On this episode of Happy Half Hour, Relic Bakery owners Samantha Bird and Derek Hadden pulled up with a selection of their best fare including Crunchwrap Supreme croissants, paté en croûte, an XO sausage wrapped in laminated dough, and a tahini strawberry cookie.

Derek and Samantha share their Midwestern pandemic love story and discuss their culinary training in Copenhagen which includes a bike crash outside of Noma (Chef Rene Redzepi's restaurant) that remains the most expensive night in bakery history. We also learn how the pair ended up in a 600-square-foot San Diego apartment with butter baked into the walls and an $800 electricity bill.

Offering a wholesale delivery service out of their butter-baked apartment (they bribed their neighbors with croissants), they soon graduated to a ghost kitchen. Last fall, they opened a proper café on 15th Street in East Village with a beer and wine license.

Listen to or watch the full episode now learn more about how Relic Bakery became one of San Diego's best.

Discover more at San Diego Magazine. Follow Relic Bakery HERE.

The Blink-182 muse who grew up feeding Kelly Slater and Rob Machado at his mom's North Shore Hawaii house debuts Breakers Cafe, Bar & Grill

Benji Weatherley walked into San Diego Magazine and immediately made everyone in the room feel like they'd known him their whole lives—which, if you grew up surfing in San Diego, you basically did.

The Momentum Generation kid; the guy whose mom essentially ran a free hotel for Kelly Slater, Rob Machado, and Shane Dorian while they were terrorizing Pipeline; the dude Tom DeLonge wrote "Mutt" about while they were roommates in a PB apartment—that guy is now a restaurateur in Encinitas.

Breakers Cafe, Bar & Grill is part Hawaiian comfort food joint, part surf museum, and part live music venue with three stages and a speakeasy called the Hideout that you get into by saying "snob" backwards. But the road to get here was genuinely brutal. Weatherley sold his house in Leucadia to save the original Breakers in Hawaii, but it ended up closing anyway.

When he eventually moved to Encinitas, he began work on his new restaurant, deciding to remodel the space by hand and opening it in July 2025. An eviction notice arrived two weeks after, right when daily sales hit $7,000 and was followed by a battle over his liquor license. After agreeing to teach hula dancing, his liquor license was approved and Breakers Cafe, Bar & Grill became a reality.

During the episode he also shares why cooking saved him more than surfing ever did. Tune in to hear the whole tale.

Happy Half Hour co-hosts Troy Johnson and Jackie Bryant pull up to Moe's by the Beach for a live episode with two guests who, between them, have thrown some of the most legendary parties Mission Beach has ever seen.

Eric Lightstein—who gave San Diego Cane's, the city's scrappiest and most beloved rock club—now runs this steakhouse out of the old Saska's space, and he's grinding his prime steak trimmings into a Brie burger that stops conversation cold. Bebemos co-founder Preston Caffrey also joins us to celebrate its one-year anniversary with a bar crawl that starts at the Waverly and ends somewhere nobody will fully remember.

Finally, in food news: Michelin is coming to town June 24, Mastiff is out at the North Park Beer Company, and somebody in La Mesa put up a full Blockbuster sign on April Fool's Day and broke actual journalism. In our carnivore fantasy draft we discuss oxtail at Trust, smoked duck at Kingfisher, lamb barbacoa in Chula Vista, salt and pepper wings at Royal Mandarin, short rib at Market Del Mar.

Discover more at San Diego Magazine. Follow Bebemos HERE.