Rockaway Beach Got Its First Brewery. Here's What Else Changed This Year.

For most of its history, sitting down to eat in Rockaway Beach meant a picnic table, not a bar stool. The town's most famous food story starts with a hot dog vendor named George Boyington, who got caught in a rainstorm over Labor Day weekend in 1939, watched his buns turn to mush, and started dipping the wieners in batter instead. That accident became the Pronto Pup, still served today at a roadside stand built to commemorate the invention, and it's more than a novelty. It's a pretty accurate description of what kind of town this has always been: something you eat on your feet, at a walk-up window, with sand still on your shoes.

Last October, that changed. On October 17, 2025, Pelican Brewing opened its doors at 165 S Miller Street, in the building that used to house Rockaway Roastery. Trade coverage at the time described Rockaway as a town breweries had never bothered with before. That makes this a genuine first for the town: a sit-down bar with a kitchen, not a walk-up counter with picnic seating out front.

A Bar With Sixty Seats, Not Sixty Feet of Counter

The building itself has a history worth knowing. It went up in 1990, ran as a coffee shop from 2022 into early 2024, and sat vacant before Pelican bought it and gutted it for a full remodel: a wraparound deck, a refurbished kitchen, a small stage for acoustic sets, a loft, and two separate bar areas packed into 1,950 square feet. The inside seats around 60 people, with room for another 30 on the patio. It's a smaller footprint and a shorter menu than Pelican's flagship brewpubs in Pacific City or Cannon Beach, but the patio is dog-friendly and the vibe is built for families, not just a happy-hour crowd. As of August 2026 the pub is open daily from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Pelican's co-founder Mary Jones has a personal reason for picking this stretch of coast. She spent childhood summers at her grandparents' cabin nearby, and when the location opened she put it simply: it's "a mini version of the Pelican experience." Whether that sentiment sells you on a pint or not, the practical detail worth knowing is where they landed it, right at 165 S Miller, walkable from the beach, and that Pelican is treating Rockaway as worth investing in long term rather than as a seasonal outpost. The company has since announced a sixth coastal location in Yachats, which tells you this isn't a one-off bet on a sleepy town. It's a pattern, and Rockaway got in early.

The Food Trucks Filled In Around It

Around the same stretch of time, a different kind of dining cluster took root a few blocks north. The Bayocean Food Court, at 112 Highway 101 North, brought together a handful of trucks under one roof: a Thai food cart, a SmashBurgers stand, Sassy Rocks Food Cart, Amore Italiano-o, and Boots 'N Brew Espresso for anyone who needs coffee before any of the rest of it. It's a low-overhead way for small operators to test a spot in town without committing to a lease on Highway 101 frontage, and it gives residents more reasons to eat somewhere other than the handful of sit-down places that have anchored the town for years, places like the dockside Old Oregon Smokehouse or Kelly's Brighton Marina.

None of this replaces the walk-up window tradition Rockaway is known for. The Original Pronto Pup is still there, still frying corn dogs in the same batter recipe, and the mechanical corn dog ride out front still runs for a couple of quarters. What's different is that the walk-up window is no longer the only option after dark.

The Beach Ran Its Own Calendar This Year

Restaurants aren't the only thing that shifted. Rockaway spent this year running its own events with a level of infrastructure that wasn't there before, and the schedule itself moved around in a way locals had to adjust to.

Start with the kite festival, because it didn't happen when people expected it to. For decades it ran every September, including its 49th edition, held September 12 and 13 in 2025. This year the Rockaway Beach Kite Festival marked its 50th anniversary and moved to a new June 19 through 21 weekend at the Wayside, sponsored as always by the American Kitefliers Association. Anyone who plans their fall around it had to reset their calendar. There's also a tentative fall kite gathering listed on the World Kite Association's event calendar for September 19 through 21, though it hadn't been confirmed by organizers as of this writing.

Summer settled back into its usual rhythm after that. The Friday Night Bonfires, hosted at the beach off the Wayside, ran weekly from early July into late August, giving locals a standing reason to be on the sand after dinner. Then, on August 15 and 16, the Wayside hosted the third annual Rockaway Beach Music Festival, a free two-day event organized by the Neah-Kah-Nie Coast Cultural Foundation, known locally as the NCAM Foundation. Proceeds support scholarships for Neah-Kah-Nie High School students pursuing training in the arts, and this year's lineup included Sneaker Wave Blues Revue, Brenda Andrus, and Wes Youssi, with food from the Portside Bistro truck (a mobile version of the Garibaldi restaurant) and Tony's Beach Bites.

Here's what makes the music festival more than a nice weekend: the town built permanent infrastructure for it. Ahead of this year's event, Rockaway Beach put in new ADA-compliant public restrooms at the Wayside along with a new beach access ramp, upgrades that outlast the festival weekend itself and make that stretch of beach more usable year-round, not just during two days in August.

The Older Story Underneath It

Go back to the Pronto Pup for a second. The reason Rockaway Beach ended up with a walk-up food culture in the first place wasn't a lack of ambition. It was a rainstorm and a vendor who had to improvise on the spot, and what came out of it became famous enough that people drive here specifically to eat one where it was invented. That's a town built on quick, practical, weather-adapted solutions, and it's been that way since 1939. The kite festival tells a similar story of staying power. Fifty years of the same event, even when the calendar date moves, is not something most small beach towns can claim.

What changed this past year isn't that Rockaway abandoned either of those traditions. It's that the town added a second layer on top of them: a brewery with sixty seats and a kitchen, a food court that gives small vendors a low-risk way to try the market, and public infrastructure built specifically so a homegrown festival can keep growing. None of that existed in Rockaway Beach five years ago. All of it points toward a town investing in year-round gathering spots rather than just surviving the summer rush and going quiet in the off-season.

If you've noticed the same shift, whether it's a longer wait at Pelican on a Friday night or a different truck parked at Bayocean than there was last spring, that's not your imagination. It's a small town adding a few new rooms onto a house it's lived in for almost ninety years.

If you're already calling this stretch of coast home and want to talk about what's changing in the neighborhoods around it, Megan Despain would love to hear what you're noticing too. Let's Connect.