The 35-year-old seafood spot has kept pace with the island's glitzier restaurant scene, adding caviar-topped oysters to the menu. But thankfully, some things—like the lobster bisque—never change.

When E.J. Harvey and his late wife Robin moved to Nantucket in 1982, it was a sleepy fisherman’s town. Residents had limited access to WiFi and phone service, and the only way to the island’s storied shores was a two-and-a-half-to-three-hour ride on the Steamship Authority boat, now colloquially dubbed the “slow ferry.”

The Harveys opened the classic seafood restaurant SeaGrille in 1991, and the island restaurant scene matched its remote status. Condensed in the charming, tiny downtown near the ferry terminal were a collection of staples, many of them family-owned. There was the Hub, a casual coffee and newspaper counter; Straight Wharf for that once-a-summer upscale meal; and the Lobster Trap for shellfish by the pound. The Chicken Box, now known as a raucous music venue, was a fisherman’s dive bar.

“It was the wild, wild West,” says Harvey. “And I fell in love with it.”

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Over the years, SeaGrille was woven into the lives of the Harvey family and the community. Harvey’s children grew up at SeaGrille, playing hockey with lemons on the kitchen floor and waiting tables on busy summer days. For years, the staff made the restaurant’s famous clam chowder in huge batches to be spooned out by the onboard concessions stand on the ferry. The Harvey Foundation, established in 2015 to honor Robin after her death, has been providing everything from sneakers to scholarships for local students.

SeaGrille—which serves daily catches from local fishermen, produce from Bartlett’s Farm, and sometimes zucchini flowers from Harvey’s own garden—celebrates its 35th anniversary this year. The restaurant scene it exists in now is a far cry from when it started.

A faster ferry service, which gets visitors to the island in just an hour, debuted in the late ’90s, and in the decades since, tourism has skyrocketed. Celebrations that were once designed for year-rounders, like Nantucket Christmas Stroll and the Fourth of July beach fireworks, now garner enormous crowds. In July, the population of Nantucket explodes from 15,000 year-rounders to 80,000 people. Madaket Beach, known for its awe-inspiring sunsets, is now littered with influencers in front of tripods, the sky blazing behind them.

Of course, tourism is the lifeblood of the island. More crowds meant more money, but it also meant the quieter quality of the island was disappearing.

“There aren’t a lot of family-owned restaurants like there used to be,” says Harvey. “It used to be that with every restaurant came a face, and that was the soul and the personality of the restaurant.”

Restaurants transformed from dining destinations to places to be seen. Summer folks scrambled to score Cisco Brewers merchandise and stood in line straight off the ferry for reservations at Asian-infused small plates spot Nautilus.

The byproduct of this great appetite is that the food scene began to get more innovative. Craft cocktails and creative flavor profiles flooded the menus at restaurants like the Proprietors and the Pearl.

“I think having the variety in restaurants is a good thing,” says Stephen Bowler, co-owner of Nautilus and music venue Gaslight. “But I think there’s definitely a bit of a charm element lost with the Instagram-ification of the whole thing.”

What was born in the 2010s is Nantucket’s signature casual-cool dining style, a high/low approach that continues to captivate diners and TikTok feeds alike. Ethos Wine Bar serves grilled cheese and caviar; Black-Eyed Susan’s dishes out diner breakfast in the morning and BYOB global plates in the evening; and 167 Raw, which began as a fish market on island in 1978, slings ceviche out of a food truck.

That appetite for luxury is what Lee Lyon and co-owner/chef Steve Rhee hoped to tap into when they opened Billie’s, a steakhouse, in August 2025. The team wanted the space to look different from the classic New England style of most local restaurants, and Lyon tapped into his experience operating Kiki on the River, a Greek restaurant in Miami. He worked with the Miami-based design team Love Lake Studio to create a lavish, immersive interior that was Instagram-ready and as suitable for a romantic dinner as for a late-night party atmosphere.

Sure, Lyon now owns a restaurant full of glittering chandeliers and marble bartops, but he grew up eating quahogs at SeaGrille every year as a summer visitor.

Though many of the menu items at SeaGrille have remained the same since the opening, like the creamy clam chowder and the tangy linguiça-crusted cod, Harvey has added things like caviar and filet mignon to keep up with the upscale tastes of visitors.

“When we started, we were more of a basic seafood restaurant, and we’ve kind of morphed into a finer-dining establishment because you have to evolve with the clientele,” says Harvey.

The restaurant industry and the island may ebb and flow, but for many, SeaGrille remains a window into the tight-knit community and history that makes Nantucket special. The next generation runs the restaurant now: Harvey’s children Tucker Harvey and Kari Harvey Lindsay, and Kari’s husband Zack. Visitors and year-rounders alike can top oysters with caviar, but they can also still dig into a piping hot bowl of lobster bisque, topped with a thick, flaky puff pastry crust. On island, the important things never change.

45 Sparks Ave., Nantucket, theseagrille.com.