Behind the grill
Doug Wiese grew up on a Gearhart grill. His son Carnegie came home from New Zealand to take the chowder. Dooger’s is still on Columbia Street.
Cove Tales · February 18, 2026 · 3 min read
On February 18, 1983, Mary Wiese and her son Doug opened a 44-seat seafood room in downtown Seaside. Doug did the cooking. Mary did the prep. The town started calling him Dooger, a leftover from a University of Oregon nickname, and the sign followed. Forty years later the room is larger, the staff is sixty, and the chowder is still the thing people drive for.
Journey here
Doug’s parents had run a restaurant in Gearhart; they sold it in 1973. “It was my parents’ restaurant, but I basically grew up behind the grill,” he told the Seaside Signal. He was ten when they moved to Gearhart. He went to Oregon, came home, and opened Dooger’s with his mother. Mary retired in 1994 and died in 2017. There were other rooms, for a while — Cannon Beach, Warrenton, Long Beach — and then there was only the original. Carnegie Wiese, Doug’s son, left for Oregon, then kitchens in Hawaii and New Zealand, then a crossroads. “I was at a crossroads and debating between graduate school or returning to Seaside to take over something that I really care about,” he told seasideor.com. He came home. In 2022 he became a co-owner. He has since opened a lounge next door, Iggy’s, another family nickname, with a rooftop for the nights that want one.
A normal day
The menu is comfort the family will not get bored of: steamed Dungeness, fried oysters, scallops, calamari, prawns, a chowder Doug and Carnegie both describe as light, creamy, packed with clams, and seasoned with a blend they do not print. Staff stay fifteen, twenty, thirty years. That is the day: the same tickets, the same plates, the same argument that consistency is harder than a special. Carnegie has said they were lucky in the people who stayed. Luck of that kind is usually a schedule.
A customer moment
The Oregonian wrote them up not long after they opened, and the 44 seats were suddenly not enough. They expanded into the vacant space next door in the late 1980s and became one of the earlier non-smoking dining rooms on the coast. The customer who mattered was the one who came back without a review. Families still sit in the same room. The nickname on the sign is the one the founder still answers to.
What visitors should know
103 South Columbia. Not Broadway, which is the point for some regulars. Call if you are coming in the dead of winter. The Long Beach and Warrenton rooms are gone; this is the one that remains. If you want the chowder, say so before you look at the rest of the menu. If you want the rooftop, that is Iggy’s, and it is next door.
It was my parents’ restaurant, but I basically grew up behind the grill.
