TL;DR: Michael Ungaro is the CEO and co-owner of San Pedro Fish Market, the 70-year-old family business on the Los Angeles waterfront that grew from a 200-square-foot storefront into 3,000 seats serving about two million people a year. For thirteen years the business grew 2.5% to 2.8% annually. Then the family started telling its own story on camera — which became Kings of Fi$h on Amazon Prime — and growth ran 10% to 14% a year for seven straight years, right through the pandemic. In this episode Michael walks through what storytelling actually costs, why one Food Beast video shut down a freeway off-ramp, and what he’s rebuilding now out of a shipping-container restaurant in a parking lot.
In this episode
- Guest: Michael Ungaro, CEO and co-owner, San Pedro Fish Market
- Company: San Pedro Fish Market and Restaurant — family owned and operated on the LA waterfront since the 1950s
- Media: Kings of Fi$h, the Amazon Prime Video series, plus the back catalog on the San Pedro Fish YouTube channel
- Host: Jeremy Julian, President & Chief Revenue Officer, CBS NorthStar
- Also mentioned: Amazon Prime Video, Food Beast, Goldbelly, Shawn Walchef, Donald Miller’s StoryBrand, California Fish Grill, Tony Gemignani, Bar Rescue, Below Deck, Iron Chef, USC, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube
Why Did a 70-Year-Old Fish Market Start Making Television?
Because nobody knew who they were, and the waterfront was about to be redeveloped around them. That is the honest, unglamorous answer, and it is the one Michael gave me first. The city was looking for partners to rebuild the Los Angeles waterfront, San Pedro Fish Market had been sitting there for decades, and the public narrative about the place was that it was a row of seafood stalls. It was a family business with a seventy-year history that had never bothered to say so out loud.
So they started filming. What began as five-minute episodes built for social platforms became Kings of Fi$h, and during the pandemic Amazon approached them about the series — which meant rebuilding the whole thing into twenty-two-minute episodes. Season one is streaming on Prime Video now.
“Social media created the opportunity to tell the story and build the brand. As the city’s going out to look for people to redevelop the waterfront, the goal was: we need to show up, so they could see the value, and we really want to be irreplaceable to this project.”
Michael Ungaro, CEO and co-owner, San Pedro Fish Market
I’ve been a fan of this place for a long time — I first ate there ten or fifteen years ago and it is still the most unusual dining experience I have had anywhere. So I’ll admit I geeked out a little on this one.
What Does “Celebrating Food and Family” Actually Mean Here?
It means three and four generations at the same table, and it took an outsider to help them see it. Michael brought in a consultant to run a value-proposition exercise and — against the consultant’s advice — put twenty employees in the room instead of five executives. That turned out to be the point. The business had grown to fourteen separate point-of-sale areas bolted together over years of weekend crowds, and the people working each one knew something about the guest that the owners did not.
The deeper piece came from a classmate of Michael’s, a business professional from Mexico, who explained the story underneath the receipts. Much of the customer base had emigrated from Mexico, where lobster and king crab were what you watched your employer eat. Coming in on a Sunday after church with the whole family and ordering a tray of it is not a meal. It is a scoreboard.
“You’re able to come here on a Sunday after church with your whole family, after all your bills are paid, and celebrate that you’ve achieved the American Dream by eating lobster, king crab and shrimp — that you could only watch your employer eat when you were in Mexico. I had no idea of that narrative, and it’s so deep.”
Michael Ungaro
A credit card processor’s heat map told them the rest: a hundred-mile draw. As Michael put it, “we’re not a restaurant, we’re an attraction.” At its peak the property ran 3,000 seats across 55,000 square feet and served roughly two million customers a year, which he says put it behind only SeaWorld among non-subsidized waterfront attractions on the West Coast.
How Did One Video Bring in 30,000 Customers in Ten Days?
