It’s a perpetual beach scene at Bear Flag Fish Co. in Newport Beach

Bear Flag Fish Co. is the seafood wonderland we all long for on idle summer days, a fish market-cum-restaurant where brilliant slabs of tuna glint like rubies and the spindrift of crashing waves hangs in the air. It’s minimalism at its seafaring best -- Bear Flag understands that often all a fish needs is a satisfying char and the salty rush of a beach breeze. The restaurant sprouted from between the corporate cracks of Newport Beach’s Balboa Peninsula. Since it opened in 2008, owner Thomas Carson, a Newport native who grew up working on his father’s commercial fishing boat, has seen Bear Flag blossom. There are those who bemoan lunch lines now, but they inevitably wait it out, patiently eyeing the shoal of fillets being branded by the grill.