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Late-afternoon light filters through the wide windows of SEAD, a restaurant located near Sunrock Hotel and The Cape Hotel in Cabo San Lucas, offering distant views of the Arch. The room features brutalist walls and high ceilings, softened by inviting furniture, warm lighting, and lush plants.
The bar anchors the space, gleaming not with rum or mezcal but with tonics steeped in herbs, roots, and adaptogens, each vessel promising clarity instead of intoxication. Bartenders pour Negroni-style aperitifs that never touch alcohol. What arrives at the table looks familiar — a deep amber drink over ice — but it carries none of the fog that follows a typical Cabo night.
Anna Cruise and Javi Tejeda refer to their creation as a conscious bar. In a region where nightlife is a key component of the economy, completely stepping away from alcohol feels almost rebellious. Yet the timing is precise: as wellness becomes one of the world’s fastest-growing travel sectors, Los Cabos is beginning to attract visitors who want to leave rested, not wrecked.
For now, SEAD is an outlier: one oasis in a desert of tequila shots. But it raises a larger question. Could this be what Cabo’s next decade tastes like?
From Nightlife to Awareness: The Turning Point Behind SEAD
Javi spent most of his professional life behind velvet ropes. He built a career producing events and managing PR for beach clubs and alcohol brands until one night, years ago, the lights blurred.
During an opening party in San Jose del Cabo, he watched the crowd with a strange detachment: the laughter, flirtation, and conviviality started to acquire a visible dark energy as the drinks multiplied. Then his own heart began to race. What followed was a panic attack, and, in his telling, something closer to a revelation. The next morning, he quit alcohol and never went back.
His partner, Anna Cruise, shared the pivot. In 2019, while helping him design a new venture, she began importing and testing nonalcoholic wines and spirits, learning the chemistry of fermentation and the emerging science of “functional” beverages, built around adaptogens and nootropics instead of ethanol.
Together, they developed the idea of a bar that could mirror the rituals of nightlife — complex flavors, social energy, and a sense of occasion — without the hangover. That concept eventually took form as SEAD: Sun, Earth, Atmosphere, Dream. The name suggests balance and reinvention.
Soon after, they were joined by Frank Tesisteco, whose role proved key in grounding the project. He streamlined operations and administration while shaping the venture’s visual identity through his photography and content creation.
Ritual Without Intoxication: Inside the Conscious Bar Movement
A conscious bar doesn’t look that different from a conventional one, until you study what’s missing. The shelves at SEAD are lined with bottles, but the labels read like botanical manifestos: Kin, Ritual, Bravus, Athletic.
Behind each is a specific intention: energy, focus, calm. Some drinks replicate familiar categories, such as gin or mezcal. Others abandon imitation entirely, built instead from ingredients that activate brain receptors without alcohol’s crash. “We can still have a bar that celebrates ritual and connection. It just doesn’t have to rely on intoxication,” Anna says.
The menu avoids the syrupy “mocktail” trap. Most drinks lean towards an herbal, dry, and faintly bitter aesthetic; perhaps more European than tropical. A Negroni analog arrives smoky and restrained; a tonic laced with blue spirulina glows like seawater at dusk. Even the food follows the same principle: plant-forward, gluten-free options beside consciously sourced proteins, cooked in olive oil instead of seed oils.
In SEAD’s world, abstinence is not about moral purity. It’s about agency: choosing what to put in one’s body and why. That idea, straightforward as it sounds, carries disruptive potential in a destination built on cocktails.
A Global Shift Toward Clarity: How Zero-Proof Became Serious Business
Globally, the movement Anna and Javi have joined is no small niche. The zero-proof and functional beverage category has surged from novelty to mainstream in less than a decade.
Market analysts estimate that the global nonalcoholic drinks segment is worth more than US$11 billion, outpacing traditional spirits. Major players, such as Heineken and Corona, have released alcohol-free lines, not as token gestures but as strategic pivots. In trend-leading cities (San Francisco, Berlin, Madrid, Mexico City), sober bars now pepper nightlife districts once synonymous with intoxication.
The appeal is generational as much as functional: younger consumers want clarity, not hangovers, and measure “experience” less in excess than in intention.
Mexico is entering this landscape in its own way. Nonalcoholic beers (like Sans) have gained steady market share. At the same time, producers experiment with local botanicals and distillates (Runneght among them) to reinterpret heritage flavors without ethanol. The country’s wellness-oriented resorts have begun curating menus with low or no alcohol, pairing them with spa programs and plant-based cuisine.
Los Cabos sits at the intersection of this global shift. It’s young enough to reinvent its nightlife, and established enough to lead Mexico’s wellness evolution.
Wellness as the New Luxury: Cabo at the Crossroads of Health and Hospitality
The global wellness economy has become a macro force reshaping travel, hospitality, and even beverage design. Valued at US$6.3 trillion in 2023, it’s expected to approach US$9 trillion by 2028, growing faster than global GDP.
Wellness is no longer a weekend retreat or a massage at check-in; it’s an entire value system that treats food, drink, sleep, and mental clarity as investments in one’s overall well-being. For Cabo, long marketed through nightlife and luxury escapism, that shift poses both a challenge and an opening. The same coastline that once sold sunset margaritas can now sell magnesium mocktails and ocean-sound meditations. Its proximity to California, one of the world’s wellness epicenters, makes the transition plausible, even inevitable.
Beverages have become part of this logic. Adaptogenic tonics, nootropic elixirs, and zero-proof cocktails align with what McKinsey calls “functional indulgence,” experiences that feel luxurious yet restorative. A glass at SEAD fits that brief. It looks like a cocktail; still, it performs like a supplement, stimulating neurotransmitters rather than dulling them.
In that sense, SEAD is providing performance and awareness, the same currencies that drive the wellness economy itself. And suppose wellness has become the language of modern luxury. In that case, Los Cabos’s hospitality sector may soon need to learn to speak it fluently.
Hospitality, Reimagined: SEAD as a Sanctuary of Presence
SEAD is less a restaurant than a philosophy rendered in space. Every detail serves the same idea: balance, inclusivity, and calm. Each dish that uses animal protein has a vegan twin; every sourdough has a gluten-free counterpart. The kitchen avoids seed oils and refined sugars, favoring olive oil and local produce. Even the lighting and scent are deliberate, tuned to what Javi calls “a nervous system at rest.”
They’ve begun hosting small weddings and private dinners, reframing celebration as conscious joy — festive yet clear-minded. If Cabo once exported spectacle, SEAD imports stillness: hospitality stripped to its essence, people gathering around good food and presence.
A Luminous Outlier, or a Glimpse of Cabo’s Future?
At dusk, SEAD glows in a shade of amber, and the mood is lucid, almost crystalline. What Anna and Javi have built may seem niche, but it sketches a credible future. Wellness tourism is rising faster than leisure travel; beverage giants are betting on zero-proof; and Cabo is well-positioned to capitalize on the trend.
Most visitors will still order traditional margaritas. Yet movements begin quietly, with those who believe luxury can mean clarity and community can thrive without intoxication. For now, SEAD remains a bright exception: a glimpse of a wider Cabo that could come into existence five or ten years from now.