→ July 8, 2016
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San Diego dining guide.

I’ve never lived in San Diego – I’d certainly love to try – so this isn’t a formal, comprehensive guide like the one I put together each year for Phoenix. Instead, here’s a list of my favorite spots around the city, several of which are on my to-do list for this weekend’s trip there for the Futures Game.

Juniper & Ivy, Little Italy. Top Chef winner Richard Blais opened this spot dedicated to the best ingredients California has to offer, a little over two years ago, and it repeatedly comes out on top of polls of the best restaurants in San Diego. It’s one of my favorite places to eat in the country, and while the menu keeps changing by the season, two perennials on the menu I always recommend are the yellowtail crudo and the Yodel dessert. There’s also currently a BBQ carrot dish on the menu that is one of the best vegetable dishes I’ve ever eaten – smoky grilled carrots served over a jalapeño chimichurri with peanuts and pickled apricot puree. They also have a great craft cocktail menu. Full review.

The Crack Shack, Little Italy. Right next door is Blais & company’s new spot, dedicated to all things fried chicken, three meals a day. J&I exec chef Jon Sloan often wanders over here as well. They have the usuals, like a bucket of fried chicken and various fried chicken sandwiches, but also fried chicken oysters, chicken lollipops, fries cooked in chicken fat, and more. It also has a full bar. Full review.

Bird Rock Coffee, Little Italy. Across the street is the best coffee roaster in San Diego, in a great location to hang out for a little while and enjoy the San Diego weather. Excellent espresso as well as pour-overs via V60 and Chemex.

Searsucker, Gaslamp. Top Chef contestant Brian Malarkey’s flagship has a similar mission to Juniper & Ivy’s, with a rotating menu that includes a lot of smaller plates. He has a brand new place, Herb & Wood, that appears to have just opened in Little Italy.

Cucina Urbana, Bankers Hill. Rustic, earthy Italian food, starring pastas and breads made from scratch. The polenta board is a highlight if you go with a group. Review in this post.

The Mission, multiple locations. Breakfast and lunch with a hipster vibe; I love their egg dishes, not so much their pancake options. Whatever you get, make sure you try their breakfast potatoes.

Prep Kitchen, Little Italy. Seasonally driven cuisine, much of it locally sourced, offering brunch as well as lunch and dinner. I’d put it behind J&I and Searsucker, but Prep Kitchen is a bit less haute-cuisine and more accessible if that’s your jam. Review in this post.

Bottega Americano, near Petco. An Italian market, a sandwich shop, a sit-down place for a casual lunch. Review in this post.

I don’t know how much I’ll explore this trip, since I have a few work commitments and a few favorites I want to visit again, but I’m intrigued by Herb & Wood, Carnitas Snack Shack (on Harbor Drive at the west end of downtown), and Solunto Bakery & Deli (Little Italy, the place to be).

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→ May 24, 2016
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The Crack Shack (San Diego).

I have a new top 25 pro prospects ranking up for Insiders.

When in San Diego briefly last week, I had the pleasure of visiting The Crack Shack, the new fried chicken-all-the-damn-time place from the same creative team (including Top Chef winner Richard Blais) behind its Little Italy neighbor, Juniper & Ivy, right before I popped in to see potential #1 overall pick Mickey Moniak. The Crack Shack’s executive chef, Jonathan Sloan, is also a huge baseball fan, so he had the kitchen send out a few extra items for me and a friend to sample while we were there, so (1) I tried a LOT of food and (2) bear in mind some of this was compliments of the chef.

The short version is that if you like fried chicken – and I love me some fried chicken – you are going to love the Crack Shack, because it’s fried chicken every which way and it’s all really good. Chef Sloan described their sourcing – they’re getting some of the best, freshest chickens available, locally raised Jidori chickens, a trademarked breed known for better flavor than your typical mass-market bird. The chickens are also raised cage-free and, most importantly in my view, without antibiotics. Just about everything else on the menu is sourced locally too, as at Juniper & Ivy, but the chicken is at the center of almost every dish.

