A new restaurant and bait and tackle shop called Hook & Cook is heading to the end of the San Clemente Pier, according to the Orange County Register.
City officials approved a concession agreement with Hook and Cook SC LLC last week. The proposal came from San Clemente residents Nicholas and Lauren Rivard, who already run The Picnic Café on Del Mar. Nine other proposals were submitted. The Rivards won out, the Orange County Register reported.
The couple is targeting a late June or early July opening.
On a clear afternoon, when the marine layer finally burns off and the Amtrak trains slide past just above the sand, San Clemente Pier looks very much like the city’s civic front porch: a long, weathered wooden walkway where tourists, surfers, retirees and day‑trippers all end up sooner or later. The 1,295‑foot structure, jutting from the base of the city’s steep “Pier Bowl” into the Pacific, has become both a postcard image and a working piece of public infrastructure, carrying fishing carts, stroller wheels and the weight of nearly a century of coastal storms.
The pier began life as a marketing hook. In 1928, Ole Hanson, the real‑estate promoter who styled San Clemente as a “Spanish Village by the Sea,” built what was then called the San Clemente Municipal Fishing and Pleasure Pier to lure buyers to his master‑planned community. Early accounts describe a 1,200‑foot wooden pier, offered as a civic amenity and symbol of seaside leisure for a town that did not yet exist on most maps.
Today’s San Clemente Pier functions as a kind of minimalist working waterfront, even in a city with no harbor. Anglers lean over the railings, set up on benches and at cleaning stations, hoping for halibut, mackerel or perch as the swells roll underneath. Surfers cluster just north of the pilings, where a consistent beach break turns waist‑ to shoulder‑high on typical days, and the wooden deck offers a built‑in judging stand for friends and family watching from above.
