The Reef—one of Long Beach’s longest-running restaurants, nestled between the Maya Hotel and The Queen Mary—has officially reopened its doors as a restaurant. And it left may locals wondering: Why did it take so long?
“We’ve always wanted to be a restaurant,” owner John Tallichet said. “It’s always been our spirit, but the pandemic changed all that. Across the past six or so years, we’ve been really focused on using our banquet rooms for events and amping up our catering. And we had to wait for the right time to shift gears back into full-time restaurant service.”\
The pandemic changed the restaurant rhythm of everyone—including The Reef. Like many large-format restaurants, The Reef shut down its dining room in 2020. When private events were allowed to return, the venue leaned into catering and banquets, keeping the property alive through celebrations rather than regular restaurant service. For six years, the dining room remained closed to the public, making The Reef feel both present and absent. Yes, still hosting memories. Still perched on the waterfront. But no longer part of the city’s everyday dining conversation.
The time has now come for its. With a staff that is beginning to navigate the return to restaurant service—one cook told me that his brain was, rightfully so, still in “banquet-mode” after six years of catering—the hope is that one of the best views of Long Beach from a restaurant can also become the place it once was. That is, a popular, friendly social space that is as good for a dinner as it is for just a drink.
The lingering effects of the pandemic are still very much present—but the evolution of The Reef’s surroundings has helped usher in its reopening.
“Certain parts of California were impacted differently from others,” John said. “In our own group, we had some spaces that doubled their sales during COVID and some that still, to this day, haven’t come back.”
That includes his space at LAX, Proud Bird, which has never fully returned—even with the built-in audience of travelers coming in and out of LAX by the millions. But with The Reef, John feels it was the neighborhood itself that, well, was kind of forgotten about. After all, the Queen Mary was going through mismanagement, Insomniac had not yet made the area a home for their music festivals, and people were having things delivered to their homes. It was a style of living that quietly pushed the Reef into the shadows, forcing them to depend on banquets and catering.
But then, the Long Beach Amphitheater arrived and, with it, a whole new potential set of patrons. Unlike Insomniac events, which have no in-and-out privileges for its guests and are all-day events, the Amphitheater presents itself as a date night.
“One thing, particularly in Long Beach, has been trying to activate our side of the water,” John said. “It’s part of why I am so excited about the Amphitheater coming: It gives people a reason to explore the area. The Queen Mary’s events, while great, pretty much lock in their crowds for those events. What the Amphitheater can provide is more of a well-rounded date: Have dinner, go to a show, maybe have a night-cap, head home.”
The Reef has immense potential to be something Long Beach really needs: An American-style, seafood-centric space.
After a fresh trip to Napa and the surrounding area, one of the best things about NorCal is its love of oysters and seafood. I am genuinely drawn to the various Hog Island Oyster Co. locations each time I visit, where plates of oysgters, bowls of cioppino, mussels bathing in a white wine broth, and seafood pastas are the regular.
The Reef has the potential to be just this in a city where, outside of the stellar Liv’s in Belmont Shore, seafood is dominated more by mariscos, . Because its current strength lies in its seafood. Oysters and crab legs adorn the cold seafood platter. The fish and chips and shrimp’n’crab cakes both feel like well-made classics. The things that are missing are a nice crudo or tostada. A seafood stew. A deeper, more genuine connection to its namesake.
Of course, this isn’t lost on staff or ownership.
“There is no question there is more we can do with the menu,” John said. “This menu is, at first, a test run. We wanted to ensure we have a menu we can actually execute and that is attractive to the community. We have people who have been with us for decades and, over the past six years, have largely provided banquet-style service. So as we build up to shifting toward a more efficient and confident kitchen, you will see the menu evolve.”
The Reef is older than Queen Mary’s presence in our city, dating back to the construction of the Port of Long Beach.
Before the Queen Mary became Long Beach’s most recognizable waterfront landmark… Before Shoreline Village, before Rainbow Harbor, before the city’s coastline became a civic postcard… There was The Reef.
Opening in 1958 at the far edge of the Port of Long Beach’s man-made land, the restaurant was not merely a place to eat; it was an act of imagination. Sitting at what was then one of the most isolated ends of the harbor, The Reef transformed a utilitarian portscape into a Polynesian-themed escape, complete with tropical landscaping. Tiki flourishes. Sweeping harbor views. And the kind of midcentury, thematic theatricality that made dinner feel like a genuine departure.
