The lease for one of Monterey’s few live music venues is for sale.

Cannery Row’s Salty Seal Brewpub and Sports Bar, one of the few live music venues on Monterey Peninsula, is up for sale.

It doesn’t appear to be for lack of business: on a recent Saturday afternoon, the Salty Seal is abuzz with customers, some of whom, their lanyards revealed, are in town to watch car racing at Laguna Seca.

Co-owner Rachael Smith, who founded the business with her now-ex-husband Jim McLennan in 2021, says the business is successful, but she wants to downsize her responsibilities and also work closer to her home in Santa Cruz.

The property, which for years prior was occupied by Cooper’s Pub and Restaurant (and before that by Bullwacker’s), was empty when Smith and McLennan took it over, but they plan to sell it with everything inside.

“It’s completely turnkey,” Smith says. “Anybody coming in as a potential buyer really has little to do.” She adds they’ve had excellent employee retention, and that some staff have been there three years.

The business, which leases an approximately 5,100-square-foot space from Cannery Row Company, comes with a prized Type 47 liquor license and an outdoor patio/venue.

The business is currently listed for $595,000. Smith says it’s not an ideal time to sell – typically, she says, you’d want to see through to the end of your five-year business plan to show consistency in numbers, so she expects it could be up to a year before they find a buyer.

For now, Smith is just happy the doldrums of winter have ended and the high season is humming. “We really did have a brutal winter,” she says. “It rained literally every weekend for a five-month period.”

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Correction 7/1/24 8:30am: This article has been corrected to reflect that Salty Seal is for sale at $595,000, not $795,000, as originally written. The Weekly regrets the error.