You cannot be in southern California and not think about San Pedro Fish. So uh, you can check them out if you want to find out more about them at San Pedro Fish dot com San Pedro fish dot com. And here to talk about what they've got going on for the summer and for the fourth July is Michael Angaro. How are you, brother, I'm great, Thanks, welcome to the show. We're just talking cigars. Are you a married man?
I am?
Okay, So look at it is uh.
Into the cigar her asthma does not agree with.
I was going to say, so, how do you do it? Man?
I have a few hiding places. Yeah, and I really.
Opened it back guard and then you have to wear like a space helmet in the house. So yeah, I stopped years ago. As never a cigarette smoker. I don't think I've ever had a cigarette in.
My whole life.
Not But cigars, they're they're really nice with a nice port or something.
Yeah, you know some basils, Basil Hayden's. Yeah, just some Luxado cherries, Oh no, the off a little bit of.
The Yeah, for the syrup in there.
You're good to go.
Nothing like buying, you know, cherries for twenty five dollars. It's but you know that you work hard in life, you want to have, yeah, some nice things. So you and I understand each other already. How's everything going out there in Santpetere.
Oh, it's going pretty well. Do you know like our situation. We haven't talked for quite a bit. No, I think we did a zoom during the pandemic. Indeed we did, so it has been a while. Yeah, but it's going well.
We in the last So just a quick background. So next year we're going to be celebrating our seventieth anniversary as nineteen fifty six of my grandfather opened the original location called This to Seafood nineteen fifty nine, moved down to the waterfront, took over place called Norms Landing seventy nine eighty. They expanded the portsical village, so we moved out of Norms into a parking lot. We're there for
about a year and a half. We rebuilt an open san Peech to a fish market Good Friday nineteen eighty two, and then we're just on a streak, just growing, growing, growing. We expanded up to three thousand seats at one point doing about two million customers a year more than anyone
except SeaWorld and then they're but they're redeveloping again. So Portucal's gone, and so we had to leave that building on March third of twenty twenty three, two years ago, move into a parking lot again, which is where we're at now.
Do you remember that?
So they're building new places now. The good news is we we're part of that project. I signed a forty nine year lease which we will move into soon. We have to build that from the ground up.
How do you sign a forty nine year lease.
Yeah, that's what everybody asks me. So we believe in the brand. You know, I'm third generation gone on Force.
Well no, I know that part, but just that I don't know. It's just is mind boggling, you know, of course the brand.
If you're getting into, like the financial part of it, what's challenging is the city and the state. They own the land. So normally you'd buy the land and then you can build on it, and you could you can finance it that way. But when you don't the forty nine year lease, banks look at it as if it's
like a home. It's like a piece of property that you even though we have to build it from the ground up, and we don't own the land, so it allows us to borrow the money that we need to build it because it could be a twenty million dollar project. It's fifty five thousand square feet. Holy and we're gonna which is what we had before, So we'll we'll go back to our three thousand seats and we're just basically going to make it all more efficient and effective than it ever had been.
Why you guys so beloved.
You know, we take care of our customers, been around a long time. Our customer base is super loyal. One of the things we notice now is people come in and say, hey, I used to come in as a kid with my parents, and I've got my kid my parents with me, and they want to re experience in that. And what we do is we really like celebrating food and families sort of our value proposition, if you will. That's what we're all about too, you know.
So that's exactly why I'm here on a Saturday too.
You know.
It's like, yeah, I think we need to remind ourselves about what we live. Well, it work so hard, right right, and and then you know people come down. Usually parties
is three generations. So it's all picnic benches, it's all right on the water, and they come down there, you know, and our height, you'd be in line for a good hour and an hour and a half two hundred yard long line just to get in the building another hour before you can actually settle and get your food, and people drive one hundred miles before the like more of a tourist attraction really, and seafood experience is what we call it. So what we're doing is we're redesigning that.
We hired an architecture firm called Studios. I assume you've been.
To Italy at some point, yeah, of course, So they designed Italy's And what we realized is what we had evolved into by accident as we were getting busier and busier and buzziers. We had all these stations that we just would build, you know, put it, put a kitchen
out there, we need another kitchen. Put a kitchen here, take half the crab, a live crab and lobster tanks out and replace it with griddles and so that worked, but it wasn't very efficient, but the experience was there, Go buy your seafood here, bring it to a kitchen there, tell you haven't to cook. Someone else waits on line for beer. Someone else gets the fish and chip, someone else gets the crab. It worked, but it wasn't really efficient.
