After 54 years of meatloaf plates and vodka cranberries next to regulars who knew each other's orders by heart, Gerry Sova closed Captain Keno's, the affordable dive bar and family restaurant that had anchored a corner of Leucadia for longer than most of its customers had been alive. Two sets of local owners didn't just want the address. They wanted the bones: the knickknacks, the furniture, the signage that made Keno's feel like Keno's. So they split it. Half became Anigma, a tarot-themed cocktail bar from the team behind The Roxy. The other half became Breakers, a Hawaiian-inspired hangout from pro surfer Benji Weatherley, who grew up splitting time between Encinitas and Oahu. Nothing about Captain Keno's survived whole. Almost everything about it got kept somewhere.
That split is a small version of what's happening across Leucadia this year. The neighborhood is absorbing its biggest wave of new restaurants and bars in a decade, and its most argued-over piece of public infrastructure just went through another round of attention. In both cases the story isn't demolition. It's reuse. New operators keep choosing old buildings on Highway 101. Longtime residents keep choosing an old dirt trail down to the beach over a newer, easier one the city has offered twice. Once you notice the pattern, it explains more about this stretch of coast than any single opening or closing does on its own.
A Restaurant Wave Made of Buildings That Already Existed
Six chef-driven restaurants are opening along Coast Highway 101 in Encinitas this year, and at least three of them are landing squarely in Leucadia, each one moving into a building somebody else built first.
| Former occupant | New arrival | Address |
|---|---|---|
| Fulano's Mexican Cafe | Chick & Hawk | 145 Leucadia Boulevard |
| Islands Restaurant | Encinitas Brewing Company | 1588 Leucadia Boulevard, Encinitas Ranch |
| A Little Moore Cafe | Coast Thai-Way | North Coast Highway 101 |
None of these operators were courted here by a developer with a leasing package. Each one looked at this stretch of the corridor and decided, on its own, that Leucadia was worth building in, according to reporting from San Diego Lineup. The same reuse instinct is showing up elsewhere in Encinitas too. Craft Coast Beer & Tacos, an Oceanside-born concept, is taking over the old Filiberto's for flame-grilled carne asada and birria tacos, and Rosemarie's Buns & Brews already opened in late 2025 on South Coast Highway, built around Wagyu sliders with onion confit and Kewpie mayo from owner Nick Balsamo, who'd run food trucks and brick-and-mortar spots in Mission Beach and Ocean Beach first. Blank Slate and The Brant round out the citywide wave, joining a dining scene that already included longtime draws like Herb & Sea for date night.
Encinitas Brewing Company is the clearest case of adaptive reuse with a paper trail, even though it sits a few miles inland from the beach, on Leucadia Boulevard at the Encinitas Ranch Town Center. The Encinitas Planning Commission approved the brewery, distillery, and restaurant concept on March 8, 2026, for a roughly 5,500-square-foot space with a patio expanding to about 1,565 square feet. Co-owner Brian McBride told commissioners the shopping center is a little quiet but works for what they're trying to do. Construction takes about five months, which puts the target opening somewhere around September 2026, though the team has said the date is still fluid.
The Sandwich That Took Five Years
If one story captures how much patience this neighborhood has for the right thing arriving slowly, it's Chick & Hawk. Skateboarder Tony Hawk and chef Andrew Bachelier, who'd met by chance in 2020, first announced the fried chicken concept in September 2021 with a 2022 opening target. The 1,421-square-foot space at 145 Leucadia Boulevard, previously home to Fulano's Mexican Cafe, sat in near-stasis for years while permit delays and funding gaps dragged on. The team kept the idea alive with pop-up dinners around North County under the name Underground Nights, along with merchandise sales to cover costs while they waited for approval to build.
