Port of Oakland Park (Cranes, Beach & Horn BBQ!)

4 min readJan 31, 2021

Our mission to take 52 awesome Bay Area day trips takes us today to Middle Harbor Shoreline Park (aka “Port of Oakland Park”).

Address: 2777 Middle Harbor Rd, Oakland, CA 94607

Here’s the entrance to the park:

There are easy walking/biking paths (note: they also allow a few cards with handicap placards to drive further into the park to be up close to the cranes).

Here’s the path to a ship that was getting containers loaded on it:

It seems that most of the day has at least one ship getting containers loaded to it (like this one):

There are plenty of places to throw down a blanket (though watch out for goose poop).

There are also little bench areas with killer views:

We found a nice spot right on the beach:

Great view of SF!:

They had at least 2 decent bathrooms that we saw. Here’s one:

Horn BBQ!

For lunch, we hit up the hot new Horn Barbecue (Pitmaster is Matt Horn) at 2534 Mandela Pkwy, Oakland, CA 94607:

We waited in a 25 person line for about 25 minutes at 11:30am on a Saturday (it opens at 11am). I recommend you pre-order through https://www.hornbarbecue.com/ to skip the lines:

It’s a super-clean place in the space that replaced Brown Sugar Kitchen:

We ordered:

Brisket (on left)
Smoked turkey (that’s the single slice in the middle)
Hot Link
Spare Ribs

…and beans, Brisket end pieces and mac and cheese as sides:

We drank this fun soda:

Everything was super-yummy. The smoked turkey was the surprise hit and the Brisket end pieces were next best with brisket the best after that. The spare ribs were a bit fatty so we’re going to try the beef ribs next time.

Here’s the outside part where the BBQ smokers are.