Seward fish and chips restaurant seeks city's first seasonal tourism liquor license

The Garage Seward LLC is asking the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board for a seasonal tourism license that would let its fish and chips restaurant at 801 Third Ave. serve beer and wine from May 1 through Oct. 31. It would be Seward's first such license. The board takes up the request at its meeting Tuesday, Nov. 17, which starts at 9 am in Anchorage.

The license type is meant for small towns with many visitors, and visitor counts cap how many a town can have. The state formula divides a year's visitors by 182 days and allows one license for each 1,500 visitors per day. In a staff memo, Licensing Examiner Shawn Kowalski calculated that Seward's 140,700 cruise passengers in 2025 work out to about 773 visitors a day, which rounds up to one license. That passenger count is down 36% from 220,200 in 2024, according to a visitor volume report attached to the application. Seward's two regular restaurant licenses, capped by a resident population of about 2,224, have none remaining, the memo said.

The memo said the board will apply the visitor count it accepts here to every similar Seward application filed this year.

John and Stephanie Higgins each own half the company. Its application says the restaurant will be the only dedicated fish and chips restaurant in town and plans to open 11 am to 8 pm daily, with a draft menu of halibut, rockfish and cod, a crab boil, and beers from Stoney Creek Brew House. The license carries a biennial fee of $1,250. State law requires the restaurant's food sales to at least equal its alcohol sales each calendar year.