Herb & Sea

Herb & Sea is a modern seafood restaurant in downtown Encinitas, a few steps from Moonlight State Beach, opened in November 2019 as the coastal sister to Brian Malarkey's Herb & Wood in San Diego proper — both run by the Puffer Malarkey Collective. The kitchen is built around wood-fired cooking and sustainably sourced local fish, and the room has the loud, full, beach-town energy that a restaurant on that stretch of Encinitas either has or fails without. It serves dinner Tuesday through Sunday.

The seasonal approach in the kitchen carries into the bar, which runs a rotating beverage programme with a dedicated Spirit Free section rather than a fixed pair of afterthoughts. The current named zero-proof builds include "Luke, I Did It Again," which works hibiscus tea against strawberry, vanilla and lemon with soda, and a Pentire non-alcoholic cocktail offered three ways — as a spritz, as a dirty martini, or simply with rosemary and tonic. Pentire is a Cornish botanical distillate built on coastal plants, which is a deliberate and rather good match for a seafood restaurant on the Pacific; offering it in a dirty martini format in particular gives a non-drinker access to the savoury, saline end of the drinks spectrum that spirit-free lists almost always skip in favour of fruit. Kollo single-origin iced tea sits alongside for anyone wanting something simpler, and the beer list carries Athletic Brewing's Run Wild IPA for a non-alcoholic option that arrives in a proper glass. The practical result is that a table splitting a whole wood-fired fish can order across the whole meal without anyone defaulting to a soda — which, at a restaurant of this price and this noise level, is the difference between a non-drinker being part of the evening and being a guest at it.