My “main” lunch – the item I actually ordered – was the Señor Croque, a sandwich of fried chicken, bacon, a fried egg, miso-maple butter, cheddar (I left this off because I despise it), all served on a fresh brioche bun. I would fly across the country to eat this again. It has ruined nearly all other fried chicken sandwiches for me. (The exception would be the Fried Chicken Sando at Tempe’s nocawich, also found at the Phoenix airport.) The chicken is breaded, dipped in buttermilk, breaded again, and chilled so the breading really sets on the meat (and doesn’t fall off), and there’s something so decadent about the whole thing that makes it hard to believe you’re eating a $12 sandwich and not, say, a $30 steak.

Of everything else that came out, my favorite item was the chicken oysters – the oyster is a small piece of dark meat attached to the tip of the thigh that is the most tender meat on the entire bird – which are pickle-brined and fried, served with meyer lemon and mustard tartar sauce. The term oyster refers to its shape more than its texture; again I’d compare this to a good steak or any highly fatty meat in texture, because it’s almost melt-in-your-mouth soft, which gives a good contrast to the crispy crust. You absolutely need that acidity from the lemon too.

The chicken ‘lollipops’ are at the opposite end of the spectrum if you want something you can really dig your teeth into – drumsticks slightly reshaped into lollipops, and they’re subtly spicy, seasoned with togarashi, a Japanese spice mix of chili pepper, seaweed, sesame seeds, and sometimes orange peel and ginger too. We also tried some of their straight-up fried chicken, which had outstanding texture inside and out with a custom spice blend in the breading, but we ended up passing some of that over for the oysters and the lollipops.. We also sampled the Mexican poutine, a big mess of fries fried in chicken fat (schmaltz), topped with pollo asado and jalapeño cheese wiz. You can also get the fries plain, and they’re as crispy as you’d expect (frying in saturated fats makes a huge difference in flavor and texture).

The Crack Shack has a few non-fried items and a few non-chicken items, as well as a breakfast sandwich of chicken sausage, egg, and smoked cheddar on an English muffin. They offer six side sauces for any of your items, and you can order either of two slaws or two salad options (I got the baby kale Caesar, which was a necessary plant item in the middle of the sea of meat). They also have biscuits served with miso-maple butter, which I’m sure I’d adore but did not dare order because that might have ended my day then and there.

The Crack Shack has a full bar and its own cocktail menu, although since it was the middle of the day I did not partake. Without booze, you could get a substantial meal here for about $20 that is more than reasonable for ingredients of this quality, which are on par with what you’d get at very high-end restaurants but available in fried form. I drove back by the restaurant that evening, a Tuesday, and there was a line out the door around 7 pm, so plan your trip accordingly.

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I’ve written about Juniper & Ivy at length and briefly here, so I won’t go overboard in writing about my light dinner there, which comprised a lot of plants and no meat other than the raw yellowtail in one item. But I do want to mention the BBQ carrots, which might be the best vegan dish I have ever eaten in my life. They’re grilled, even lightly charred, skin-on, and served over chimichurri with smoked peanuts and dollops of pickled apricot puree. I’ve never had anything like this – it was a giant bomb of sweet and sour – and it’s possible I’ve got some apricots pickling in my fridge right now to recreate this. J&I’s menu changes often but if you get there soon I can’t recommend this dish highly enough.

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→ December 19, 2014
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San Diego eats, 2014 edition.

I have been writing the things for Insiders, on the Justin Upton trade and the Derek Norris/Jesse Hahn trade just in the last 24 hours.

The best meal in San Diego, our annual big writers’ night out, was at Juniper & Ivy, Richard Blais’ restaurant in Little Italy and one of my favorite restaurants in the country. I arranged the dinner well ahead of time, so we had a prix-fixe menu that included some items (like the amazing mac and cheese with house-made pasta and fontina) that aren’t on the typical menu. The takeoff on the Yodel is a regular item, though, and it’s bonkers … I split one with USA Today football writer Lindsay Jones and it didn’t stand a chance. There was a second dessert, not listed on the menu, that had to be tasted to be believed: blood-orange gelée, frozen yogurt, clementine supremes, lemongrass ice cream, and shards of roasted-citrus ice. I wanted to take that gelée home, but was afraid I couldn’t get a pound of it through airport security. The staff went all-out for us, clearly, and the service was exemplary. I reviewed J&I in full in March, and have now eaten there three more times, never once walking away less than fully satisfied.

