About Us
Norma’s Seafood & Steak (previously "Norma's Seafood" and later "Norma's Ocean Diner") was founded in 1976 by Norma Saunders and was located on Broadway. With success came the opportunity to expand and Norma, along with her husband Vincent Benbennick, acquired property at the current location, previously the Seaside Chamber of Commerce.
The doors of the new building opened in 1983 without picnic tables and paper cups, however, Norma still cooked daily. The restaurant held
business hours through the months of March through October. Norma passed in 1993. Her daughter and son-in-law ran the business as absentee owners until fall of 1999. Randy and Darleen Frank purchased the business, property and building in 2001. After three months of remodeling, Norma’s opened for business on March 20th in time for Spring Break. Since that time, the restaurant has been in a constant state of renovation.
The name of the purchasing corporation was L. Frank Inc. and is solely owned by Randy and Darleen Frank. Randy has lived in the area since 1965 and his first cooking job was at the Crab Broiler where he worked from 1970-1979, the latter two years as kitchen manager. He brought 30 years of experience in restaurants combined with business, accounting, and manual writing. Darleen brought a multitude of experience, both in restaurants, human resource and accounting.
August 1, 2017 began the next chapter of the Norma's legacy when Bassem and Amal Taha purchased the business, property and building. They changed the name of the holding corporation to B & A Ocean Diner. Bassem is an electronic engineer, has a graduate degree from OSU with 30 years in the industry including 26 years at Intel corporation working on state of the art CPU designs. Amal is a licensed CPA in Oregon, has an accounting degree from PSU and has extensive expertise in accounting & tax returns.