Longtime Morro Bay restaurateur Stan Van Beurden has teamed up with chef Kevin Fryburger to renovate the former Whale’s Tail restaurant building on the Embarcadero into a new casual seaside café that would cater to locals and tourists alike.
Anchor Park Café — expected to open in August — will feature local vegetables, local fish and other fare in the mid-priced range, said Van Beurden, who also owns the Hofbrau der Albatross restaurant next door.
“We want family-style, comfort food,” he said.

In the meantime, Van Beurden is making big changes to the building. It was built in the 1940s as an albacore-processing plant, and then it housed the Whale’s Tail restaurant starting sometime in the 1970s, he said.
The new business owners want to get the building current with a number of newer city codes, such as widening the sidewalk. This means the restaurant’s signature concrete whale, which took up too much sidewalk space, had to go.
Van Beurden said he is happy to report the city has adopted the whale and will likely keep it as statuary in the city’s Anchor Park next door.
The renovation is planned in two parts. About 1,800 square feet at the front of the building, facing the street, is expected to be finished this August and is designed to seat about 48 people; the second half of about 700 square feet that faces the water is to include outdoor patio dining that would adjoin the Hobrau patio seating, walks open to the public and a ramp that will lead down to three or four boat slips and a dock on the water.
Those improvements probably would take three or four years, depending on approvals by the California Coastal Commission, Van Beurden said.
Van Beurden opened the Hofbrau with his father in 1971 down the street from its current location, where they moved in 2002.
He said the restaurant has been recession proof, and that made him bullish on seaside restaurants in Morro Bay.
“I’m very pumped about the economy in Morro Bay,” he said. “It’s going to be good; we’re one of the top places people come to on vacation, and I think we’ve got the best locations on the waterfront. But we’re also here for the local clientele.”
The original Whale’s Tail restaurant, which is owned by Danielle Mandella, moved to another location off the waterfront at 430 Morro Bay Blvd.
— Melanie Cleveland