If you aren't jealous, you should be. @juniperandivy @richardblais

A photo posted by Keith Law (@mrkeithlaw) on

Bird Rock Coffee Roasters, based in La Jolla, opened a second location a month ago, right across the street from Juniper & Ivy, and it’s now the best coffee option in the city, a small-batch roaster that is also the only direct-trade outlet in San Diego. I had an espresso macchiatto there each morning, but they also offer pour-overs and Chemex brews as well.

My other dinners in San Diego came at Cucina Urbana and Prep Kitchen, both strong, with Cucina Urbana my preference among the two. A new, upscale but reasonably-priced Italian trattoria, Cucina Urbana features a deep menu of pizzas, house-made pastas, and a slew of small plates, including the daily “polenta board,” assembled tableside with a ragù spread on top of a thick smear of creamy polenta on a wooden board. My pasta dish, bucatini with tomato, guanciale, cabbage, chili pepper, and a poached egg, was a great southern-Italian comfort-food dish, satisfying in texture (al dente, with the added bite from the jowl meat and the cabbage; smooth from the egg mixing with the tomato) and flavor (obvious), with just the right portion size between the starter polenta and the fact that I wasn’t leaving without trying the chocolate donuts with hazelnut filling, which didn’t even need the passion fruit dipping sauce except maybe to cool them off enough to eat them.

Prep Kitchen was a little more hit-or-miss. The yellowtail crudo was actually a slight disappointment, with a not-subtle fishy note marking the tuna as less than perfectly fresh, and the chocolate “budino” wasn’t a budino (an Italian custard, often thickened with cornstarch as well as eggs) but a warm chocolate cake served in a mason jar, but the pumpkin bread pudding had great balance of sweet and savory flavors without turning to mush, and the porchetta (which appears to be off the menu already) was superb if slightly fattier than I’ve had elsewhere.

I grabbed lunch twice at Bottega Americano, located just east of Petco Park in a cute space that combines a little Italian market and deli counter with a sit-down restaurant. Despite the grammatical error in its name, the restaurant serves excellent sandwiches and salads and makes a legit French macaron as well. The speck (smoked prosciutto), fuyu persimmon, shallot marmellata, arugula, and goat cheese sandwich on olive bread was my favorite for flavor, although I found it tough to tear through the speck, which they need to slice more thinly before serving; the olive-oil poached tuna sandwich with yellow pepper aioli and farmer’s egg (I didn’t know farmers laid eggs, but perhaps that’s a new mutation) was much easier to eat but needed more acidity somewhere in the mix. That was a better option than Kebab House, which is outstanding if you’re looking for cheap eats near the ballpark but was much heavier and I think a little overloaded with garlic.

I am in love with the Mission for breakfast in San Diego, and ended up eating there three mornings out of four; the one variation was at the Fig Tree Cafe in Hillcrest, where I had a disappointing salmon benedict with a potato/arugula side dish that couldn’t live up to the Mission’s amazing rosemary potatoes. I know the Tractor Room gets raves for its brunches, but I wasn’t there any morning when it was open for breakfast and have to save that for a future trip.

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→ March 17, 2014
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Juniper & Ivy.

I was fortunate enough to have time on Saturday to visit Juniper and Ivy, the new San Diego restaurant from Top Chef (and onetime podcast guest) Richard Blais. I can report that Chef Blais’ hair is even crazier in person. Also, the food was spectacular – different from what I had at the Spence in Atlanta, but with a similarly experimental bent, very much what you’d expect at a place with Blais’ name on it.

(Full disclosure – Richard was kind enough to send out a number of dishes for me to sample, so portions of my meal were complimentary. As always, this doesn’t affect what I’m telling you about the meal or its quality, but I’d prefer you know this information up front.)

The menu is extensive, longer (I think) than the Spence’s, divided into a number of distinct sections: Snacks, Raw items, Pastas, Toasts, Small plates (including salads and vegetable dishes), Entrees, and Desserts. I didn’t really need to capitalize all of those, now that I think about it. The restaurant opens at 4 pm for cocktails and snacks, with the full menu available at 5 pm.

