A Landlocked East Bay Yacht Club Drops Anchor Forever: The After Hours

WALNUT CREEK, CA — For nearly three decades, the joke was part of the charm: a yacht club with no harbor, no marina and no water in sight. Now the Walnut Creek Yacht Club is sailing into history.

A downtown seafood fixture is closing after 28 years as its owners change course, while a prominent local restaurant family plans a sweeping remake of the property.

Owners Ellen McCarty and Kevin Weinberg announced they would close the seafood landmark at Bonanza and Locust after 28 years, ending a run built on clam chowder, oysters, fish and chips, craft cocktails and a nautical fantasy.

The Ghaben family, a local restaurant group tied to Batch and Brine, Broderick, World Famous Hotboys and local Black Bear Diner and Mel’s franchises, is buying the property and plans to replace the longtime yacht club with a fish bar.

The new owners plan to christen the new business as the Oceania Fish Bar, according to city documents.

Plans filed with the city call for expanding the building at 1555 Bonanza from 3,767 square feet to 6,306 square feet, including a 1,360-square-foot addition on the ground floor and a 1,179-square-foot second-floor addition. The project also proposes removing parking, adding outdoor seating, building a new trash enclosure and making significant exterior changes.

It is a dramatic overhaul for a restaurant known less for reinvention than ritual. McCarty and Weinberg opened Walnut Creek Yacht Club in May 1997 with a deliberately improbable concept — bring the atmosphere of a waterfront club to inland Contra Costa County.

“Why do we call ourselves a yacht club?” the owners asked on the restaurant’s website. “Because we want to bring the atmosphere of a day on the Bay to landlocked Walnut Creek.”

They filled the room with teak, mahogany and stainless steel, hung an authentic jib gifted from America’s Cup defender Alinghi, expanded with an oyster bar in 2008 and turned the playful premise into an East Bay institution.

Along the way, the restaurant collected accolades, including repeated Diablo Magazine best seafood honors, Wine Spectator awards from 2005 through 2022 and Michelin Guide recommendations, according to the website.

Then came the farewell. In a closing letter signed “Fair Winds and Following Seas,” McCarty and Weinberg called retirement “the most difficult decision of our 28 years,” saying they chose to close rather than hand the restaurant to others.

“This craft was built with our blood, sweat, and tears,” they wrote, adding they wanted patrons to remember the restaurant as it was rather than risk watching it lose its identity.

The decision carried unusual emotion for a business closing announcement, framed less as a transaction than a final voyage.

The owners described watching generations of families celebrate birthdays, graduations and memorial gatherings in the dining room, saying those shared memories became part of the restaurant’s legacy. The final service fell on May 7, the anniversary of the yacht club's opening.

A rendering of the new development planned f0r the corner of 1555 Bonanza occupied by the Walnut Creek Yacht Club.

The new owner, Ghaben and her family have steadily built a downtown restaurant footprint. Across the street from the departing yacht club is Broderick, a roadhouse "comfort food, beer & boozy shakes" kind of place owned by Rolla Ghaben and brother Mike. They took over the family restaurant business and now are also invested Lita, Batch and Brine, and Original Mels Diner.

They are betting the same corner can support a new seafood concept with a broader physical footprint and a different vision.

But the idea of the Walnut Creek Yacht Club endures as one of downtown’s most unlikely — a yacht club that never needed a harbor.