The Santa Monica Pier has spent a century being many things to many people — a pleasure palace, a fishing spot, a place where the continent runs out of road. On Sunday, October 11, it becomes a seafood festival again, as Off the Hook returns for its eighth year with tastings from more than 25 restaurants and chefs, a yacht rock party, and a theme tied to the 100th anniversary of the highway that famously ends, or begins, right there at the water's edge.
The event is the work of Kim Koury, president of Spin PR Group, who has lived in Santa Monica for 18 years. Koury told the Santa Monica Daily Press that the pier's status as the western terminus of Route 66 shaped this year's theme, calling the festival a labor of love. It is a fitting year for it. Route 66 was first declared a federal highway in 1926, which makes 2026 its centennial, and the pier has become a magnet for anniversary programming — including a June "Pier to Pier" celebration that linked Santa Monica's Pacific Wheel with Chicago's Centennial Wheel, offering 66 minutes of free Ferris wheel rides on each coast starting at 10 a.m. local time.
The pier's claim on Route 66 is more symbolic than official, and the story of how that came to be is worth telling. Route 66 originally ended ambiguously in downtown Los Angeles. In 1935 it was formally extended from Broadway and Sunset to Santa Monica, 13 miles west. The official terminus, historically, was the intersection of Lincoln and Olympic Boulevards, where U.S. 66 met U.S. 101A — a spot chosen so the highway could reach Pacific Coast Highway without plunging over the edge of the Palisades. But travelers, many of whom had come from far inland, kept going until they could touch the Pacific. In 2009, on the 83rd anniversary of the highway's inception, Dan Rice of 66 to Cali, the Route 66 Alliance and the Santa Monica Pier Restoration Corporation got together and dedicated the much-photographed "End of the Trail" sign on the pier, just past the Bubba Gump shrimp franchise and before the Playland arcade. It has been drawing cameras ever since.
That the sign sits a short walk from a shrimp restaurant is a coincidence, but the festival's organizers have built a more deliberate kind of symbolism around the day. Off the Hook describes itself as 100 percent free of single-use plastics and is built around sustainable seafood and ocean conservation. Proceeds benefit Heal the Bay, which works to protect the coastline and restore local waterways, and the Santa Monica Pier Corporation, the nonprofit that channels funds toward free community programming on the pier.
Heal the Bay's ties to this particular patch of coastline run deep. The organization was founded in 1985 by the activist Dorothy Green, and in 1992 it launched its Beach Report Card, the A-to-F bacterial grading system that helped secure more than $200 million in California state cleanup funding. In March 2003, Heal the Bay acquired the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium — tucked beneath the historic carousel — from UCLA for one dollar, transforming the 4,500-square-foot space into a public marine science museum housing more than 100 native species. The aquarium is a short stroll from where the festival's crowds will gather.
This year's event also turns the day's debris into next year's habitat. Santa Monica College's Life Sciences Department will be on hand to promote its aquaculture program, and OC Coastkeeper will collect oyster shells through its Shells for Shorelines program, which repurposes discarded shells for native oyster restoration projects across Southern California. Organizers collected more than 70 pounds of shells at last year's festival and expect to collect more than 140 pounds this time around.
The stakes behind that collection are real. Oyster reefs in California have declined by roughly 85 percent, according to Orange County Coastkeeper, battered by overharvesting, habitat destruction and degraded water quality. The Olympia oyster — Ostrea lurida, the only native oyster species on the West Coast — was once widely distributed from Alaska to Baja California, covering large expanses of intertidal areas in dense beds. Oysters are, as Coastkeeper puts it, tiny titans: they buffer shorelines from storm-driven erosion, filter pollutants and improve water clarity, and provide nursery grounds that support fish and shellfish. Coastkeeper's recycling program has diverted more than 24,000 pounds of discarded shells from restaurant waste streams since it began, curing them in the sun for at least six months before using them in living shoreline projects in Newport Bay, Alamitos Bay and Seal Beach. The practice itself is not new — repurposing oyster shells is a long-standing restoration technique rooted in Indigenous coastal stewardship.
The menu on October 11 leans into the classics. Participating restaurants include Santa Monica Seafood, Water Grill, Rustic Canyon, Huckleberry, Sushi Roku, Michael's Santa Monica, Mastro's Ocean Club, Fogo de Chão, Pacific Catch and The Lobster, with oysters, lobster, shrimp, tuna, caviar and sushi headlining the tastings. Beverage producers Duvel, Dulce Vida Tequila, Giesen Wines and Junipero Gin will pour alongside the food, and the afternoon closes out with a yacht rock party featuring The Windbreakers spinning smooth 1970s and 1980s sounds. KTLA's Wendy Burch hosts, and attendees can vote for their favorite restaurant to take home the People's Choice Award. There is also an oyster shucking competition sponsored by Westside Oyster Club — the "Best in Shuck" showdown gives competitors five minutes to shuck and present as many oysters as possible, with presentation counting for as much as speed.
General admission Little Fish tickets start at $115 and include seafood and beverage tastings, games and live music, with entry beginning at 4 p.m. VIP Big Fish tickets start at $175, allow early entry at 3 p.m., and include access to the Sustainable Seafood VIP Lounge presented by Santa Monica Seafood, with curated cocktails and additional tastings from Calabra at Santa Monica Proper Hotel, Shuck Brothers and Vibe Caviar. VIP guests also receive a gift bag and unlimited rides at Pacific Park, a pass valued at $40. Tickets are available at offthehookseafoodfest.com.
The festival's own history has not been uninterrupted. The first Off the Hook splashed onto the pier in October 2015, presented by Shock Top, with a Sustainable Seafood VIP Lounge and an oyster shucking competition hosted on the main stage. In its early years it benefited the Westside Food Bank and partnered with Seafood for the Future; the beneficiary has since shifted to Heal the Bay and the Pier Corporation. The event has run for eight years, drawing visitors from across Los Angeles as well as attendees who fly in, though it also endured a three-year hiatus after the pandemic — a gap that helps explain why an event with a 2015 origin is only now marking its eighth edition.
The timing of the return lands squarely within National Seafood Month, a designation Congress created in October following passage of the Fish and Seafood Promotion Act in 1986 to highlight the economic contributions of fisheries and promote sustainable seafood consumption. For Koury and her team, the goal is to fold that message into the experience itself — supporting ocean protection alongside the local restaurants and businesses that line the pier. On a Sunday afternoon at the end of the Mother Road, with a plate of oysters in one hand and a view of the Pacific in the other, the symbolism is not hard to find.