The first item on the Snacks menu is a buttermilk biscuit served with smoked butter. I have never turned down a biscuit, but I think I’m something of a biscuit snob – I like them tender, not flaky; I think buttermilk is overrated; and I demand a browned crust. J&I’s biscuit hit all three points. The texture was more like that of a warm cake than a traditional biscuit, with no layers like you’d expect from biscuits that came out of a can. The buttermilk flavor was subtle – it reminded me of a tangy Southern buttermilk biscuit, without smacking me in the face with that soured milk flavor. And the top was crispy, with the salty smoked butter drizzled over the top. The presentation is slick as well, coming out under glass, served in a miniature cast-iron pot. Blais’ Chicken and Biscuits should be coming to a strip mall near you, damn it.

From the raw menu, I ordered the one item both Chef Blais and my server, Alexis, recommended – Dungeness crab with meyer lemon curd and dill pollen, served on a nasturtium leaf that you roll up to eat the crab mixture, almost like you’re stuffing a grape leaf. The peppery leaf was a good offset for the two sweet elements inside of it (crab meat tastes sweet to me, at least); Blais loves lemon curd, which is the star ingredient in the recipe I cook most often from his Try This At Home, lemon curd chicken, and here I would have been happy with a little more curd to crank up the acidity even further.

Chef Blais sent out the hamachi (yellowtail) crudo, served with a tiny panzanella on top that included sliced olives, giant raisins (I’m not sure what kind but they tasted more like dried cherries than grapes), and samphire – glasswort, a wonderfully crunchy, salty vegetable that isn’t used often enough in my opinion – with a jamón vinaigrette. I enjoyed the panzanella, but at the end of the day, a crudo dish lives and dies by the quality of the fish, and this was top-end, beyond fresh, sliced sashimi-style, and if they’d sent the fish out as one plate and the panzanella as another I’d still rave about both because the fish was that good. (The main food item or category I missed while living in Arizona was quality fish; in fact, the only restaurant where I’d order raw fish preparations in the Valley was, appropriately enough, crudo.)

The Toasts menu had three items, two of which included things I prefer not to eat – raw beef and beef heart – so I went with the vegetarian option, charred black grapes with ricotta, hyssop, and ice wine vinegar. (Hyssop is a strongly flavored herb used in a lot of cough medicines as well as in the liquor Chartreuse.) The grapes were skinned but served whole, all on a giant slab of grilled sourdough bread that was coated with a thin layer of ricotta, a flavor combination (grapes and ricotta, which isn’t even really cheese) I wouldn’t have thought of myself – grapes and cheese, yes, but I think of ricotta as a pretty generic food because I grew up only knowing the kind that came in the plastic tub from the supermarket. (So did Blais, who grew up a few towns over from me.) The creaminess of the ricotta helped balance the sweetness and slight acidity of the grapes plus the brighter acidity of the vinegar, and I’m a pretty big fan of grilled bread in all its permutations. I didn’t really notice the hyssop, or anything that reminded me of Chartreuse.

Chef Blais also suggested the green gazpacho, which is poured tableside – a bowl arrives with “early” green grape tomatoes, green almonds (a new item for me), lime caviar, and what I think was coarsely diced honeydew, after which the rich green soup, which is more like a dressing, is poured over the top, tableside. This was a vegetable-lover’s treat, with all of the huge flavors coming from the produce itself, especially the tomatoes. This is the kind of dish I would have hated twenty years ago because it was all vegetables, and ten years ago because it has tart and savory notes, but now I could easily see this as the centerpiece of a vegetarian meal. It is potent, almost aggressive in its vibrancy, like a spring harvest in a bowl.

It wouldn’t be a meal at a Richard Blais restaurant without at least one weird plate. “Abologna” is pretty much what it sounds like: mortadella, a forcemeat that originated in Bologna, that includes abalone in place of some of the pork fat. J&I’s abologna also includes pistachios and is served in slices with drops of passion fruit-Dijon mustard. Once I got over my initial reaction – the abologna looks like olive loaf, a form of bologna popular in New York that I have always found repulsive – I was shocked by the texture of the abologna, softer than the American bologna, more like an airier paté than a typical forcemeat. The fish added a sea-air flavor but there was nothing fishy about the taste; I think the conflict between the pork and sea flavors is the dish’s defining characteristic. It lacked a contrasting textural element, however; anything this soft needs something hard or crunchy to offset it, even just some grilled bread, and the pistachios weren’t able to fill that need.