It was effective, but it was efficient. So Studios we realized that would be a great firm to hire because what we accidentally created was a very ineffective version or innefficient version of what Italy is, which is a lot of different places to get your protein, your side, your sandwich, whatever. So they're bringing that experience back in the first place you'll find it is on the Fisherman's War from Monterey Bay.
I just signed a thirty year lease for a location there, seventeen thousand Squareclow restaurant, which we planned open next summer.
Wow, so it works.
We're on the rise, we're expanding.
Let me carry the one. Yeah, I will not be it wet.
But that's that's part of it. So back to the original question. What we did was we left the original buildings March third to twenty twenty three sink of the mile. Two months later we opened and a pop up parking lot was seating for nine hundred serving about five hundred to six hundred thousand people. Out of that holy so smoke, and we had to really pivot and what was so the terrible parts right, you're watching these buildings we grew
up and get torn down. The plus is that allowed us to start from the ground up and do all the things we couldn't incorporate into that old structure, like a lot of technology. So the only way we could do this was QR codes on the table, scan and will run the food to you. Not what we envisioned doing, but we gave it a shot and people are like, hey, I don't have to wait in six different lines. You're just going to keep bringing the food and the beer to meat. Great, and we were able to actually be
a lot more efficient that way. So we'll have some of that technology in the new locations, but really the goal is bringing back the seafood experience, which we just kind of brought back about maybe three months ago. We didn't have a fish market built into a parking lot, but we figured out how to do that, and we'll figure out how to do it in the next phase.
So in between the forty nine year lease and the parking lot we're in now is what we call Phase two, and that's a dirt lot that's sort of right between the two places, but right on the waterfront. We're going to open that. I'm hoping we'll be able to use it for fourth of the Jolly weekend. We're just trying to get through building and safe really, but that is incredible.
This is thirty three thousand square feet. We use a company called MKUSA that does container kitchens, so they fashioned this entire kitchen complex about twenty five hundred to three thousand square feet in size. It's got a sixty foot long kitchen of just griddles and flyers, walk in freezers, refrigerators, and then we use another candard that's a bar and then it's just all DG just basically all like sand.
That's what it looks like right with uh. We could probably get up to eighteen hundred seats on it and it's right on the water which is but it's been hard to open it because no one is building in safety. When you go it's just temporary or rebuild. It's like thirty days ninety days. Now we need like three to five years and there's no box to check.
Wow.
So like running around building and safety for two years and fire and health and everybody else. But they've been great. They've they've accommodated everything. It's just unique. I don't think anyone's done that before. Wow, it's pretty cool.
Look at you thrown around, d G decomposed, look at that. Sorry Saturday, you learned things on this show. Sorry if you expected not to today, but you did. But it's beautiful to look at too. It's like bright.
It is really nice. Yeah. I mean if you feel like you're you're in the park, but it's not sand. Yeah, but it has some similar concept, but it drains. It's easy to maintain and it reflects. It doesn't like you're an asshalt right now. So the heat just bounces right off and it's it's hard this this that it would be much more. It's just much more people friendly.
That's cool. We come back. We're going to talk about your barbecue tray and stuff you're doing for the upcoming holiday. But I just wanted us to catch up because it had been so long and there's so much going on. You guys continue to grow, and we need to keep these heritage places. Man, it's imperative. Hey, Kayla, she's reaching for the food. I want to talk hanging out with Michael Angaro, the San Pedro Fish Market. You can find
out more at San pedrofish dot com. San pedrofish dot com where he brought so much food and it smells fantastic. But I gotta tell you, I usually wait till I'm on the air to eat, so my reaction is right there. But I couldn't that that that, you know, just this, The wonderful smell of this is it's very, very enticing, and I had to just jump in, so I did bad host. And this is your barbecue tray. It's available July fourth through the sixth. It is in Long Beach
and it's sixty nine ninety nine. It's so what am I looking at? What part of this is that tray? I'm a little bit of heat on it. Ye oh, you were trying something new to this.
