Calico, a new seafood and chop house in Huntington Beach, is in some ways a return to form for local chef and restauranteur Andrew Gruel and his wife and business partner, Lauren.
The restaurant sits at the corner of Admiralty Drive and Pacific Coast Highway in Sunset Beach, taking the spot of Fish Camp, a seafood restaurant that closed last year. Calico is named after the Calico Bass which is native to Southern California waters.
The couple, best known for creating Slapfish, a fast-casual award-winning seafood franchise, sold the company last year, with no plans to jump right back into the brick-and-mortar.
“Within 24 hours of selling Slapfish, we got a call that we have to enter the food market again where the old Fish Camp was,” Gruel said. “This wasn’t in the incubation, it wasn’t in the plan. We were hoping to take some time off and travel with our kids.”
But the space, which wasn’t changed much physically except for the interior, was too good to pass up and within a few months they were up and running.
The menu is chef curated and will have rotating proteins, depending on what fishermen driving up to Long Beach pass by the restaurant to drop off each day.
“The formula we have here is doing dishes everyone knows and elevating them,” Gruel said.
So instead of doing an traditional L.A. baseball game classic like a bacon-wrapped hot dog, they do a lobster dog — a ground lobster hot dog rolled daily in the kitchen, wrapped with bacon and topped with a pepper pickle relish on a brioche bun.
“We felt like we weren’t done with Slapfish yet,” Gruel said. The new owners of the chain shut down the flagship location in Huntington Beach and Raw Bar by Slapfish.
“When we started Raw Bar in 2018, it was a learning curve,” Gruel said. “By 2022, people couldn’t get enough.”
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