Half Moon Bay

Half Moon Bay's food culture begins in its fields. Artichokes reached the Coastside early — the first commercial California planting is credited to Dante Dianda at El Granada in the 1860s, and coastal artichokes were shipped to Italian communities on the East Coast by 1904. Italian immigrant grower-shippers, among them the Debenedetti family, farmed roughly a thousand acres of artichokes and Brussels sprouts from the 1880s into the 1970s, an era documented in UC Santa Cruz's regional oral histories. Frozen-food packers followed in the 1950s; farmers' markets and direct-to-restaurant sourcing followed them.

The second source is the water. Pillar Point Harbor at Princeton-by-the-Sea still supports off-the-boat sales and a Dungeness crab season running roughly November to June, and its plain seafood houses — Barbara's Fish Trap, operating since 1971 — codified the local canon of chowder, fish and chips, and cracked crab.

Drinks arrived later and locally. Half Moon Bay Brewing Company opened as a restaurant on the harbor in 2000 and added a brewery in 2002, described by the company as the first operating brewery on the San Mateo Coast since 1873. Half Moon Bay Distillery, founded at Princeton-by-the-Sea in 2012 by Ulli and Caesar Bisono, works Austrian-influenced fruit brandy, whiskey, and vodka on a small imported still.