Moss Landing Harbor in 2026: What's Open, What's Not

Stand at the harbor on a Saturday afternoon and you will find otters floating past the docks, a line forming for fish and chips, and a boat pulling away for its next wildlife tour, right on schedule. Walk two minutes north and you will find a guarded gate, a scorched building still waiting on its final demolition permit, and a cleanup timeline that keeps sliding into next year. Both of these are Moss Landing in August 2026. The mistake locals keep making, understandably, is assuming they're running on the same clock.

They are not. The harbor's daily life reset itself in about a year. The industrial site next door is still years from finished. Understanding that gap is the difference between an accurate picture of this town right now and one that's a year out of date.

The Reopening Nobody Rushed

The Haute Enchilada closed on February 21, 2025, a little more than a month after the Vistra battery fire, and it stayed closed for almost exactly a year. That's a long time for a restaurant and gallery that had been a fixture at the entrance to the harbor. When it came back on February 12, 2026, it didn't come back the way it left. Owner Kim Solano described the new version as an intimate, casual counter-service offering, designed for those who appreciate something a little more personal and intentionally unhurried, according to reporting in Monterey County NOW. The mole enchiladas stayed on the menu. The hours got smaller. The art gallery, still showing work from more than 50 regional artists, kept its private viewings and seasonal artist meet-and-greets.

That's worth sitting with for a second. A business didn't just reopen. It reopened smaller and slower on purpose, which tells you something about how the owners are reading the moment: recovery, but not yet a full return to what the place used to be.

The Restaurant That Didn't Need a Year

Contrast that with Woodward Marine Market, which occupies a former bait-and-tackle shop at the harbor's fuel dock and has continued serving lunch and dinner through 2026 without the kind of extended closure the Haute Enchilada went through. The space has history. It served fuel dock customers as a market for a generation before that, and a previous operator once ran ham-and-cheese sandwiches out of what Monterey County NOW described as a tiny kitchen, a detail that gave the current owners a leg up with permitting since the kitchen use already existed.

Today Chef Nichole Robbins runs the kitchen, and her fish and chips reportedly sell fast enough that making the best version is a stated goal, not a slogan. The deck looks out over a harbor that Monterey County NOW's coverage called a meeting point of different worlds: commercial fishing boats, liveaboards, quiet eco-tour vessels, and an expanding Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute campus, all sharing the same water. Out front sits the Western Flyer, the fishing vessel John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts took to Baja, docked there while it waits for a permanent home in Monterey. Owner John Gregg, who also owns the boatyard property, collects fossils and ship figureheads that show up throughout the restaurant's decor.

The harbor kept moving even as the site next door became a construction and remediation zone. That's the first piece of evidence for the gap between the two clocks: one business needed close to a year to reopen smaller, and another has just kept serving lunch on the same deck the whole time.

The Boat Still Leaving the Dock on Schedule

The same pattern holds on the water. Elkhorn Slough Safari has run pontoon tours out of A Dock in the South Harbor since 1994, and visitor accounts from this year describe trips seeing 25 to 40 sea otters in a single outing, some with pups, alongside harbor seals, sea lions, and dozens of bird species. The operation still departs seven days a week from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., the same hours it has kept for years.

If you wanted a single number that captures how normal harbor life feels right now, that's it: a 30-year-old wildlife tour company filling boats and counting otters in the dozens, on a slough that sits less than a mile from an active federal cleanup site. The wildlife hasn't relocated. The tourists haven't stopped booking. The naturalists haven't stopped narrating.

Behind the Gate, a Slower Calendar

Here's where the second clock runs. The Vistra battery fire started January 16, 2025, at the Moss 300 building, a 300-megawatt facility that was, at the time, the world's second-largest battery storage site. Roughly 55% of its 100,000 lithium-ion batteries were damaged. Cleanup has been underway ever since, overseen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency alongside the U.S. Coast Guard Pacific Strike Team, Vistra, and California's Department of Toxic Substances Control.

At a Monterey County Board of Supervisors meeting on January 6, 2026, the county's emergency management director told supervisors that roughly 34% of the batteries had been removed and that Phase 2 of the cleanup, including demolition of the fire-damaged building down to its concrete foundation, was expected to begin around mid-2026. By the time Lookout Santa Cruz checked back in early August 2026, the tally stood at 34,316 intact batteries removed, but the EPA and Vistra now estimate roughly 5,000 additional intact batteries still need to come out before demolition can proceed, and officials say the work is expected to stretch into 2027 given the added complexity of a structurally unsound building and batteries damaged by both fire and water. Separately, Vistra has decided that the Moss 100 facility will not return to service at all, judging the cost of recommissioning it not worth the potential revenue, though the company says that decision doesn't affect employment since those workers have other responsibilities on site. Vistra says it is still evaluating whether the Moss 350 unit can restart.

Because there hasn't been major activity on site between phases, Vistra, the EPA, and Monterey County agreed to scale back from continuous air monitoring to monitoring only while active work is underway. Reporting from Inside Climate News in January 2026 also captured the split screen directly: a marine geologist at San Jose State University's Moss Landing Marine Labs, evacuated during the fire, later returned to the slough to test soils for particulates, even as birds waded in the nearby estuary and visitors carried on at the marina a short walk away.

Why the Gap Matters More Than the Headline

The easy version of this story is "Moss Landing had a fire and it's recovering." That version isn't wrong, but it flattens two very different timelines into one, and flattening them is what makes people either more worried than they need to be about the harbor, or more relaxed than they should be about the plant.

The harbor's clock reset fast. A year to bring back a beloved restaurant, even in a smaller form, is a normal recovery arc for a small hospitality business. A wildlife tour operation still filling boats with otter counts in the dozens, a waterfront restaurant with a deck that's stayed busy, an antique fair on Highway 1 that returns every August: that's a town whose everyday rhythm has come back to something recognizable.

The plant's clock is on a different scale entirely. Nineteen months after the fire, crews were still removing thousands of batteries. Demolition of the damaged building, originally hoped for mid-2026, is now expected to run into 2027. A structure once billed as a flagship of the energy storage industry has become instead a long, careful decommissioning project, with a battery count still being tallied truckload by truckload.

Knowing which clock applies to which part of the story is the actual local knowledge here. If a neighbor asks whether Moss Landing is back, the honest answer depends entirely on which Moss Landing they mean. The harbor, the restaurants, the boats leaving the dock every morning: yes, and it has been for a while. The site behind the gate: not yet, and not for a while longer.

If you're weighing what any of this means for a home or property near the harbor, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks both clocks closely. Megan Lyng works this stretch of Monterey Bay every day and can walk you through what's actually changed on the ground, not just what made headlines a year ago. Let's Connect.