, and did it quietly enough that most locals still don't know it's there. That's a different kind of wharf story than the one built on press releases.
The space that keeps changing hands, quietly
A few doors down, Rockfish Harbor Grill occupies a spot with more turnover history than most diners realize. Before Rockfish, it was Rappa's, a long-running favorite for wharf regulars who wanted comfort food with a harbor view. Before Rappa's, it was Big Fish Grill. The current iteration completed an upscale redesign in 2023, with wide windows facing the working harbor and a menu built around Pacific rockfish and other fresh catch.
None of these transitions made regional news. No mayor issued a statement. But this is the actual texture of a working wharf: spaces change hands, names shift, and the wharf keeps functioning because someone is always ready to reopen the door rather than leave it dark. Compare that turnover speed to the multi-year build cycle happening one storefront over, and you start to see the shape of the real story.
Why the big name takes years and the small ones take weeks
There's a mechanical reason for the gap, and it has nothing to do with ambition. San Pedro Fish Market's Monterey location is being built inside a 17,000-square-foot space that has sat empty since Scales closed in 2021 after a seven-year run. A renovation of that scale on a working municipal wharf means permitting, structural work tied to a historic pier, and construction logistics that can only happen around the tides and the boat traffic that still use the harbor for a living. A two- to three-year buildout, which is what the company itself has described, was always the realistic number even if the press cycle preferred to round down to "2026."
Kafe Toribashi and Rockfish, by contrast, moved into spaces that were already built out as restaurants. Existing plumbing, existing seating, existing kitchen hookups. An independent operator with a defunct café or a redesign plan can be serving food in months, not years. The wharf's real turnover engine is small operators reusing existing footprints, not anchor tenants building from scratch. If you want to know what the wharf will actually feel like next year, watch the small spaces, not the big lease.
The wharf's older identity, one weekend at a time
None of this happens in a vacuum from the wharf's history. This month brought Festa Italia back to Custom House Plaza, right at the wharf's entrance, for its annual three-day run honoring the fishermen who built this stretch of coastline before tourism reshaped it. It's the kind of event that reminds you the wharf was a working fish market long before it was a place to buy saltwater taffy, and that the current wave of small food businesses opening in its old storefronts is, in its own way, a continuation of that same instinct: use the space, feed people, keep the harbor alive.
Why this matters if you already live here
If you've walked past Old Fisherman's Wharf for years assuming nothing changes there except which chowder house has the shortest line, this is the year to look again. The businesses worth watching aren't the ones with press releases attached. They're the quiet reoccupations, the DIY ramen counter that opened without fanfare, the harbor grill that's outlasted two previous names in the same space. The loud story is still under construction. The quiet ones are already open, and they're the ones that will define what the wharf feels like a year from now, well before the big lease finally opens its doors.
If you're weighing what a home near this stretch of the Peninsula is really like to live with day to day, beyond the postcard version, I'd welcome the conversation. Ryan Sherman Luxury Real Estate works this coastline closely enough to know which changes on the wharf are worth paying attention to and which are just noise. Schedule a private consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
