The restaurant group behind Water Grill just named its next President and COO, and in SoCal hospitality, that seat is one of the most consequential operating jobs in the industry.
King’s Seafood Company, the Costa Mesa-based restaurant group behind Water Grill and King’s Fish House, named Kelly Ellerman President and Chief Operating Officer, per the company’s announcement, which also welcomed Mike Flynn to the leadership team as part of a broader strengthening of the executive bench.
Understand what this company is in the SoCal landscape, because the history runs deeper than most guests know. The family story begins in 1945, when Lou and Mickey King started building restaurants across Southern California. Cousins Jeff and Sam King launched the modern company in 1983 and renamed it King’s Seafood Company in 1998. Today the family-owned group operates a dozen King’s Fish House locations, seven Water Grill dining rooms, and concepts including 555 East, Lou & Mickey’s, and Meat On Ocean, across California, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, and Washington, with the iconic Water Grill anchoring downtown Los Angeles since the early 1990s.
The President and COO seat runs all of it: operations, people, supply chain, and the guest experience across every location. And the company has been explicit about its direction, restructuring operations to focus growth on the premium Water Grill concept. That makes this appointment a growth mandate, not a maintenance one. Premium seafood dining rooms are among the hardest operations in hospitality, live product, high ticket, zero tolerance for a bad night, and scaling them across five states requires an operator who can hold culture and margins in the same hand.
Hospitality is the stealth story of the Southern California executive market right now. Premium dining keeps expanding across OC and LA while the labor market underneath it stays brutally tight, so the operators who can hold culture, margins, and hundreds of employees together have become genuine executive talent, recruited and paid accordingly. That rising respect for operations leadership is a pattern we keep documenting in our hiring trends coverage, and it shows up in the numbers our Compensation Watch series tracks.
A President and COO title, rather than either alone, tells you the board wants one accountable owner for both strategy and execution, a structure more SoCal restaurant groups are adopting as they scale across the regional market. For hospitality leaders reading this and wondering what your own operating experience is worth right now: more than it has ever been, and our Get Placed desk can tell you exactly how much.
To Kelly Ellerman: congratulations. Thousands of team members and some of the best dining rooms on the West Coast are now your daily craft, and that is a title earned in service, the hardest way there is.
The family-ownership context makes the professional stakes higher, not lower. Eighty years of family history means the brand carries obligations a private equity roll-up never has to think about: consistency guests can taste, tenure employees can build lives on, and a name above the door that belongs to actual people. Executives who take operating roles inside multigenerational family companies are signing up to be stewards as much as strategists, and the ones who do it well become some of the most respected operators in the industry.
What to watch next: the pace of Water Grill’s premium expansion and where it plants its next flags, how the leadership team beneath Ellerman takes shape, and whether more SoCal hospitality groups consolidate strategy and operations under a single President and COO. The region’s dining economy is a talent economy wearing an apron, and we will keep covering its leadership moves on the People Moves Tracker.
And for every general manager grinding through service tonight somewhere between San Diego and Seattle: this is what the top of your ladder looks like. Hospitality has always promoted its best from the floor, and the industry’s executive ranks remain one of the last places in American business where starting at the host stand and ending in the C-suite is a documented career path, not a fairy tale. Ellerman’s new title is proof the ladder still reaches all the way up.
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Sources & verification
Appointment: King’s Seafood Company announcement, June 2026 · Company history & portfolio: kingsseafood.com
Cathy Trinh is the founder of Recruiter Hustle and has worked in executive search since 1998, advising companies and leaders across finance, accounting, operations, manufacturing, logistics, real estate, technology and professional services. Through Recruiter Hustle, she combines executive search, talent intelligence and market media to help companies and people make better decisions about work and leadership. HEART. HUMAN. HUSTLE.