Chick & Hawk finally opened on November 6, 2025, more than four years after that first announcement, with a friends-and-family soft opening the days before. The signature Birdman sandwich, a Nashville hot-style build with purple cabbage slaw, kimchi comeback sauce, and sweet-spicy pickles, comes in heat levels that top out at "900 degrees," a nod to Hawk's signature skateboarding trick. The bar pours a custom lager called Cheep Skate, brewed with Viewpoint Brewing in Del Mar. A short walk away on North Coast Highway 101, chef Claudette Zepeda's Leu Leu, a lounge inside a 1930s bungalow, had already been open since February 2025. Zepeda and Hawk are now also partners on a separate project, a modern Mexican restaurant called Novecientos Grados set to anchor Terminal 1 at San Diego International Airport, which puts two of Leucadia's newest culinary names within a few blocks of each other, each one launched before the other had fully proven itself.
A Trail Everyone Keeps Voting to Leave Alone
The other half of this story runs downhill, at the beach everyone calls Beacon's. Officially it's Leucadia State Beach, maintained by the City of Encinitas under a state park general plan, and it's reached by a narrow trail with three switchbacks cut into the bluff face.
The current dirt trail exists because the original concrete staircase, built in 1972, was destroyed by El Nino storms in 1982, which also reactivated the landslide that still moves under that bluff today. California State Parks responded by barring any new stairway construction until the slope proved stable, and it never fully has. The city floated seawalls in 2001 and 2004, both opposed by local Surfrider Foundation volunteers on the grounds that seawalls erode the very beach they're meant to protect, a stance backed by the 1983 Leucadia State Beach general plan's own bluff fortification policy. A 2018 push for a concrete staircase went to public workshops and got polarizing fast. The Planning Commission voted it down not once but twice that year. Rather than fight a third round, the city redirected the staircase budget toward a separate underpass project and settled for the smaller step of moving the parking lot back from the unstable edge.
That's not the end of the maintenance story. A partial landslide closed the trail for about two months in the spring of 2022 before it reopened that June. More recently, in the spring of 2025, the city upgraded the parking area with new planting and seating and fixed the base of the switchback path, replacing the loose pebbles that used to make the last stretch a hassle with sturdier steps, while leaving the switchback trail itself intact rather than replacing it outright. Preserve Beacon's, a local advocacy group, has been consistent about why that distinction matters. As one member, Ari Marsh, put it after the 2022 reopening, "Beacon's is like the epicenter of Leucadia." The trail stays a trail. The neighborhood keeps choosing it that way, one vote at a time.
One Sunday in August, Almost Nothing Changes on Purpose
The clearest annual proof of this pattern lands on August 30, 2026, when the LeucadiART Walk takes over the same stretch of Highway 101 that's currently filling with new kitchens. It's the 20th year the Leucadia 101 Mainstreet Association, a local nonprofit, has run the event, and the format hasn't needed reinventing.
- More than 100 juried artists set up along Highway 101 between Marcheta and West Jason streets
- Three stages of live music and entertainment, plus a children's art pavilion and beer garden
- Roughly 8,000 attendees typically show up, per past-year figures from the event
- Free admission, run entirely by the same local mainstreet association that's organized it since the beginning
No outside promoter has taken it over. No sponsor has renamed it. It's the kind of event that gets bigger without getting different, which is the same thing happening one block over with the restaurants.
What Stays the Same While Everything Changes
None of this means Leucadia is standing still. It means the shape of the neighborhood, the buildings, the trail, the yearly rituals, tends to hold even as what fills that shape turns over. A dive bar's furniture ends up split between two new bars instead of a landfill. An old brunch spot becomes a Lao-Thai kitchen instead of a vacancy. A dangerous, decades-old switchback trail gets patched at the bottom instead of paved into a staircase nobody asked for. If you've lived here long enough to remember what used to occupy these addresses, that continuity is probably part of why you're still here.
Amy Green has spent more than two decades working this same coastline and keeps a running list of what's opening, what's closing, and what's quietly holding on along the way. If you want the local rundown on Leucadia beyond what fits in one post, Let's Connect.