That brings me to the best item of the night, the prawn-and-pork rigatoni, which is just what it sounds like. It’s a classic New York Italian red sauce with meat, but this time also uses bits of prawns, which add more texture than anything else. The result is a small plate (a primo portion) of pasta that feels more satisfying because the three main components, the pasta, the pork, and the shrimp, all have some tooth to them. You could split one of those biscuits in half and cover it with this sauce and probably get a line halfway to Escondido. You could also put a few New York Italian grandmothers to shame with this sauce. I’ll even forgive Blais calling it “gravy.” It’s sauce. Salsa pomodoro. Save your gravy for Thanksgiving.

Dessert was one of the treats sent from the kitchen, but it was actually the dessert option I would have chosen of the four on the menu: coconut panna cotta with passion fruit, crushed almond macaron, and jasmine rice sorbet. The sorbet was the most interesting and peculiar sorbets I’ve ever tasted; sorbet is usually kind of a letdown, all ice and no mouthfeel, but this one had the essence of the rice so that one taste brought to mind all the flavors and experiences of sitting in a Thai restaurant, then reinforced by the coconut flavor in the perfect panna cotta. It was also the most visually stunning dish of the night.

Juniper & Ivy also has an exclusive cocktail menu, including a gin drink similar to the Sailor’s Crutch that I liked so much at the Spence. I went for the rum drink this time, however, called Twice on the Vine – rum, grape-tarragon gastrique, lime, and fino (sherry) finish. Aside from the garish magenta color, it was solid, with about the right sweet/sour/strong balance for a rum drink, although the rum itself was a little lost under all of the finishing flavors. (The classic ratio for rum cocktails, especially the one best known as planter’s punch, is encoded in rhyme: One of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak. Flip the sweet and sour and you lose the rhyme but get a less cloying result.)

The prices are very reasonable for this kind of cuisine, especially given the superlative quality of the inputs, comparable to the price point of the nearby Searsucker (another great place to eat in downtown San Diego) but providing better presentation and more creativity to the dishes. It’s a little further off the beaten path, however, so it won’t likely get the walk-in traffic that Searsucker could get if it weren’t already so well-regarded. If you’re in San Diego, Juniper & Ivy is well worth the ride over to Little Italy whether it’s for a meal or just drinks and a biscuit.

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→ August 20, 2013
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Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Diego eats.

I had a column up from earlier today looking at which organizations are deepest at each position; there’s a lot of Pittsburgh on there. This week’s Behind the Dish podcast features my conversation with Padres VP and former Mets scouting director Chad McDonald.

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I went to Salt’s Cure with a friend during the Area Code Games, just on the recommendation of a reader who thought it was my kind of place – a spot-on suggestion, since restaurants with small menus that change daily are very much up my alley. We started with their cheese plate, featuring a trio of California cheeses, one each from cow’s, goat’s, and sheep’s milks, as well as a little apricot jam and some grilled bread. As expected, I liked the goat and sheep options but didn’t love the cow’s – a function of my palate, not the cheeses themselves. I intended to eat something light that night but couldn’t pass up the braised pork shoulder over creamy grits with caramelized onions, a meal that photographed poorly but that was perfectly cooked, with the (cheese-less) grits a good balance to the fatty/salty meat and the sweet/tart flavors from the onions. We also ordered the very simple raw kale salad on the side, which was only the second-best kale salad I had that week. My friend got the lamb sirloin with romanos beans and romesco, all of which he raved about – I didn’t try it as I’m just not a huge fan of lamb. For dessert, we had these multi-layered chocolate custards that were rich and dark and not too sweet … I can’t even remember what the other layers were. This was a huge find, just a fantastic locally-focused place with amazing food.

My second swing to Umami burger, first since February of 2010, was just as good as the last time out – their original burger is an umami-bomb, and now they offer ice cream sandwiches that are also pretty spectacular.

