The low-slung, shingled roof of A Restaurant sits at the entrance to the stretch of PCH known as Mariner’s Mile—about the best place in Southern California to hear tales from the sea. And Grant Livingstone is just the person to tell those tales.

“As a sailor, this is my kind of bar,” the compact 56-year-old Aliso Viejo resident declares, setting down his Johnnie Walker Red, neat. “This place has got a story to tell. It’s got character. It’s got depth.”

Livingstone’s parents are from Scotland, but he was born in Inglewood and grew up in Huntington Beach and Irvine. (He does bust out a perfect brogue when he’s telling the one about almost getting in a bar fight in Glasgow during a family reunion.) The son of a merchant mariner, he’s been at sea his whole life—much of the time thousands of miles from shore. But for the past quarter-century or so, his job has involved getting nail-bitingly close to shore.

Livingstone is a senior harbor pilot for Jacobsen Pilot Service, the private company that holds the exclusive contract to steer massive ships into and out of the Port of Long Beach. All those massive cargo ships and tankers you see anchored within sight of shore every time you go to the Aquarium of the Pacific? They’re waiting for a little pilot’s launch to pull up alongside and deliver Livingstone or one of his colleagues, who steer these 950-foot-long behemoths safely up to the pier.

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