By trading four episodes of a TV show for an audience. Michael had 20,000 followers and Food Beast had over a million, so he offered them the first four episodes of Kings of Fi$h in exchange for the eyeballs. Food Beast decided they were getting the better end of the deal and offered to come down and shoot content instead. They found an obscure line on a weekend-only menu — the Super Tray — that Michael himself had never noticed, and he built them one: lobster, king crab, shrimp, the whole thing.
A few days later he was out of town touring colleges with his daughter when the Port of Los Angeles Police Department called. It was March, it was raining, and they had closed a freeway off-ramp because they could not manage the traffic. That video brought in about 30,000 customers in ten days, from every state in the country.
The trays were already the engine — Michael says they move roughly 200 tons of shrimp a year through them — but the trays are also the most photographable thing on the property, and guests had been geotagging them for years. That is how a fish market ended up on CNN and in Time alongside Café Du Monde and Katz’s Delicatessen as one of the most Instagrammed restaurants in the country. Shawn Walchef made almost exactly this argument about owned media on our show a few years back in Turn Your Restaurant Into a Media Powerhouse — Shawn Walchef, and Michael cites him by name in this conversation.
What Happens to Growth When You Start Telling the Story?
This is the number I’d put in front of any operator who thinks content is a hobby. Michael says the business ran about 2.5% to 2.8% growth a year for roughly thirteen years — flat, basically. Once storytelling became a real function, growth moved to 10% to 14% every year for seven straight years, and it held through the pandemic.
His explanation for the pandemic part is not that the content sold food. It’s that the brand had been built loudly enough that guests had already decided. “I’m going there whether there’s a pandemic or not.” Having all that outdoor seating did not hurt either.
That is the same compounding logic Brett Linkletter and I worked through on the measurement side last week in Restaurant Marketing You Can Track — Brett Linkletter, Dishio. Brett’s point was that you cannot manage what you cannot see. Michael’s is that the thing worth building in the first place is a reason to be chosen.
Why Are So Many Operators Scared of Marketing?
Because they think it’s either expensive or fake, and because one bad post confirmed it. Michael hears the same three reactions constantly: they’re scared of it, they don’t understand it, or they think it’s hocus pocus. I hear a fourth — I posted once and nothing happened, so it doesn’t work.
Michael learned the counter-argument the hard way. In 2004 he left the family business and opened his own restaurant in Carson, half a block on the wrong side of a stadium off-ramp. Every business between him and the exit was up ten to twenty percent a week. He was down. He closed it near bankruptcy.
“I realized I’m okay on the operations side, but I really don’t understand finance as well as I thought — and I definitely don’t know marketing. And I learned that marketing’s really what I enjoyed: telling the story of the business.”
Michael Ungaro
What I appreciate about how he tells that story is the absence of self-pity. Every failure — banking, insurance, the Carson restaurant, a catering brokerage he ran out of a rented garage until gas hit $6.50 a gallon — gets processed as material. What did I learn from this that I can innovate with?
The Hardware Store Christmas Card
My favorite story in the episode, and it involves no technology at all. Michael needed holiday catering customers in an industrial part of Carson. The hardware store next door had a list of commercial accounts and an owner who said, flatly, “I hate marketing.”
So Michael offered to send that list a Christmas card from the hardware store, thanking them for fifty years of business — because it was the store’s fiftieth anniversary and nobody had mentioned it — with a free fish taco at Michael’s restaurant on the back. The customers came in and thanked the owner for something no one had ever done for them. Michael got a list he could send a catering menu to. Nobody spent money on media.
That’s marketing. It just doesn’t look like the thing operators are afraid of. Pop’s Italian Beef built a following out of the same instinct, which we covered in Pop’s Italian Beef: Building Community.
Who Should Actually Be Telling the Story?
Your guests and your staff, mostly. San Pedro has a host at the front of the line — which can run two hours long — whose real job is to talk to people while they wait. Where did you come from? Why are you here? One answer Michael quoted: we always do this place and Disneyland the same weekend.
None of it is coached. That’s the whole value. And on the employee side, Michael interviewed about ten team members, some with thirty years in, originally as a recruiting asset for HR. What came back was bigger than recruiting: people describing real estate they own and daughters they put through college on the money they made there.
