The worst day fishing is better than the best day working, but Thomas Carson solves any dilemma by doing both.
His Newport Beach-based Bear Flag Restaurant Group has three fast-casual restaurants: a taco shack, a new family-friendly fish-and-chips joint, and next month brings distribution of fresh fish from a 4,000-square-foot warehouse in Costa Mesa.
He’s also separately a partner in a water store that has bigger plans than filling up five-gallon bottles.
The best-day part comes from the 50-foot commercial fishing boat he docks nearby.
Did we mention the food truck?
“We do a lot of charity events” with it, Carson said. “But we’ve used it for weddings and at trade shows, too.”
He co-owns the company with his wife, Erika.
Their efforts taken together employ about 150, including the fish-and-chips shop and the distribution work that are just ramping up. Carson declined to disclose financials, but the Business Journal estimates companywide annual revenue at about $15 million.
None That Got Away
Carson—“Thos” to all, including reporters—has been prepping the distribution for about two years.
One idea is to supply fish for his restaurants, and he’ll continue to buy from current sources, which include Newport Beach’s Dory Fleet.
“The focus is on our chefs,” Carson said.
The venture could grow to include selling to other restaurants and perhaps the public. There’s kitchen space where an observer could watch a big tuna or swordfish—200 to 300 pounds apiece—being broken down.
These possible uses aren’t set yet.
“We need to figure it out and see if it can drive new concepts.”
He also catches some of his own product on the fishing boat.
The day an assistant submitted Thos’ photo for the OC 500, Carson was out fishing.
“I grew up on boats,” he said.
Bait & Hook
The warehouse is the farthest inland of his ventures.
Carson planted the freshest Bear Flag, the Circle Hook fish-and-chips shop, and the taco shack, Wild Taco, within a half-mile of each other, from Via Lido to 31st Street.
A second Bear Flag is at Crystal Cove, also in Newport Beach. The third is at Pacific City in Huntington Beach.
Pacific City developer DJM Capital Partners Inc. renovated Lido Marina Village, home to Circle Hook.
Wild Taco is at the site of the first Bear Flag—parking spaces still have the former name painted on them—and is harder-edged now, with a Guns N’ Roses soundtrack, street tacos and $4 Sangria Saturdays.
“We grew out of it,” Carson says of the first Bear Flag—a former Volkswagen repair shop—which opened on July 4, 2008.
“It was my wife on the register and me on the grill,” he said.
Crystal Cove followed in 2012, Via Lido in 2014, Pacific City in 2016.
Circle Hook is 1,200 square feet in an eatery row at the Village selling local-caught black cod and red snapper. His partner in that deal is Scott Breneman, an Orange County commercial fisherman.
Each site has unique tweaks: an oyster bar or kid’s menu here, fresh fish cases and sushi there; Wild Taco has a bar and a side room with a pool table and a stash of photo books of Carson and companions fishing.
Bear Flag at Pacific City has a full bar and “a fire pit with an ocean view.”
Water World
Citizen Water Co. seems a fish out of water as his ventures go until seen in terms of creativity and patience.
Qualities that fishing requires also serve Thos the restaurateur.
So Citizen is where you take sea-sky blue bottles to fill with water—just a Costa Mesa water store—plenty of those fish in OC’s sea.
Except you can get house-made kombucha and seasonally flavored water at some spigots, and it’s planned as a venture, too: supply restaurants with bottled items for sale and for coffee, tea—and of course, drinking.
“It can be a canvas for everything we do,” Carson said.
A home version of the shop’s filtration system is for sale.
“Don’t know where it’s gonna go,” he said. “One step at a time.”
Carson said he has no ventures planned for next year while this year’s debuts get up and running.
School of Fish
The longer the tale, the bigger the fish.
Thos’ life—he’s 38, with the weathered look of a man of the sea—looks charted by hand with a sextant and a ship’s log.
“I was born into this.”
His dad, Tom, built boats—including the Bear Flag commercial craft from scratch—and now crafts custom metalwork from Costa Mesa shop Marine Fabricators Inc.
Thos worked charter fishing boats at age 16—called “six packs” for the small groups going out for big fish—learned knife skills at restaurants as “the white guy in the kitchen who could cut fish,” got a taste of wholesale work at Del Mar fish markets, and began “to see everything as a whole” in the running of a seafood enterprise.
He worked in the industry during college in San Diego, then at the Corona del Mar Bristol Farms—and was offered a corporate slot with its owners but “wanted to run away from that as fast as possible.”
Mom, Valerie, is a plein air painter who has done artwork for the Crystal Cove location; her paintings are in Laguna Beach galleries. Thos’ brother Peter is, like their father, a fabricator, and customized the Bear Flag food truck.
Erika’s dad, Jan-Erik Palm, has provided commercial real estate expertise, and her brother, Robert, worked at the first Bear Flag.
Thos and Erika have two girls, Charlize and Chloe.
Paging Steinbeck
Most of the enterprises—the parent company, the fast-casual restaurants, the distributor and the fishing boat—are called “Bear Flag” from the name of a popular establishment in John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row” and that book’s sequel, “Sweet Thursday.”
“It’s the brothel,” Carson said.
The books’ Bear Flag has its character flaws, but its core is community: the proprietor gives to charity, pays people’s bills, keeps no hard liquor, and allows no vulgarity.
As Steinbeck puts it, Bear Flag is “a decent, clean, honest, old-fashioned sporting house where a man can take a glass of beer among friends … a sturdy, virtuous club.”
Bear Flag Restaurant Group is California-focused.
“There’s a West Coast style,” Thos said. “A local seafood identity.”
He cites sushi, the “Bluewater Gold Rush” sea urchin divers of the 1970s and ’80s, surfers pursuing big waves in Hawaii and returning with a penchant for poke, and “the whole Mexico-Baja-Ensenada” thing.
He has the “long(ing) for the immensity of the sea” counseled by Antoine de Saint-Exupery and a life that flows from it.
“The fishing has come closer in” to shore recently, Carson said. “I try to go out once a week.”
