There are two types of restaurants located on the beach :

1. Restaurants where you sit on the beach with your feet in the sand that are perfect for snacking while wearing your bathing suit, and usually offer a variety of familiar dishes {hamburgers & fries, schnitzels, watermelon and Bulgarian cheese} which are generally mediocre {and lower} quality.

2. Restaurants on the beach that overlook the sea shore, but are at an elevated position that makes you enjoy the sea air and freedom in style – without the annoying part of cleaning the sand from your body before going into the car and house.

There’s no doubt that these are two completely different types of restaurants, each one fills a different need of leisure, but they have one thing in common – they are both usually very pricey compared to other restaurants.

What can you do, there’s a price to pay for a location with an amazing view – and these costs usually come out of the consumers’ pockets.

Honestly, I don’t eat in these restaurants often.

Usually, when I look for good and high-quality food I get to urban Chef restaurants, where I know that a big part of the high pricing is a result of the high-quality raw materials, and not the view {although most of these places are in Tel Aviv, which automatically makes the dishes more expensive…}.

Not long ago, my friend told me about the restaurant Yam 7, located on the beach in Herzliya.

She said that this restaurant is perfect for me – an elegant restaurant with great food, cocktails and an amazing view of the bright turquoise sea.

When Daniel and I get to the center of the country, we usually don’t leave the borders of Tel Aviv when it comes to culinary choices, but we decided to bend our rules a bit and check out this recommendation.

The restaurant Yam 7 is in a weird location, which we probably would have never reached without that recommendation.

It’s underneath the Dan Acadia Hotel and next to the water line, and in order to get there you have to walk on unmarked and quite rundown paths, which made us think twice about our decision to go to this specific restaurant.

After passing the obstacles, everything looks much better.

The restaurant is on the mountainside and is completely covered with windows towards the shore, so you can enjoy the wonderful view from any place in the restaurant. The restaurant’s design is very elegant and combines a beach and nature vibe along with aesthetics that are easy on the eyes.

It’s just a shame that the air conditioner there can’t overcome the heat passing through the glass, which made us move twice until we found a table that was cool right under the air conditioner.

We started off with two cocktails – Spicy Mango {fresh mango, vodka and touches of hot peppers}, which was tasty but nothing really special, and the Misopy Cocktail {white chocolate, passion fruit, Campari and Bacardi}, which was much more interesting {45 NIS each}.

They were a bit expensive in my opinion, especially since they weren’t super special cocktails – like the ones served in Imperial, and are priced roughly the same.

From the appetizers we ordered the homemade bread {17 NIS}, which was served hot, straight out of the oven with a tomato and garlic confit spread, the Thai seafood salad {62 NIS}, Indian falafel {42 NIS} and the fish carpaccio {62 NIS} from the daily specials.

The Thai salad reminded us of the Sum-Tam Thai salad, but also included less traditional ingredients like cellophane noodles, cucumbers, sprouts, red onions and celery.

The addition of poached shrimps and calamari, which probably made this dish more expensive, wasn’t really felt and was unnecessary. The dish was very tasty and refreshing, but we both thought it was too expensive for an appetizer {even compared to appetizers at Chef restaurants}.

The Indian Falafel was wonderful! It’s a very special dish that’s a successful combination of Indian Samosa {potatoes, hummus, peas and Indian spices} and of the known and beloved Falafel. The mango chutney sauce that came with the “Falafels” was tasty, but a bit too sweet in my opinion.

The Fish Carpaccio was tasty and very fresh, and was made from the Ben Gurion fish which has a very mild flavour, shatta peppers, cherry tomatoes, white and black beans and a pepper spread with anchovies and mint leaves. An excellent dish to start the meal.

For the main course, we decided to order two fish dishes – after all, the restaurant is right by the ocean, so it seemed like the right call 😉

Daniel ordered the sea bream fillet with green vegetables {119 NIS} and I ordered the meagre fillet with tomato risotto {132 NIS}.

Daniel’s dish was fresh and light – the grilled sea bream on a pile of grilled vegetables {zucchini, mushrooms and tomato} with fish sauce, lemon and chili which were all well made.

Nothing special – a good and classic dish.

My dish was a lot heavier – the meagre filler was a lot fleshier and the Arborio risotto on the side with the tomato coulis was very rich with butter and parmesan.

The portion was relatively big, and could easily be enough for two people – and that’s a good thing since it was overpriced for a main course, too, in my opinion.

For dessert we ordered the Paris-Brest {46 NIS}, mainly because it was first on the dessert menu and Daniel believes that the dessert at the top of the menu is always the restaurant’s best dessert.

They were eclairs filled with mascarpone cream and with wild berries – sounds like a simple and banal dessert, but I decided to go with Daniel’s gut feeling.

To my surprise, we got a huge and crisp éclair full with a very tasty cream that went along perfectly with the sour wild-berries {even though they were the frozen kind}, and I’ll even dare say that this dessert isn’t less delicious than similar desserts we had in all kinds of European cafés.

The bottom line is that it’s a very good restaurant.

You won’t find dishes that will challenge your taste buds, but most dishes were prepared precisely. The prices were a bit high in my opinion, but like I already said, there’s a price to pay for a view and the view was absolutely amazing.

What do you think about restaurants on the beach? Are the pricey menus worth the view? Or would you rather pass on it and pay less or, alternatively, enjoy more interesting food?

If you enjoyed this post, share it on Facebook and save it on Pinterest

• We were invited to this restaurant in order to review their new menu.