“I never thought I’d be able to have the life I have based on what you provided to me as an employer. There are stories everywhere, and they’re just waiting to be told.”
Michael Ungaro
Michael’s framing, borrowed from Shawn Walchef: be the show, not the commercial. People don’t want to be sold to. They are genuinely interested in your brand. Those are two different activities.
Would the Business Have Survived Without It?
Michael doesn’t think so, and he’s direct about it. They were evicted when the waterfront redevelopment finally moved, and spent about four years operating out of a parking lot. Without a brand loud enough that a hundred-mile customer base — and their elected officials — cared whether it came back, he believes they would have been cleared out with everyone else and quietly not invited to return.
Instead they reopened on October 1 in a temporary restaurant built out of shipping containers, with about 2,000 seats, on the back of what he says was roughly a billion media and PR impressions. He expects that temporary location to do around $20 million. Out of shipping containers.
The marketing also surfaced opportunities they had no other way of seeing. Customers in all fifty states. A meaningful number driving five hours each way from Phoenix for a single meal — which has him looking at Phoenix and Las Vegas as real markets rather than guesses. Clifford Hudson described the same thing at a very different scale in How Sonic Went From Drive-In to Digital — Clifford Hudson: the data tells you where the business already is before it tells you where to build.
How Do You Build a Story Arc Out of a Real Business?
You hire someone who does it for a living and then let them work. The producer San Pedro has used for ten years works on Bar Rescue, Below Deck and Iron Chef. His method is to sketch out what’s actually happening in the business, film as much of it as he can, then pull people aside for on-the-fly interviews and prompted pieces to camera — often without telling them what he’s building toward.
Michael says the lesson that producer carries from his editing days is the one operators should hear: you can only edit what someone gave you. Conflict, rising action, resolution — those have to be captured, not invented afterward.
The most recent season nearly didn’t happen. One of the show’s central figures, Tommy Jr., died of COVID in his mid-fifties, and the family wasn’t sure it was appropriate to continue. The producer, who had been close to him, made the case that the footage itself was the memorial — that most people have a few photographs on a mantle, and this family had seasons of a man being himself. Then the eviction notice arrived, and the season became the story of a business back in a parking lot for the first time in thirty years. That’s the cliffhanger season two has to resolve.
What Does the Marketing Pivot Look Like Right Now?
Smaller, and honest about it. The marketing organization they built was sized for six or seven locations. They now have two, and Michael says the structure became too bloated for the budget — a lot of people on retainer that two restaurants cannot carry. So he’s on calls about ROI: what can be outsourced to AI, what an agency should own, what they already outperform without help.
His read on the agency conversations is the most useful sentence in that section for anyone shopping: “the sales pitch is never the same as the actual product once you get it.” He’s finding they can already beat some of what’s being pitched, while genuinely lagging on other things — the website needs work, there’s a TikTok presence they should have and don’t.
Can AI Do the Marketing Work?
Some of it, and Michael is unsentimental about the part that makes people nervous. The framing he keeps coming back to, from a conference he attended: we’re not using AI to replace people, we’re using it to replace the work they’re doing, so their time opens up for things that actually need a human.
His caution is the honest one. Not everybody can fill that space. Plenty of people want defined tasks and a paycheck, and asking them to invent and innovate instead is a different skill set — one you have to teach rather than assume. That’s a leadership problem before it’s a technology problem.
He also sees the competitive clock. If you’re not using these tools to lower cost and raise return, the operator down the street will, and by the time you figure it out you won’t be able to catch him. My own version of this: I’ve built twenty-eight agents for myself, and the prep email Michael got before this recording was written by one of them, trained on our conversations. He didn’t notice — he was busy using Claude to summarize his own marketing thread before the same call.
How Do You Compete When Food Is Everywhere?
On story, because there is nothing else left. A friend told Michael years ago that there is no shortage of food in America, which makes charging a premium brutally hard when there’s an option on every corner. He says it messed with his head for about five years before he found the answer.
