Business professionals, marketing professors and banks will tell you that you can’t run a business that’s underwater for most of the year— unless that business is Pearson’s Port Seafood Market, which on February 28 celebrates 55 years purveying fish and other undersea delicacies they’ve caught to Newport Beach residents and restaurants.
According to 29-year-old Carley Pearson, granddaughter of market founder Roy Pearson and the third-generation family store manager, Pearson’s Port is the “only floating fish store on the American west coast.”
Roy passed away in 1998; now his son, Tom, and Carley’s mom, Terese, own the operation. “He’s pretty much behind the scenes; he’s always out fishing,” Carley shared; and that’s why few customers get to meet Tom, for he usually casts off around 5 a.m., and doesn’t return to offload the day’s catch until 5 or 6 p.m. “My mom ran the operation day to day and has built the market into what it has become for the past 30 years,” Carley said with pride.
Closed Mondays and Wednesdays, the store is located in a shanty on a floating dock under the PCH bridge that straddles the Harbor and the Upper Bay, where it offers a selection of freshly hooked or trapped denizens guaranteed to appeal to all seafood “a’fish’ianados.”…