Red Sails Inn on Shelter Island Drive, a traditional restaurant with a laid-back, sailboat-themed dining room serving steaks and seafood, has been sold to nearby Brigantine, which plans to remodel it and reopen it as a new restaurant concept.
“It’s true, the Red Sail is going away,” said the bayfront restaurant’s co-owner Bill Dargitz, who added, “It was a good time for us to sell.”
Dargitz admitted he and his father Jack’s departure from the restaurant business they’ve owned for a quarter century will be “bittersweet.”
“We were hoping they (Brigantine) were going to keep the name and the identity,” Dargitz added.
Mike Morton, president of Brigantine Inc., said they’ll be closing Red Sail briefly for remodeling, and will re-open it with a new theme. But he added Brigantine will give hiring preference to existing Red Sail employees, and will likely retain some popular menu items.
Morton said the new restaurant will be named Ketch, a sailing craft with two masts in nautical terminology.
“The name is a play on the restaurant’s being seafood-centric,” said Morton, noting Brigantine, which doesn’t open before 10 a.m., intends to keep its new re-imagined restaurant open for breakfast on the weekends, and likely a day or two during the week.
Morton added that the new Point Loma Ketch will be a prototype for a second restaurant Brigantine is opening in downtown San Diego where Anthony’s was previously on the Embarcadero.
Depending on how well permitting goes, Morton said the goal is to have Point Loma’s Ketch “up and running by Dec. 1.”
Dargitz noted Red Sail actually was started downtown in the ’20s and ’30s by Carlsbad’s Palomar Airport creator Jack Allen Davis, before being moved to its current location. He said he and his father are proud to have maintained an eatery that “appealed with the locals.”
“Every time you came in the place was pretty much the same, had the same menu and atmosphere, which is why people came here, as well as for the food,” Dargitz said.
Dargitz said Red Sail will officially change hands on Wednesday, Aug. 31. He hopes to do something special for the occasion.
“I’m hoping we may have a band,” Dargitz said, adding he’s appreciative of the loyalty of his customers, some of whom he noted, “Have come here every day.”
Morton said Red Sail will be redesigned to “open it up more to the street, adding more glass and more natural light creating a more indoor-outdoor feel.” The Brigantine president pointed out his company remains 100 percent family owned. “I work with a couple of my siblings in the company,” he added.
In parting, Dargitz said, “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t going to miss this place.”
Dargitz, however, had one final request.
“I hope they keep our World War II diving suit and helmet we have up front. The kids love that.”