“There’s no shortage of seafood restaurants. But one that’s family owned and operated for seventy years, with uncommon accomplishments and their own TV show — that’s something people are interested in seeing.”
Michael Ungaro
The sharpest version came from a neighbor in the industry who told him he could open directly across the street from a strong, well-run seafood chain and still compete — because they don’t have his story. Put the storyboard on the wall, run the show on the TVs, and the similarity in the menu stops mattering. Jennifer Schuler made a related argument about brand and community at Handel’s Ice Cream — the product gets you in the category, the story gets you chosen.
What Should You Order the First Time?
A tray, obviously, and Michael builds his the same way every time for visitors: shrimp, scallops, swordfish, lobster, some clams, black mussels because they pop open and look good on the table (he prefers green), baby octopus or calamari, the bell pepper and tomato and onion, red potatoes, their signature Cajun-style seasoning, and a couple of loaves of garlic bread. Clam chowder to warm up first if you want it.
Then it goes in the middle of the table and everybody eats family style, which is the entire point. If you can’t get to the LA waterfront, they ship trays anywhere in the country through Goldbelly — Michael admits it isn’t especially profitable, which is a fairly telling thing for a CEO to say on a podcast.
How Do You Follow San Pedro Fish Market?
Start at sanpedrofish.com. Every social account is @sanpedrofish, including YouTube, where the full back catalog of the series lives. And if you have Amazon Prime, search Kings of Fi$h and watch season one — which will tell you the seventy-year version of this story far better than a blog post can.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Kings of Fish and where can I watch it?
Kings of Fi$h is a documentary-style series about San Pedro Fish Market and the Ungaro family, produced by the business itself. It started as five-minute episodes for social media, and during the pandemic Amazon approached them about the series, so it was rebuilt into twenty-two-minute episodes. Season one streams on Amazon Prime Video, and the earlier back catalog is free on the San Pedro Fish YouTube channel.
Does restaurant storytelling actually drive sales?
It did here, measurably. Michael Ungaro says San Pedro Fish Market grew about 2.5% to 2.8% a year for roughly thirteen years, then 10% to 14% a year for seven straight years once the family began telling its story on social and in video — a run that held through the pandemic. A single Food Beast video drove about 30,000 customers in ten days.
How much production do you need to start telling your restaurant’s story?
Far less than operators assume. San Pedro Fish Market’s highest-return content is unscripted: a host interviewing guests in line about where they drove from, and employees talking about thirty-year careers. The Amazon series came years later. The phone in your pocket is enough to start; what it requires is intent and repetition, not a crew.
How big is San Pedro Fish Market?
At its peak the waterfront property ran 3,000 seats across 55,000 square feet and served roughly two million customers a year, drawing from a hundred-mile radius. After the waterfront redevelopment forced them out for about four years, they reopened October 1 in a temporary shipping-container restaurant with about 2,000 seats, which Michael expects to do around $20 million.
Should a restaurant hire a marketing agency or build it in-house?
It depends on how many locations carry the cost. San Pedro built a large in-house marketing team when they had six or seven locations and found it too expensive to sustain at two, so they are now reassessing agencies and AI tooling. Michael’s warning from that process: the sales pitch is never the same as the product once you have it.
Takeaways
- Your story is the only thing that isn’t a commodity. There’s no shortage of food. There is a shortage of reasons to choose you.
- Ask your staff what the guest cares about. Twenty employees in a room knew more about the customer base than the owners did.
- The best content isn’t about the food. It’s the guest who drove five hours, and the employee who’s been there thirty years.
- Be the show, not the commercial. Nobody wants to be sold to. Plenty of people are interested in your brand.
- Brand equity is disaster insurance. It’s what got them through a pandemic, an eviction and four years in a parking lot.
- Treat AI as capacity, not headcount. And teach people how to use the time it gives back, because that’s a skill they may not have.
Prefer to read it? The full transcript of episode 355 is available, with speaker labels and section headings: Michael Ungaro on Restaurant Storytelling — Full Transcript.
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