Manhattan Beach has a main street that runs downhill to the sand, and about halfway along it there is a small seafood restaurant with a raw bar, roughly thirty seats and a name borrowed from a phrase about catching fish the illegal way. Fishing With Dynamite is the best argument in Los Angeles County for the proposition that a seafood restaurant does not need to be large, expensive or dramatic to be excellent.
Fishing With Dynamite is small enough that the difference between five o'clock and seven o'clock is a table or an hour on the pavement. Ask Karpo when to head down to Manhattan Beach.
Old school and new school
The menu splits explicitly into two halves, and understanding that is how you order well here. The old-school section is the canon: clam chowder, oysters Rockefeller, a shrimp cocktail, a lobster roll, fried clams — the things a good American seafood restaurant has always made. The new-school section is where the kitchen does its own thing with raw fish, citrus, chilli and whatever is at its peak.
A table that orders only from one half has a less interesting meal than a table that orders across both. The classics tell you the kitchen has technique; the modern dishes tell you it has ideas. The best version of this meal is chowder, a dozen oysters, one raw dish from the new-school side and one thing from the fryer.
The raw bar is the reason
The oyster list is the heart of the restaurant and is usually drawn from both coasts, which is the useful thing — the difference between a briny, mineral East Coast oyster and a sweeter, creamier West Coast one is real and best learned by eating them next to each other. Ask which are best that day rather than ordering by name; the answer will be specific.
The chowder deserves its own sentence. It is a New England-style chowder made properly — not a thickened paste, not flour-heavy, actually tasting of clam and cream and smoke — and it is the dish that most reliably separates a good seafood restaurant from a mediocre one.
It is very small
Thirty-ish seats in a narrow room with a bar along one side means that a normal evening fills the entire restaurant, and there is no bar area to absorb people waiting. This is the practical constraint that governs everything about a visit. Early is not merely quieter; early is the difference between eating and standing outside.
The bar seats are the good ones and are also the ones most likely to become free. For two people, sitting at the bar is a genuinely better meal — you are closer to the raw bar and the kitchen — and materially easier to get.
Making a day of it
Manhattan Beach is about forty minutes from central Los Angeles without traffic and considerably more with it, which means this is worth building an afternoon around rather than driving down for dinner alone. The beach is at the bottom of the hill, the pier has a small public aquarium at the end of it, and the Strand — the paved path along the sand — runs for miles in both directions.
The sequence that works: arrive mid-afternoon, walk the Strand, come up the hill for an early dinner, and drive home before the beach towns empty out. Parking is metered and the closer you get to the sand the harder it is; park a few blocks up the hill and walk down.
Who is cooking
The restaurant comes from David LeFevre, a chef who ran a serious downtown Los Angeles kitchen before moving to the South Bay and opening a run of restaurants on the same few blocks of Manhattan Beach. That background is the explanation for why a thirty-seat neighbourhood seafood place has the technique it does — the chowder, the sauces and the fry work are all being done by a kitchen with fine-dining training that has chosen to make familiar things properly instead of unfamiliar things elaborately.
The same group runs a couple of other restaurants within a short walk, doing quite different food. If this one is full and you are already down there, that is the fallback rather than driving home.
What it costs
It is a mid-to-upper priced restaurant rather than a cheap one, and oysters by the piece plus a couple of dishes adds up faster than it appears to. The value sits in the classics — the chowder and the fried items are generously portioned and fairly priced — while the raw bar is where a bill escalates without anybody noticing. Decide on an oyster number before you start rather than ordering another dozen because the first went quickly.
Lunch, where it runs, is the cheaper and considerably calmer version of the same kitchen, and on a weekday it is one of the better meals in the South Bay for the money.
Getting there
The drive from central Los Angeles is roughly forty minutes clear and can be double that in the wrong direction at the wrong hour. Going down mid-afternoon and coming back after eight avoids the worst of it in both directions. There is a Metro line running toward the South Bay but it does not get you close enough to the beach to be useful without a connection, so this is realistically a driving trip.
Park uphill. The blocks nearest the sand are metered, competitive and time-limited, and walking four blocks down a pleasant street is not a hardship.
Practical notes
Fishing With Dynamite is a small seafood restaurant on Manhattan Beach's main commercial street, about forty minutes from central Los Angeles without traffic. The menu splits into old-school classics and new-school raw and modern dishes; order across both. The oyster list usually spans both coasts and the chowder is the benchmark dish. There are only about thirty seats and no waiting area, so book, or arrive early — the bar seats are the best in the house and the easiest to get. Build a beach afternoon around it and park several blocks uphill.
Tags: #LosAngeles #FishingWithDynamite #SeafoodNearMe #ManhattanBeach #Oysters #RawBar #LAEats #ClamChowder #WeekendPlans #SouthBay #LARestaurants #BeachDay #SeafoodLA #TheStrand
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Ask Karpo first
Want to know whether there is a seat at the bar right now, which oysters are best today and how bad the drive down is? Ask Karpo for a live read on Manhattan Beach, the easiest sitting to aim for, and a Strand walk to put in front of it.
