A Fine Dining Restaurant Alum Dishes Fanciful Seafood in Union Square

A Fine Dining Restaurant Alum Dishes Fanciful Seafood in Union Square

Felix Santos cut his teeth at Atelier Crenn and Quince. Now he’s helming the ship at Maritime Boat Club.

Maritime Boat Club is now open as of Tuesday, June 24. The new restaurant lives behind a literal curtain in Bar Maritime. This full, separate restaurant comes from much of the same team behind the new Union Square bar with the addition of the restaurant duo’s new chef Felix Santos, an Atelier Crenn and Sorrel alum.

Maritime Boat Club isn’t a fine dining restaurant, though. The hope is to provide upscale seafood options that are still accessible for wallet-conscious diners. There are still banner, pricy items for special occasions; however, most items fall under $30 with many bottles of wine below $100. Santos’s flavors lean Mexican — his wife, fellow chef Sofia Lechuga-Santos is Mexican and he’s cooked throughout Mexico — and he says tostadas and tacos are the dishes he reaches for.

The snacks that chef George Dingle made for the initial opening as a consultant for Bar Maritime will cycle off the menu now that Santos is in the pilot seat. In their place, find Tomales Bay mussels, steamed then marinated in market vegetables for a few hours and fried, paired with toasted bread escabeche-style. Peppers come stuffed with cod and scallop, a “seafood sausage,” to invoke a rustic texture. Santos says he’ll be doing his job well if all that seasonal produce maps right onto the bar.

Steak frites will get swapped out for a bistro burger. Santos says he loves burgers (he’d had an ABV burger just the night before this interview) and is nerding out on dialing in the ratio of Painted Hills beef to proper bun size. He says it feels like a call back to his year spent in the Mexican resort town of Tulum, where he and his wife worked as food and beverage manager and executive chef respectively for a boutique hotel. The two of them spent a year eating burgers by the sea. “It was wonderful. Mexican food, local produce,” Santos says, “that’s exciting for me to call back to something I’ve done in the past with a close place in my heart.”

Larger dishes in the dining room include grilled ikejime halibut, in bay laurel bearnaise sourced from Jooharian Farms alongside white asparagus. Diners might also contend with the Kraken, a $125 seafood tower jeweled with Hog Island sweetwater oysters and highwater oysters, mussels escabeche, jumbo gulf shrimp, and tuna tartare. Not to be outdone, there’s a $140 Painted Hills cote de boeuf, too, an indulgent collision of McGinnis Ranch purple haze carrot, guajillo, and a smattering of pepitas.

Larry Piaskowy, formerly of Rich Table and True Laurel, will work the drinks here in addition to Bar Maritime. Same goes for wine man Andrew Pettingell of Otium and Osteria Mozza, selecting wines for both operations. Santos came into the role through friends who knew about the opportunity. An Atelier Crenn captain linked him to the job.

Now, Santos says he’s just excited to take the storied space — formerly the Burritt Room and all its old-school charm — into its next chapter. He’s thrilled to take produce right from the ocean, five orders of oysters if that happens to be what’s available that day, and serve it that same day. “A food menu that’s thoughtful and delicious, but not prohibitive,” Santos says. “The option for value, but also the option to splurge. If I get live scallops, it’s not going to be $10 scallops.”

Maritime Boat Club (417 Stockton Street) is now open from 5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m.Tuesday through Thursday and from 5:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday.Reservations available now on Resy.