Affordable prices at Surfside Fish House encourage tables covered in seafood

Visions of a celebratory seafood feast drew us to Surfside Fish House, a sharp-looking casual eatery technically nine miles from the surf, yet evidently intent on bringing all the contents of the ocean to Scripps Ranch.

The counter shop features a bar, covered dining patio, and small raw bar, with oyster and poke salad selections on display inside a glass counter. However, aside from that, it's not the fish market style of restaurant we're accustomed to seeing on San Diego coastlines — rather, its kitchen spins an invisible inventory of fish, crustaceans, and mollusks into a broad variety of seafood traditions.

A new casual seafood shop in Scripps Ranch

For example, from San Francisco we get the fisherman's stew cioppino ($19), characterized by shrimp, clams, mussels, scallops, and calamari in tomato broth. The same assortment of seafood turns up with sausage, corn, and potatoes in a southern-inspired seafood boil ($19). Other dishes arbitrarily split between the shop's "Signatures" and "Favorites" menus include a spicy shrimp linguini ($16), a creole gumbo ($15), and your choice of fried cod, shrimp, or catfish with fries ($14-15). Or, for that matter, mussels with fries in a beer-steamed rendition of the Belgian favorite moules frites ($16).

Beer steamed and over-seasoned moules frites

Despite the Surfside name, for residents and neighbors of Scripps Ranch, it has to be a convenience to have that coastal dweller's privilege of so many fishy options close at hand. Our reasoning was different: we made the trek across freeways because, in 2024, these are nice prices.

Grilled fish plates go for a reasonable $15, alongside $5 cups of clam chowder and $3 oysters, which during our visit included local Kumiai oysters as well as Atlantic Blue Point oysters and a selection from British Columbia. Even better during the 3pm-6pm happy hour, when they offer $1.50 shucked oysters, $2 fish tacos, and $7-8 specials on ceviche, poke nachos, or southern fried oysters.

A mix of Blue Point and Hollywoods oysters

Point is, our small group sat down to a table packed with seafood and ready to dive in... to mixed results.

This is a lot of different dishes for a month-old restaurant to master, so it's probably no accident that we found the most success with raw and fried dishes. The boiled and steamed dishes we tried suffered from uneven seasoning and textures by comparison. Consequently, instead of overindulging, we put our forks down after merely indulging.

 An under-seasoned cajun spiced seafood boil

That is not to say Surfside Fish House isn't a wonderful place to hunker down with piles of affordable seafood, it just means sticking to the less exotic stuff. I'm hoping that, as locals catch on to their favorite menu items, take advantage of those happy hour oysters, and give this place time, it will grow into a place budget seafood enthusiasts can truly find it in their hearts to overdo it.