Crow’s Nest Santa Cruz

Surf culture, a university crowd, and a genuinely progressive beach town all converge at the Ideal, cold beer, pool tables, and Santa Cruz’s particular brand of neighborhood-bar warmth a few blocks from the boardwalk.

Randall Grahm has been making California’s most eclectic, most philosophical wines since 1983, and tasting them on the Davenport cliffs makes even the weirder labels make sense.

Sea otters float in the kelp just offshore while you eat. Schooners sits inside the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, which is a wildly overqualified backdrop for a plate of fresh seafood and a cold California beer.

Half Moon Bay does cold, foggy, and windswept instead of sun-soaked, and Sam’s leans all the way into it, genuinely Northern California beach bar energy, no tan lines required.

A living-room jazz club on a Pacific cliff since 1968, Bach Dancing books world-class musicians for Sunday afternoons and asks nothing more of you than a drink and an ocean view. There is genuinely nothing else like it on the coast.