I haven't actually tried it yet, so I just saw it. I only saw it on our social media. So it's pulled pork, there's a cubosa sausage, and then it's our normal shrimp tray, which is a veggies potatoes, you know, belot of po tomato onions, shrimp, there's corn on the cob. And then what we added to this that makes it unique is because in the spirit of barbecuing, and fourth of July is the pulled pork and this Carolina honey barbecue sauce, which I actually hadn't tried to write. Now
it's really good. It's a great it's a great accompaniment to this, and it brings out the flavor in a different way. So it's awesome. And yeah, it's gonna be only available on the fourth, fifth, and the sixth, only in the Long Beach location, so if you don't, if you go to Pedro, you can still get great trays. You just be able to get this specific one.
This is insanely good.
Yeah, it's really good. It's like.
Everything you could possibly want in one tray, and then the bread even.
And it's a great deal too. I mean, easily feed four people with this. I mean, unless you're super hungry, I guess you could take your time for two, but I would.
You could easily listen. Can I deal with it myself? Yeah, I'm not. Yeah, even craft Mac and Cheese says that I'm a family of four, so so I get it. But just the balance in flavor of all these things come together, I mean I'm not surprised. You guys just do it. Right, yeah, thank you. You know it is the best of the best. I mean, the top is the highest tier that you can think about when it comes to seafood. Is what you get at San Pedro.
Are things always been to let the customer pick out their own seafood and make their own trays. And I think it was maybe six years ago. My uncle Tommy's one of the founders. You know, he's still around. I just passed him when I was leaving with this. He's I think he's eighty two, eighty three this year. He's still there. Good on him every day and he's like, we should put let people buy a sausage, and we
should let people buy a bacon. And then he put all these things in the fish case, like I don't know if that's across contamination. I don't sure what we're doing here, but it was crazy. People started buying it, and then the corn and the cop which we'd had corn in the cop forever, but we never offered it as something you could add to the shrimp tray. So just moving it into the seafood case all of a sudden, total selling tons of it, and I'm like, I had
I really didn't see that coming. But that's his thing. He's always looking at what can we test, what we can try. Now, we brought in a lot of a lot of people with the kitchen and back kitchen experience and restaurant experience from different different companies, and they kind of looked at it and added a whole different layer to it, like that pulled pork is something I never would have thought to try. But we're cooking it ourselves and then adding it to the train. It's it's really good.
Can I ask where you guys are getting bread from right now? We're using a local baker that we've used forever, one of the family places in San Pedro. I'm not sure fantastic is fantastic? You know, we were talking earlier about Monterey the challenges. I'm not sure how we're going to transport it up there. So we're talking to other bakers and trying to find a match because we have to find a way to make it available six hours away, and I don't know how it's going to happen.
Yeah, that's tough, especially when you're growing, and you guys have always seemed to grow properly. You know, you put push the COVID out because nobody could see that going. But you know what I'm saying, growing is difficult to size something that you that people that's beloved.
Yeah, I think that for us, the well, yeah, there's a lot there. We were fortunate with COVID because the main location in sant Peedro, all the seating was already outside, so we just had to move tables apart and put partitions up and we it gave us an unexpected advantage, so we still did pretty well once it started to loosen up. And then you know also and when it wasn't and you couldn't go in there, we just said
we got to try this third party thing. The funny part about it was we what we did and this might have been what we were talking about services, Yeah, yeah, like door dash and grub up. What we did and I think this is what we would have been talking about last time I was here, was we said, you know, here's the thing. I don't want to we don't want to make money in the situation, but we got to keep people employed and we have vendors that need that
we have to buy problem from. So we created a twenty A nineteen ninety nine twenty dollars basically tray of our shrimp tray that could feed a family of four, and we just pushed it through the door Dash and grub Hub and luber Eats and that worked out really, really well. And what the funny part about it was here we are in San Pedro, we've been there forever. The most of the people in the community didn't visit us because it's too crowded. They don't want to deal
with the lines. But all of a sudden they're like, Oh, I'll get it through door Dash or grub Hub, Like, is this what everyone's waiting the line for. They had no idea this is what we're serving.
That's insane. Yeah, that happens a lot, some of the closest places to me I visit the least. Yeah, it's just the way you know it can be.
