Your Lighthouse Point Dock Has a Dining Circuit. Most Residents Drive Past It.

The canal grid in Lighthouse Point is one of the densest private-dock networks on the Gold Coast. Hundreds of households sit on direct Intracoastal access. Most owners use it on weekends — running offshore in the morning, tying up at a sandbar, coming home by early afternoon. Then they shower and drive to dinner.

That sequence is so standard it rarely registers as a choice. It is one. And the dining circuit that runs from the Hillsboro Inlet south through the Intracoastal — starting at PORT 32 Lighthouse Point Marina and terminating at a restaurant with no road and no parking lot — suggests a different way to use what you already own.

The Restaurant That Removed the Road

Cap's Place opened in 1928 as Club Unique: a speakeasy, gambling den, and restaurant built on a $100 barge that its founder, Eugene "Cap" Knight, beached on a mangrove spit near the Hillsboro Inlet. Knight used Dade County pine to frame the structure on top of the barge. He ran rum from Bimini fifty miles offshore, guided home by the Hillsboro Inlet Lighthouse — whose keeper was his brother. There was no road to the restaurant then. There is no road now.

Added to the National Register of Historic Places on August 10, 1990, Cap's Place is the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Broward County and the oldest standing structure in the City of Lighthouse Point. The only way to reach it is by the restaurant's own motor launch, which departs from a shoreside lot at 2765 NE 28th Ct. No parking on the island; the exception is a single handicapped space. The boat ride takes roughly ninety seconds and deposits you at a dock in front of a collection of five wood-frame vernacular buildings, four of which are considered historic.

The menu shifts with the commercial catch — local dolphin, wahoo, cobia, snapper, pompano, lobster, stone crab. Your server hands you a history sheet alongside the menu, listing notable guests: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, JFK, Al Capone, Walt Disney. The bar occupies a separate wooden shack that looks essentially unchanged from the late 1920s. Dinner service runs Wednesday through Sunday, doors at 5:30 p.m.; reservations are recommended.

One detail that rarely makes the standard write-up: Cap's has no seawall on its Intracoastal side. There is a sandy beach. Kayakers regularly land there for a drink at the bar without holding a dinner reservation. For a Lighthouse Point resident paddling south on a weekday evening, that is a genuinely useful piece of information.

The owners today are the children of Al Hasis, one of the three original founders alongside Cap and Lola Knight. The same extended family has operated it for nearly a century. A menu was included in a Broward League of Cities time capsule in 2000. The history, more than the food, is the product — though the crab cakes draw consistent praise, and the fish of the day does what fresh local seafood is supposed to do.

What PORT 32 Changed at the Marina

In March 2023, PORT 32 Marinas acquired Lighthouse Point Marina — after more than fifty years of unbroken family ownership and, according to PORT 32's own announcement, the first time the property had ever been offered for sale. The marina sits at 2831 Marina Circle, less than half a nautical mile from the Hillsboro Inlet.

The facility runs 102 wet slips across 4,410 total linear footage, accommodating vessels from 25 to 80 feet. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection has certified it as a clean marina through the Clean Boating Partnership. It includes a Sunoco fuel dock, a live bait station, a ship store, a pool, and tennis courts. For residents who keep a boat elsewhere, PORT 32 Lighthouse Point offers direct Atlantic access for any size vessel in a passage that most days takes under ten minutes from slip to open water.

The acquisition also included the Nauti Dawg Marina Cafe, a 2,271-square-foot waterfront restaurant that has been a neighborhood fixture for years. Nauti Dawg runs live music Wednesday through Sunday, offers dock slips for arriving boaters, maintains a dedicated menu for dogs, runs a kids-eat-free promotion, and extends a ten percent discount to guests arriving by water taxi. Brunch runs through the afternoon; dinner carries into the evening. The location is the everyday version of the water-access dining circuit — less ceremony than Cap's, more useful for a Tuesday or a Sunday morning with nowhere particular to be.

What the Circuit Actually Looks Like

The practical run for a Lighthouse Point resident with a private dock: clear your canal, turn north on the Intracoastal toward PORT 32 for a late Sunday brunch at Nauti Dawg, dock at one of the marina slips, and be back home before the afternoon wind picks up. Alternatively, turn south past the Hillsboro Inlet Lighthouse marker on a Thursday evening, make the short run down the waterway to Cap's motor launch staging area, and reserve the return for after dark when the inlet is running flat.

Neither route requires a car. Neither route is available to someone without a dock.

The Lighthouse Point Yacht Club anchors the longer end of the social calendar for members running offshore or coordinating group runs, and the club adds institutional structure to a boating community that otherwise self-organizes around private slips and informal arrangements. On land, Pampa Gaucho Brazilian Steakhouse holds a consistent local following for evenings when tidal logistics are not part of the plan — a churrascaria that draws from the wider neighborhood, not just the waterfront. The Red Fox Diner comes up in reviews for breakfast runs when the goal is something casual and land-based before a morning offshore.

The circuit is not exhaustive. It is a starting structure: one direction runs toward a 97-year-old island that was off the grid by design, the other toward a marina under new ownership that has invested in making the on-water arrival experience work. Both reward the same thing — leaving from the dock instead of the driveway.

The Part Worth Saying Directly

The dock in Lighthouse Point is not comparable to a pool or a putting green. Those are amenities in the conventional sense: optional, pleasant, unused for months at a stretch without consequence. The dock here connects to a navigable waterway that reaches the Atlantic in under a mile, passes a nationally recognized historic restaurant accessible no other way, and terminates at a full-service marina with fuel, food, and slip availability for visiting vessels.

Cap's Place has been demonstrating since 1928 that the water here is infrastructure, not scenery. PORT 32's acquisition of a fifty-year family property in 2023 extended that infrastructure into the next generation. The residents who use both in the same weekend have a routine that does not exist in the same form anywhere else on the corridor between Boca Raton and Fort Lauderdale.

The canal-front home in this market is priced for the access. The question is whether the access is being used.

When you are ready to buy, sell, or simply understand what a particular dock and waterway position is actually worth in today's market, the Tinka Ellington Group specializes in waterfront properties across the Lighthouse Point corridor and the broader Boca Raton to Pompano Beach coastline. Request a private consultation to discuss what the water means for your property's value and your next move.