The Seafood Is Alive and Well in Newport

Tom and Terese Pearson don’t think of the seasons as winter, spring, summer and fall. Instead, they mark them as scallop, lobster, tuna and crab.

“We sell those things fresh,” says Terese, co-owner with her husband of Pearson’s Port in Newport Beach. They know they’re fresh, she says, because most of the sea creatures, when in season, go directly from the couple’s fishing boat into filtered tanks that keep them alive until customers come for them. “The trust is there,” Terese says of her regulars.

Welcome to Orange County’s floating fish market, a mom-and-pop icon on this part of the coast.

It started in 1972 when Tom Pearson’s parents -- Roy and Vi -- built the little wooden shack on pontoons in Upper Newport Bay. Located near a Coast Highway bridge on a spot of water unseen from the road, the place was an immediate hit among the county’s Vietnamese refugees then arriving in droves.

“They came in and liked what they saw,” recalls Vi Pearson, 77, who still occasionally works at the market. “We were the only Orange County market that had live crabs in tanks,” just like in Vietnam.

She turned the business over to her son and daughter-in-law three years ago after the 1999 death of her husband.

These days, Tom Pearson boards his 26-foot boat in Dana Point at 5 a.m. to do the fishing up and down the coast while his wife minds the store. Their customers, according to Terese Pearson, can total 150 a day, crossing ethnic lines and ranging from “people who take the bus here to those whose yachts are too big to fit under the bridge.” Together they buy about 2,000 pounds of seafood a week.

People come, she says, not only for the lobsters, scallops and crabs but also for fresh snapper, tilapia, octopus, squid, shrimp, swordfish, catfish, salmon, tuna or whatever else is available and in season. About three-quarters of the catch comes from Tom’s boat, Terese says, the rest from nearly a dozen other fishermen from Monterey to Baja California.

“I spend some time on the road,” Terese explains.

The day before Thanksgiving, for instance, began with her making an early-morning drive to Santa Barbara for about 700 pounds of squirming northern rock crabs that were much appreciated by customers planning to serve seafood with -- or instead of -- turkey.

“This is my first year of incorporating an edge-of-the-water lifestyle into the holiday,” said Teresa Guido, a Huntington Beach resident planning a dinner for 12 that included smoked salmon and a shrimp-and-scallop casserole “along with all the trimmings.”

“This is on the water,” she said of Pearson’s. “Everything is live and fresh, and you don’t have to go into a grocery store.”

Laguna Hills resident Margaret Hill said she had been coming to the little fish shop under the bridge regularly for 16 years. “It’s the best fish and the best people in the world,” she said.

And Linh Ho, on hand to buy 70 pounds of sea snails for the Vietnamese restaurant he owns in Little Saigon, said he preferred Pearson’s to the live-tank fish markets now dotting his own neighborhood because it was “fresher and cheaper.”

“The place is family-owned,” Ho said, “and they are more into serving people.”

Tom Pearson says he’d like to keep it that way for as long as he can. “Perhaps someday one of them will take over,” he said on a recent afternoon, nodding toward his two daughters -- Carley, 8, and Haley, 10 -- who were spending the day at the store.

Tom had taken a day’s leave from his fishing boat to help Terese prepare for the holidays. About midday, he untied a small boat to motor the girls across the water for cheeseburgers then took them to the middle of the channel for half an hour of -- you guessed it -- fishing.

“We caught two sand bass,” the father boasted upon their return. This particular fresh seafood, however, wasn’t destined for the family fish market. “We let them go,” Tom said of the lucky critters. “It was just for fun.”