Sometimes. Well it's like you get. One of the things we would hear is I wouldn't wait in line a line like this anywhere but Disneyland. So I think that drives a lot of people away unless they've driven on it hundred miles. So we have a lot of customers coming from Phoenix and Vegas for the day going back home.
So that's why we think our Monterey project is going to be successful because there's a ton of people already in Monterey that our customers making the drive that we'll be able to offer something in their backyard.
I'm a huge fan of Disneyland. We have passes and we go with our family all the time. I'm a big fan, and I think that there are things worth waiting for. I don't normally wait and line long lines for food. I would wait in line for this. Here's the Fork reporter. I suppose always nice to see you, my friend, and glad that things are going so well. The growth, all of those things are always exciting. Again.
The on Facebook, San Pedro Fish website, San Pedro Fish of course, San Pedro Fish Market is you know, it's a staple here in southern California. You'll find them the same on Instagram as well. But check that out. You gotta see this.
Also Amazon Prime, you can watch our TV show called King. Oh.
I forgot to mention I had that note as well. How's that going?
It's going on? I think Amazon doesn't share a lot of data with us, but it's still it's so on its streaming. It's also we're going to be moving at the YouTube so we have a little more control. And you can watch my podcast Fish Factor, which is also on the San Pego Fish YouTube channel, which we toss on how we made it and all the background and who the producers are.
Not I'm sorry I would have plugged that more. Oh, no worries, but it's good to see you and we got to do this more often. Man, this is fantastic. To get this, you want to go check out the website because they have everything there San pedrofish dot com. You can look and you can see that they have their barbecue tray sixty nine ninety nine serves two to four people depending on if they're me or a normal person.
But this is only available at July fourth through the sixth, and just you pull a sausage, pulled pork corn on the cob, coleslaw, the garlic bread of course, homemade Carolina gold barbecue sauce on the side. Just fantastic. The flavors are just spot on and with every note in there. I've asked Michael Longaro from San Pedro Fish Market to stick around because I totally neglected to talk about some of the other projects that you've got going on that people can enjoy the podcast and the TV show and
the like. Plus this food is just so fantastic. A reminder to check out the website at San Pedro fish dot com San pedrofish dot com. The barbecue tray in Long Beach only available at the Long Beach location July fourth through the sixth. This barbecue tray, it's fantastic, got my absolute seal of approval. I'm guessing by the look on your face, Kayla the same. Yeah, she's giving me the look like you don't even have to ask.
I'm just grateful that he bought to go boxes. I'm going to be eating this. This was so good. Yeah.
I saw you go Sunday Monday Tuesday, and I figured ouh, yeah of the bus lanting names of the boxes. No, it is that the spice, even without the sauce on it. This is just in its own lovely juice is a spot on And.
You could also if you go to the website, or you can go, I think directly to San Pedro dot Fish, but it'll link from the website too. You can buy our trays through gold Belly and we ship them all over the country. Wow, ready to cook? So you got it? You want to cook? It within a day or two of receiving it because it's all fresh seafoods and you can't freeze it because the veggies and potatoes are no notle
run it. Yeah, but you can get there's a whole bunch of different combinations with crab, lobster, shrimp, fish, and you can I think there's a couple of additions you can put on there and we'll ship it anywhere in the country.
And gold Belly is really it's like the premiere flavors of all these different areas and they manage to figure out ways to get the best of the best to you no matter where you are.
Makes a great Christmas present for everybody.
Oh yeah, the local places like a cake you want on the East Coast or something like that, cheesecake, Yeah, exactly.
Well, you know, I get brisket from Texas or ribs from Kansas City, and you just send stuff all over It's insane. Would you do this?
I'm like, So, it's an honor man, because if your name is in Thatchol, that's because you have something that is unique and regional that people want other places.
You speaking of that, when when the news came out that we were getting the news reported US as being shut down, they didn't report it for the most part of us moving so I started. So we had to do a lot of course correction on that. You know, we're still open, we're still here, and we did. It
was fine, but it's interesting. What I'm noticing is a lot of copycat places popping up from Bakersfield to Inland Empire to like all over the place, thinking well, they're not there anymore, so we could sell these world famous Strom trades for ourselves. I'm like, hold on, and people say I went to your new location in Murrietta, I'm like, I even know who that is.
So are they Are the names similar enough?
