Amesbury sits where two rivers meet. The Powwow flows down through downtown and empties into the Merrimack a few blocks from Market Square, and for years, only one of those rivers had a restaurant built to face it. Blue Moon Kitchen & Bar has served meals from a deck that hangs directly over the Powwow, the only spot in the city where you can eat with the water moving underneath you. The Merrimack, the bigger river, the one the city was actually built along, never had that. It had marinas. It had a public boat ramp. It had four decades of boats coming and going past docks that were built for boats, not for dinner.
That changed on June 19, 2026, when Marker 34 opened at 2 Merrimac Street.
What was actually missing
It's worth being precise about what Amesbury's waterfront lacked, because "no restaurant on the Merrimack" undersells how functional that stretch of the river has been. The land at 2 Merrimac Street sits at Amesbury Point, part of a marina property owned by local businessman Dan Healey. Downtown Amesbury has spent the last fifteen years turning old mill buildings into restaurants, shops, and apartments, and that renewal reached Elm Street, where Crave has served contemporary American food since 2013, and it reached the Powwow, where Blue Moon built its reputation on being the only deck over the water. It never quite reached the Merrimack itself. The river that gives the city its name and its waterfront identity was still mostly a place you looked at from a parking lot or paddled past, not a place you sat down next to for a few hours.
Marker 34 is Healey's answer to that gap. The name comes from an actual navigational marker on the Merrimack, a point boaters use to orient themselves on the water. The restaurant is built around that idea directly: floor-to-ceiling views of the river, dock access for boaters who want to tie up and walk in, and a seasonal New England menu built around seafood. It's open daily for lunch and dinner, 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., which puts it in the same operating window as the marina traffic it sits next to.
A few things worth knowing before you go
The reservation setup has a quirk that matters if you're planning a night out rather than researching one. Reservations at Marker 34 only guarantee an inside table. Patio and bar seating are first come, first served, and can't be booked ahead, even for the outdoor tables that are the whole reason people are driving over. Early diners on OpenTable have flagged this in their reviews, including one who booked a table for five and asked about the patio on arrival, only to be moved outside a few minutes later once a spot opened. The lesson isn't that the restaurant does something wrong. It's that if you have your heart set on the deck specifically, showing up and asking is currently as reliable as reserving.
As of late July, the restaurant's own menu page noted it was still expanding, several weeks after opening. That's normal for a new kitchen finding its rhythm, but it means what you order in September may look different from what a friend describes from a June visit.
The part that isn't about the restaurant
Here's what makes this opening more than one more addition to Amesbury's dining scene. Marker 34 sits on Merrimac Street. So does Washington Landing, the city's only public boat ramp, located at 18 Merrimac Street, a few hundred feet away. And Washington Landing is in the middle of its own overhaul, one that's been building for two years and is still not finished.
The city secured its first grant for the project, $840,000, back in January 2024, aimed at replacing the boat ramp, adding a boardwalk, and building a harbormaster office. By this year, the price tag had grown. The City of Amesbury announced an additional $1.19 million in state funding on top of the original grant, bringing the total project cost to roughly $2.55 million, with the city covering about $510,000 of that through a local match. The engineering firm GZA has finished the preliminary site design. Permitting is underway now and is expected to take about a year, which puts construction on a realistic timeline of late 2027, not this year and not next.
That ramp isn't just for private boaters. Merrimack Valley Transit has identified Washington Landing as a planned stop for its new electric ferry service, a solar-assisted route intended to connect Haverhill, Amesbury, and Newburyport. The ferries themselves are already in development, according to reporting from Streetsblog Massachusetts, with a design built by Lyman-Morse and Response Marine that seats 18 to 22 passengers. The dock they'll use hasn't been built yet. The boat ramp they'll dock at is still in permitting. But when it is finished, the stop will be a two-minute walk from a restaurant that didn't exist a year earlier.
That's the actual shift here, and it's easy to miss if you only think about this as a restaurant opening. Amesbury didn't just add a place to eat. It added that place to eat on the exact stretch of river where the public dock investment is also landing, years apart in timing but converging on the same few hundred feet of Merrimac Street. When the ferry eventually starts running, whoever steps off it won't be looking for somewhere to go. There will already be one there.
What's actually on the water right now
For anyone weighing options this fall, downtown Amesbury's water-adjacent dining now breaks down into three distinct experiences, not three versions of the same one:
- Crave, on Elm Street, serves contemporary American food a short walk from the water, not on it.
- Blue Moon Kitchen & Bar puts you directly over the Powwow River from its deck, the smaller of the city's two rivers but still the only spot that's had a table on the water for years.
- Marker 34, at 2 Merrimac Street, is the first restaurant built to face the Merrimack itself, open daily from 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., with dock access for boaters and a seasonal seafood-forward menu still finding its final shape.
None of these replace the others. They sit on two different rivers with two different reasons to choose them, which is closer to what a city with real waterfront depth looks like than a single new opening ever could be on its own.
What changes this fall
If you've lived in Amesbury for a while, the practical change is simple: a water-view dinner on the Merrimack no longer means driving to Newburyport or further. It means walking or driving to Merrimac Street, checking whether the patio's open, and understanding that the boat ramp construction fencing you might start seeing down the block in the next year or two isn't unrelated noise. It's the second half of the same investment showing up on a slower schedule.
If you own property near this stretch of the waterfront, or you're watching what a corridor like Merrimac Street does to interest in a neighborhood, this is the kind of change worth tracking as it plays out over the next two years rather than the next two months. The Barnes Team can pull the numbers for your specific address and show you how this pocket of Amesbury is trending. Get your instant home valuation and see where you stand.
