Kings of Fish Debuted on Amazon Prime, Featuring San Pedro Fish Market By Writer and Contributor Emily McGinn
Photo courtesy San Pedro Fish Market
San Pedro Fish Market has made the jump to a streaming platform with their new season of “Kings of Fish.” The reality show, formerly an award-winning web series produced by the restaurant group, debuted on Amazon Prime on Aug. 13.
The show follows the San Pedro Fish Market, which is the largest restauranteur family empire in the United States. The series is set in San Pedro and follows the family as they navigate managing the multi-million dollar business and the drama that comes with it, including an eviction.
Michael “Mike” Ungaro is the CEO and co-owner of San Pedro Fish Market. His father, Mackey Ungaro, founded the restaurant in 1956.
“[The series] is about my family and the history of how we started as a small corner shop selling seafood to locals out of stainless steel ice chest and a space that was about 200 square feet in 1956, and how we grew into one of the largest, most successful restaurants in the country over the course of six decades,” Ungaro said. “And [it covers] a lot of the trials and tribulations that we've dealt with. There's a lot of humor, there's some drama. And it's pretty authentic.”
Kings of Fish is new to Amazon Prime, but it is not new to fans. The show ran for seven seasons as a web series produced by the restaurant family online, garnering more than 60 million episode views. The format was much different, with episodes spanning less than 10 minutes.
Ungaro said the family launched the web series in June 2016 and continued with it because it helped with expanding the brand.
“We knew we had a social media following, and we thought, if we take the series and we produce it ourselves, maybe it would help to amplify what we were already doing on social media,” Ungaro said. “It instantly got a ton of views. We saw a huge spike in sales that we couldn't have accounted for any other way, almost like a 25-30% increase in our sales for that month, and it was already our busiest month of the year. So we thought, ‘We have something here, so we should continue on with it.’”
However, the final season during COVID-19 brought the show to a halt. During the pandemic, one of the family members, Tommy Amalfitano Jr., son of one of the founders Tommy Amalfitano Sr., passed away from COVID.
Initially, when they were approached to do a network series, the family was uncertain about if they wanted to move forward with the show in light of Tommy Jr.’s death. Ungaro also had reservations from past conversations they had with networks in which producers wanted fighting, drama and fabrication. However, the family decided together to do the show.
“What we ultimately decided was this might be a great way to memorialize [Tommy Jr.], because he was part of our family, and he was a big part of the show,” Ungaro said. “And we sat down with his kids, and his dad and my partner, Tommy Sr., and we ultimately said, this might work. So that's what we did. And we made this season that you see now.”
The major storyline of the story is the drama surrounding their eviction notice about two years ago for the location they had occupied in San Pedro since 1982.
“[It] gave us an opportunity to not just continue telling our story, but to demonstrate the story of how resilient we are, how innovative we can be, and how as a family, we work together to deal with traumatic situations like losing people that we care about in the family and also dealing with, for the second time in our history, being evicted and having to work out of the parking lot,” Ungaro said. “The same thing happened in the late ’70s when we were building this building that we just left.”
Although the show deals with dramatic situations, Ungaro said that one of the most valuable aspects of the series is capturing the family being themselves.
“My dad passed away when he was 56 years old, and Tommy Jr. was 55, so I could relate to what his kids were going through, because I was their age when I lost my dad,” Ungaro said. “And as I thought about it, I go, you know, what do I have for my dad? I have some photos and a couple videos, because this was the ’90s. But these kids, the Amalfitano family, they have seven seasons of their dad being himself — television-quality video of him — in addition to all the photos and their memories. I think it was really unique.
“What I took for granted was that we've captured parts of our life that aren't fabricated. It's authentic. It's who we are. It's what we do. And it's on video forever for anyone to watch.”
Ungaro and the family hope to reach the benchmark of at least 100,000 views in the first 30 days of going live on Amazon Prime so that they can be renewed for another two seasons. They have plenty of content in the pipeline, including a new restaurant spot planned for Northern California and potentially one in the Anaheim area. They are also looking to expand their e-commerce and retail products.
“Really what all this is is it’s us transforming the company from being just restaurants and seafood markets into a media brand,” Ungaro said. “And that opens up a whole bunch of opportunities for employees [who might] like working here, but [are] tired of flipping fajitas. [They] want to do something else. Great — we need it. We're producing content, there's social media, there's marketing. It just really opens us up to a lot of new opportunities for people that want to try something different, that are willing to learn a new skill or a new trade. So I'm excited about that. I just think it's a whole bunch of new possibilities for everybody.”
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