Yeah, they're calling them. They'll call them San Pedro Trays, San Pedro Famous fish trays or shrimp trays. And it's sad because I own the IP so I would rather have a way to partner with a lot of these companies, But the way the laws are written, you have to tell them the stop first to protect your intellectual property, which sucks because.
People don't understand.
I want to support these mom and pop places and help them grow and it helps us. It could be synergishal but you've got to do the season the sist thing and try to talk to them and that's you have to cereal and you don't want to do it.
But people don't understand that you will lose your trademark if you don't defend it exactly. And people don't you know, because I used to do all the trademarking for KFI as well. Did you really Yeah, I had to, you know, in my management. I had to cover all that. And maybe people think that you're just being a big mean corporation and you're like, no, if I don't do this, then anybody and everybody gets it, and all the stuff I've worked for.
Yeah goes snick. Like I said, next year is going to be seventy years if I mentioned that, but our SEC anniversary, right, So I was like, I have to protect the legacy we built. So it's kind of lame, but it is what it is. You don't have a choice. But like if we were talking about the web serity, so if you go to Amazon Prime, you watch it, go search for Kings of Fish if you don't have an Amazon Prime. We have actual seven seasons of the
show that started nine years ago. I think today maybe it launched and and why that signific is we were only doing for social media's little four minute episodes. Five minute episodes with the four story arc, the first ones we came out with in July. I guess it's twenty eighteen, twenty seventeen, and.
Right now we're hanging out with Michael Angaro from San Pedro Fish Market and you know they've been around for seventy years. That to put that in perspective, Disneyland is celebrating his seventieth right now, now one hundred years of Walt and his business. But as far as Disneyland is concerned, so that's you know, so it's pretty pretty Oh, you can pop your mic on. I'm sorry, bored up, just stepped away from it here.
I'm back.
Look at you. You're like, you know, I run restaurants, man.
I don't know. I don't. If I wish if I could just push a button and make them work, I would everything was a microphone. Yeah, Disney's a cool play. I mean, we we have We did the study of just asking people on a survey and it turns out our customer base that visits us right they're driving one hundred miles or they're coming in from out of town. The two places they go is us in Disneyland and the same like more than sixty or seventy percent of
the customers we talked to that's their two destinations. That's crazy. We didn't know, you know, but the more you look at technology and social media allows you to run these polls, track or we had that at one point one of the credit card companies we had would give us a map like thoughts on a map, like here's the clusters are your customer basis And I was like, wow, that's one hundred miles we had. We didn't realize that we
were drawing that far out everywhere. Wow, I don't. I mean, I had to say, we're really not a restaurant at this point. We're more of a destination seafood experience. And that's really how we think about ourselves now.
And you know what's interesting that came out of the the pandemic was people want experiences with their food.
Yeah.
Yeah, And that could be whether it's a manufactured experience of some kind where you're like, hey, this is this is our vibe or what we you know, kind of the insides or and what the feel is of it. And then there's you know what you've built, which is making outstanding food in a way that's approachable.
And what's interesting that we did again by accident and we just kind of evolved, is we allowed people to pick their own combination of seafood and that was the experience for them. So at one point, and they don't do this anymore, but Instagram would list the top ten most Instagram restaurants by geotagging, and we would be in the top ten. You know, it would be Cafe Dumont, Kat's Deli Us And I was like, how do we
get in this? But there were so many people that are like, I can't believe the size of this tray with all this seafood overflowing, and they were picturing and showing their friends and family and geotagging, and I think we had an advantage of three thousand seats over the other restaurants because you know, the volume of clicks was higher. Sure, but I was like, we were on Time magazine at CNN. I'm like, we weren't trying, you know, it was like,
we're just doing what we do. But it was a really good like testament to the customer fan base that we had, which is really cool.
You know, so called trying is only going to go so far. The consistency of just wanting to serve. Yeah, the hospitality, if you remove the hospitality out of the restaurant industry, it's gone.
