09/08/2026
It started as a 250-square-foot room on the sportfishing docks. 🐟
Kelly Christianson and his wife Marie opened Point Loma Seafoods in 1963, in a space you could cross in four strides, on the working waterfront at the foot of Emerson Street where the charter boats tie up. The idea was easy to state and hard to hold to: sell only the freshest fish in town, and turn away anything that is not.
Everything else grew out of that rule. They filleted, packaged and custom-smoked catch for sportfishermen coming off the boats, which made them part of the harbor's working life rather than a shop looking at it. And then they did the thing that made them famous: took the fish they were already selling raw, grilled or fried it, and put it hot on fresh sourdough under house-made tartar sauce. A fish market that decided to also be a lunch counter. The slogan they settled on says the whole business in four words: The Freshest Thing In Town.
Their sons Jack and John came into it. The building grew in 1980 and was rebuilt again in 2010 on the same footprint.
Six decades on, people still eat standing at the rail, watching the boats they may have just bought lunch from.
