Spenger's Fish Grotto abruptly closes after 128 years in Berkeley

Berkeley’s beloved Spenger’s Fish Grotto restaurant has closed after opening 128 years ago.

Customers were alerted to the abrupt closure by a white piece of paper taped between the handles of a ship’s wheel affixed to the front door, stating that the seafood restaurant had closed its doors permanently on Wednesday.

“Sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused you,” the note read.

The restaurant opened in 1890. Neon signs on the restaurant’s facade were still on Wednesday night.

A public notice was plastered on another window of the seafood spot announcing that the parent company of Joe’s Crab Shack, known as KRG JCS, LLC, had applied to open a restaurant at the location. The notice was posted by the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

Additional details on the ownership change were not immediately available. On Wednesday, a man who identified himself as Kevin, a restaurant manager, said he could not comment because he was about to inform the employees of the closure.

In the decades after World War II, what had begun as a cozy fish market became a hugely popular family-owned destination for residents of the fast-growing East Bay. In 1983, according to the book “Berkeley Landmarks,” its 240 employees served 3,000 meals a day.

But business ebbed as the city changed, and new buildings nearby on Fourth Street sprouted design-conscious shops and restaurants. Spenger’s closed briefly in 1998 but reopened the next year with a new corporate owner.

Kevin Vuorenmaa-Navarro, a store manager for Saje, a nearby aromatherapy shop, said he saw workers outside the restaurant Wednesday.

“I was taking trash out today and I saw people in their whites on their break or whatever,” he said.

Ren Sanchez, of Berkeley, drove past the restaurant with his family Wednesday night after a friend texted him to tell him the restaurant had closed.

Sanchez said he often dined at Spenger’s, where he enjoyed the popular seafood happy hour. He said the businesses on Fourth Street have changed over the years and said he was saddened that another of the neighborhood’s “mainstays” is closed.

“The institution being gone is sad,” Sanchez said. “I’m guessing leases are getting ridiculous.”

Sanchez pointed to Brennan’s, a family-owned Berkeley restaurant that shuttered after celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, as a sign of changing times and tastes.

The seafood restaurant joined a number of other East Bay staples that closed in recent months and years, including Berkeley’s H’s Lordships, which closed after 50 years, and Mexicali Rose, which closed after being in Oakland for 91 years.

Spenger’s closure comes more than a month after the city of Berkeley rejected an application to build a 260-unit housing complex in the parking lot across from the seafood restaurant on Fourth Street. The development garnered controversy among Berkeley officials and American Indian groups who say the proposed project would be built atop the West Berkeley Shellmound, an archaeological Berkeley landmark since 2000.

San Francisco Chronicle

staff writer Justin Phillips

contributed to this report.

Gwendolyn Wu and Lauren Hernández are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: gwendolyn.wu@sfchronicle.com, lauren.hernandez@sfchronicle.

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