San Pedro: LA's Croatian and Italian fishing port

Los Angeles isn’t supposed to have a fishing town. It has a harbor — one of the busiest container ports on earth — but the romantic, working-waterfront, the-boats-came-in-this-morning kind of port feels like somewhere else: New England, San Francisco, Monterey. Except it does have one, tucked into the bottom of the city: San Pedro, the harbor neighborhood whose food culture was built, over more than a century, by Croatian and Italian fishing families. The boats are fewer now and the canneries are mostly gone, but the community is still there, and its food — Adriatic-grill seafood, century-old Italian dining rooms, communal trays of grilled shrimp — is one of the more surprising things in the LA directory.

Where the community came from

The defining immigration was Dalmatian — from the Croatian Adriatic coast and its islands (Brač, Hvar, Vis, Korčula, the fishing town of Tribunj near Šibenik), places whose entire economy was fishing and where, around the turn of the 20th century and again after both World Wars, men left for California’s fishing ports. They came for the same reason the Japanese came to Terminal Island and the Italians (largely from the south, and from Ischia) came to San Pedro: the harbor’s tuna and sardine canneries — Van Camp, French Sardine (later StarKist) and the rest — needed boats and crews, and the work was familiar. By mid-century San Pedro was one of the great fishing ports of the Pacific coast, and its dockside culture was a Croatian-Italian-and-increasingly-Mexican blend, Catholic, blue-collar, organized around the boats. Mary Star of the Sea, the parish founded in 1889, drew its original congregation from exactly these fishing families ^[1][2].

The Croatian institutions

The community’s anchor isn’t a restaurant — it’s the Croatian Hall (the Croatian-American Club’s building at 631 W 9th Street, in use since the early 1970s), where the food culture actually lives: sarma (stuffed cabbage), grilled fish, palačinke, klapa-music dinners, the wedding-and-fundraiser cooking that immigrant communities keep alive in their halls long after the restaurant scene thins out. For decades the public face of Dalmatian dining was Ante’s — Ante’s Dalmatian Croatian Restaurant, first opened on 5th Street in 1951 by Ante Perkov, who’d come from Tribunj to San Pedro around 1941, and moved to its final home (the former Alaska Inn) in 1975; Ante’s served the Adriatic-grill canon (grilled whole fish, čevapi, raštika, brodet). The city renamed the section of Palos Verdes Street the restaurant sat on Ante Perkov Way in the 1990s, honoring Perkov as one of San Pedro’s most prominent citizens. Ante Perkov died in 2001; his son Tony took over; when Tony died in 2012, Ante’s closed ^[1][3]. There is, at the moment, no open full-service Croatian restaurant in LA; that DNA — the live-fire whole-fish, the simple Adriatic preparations — is now absorbed into San Pedro’s Italian and seafood spots and into the Croatian Hall’s kitchen. (If a Croatian spot opens at the redeveloped waterfront, that changes.)

The Italian institutions — and a near-century dining room

The Italian side of San Pedro has stayed visible. The flagship is J. Trani’s Ristorante at 584 W 9th Street — Italian-American, founded in 1925, run by the Trani family into a fourth generation (chef Dustin Trani), a near-century San Pedro institution of the white-tablecloth-and-cioppino school, with a newer waterside spinoff (Trani’s Dockside Station) down by the 22nd Street Landing. Around it run the others — Raffaello’s, Sorrento’s, Canetti’s Seafood Grotto by the docks — plus the harbor’s odd British holdout, The Whale & Ale. The pattern is the same as the Croatian one: the immigrant fishing community fed itself, then opened restaurants, then the canneries closed and the boats thinned, and what’s left is a handful of legacy dining rooms holding the line.

The waterfront, old and new

For decades the postcard San Pedro waterfront was Ports O’ Call Village — a faux-New-England fishing-village shopping-and-seafood complex from the 1960s, with the Mexican-influenced San Pedro Fish Market & Restaurant and its “World Famous Shrimp Tray” (the Italian-American Ungaro family’s communal platter of grilled shrimp, vegetables and tortillas, dumped on a tray for a table to share) as the draw. Ports O’ Call was demolished in the late 2010s; in its place is West Harbor, the new dining-and-entertainment development on the same channel — the San Pedro Fish Market reopened there, and the question hanging over the neighborhood is whether the redeveloped waterfront keeps any of the working-port, immigrant-community texture or just becomes another LA leisure destination ^[1][3].

Why it’s in the directory this way

San Pedro should be carried as a living harbor-community note with a real cluster behind it: J. Trani’s (1925, fourth-generation Trani), the San Pedro Fish Market (the shrimp tray), Canetti’s, the dockside seafood-grottos, the Whale & Ale — plus the Croatian Hall as the community institution and Ante’s (closed 2012) as the closed-legacy entry and the reason the street is called Ante Perkov Way. Describe the food by tradition — Dalmatian/Croatian and Italian-American, the Adriatic-grill and red-sauce-Italian lineages, with the Mexican fishing-community mariscos layer alongside it — and pair it with terminal-island-furusato-lost-japanese-fishing-village (the third fishing community of this harbor, the one the war erased).

Draft — Search session, 2026-05-11. Citations partially hardened 2026-05-12 (Random Lengths News, Eric Brightwell “No Enclave”, Croatia.org). Confirmed: J. Trani’s at 584 W 9th St operating since 1925 (Trani family, 4th-gen chef Dustin Trani); Ante’s first opened on 5th St in 1951 by Ante Perkov, moved to its final home 1975, the street renamed Ante Perkov Way in the 1990s, Perkov died 2001, son Tony died 2012 and Ante’s closed (correction applied — the renaming predated Tony’s death). STILL TO CONFIRM before publish: the Mary Star of the Sea 1889 date and the Croatian Hall address (631 W 9th St) / era of use; the Ports O’ Call → West Harbor redevelopment timeline. Add the Trani’s site / LA Conservancy / Croatian-American Club URLs. Describe the food by tradition (Dalmatian/Croatian, Italian-American) — do not invent ethnic labels. owner_domains: [croatian, italian-american] — confirm intended encoding. Companions: terminal-island-furusato-lost-japanese-fishing-village.