As the story goes, Gracie Strom was once so desperate for customers that she got out some kitchen utensils and started banging around on the bottles behind the bar of her Depoe Bay restaurant, playing along to old songs like “Alley Cat” and “Roll Out the Barrel.” When people started popping their heads into the restaurant to check out the racket, a new Sea Hag tradition was born.
Today, the restaurant’s co-owner Clary Grant still plays the bottles for customers, who still poke their heads in to see what’s going on. It’s a conscious attempt to keep the old traditions alive at Gracie’s Sea Hag, a classic “seafood dive” that has survived to become one of the Oregon coast’s oldest and most beloved institutions.
Found on the main drag in Depoe Bay, a small town built on the rough basalt shoreline of the central Oregon coast, Gracie’s Sea Hag has an aesthetic that you might call “vintage nautical”: The walls are wood paneled, the lighting is dark and the booths are topped with ocean-themed stained-glass designs. There is, as you might expect, an old timey ship’s wheel mounted on the wall.
Strom opened the restaurant in 1963 with her husband, Dick, who died only five years later. Gracie grew the business on her own as she raised her three kids, becoming one of a group of central coast women who made their mark on the region. She was a peer of Mohava “Mo” Niemi of Mo’s Restaurants fame and Betty Taunton, a local civic leader who also ran the Spouting Horn Restaurant just a few doors down from the Sea Hag.
There are many tales surrounding Strom, who was once called “the Princess Di of Depoe Bay.” There was her old strategy of stealing customers from the local Polynesian bar by promising free “entertainment,” which turned out to be her, playing the bottles. There was the time she and fellow restaurateur Harold Lee ran for the local water and sewer board, promising free drinks at the Sea Hag for anyone who wrote the pair’s names in on their ballots. “What did it prove?” she told The Oregonian reflecting on the win. “That you could buy votes — and, by golly, I did it.”
Gracie’s name graced local headlines long into her life, including when she remarried in 2002, already well into her 70s. She met her second husband, Stan McDonald, in an aerobics class at the local gym, where she wasn’t shy about her attraction: “Any fella who takes care of his body like that at this age is going to have me looking twice,” she told The Oregonian at the time.
When Clary and Jerome Grant purchased the business in 2006, there was real concern about what people would think. With such a beloved community member stepping down, and newer, younger owners stepping in, would the regulars stick around?
“We wanted to keep everything the same because people like stable traditions,” Clary said.
“We had a strategy, a plan,” Jerome added. “And part of that was, don’t change anything.”
After the turnover, and after Strom’s death in 2015, Gracie’s Sea Hag has remained Gracie’s Sea Hag. As far as the Grants are concerned, it always will be. But that’s not to say nothing has changed.
When the Grants took over, one of Jerome’s first acts was to improve the restaurant’s seafood. He sourced wild-caught prawns from the Sea of Cortez, started ordering specialty weathervane scallops from a co-op in Alaska, and sought out as much local product as possible. The traditional chowder and fish and chips recipes remained the same, but the Grants focused on using higher quality meat in those recipes.
The Gracie’s Sea Hag menu, which was scaled back in 2020, still has impressive range. There are few places in Oregon where you can order Crab Neptune and a chicken fried steak with a side of marionberry pancakes — and that’s just for breakfast. For dinner, you could start with a cup of clam chowder or a calamari steak, followed by a Sea Hag Seafood Louis, a deep-fried Monte Cristo sandwich (as seen in Disneyland) or, on Saturdays, a full prime rib dinner.
With such a varied menu you might wonder what, typically, people like to order.
“Everything, man. Everything,” general manager Eli Burke said. “We do sell a lot of crab though. … We sell more chowder than anyone I know.”
The diversity of the menu, the quality of the seafood and the longstanding traditions are what keep people coming back year after year, the Grants said. Their ownership has also maintained another tradition: keeping the employees around.
As the couple reflected on their own long history with the restaurant, they started shouting around to the staff, asking how long each had been at the Sea Hag. The answers came back one by one: 10 years, 13 years, 15 years, 16 years. At least one person had lost count. Two people said their kids had started working alongside them.
Even the Grants’ daughter now works at the restaurant. She was serving drinks behind them at the bar as they talked. Their family’s whole life has been wrapped up in this place, they said. Jerome and Clary even met at Gracie’s — though Clary stopped Jerome before he could tell the full story.
Even as the couple has expanded their business ownership — they purchased the old Spouting Horn Restaurant in 2014 and reopened it in 2016 as The Horn Public House and Brewery, developing a whole new pub menu — their hearts have stayed loyal to the Sea Hag, as have many hearts in town.
Outside the restaurant on the sidewalk, placed right in front of the seafoam-green-painted building, stands a weathered carving of an old woman (the sea hag) and an old man. She holds a sign that was once painted with the name and phone number of the restaurant. One of his hands is draped lovingly over her shoulder and the other is clutching a bottle. The statue is tied to what appears to be a mast, like Odysseus in “The Odyssey” as he sailed past the sirens.
In that light, you could imagine Gracie’s Sea Hag sailing through the modern era, resisting the siren song of change. In truth, the Grants face no such temptation. It’s easy for them to keep the restaurant the same. Why mess with the things people like? Gracie Strom might be gone, but her influence, like her name on the sign, remains. The Grants have made sure of that.
“As long as we own it, it will also be Gracie’s Sea Hag. We’ve honored that. I ain’t going back,” Jerome Grant said.
“Gracie’s always been the queen of the coast,” Clary Grant added. “Gracie used to say when they stop talking about you, that’s when you need to worry.”