Scotty McColgan, whose family’s Hermosa Beach bars and restaurants have included Point 705, Mickey McColgan’s, Club Sushi and Sharks Cove, is selling his Manhattan Beach Sharks Cove to another local, family owned restaurant group.
The downtown sports bar’s new owner will be the Newman family, whose restaurants and bars include two Baja Sharkeez’s in Manhattan and one in Hermosa, as well as Palmilla Cocina Y Tequila and the soon to be open Tower 12 in Hermosa.
McColgan opened Sharks Cove on St. Patrick’s Day in 2004 to a standing room only crowd. The sports bar continues to be popular, despite the early reservations of some city councilmembers.
“I think there’s tremendous potential for [negative] impact on our town,” then councilwoman Joyce Fahey said during a 2003 public hearing on McColgan’s requests for giant plasma TV’s and a cooking station on the patio facing Manhattan Beach Boulevard. The request was denied for fear, as one resident told the council, “It would roll back Manhattan to the alcohol scene of the last decade.”
“Sports bars were a new concept,” McColgan said.
Newman is unlikely to encounter similar concerns. He plans to convert the sports bar into a second, upscale Palmilla. But not until after football season. Newman expects the permit process to take at least that long. In the meantime, he said, Sharks Cove will continue offering live music on the weekends and showing a wide range of sporting events on its 50 flat screen TVs.
Newman said that even after Palmilla opens he hopes to retain Sharks Cove’s kitchen crew, led by chef Carlos Ramirez and its bar and serving staff.
The new Palmilla will share the Hermosa Palmilla’s architect Gulla Jonsdottir and executive chef Christina Cipres. Jonsdottir is a recipient of an Esquire Magazine “Best Design of the Year” award for her work on the Red O restaurant in Los Angeles. Cipres formerly worked for celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck.
Newman said he had been looking from Santa Barbara to Newport for a location to open a second Palmilla because had given up hopes of finding a Manhattan Beach location. Then, in December, while skiing in Whistler, Realtor Mike Kantor called him to say McColgan was ready to sell Sharks Cove.
Allen said Manhattan’s increasingly upscale restaurant scene and the absence of upscale Mexican food make him confident of the new Palmilla’s success.
McColgan had been waiting to put the sports bar on the market until completing negotiations for a 20 year lease extension. The negotiations were complicated by the landlord’s Croatian residency.
“Without the lease my business is worthless,” he said. His family lost their equally successful Sharks Cove in Hermosa Beach because they could not reach an agreement with their Hermosa landlord on a lease extension. McColgan’s brother Shane, who owned the Hermosa Sharks Cove, subsequently bought the Crest bar and its building in Old Town Torrance.
McColgan said he plans to focus his attention on his King’s Cove restaurant in the Toyota Sports Center in El Segundo, which his wife Melinda manages. (He had planned to name that restaurant Sharks Cove, also, until being advised that the San Jose Sharks were the LA King’s arch rival. “So I said, okay, we’ll call it King’s Cove,” he said.) A second Kings Cove in a new AEG ice complex is also contemplated.
In the meantime, McColgan said, he plans to use his newfound free time to resume training boxers. He and his brothers boxed professionally in their youths and on occasional hosted “smokers” or boxing matches at Point 705 in the mid 1980s. In the early 1990s, when the McColgan family owned Boxing Works in Hermosa Beach, he helped train Sammy “The Hermosa Hurricane” Fuentes. In 1995, Fuentes won the WBO Light Welterweight title.
Sharks Cove will thank its customers and musicians on Wednesday, September 7 for all their support over the past decade with an all day happy hour and live music beginning at 5 p.m.