Its founder, David Tallichet, was then a young hotel man working at the Lafayette Hotel in Downtown Long Beach. A World War II aviator with grand, almost cinematic instincts, David looked out toward the harbor and saw possibility: a restaurant that could use its location not as a limitation, but as the whole point. It was one that embraced the era’s fascination with tiki culture and escapist dining, led by Walt Disney, which had opened Disneyland just three years prior.
And it was an immediate hit, reportedly drawing thousands in its opening week and proving that a restaurant could be more than tables and plates: It could be a world.
The Reef created a restaurant empire birthed out of Long Beach.
Its earliest form leaned heavily into that fantasy. Archives show a restaurant layered with Polynesian references: tiki carvings. Tropical rooms. Luau spaces. Pupus. Rum-forward drinks. And names that evoked an imagined Pacific that didn’t really exist. It was part of a broader Southern California moment that included Java Lanes and other themed spaces where midcentury Angelenos and Long Beachers could step into an invented paradise. Today, those aesthetics deserve a more critical eye—the “Polynesian” restaurant boom often flattened real cultures into commercial exotica—but The Reef remains an important artifact of that era: a local example of postwar American leisure, fantasy, and restaurant-as-theater.
That idea would make The Reef quietly historic. From that lone restaurant on the water, David’s Specialty Restaurants Corporation grew into a national empire of themed dining—Castaway in Burbank, Proud Bird near LAX, Ports O’ Call in San Pedro, Shanghai Red’s in Marina del Rey, and dozens more. But Long Beach was the launchpad. The Reef was the first proof of concept: match the drama of a place with the drama of design, then let the view do half the work.
In a Navy town defined by shipyards, oil islands, port infrastructure, and the constant churn of maritime commerce, The Reef offered fantasy without leaving the city.
The Reef was, briefly, not The Reef.
The restaurant’s history was not without rupture. In 1976, the original building was destroyed by fire, wiping away much of the original tiki architecture and atmosphere. The Reef was quickly rebuilt, but the structure that emerged was different—larger, more formal, and less overtly Polynesian.
“My dad long had this idea of what he wanted to build,” John said. “And, it turns out, what was in his head was not what he liked at all: he hated the new building. So much so he abandoned it being The Reef’s new home and sublet it to a new owner.”
Yes, the new operator maintained The Reef name until, in the 1980s, it was briefly rebranded as The Sassafras. And that would be its downfall: As patronage slipped, so did the sublease.
“My dad called me and said, ‘It’s time for The Reef to come back,” John said.
David urged John—then in Florida—to return to the business and protect what had begun in Long Beach. The Reef name came back, and with it came a renewed sense that the restaurant was not simply another property in a portfolio. It was the beginning of the family’s empire—and, for Long Beach, one of its longest-running dining landmarks.
John hopes The Reef’s legacy—the good, the bad, the burned down—will once again soar with liveliness.
By the 2000s and 2010s, The Reef had become less defined by everyday dining and more by life’s large rituals. Led by John since his father’s passing in 2007, it has been the site of weddings. Quinceañeras. Bar and bat mitzvahs. Corporate parties. Anniversaries. Proms. Memorials… The Reef became one of those spaces where Long Beach families marked time. People did not merely remember meals there; they remembered first dates, receptions, graduations, family photos at sunset, champagne toasts with the Queen Mary in the background. In that sense, The Reef became something rarer than a restaurant: a piece of civic memory.
Its reopening changes that. With The Reef once again welcoming public diners, Long Beach regains access to one of its most historically layered restaurant spaces. The timing is fitting: The city’s waterfront is entering yet another chapter, with new entertainment infrastructure and renewed attention on the harbor-facing edges that have long shaped Long Beach’s identity.
The Reef has already survived the loss of its original building, the fading of the tiki era, a rebrand, generations of renovations, and a pandemic. Its return is not just the reopening of a restaurant. It is the resurfacing of a place that has watched Long Beach repeatedly remake itself from the edge of the water.
And perhaps that is The Reef’s real legacy. It began as a fantasy at the end of a landfill—a Polynesian-themed paradise planted against the industrial sweep of the Port of Long Beach. Then it became the seed of a restaurant empire. It became a banquet hall. Now, nearly seven decades after David Tallichet first bet on that isolated harbor site, The Reef is once again asking Long Beach to come in, sit down, look out, and remember how much history can live inside a dining room.
The Reef is located at 880 S. Harbor Scenic Dr.