I think the hospitality and the story are the two main things. Like if so, we do the best we can with hospital and we are constantly working to improve on that. But at the same time, if you had three seafood restaurants next to each other, which at one time we did, like when we're in San Pedro, all these places open next to us and copycass they weren't supposed to like it was in their least that they couldn't do it. They were supposed to sell tempera and sushi,
but they copied everything we did. And it was like, you know what, I'm not even going to push back on it. Because we had so many customers we couldn't handle it. They needed an alternative so they would come back when it wasn't as crowded. So it actually worked our advantage. But we realized was you could compete against all of them based on the story that we had and people didn't know we had been there for decades and decades they didn't know my grandfather was originally a bookie.
They didn't know that's why he started the business. They didn't know. They thought, you know, they just thought we were just random seafood swap meat. So Kings of Fish evolved out of that. It was a way to not just tell our story, which we're experimenting on social media, but actually own it, produce it, and be able to point it where we wanted to point and so people could see, like you can be part of the story. You can come in on more filming, you could be
in the storyline. Then that's what we're doing now with all of our business partners. It's like anybody that we buy from, our tech people, our suppliers, we're happy to include you in, but we do need some help with that, so we're like looking for them, like if you invest in the show, you you can be sponsored by or we can incorporate in the storyline, you know, like Corona or Modello. Yeah, yeah, you know, I could see us. I'm flying out. We ran out of product and you know,
someone's coming in with a parachute dropping it off. We can create any storyline work because we're self producing it, you know, so it's really fun and it gives us a place to be creative. And then's for the fourth generation that's coming up. I don't want to sling fish. Great, we're also doing this whole media thing. We have a whole it thing. So my nephew now handles all of our it. My daughter's our executive assistant. My other daughter
is working. She's actually an executive assistant from Hoda Coppy and her company. So I'm like, if you ever decide to come back to California, I could do some help with the media stuff since you're helping her build her media brand. So like, it creates opportunities for the next Sho generation. It doesn't want to be slinging fish.
Isn't it interesting though, how a restaurant business is not a restaurant business anymore. You have to have your hand in everything else. Yeah, to remind people, Yeah, but you're in control.
Yeah, so you want to own as much as it as you can. You know, the expansion gets us into a situation where you know, we got to borrow money. Can't to build a fifty five thousand square foot restaurant that's twenty or thirty million dollars, Not like I there might be some cans dug in somebody's backyard, but there's not to be that much. It's neight be twenty million dollars. You know, it's joking. Yeah, so you got to We had to bring in people that understand how to finance
restaurants in a different way. And even these guys like one of my my business partners, Albert Dwex, great guy in New York, comes in, he goes, I do a lot of real estate development in New York, but I've never thought about forty nine years on the lease. Like the way you have to think differently because the time horizon so long. The banks don't even know how to think about it. Even we don't like we have to project out, Okay, well you get to year thirty, what's the shrimp cocktail cost?
I don't know. It could be fifty dollars with inflation, that's impossible, but it was twenty five cents when we started. Yeah, so so to think about those things are much much different. But again you're not you know, you got to get outside of the operational part all of that. Yeah. Yeah, they have a forty nine year projection for for the investors to think through and I'm like, I don't know what's going to happen in five minutes, never mind five
years to forty nine, you know. So it's it's it's been a learning experience for us, but that's part of growing the legacy for the next generations.
Wow, I'm glad this has been a really fun conversation just because the insight to all of it. I mean, you guys already have everything else down the food, that stuff, but you're constantly learning.
Yeah, and and like Fish Factor and Kings of Fish, they're the way to tell those stories and show people behind the scenes like I loved, well, I shouldn't say I loved I beared through watching The Bear.
Hard to watch for so hard to watch it yet, but pretty.
Accurate, especially the whole time. My whole family's Italian, so I'm watching it going, yeah, that's Christmas Eve. But it's really accurate to see, you know, see somebody tell the behind the scenes story of what the stress is like. You know, because that customers when they're wait for a long time, they assume you're just out to get them. I've tried to help you, man, Yeah, but they have to really be on top of the hospitality part. Of it. Wow.
So yeah, the storytelling brings him in the hospitality keeps them coming back.
Well, it's always always great to spend time with you and chatman. I'm glad that things are still going with full bore seventy years later, Michael Angaro from the famous San Pedro Fish Market and you can find out more at San pedrofish dot com and on all the social media's. Check out the shows as well as the podcast. And we'll see you again man, anything we can do, you let us know when any of these changes happened. We'll make sure people.
Know about it. Appreciate it, man, great to be here. Thank you, Good to see you.