I discovered Caulfield’s in January when Bobby Flay tweeted that it was the “best new restaurant in LA,” which seemed like sufficient reason to check the place out. It’s located in the Thompson Hotel in Beverly Hills, but isn’t your ordinary hotel restaurant, with an inventive, seasonally-informed menu that has lots of lighter dishes that don’t sacrifice flavor. I ordered a starter, the albacore tuna and sockeye salmon poke, and a salad, a kale salad with almonds, hard-boiled eggs, bacon, and anchovy dressing. The poke was solid, although the wasabi-ginger-soy dressing overwhelmed the fish a little bit, especially the albacore tuna which doesn’t have a pronounced enough flavor to survive that much salt and heat. The salad, however, was among the best I’ve ever had: thin ribbons of kale perfectly dressed with an umami-heavy dressing (think Caesar dressing, but without the parmiggiano-reggiano), with added texture from the almonds and the smoky boost from the bacon. It was absolutely perfect, and that’s before I consider its high content of antioxidants and omega-3 fatty acids.

Over in Long Beach, there isn’t a whole lot to recommend. I went to Koi in Seal Beach for sushi, as I do every year, although I admit it’s a little weird to park across from the hair salon where eight people were killed in 2011. The fish at Koi is outstanding, with a specials board always up showing what’s fresh, and many of the nigiri options come with the sauce of the sushi-ya’s choice.

As for new spots, Lord Windsor Roasters is a new-ish third-wave (meaning lighter roasts) coffee roastery and cafe on 3rd, about ten minutes’ drive from Blair Field. They roast their coffees in the back of the store, with three options available for pourovers each day I was there, as well as their own blend for espresso drinks. The pourover was a little weak by my standards, without much body, as if the grind was a little too coarse, but I loved their espresso for flavor and texture.

I can also recommend Thiptara, a Thai restaurant on PCH right by Blair Field, which has the standard Thai dishes but also has some more regional items, like the yellow pumpkin curry with chicken that I had as an entree. The sauce includes a roasted chili paste as well as the spices you’d expect to find in Thai yellow curry, with a coconut milk base, but it’s the chunks of al dente pumpkin that set the dish apart, bringing sweetness to balance the salty and spicy notes of the sauce. I also had the green papaya salad, with carrot, cherry tomatoes, and string beans in a garlic-chili-lime dressing, which was just mildly spicy. The salad had great color and crunch and everything was obviously very fresh.

The trip to San Diego was a little less successful. Breakfast at the Mission was amazing, as always. Cafe 222 was a mess, the second time I’ve been disappointed there – and thus the last. I drove up the coast a little to visit Bird Rock coffee roasters, where I got a decent espresso (although too small to be the double I’d ordered) and was shocked to see an option for Chemex coffee using geisha beans (which are the world’s most expensive) that cost $9 for a cup.

Dinner at Craft and Commerce was a mixed bag. I had a good salad to start, with citrus supremes, avocado, and sliced jicama, although the fried goat cheese came in ping pong ball-sized chunks that were at room temperature when that should be served warm. They were also out of their signature dessert item, warm beignets with chocolate-bourbon sauce, even though it’s not a yeast dough and could be made to order if need be.

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→ August 19, 2011
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Long Beach, Manhattan Beach, & San Diego eats.

MB Post in Manhattan Beach is set in a former post office and, despite a trying-way-too-hard hipster vibe, the food is excellent. It’s a tapas bar in practice, although they use the tired “little plates” euphemism, bringing together Spanish, American, and southeast Asian influences; every dish we ordered was enough for two to share but would have been stretched for three, except for the Brussels sprouts (with hazelnuts and Emmentaler) which was roughly a week’s supply. The first winner was the warm pretzel with hot horseradish-mustard, a sinus-clearing (that’s good) dipping sauce that probably should be served at every decent burger joint in the country. The confit pork belly with Swiss chard and corn agnolotti, one of the nightly specials, was soft enough to spread on toast and very generous with the chard, although I found the agnolotti almost dessert-sweet. The menu includes a number of vegetable dishes that highlight the star ingredient (as opposed to just satisfying the demand for vegetarian options), like the marinated cucumbers with peppadew peppers and crunchy roasted and fried chickpeas and the aforementioned Brussels sprouts – and the giant “fee fi fo fum fries” are stellar, brown and salty and not greasy with a mayo-based dipping sauce. The menu changes daily, though, so the vietnamese caramel pork or the yellowtail sashimi with yuzu may not be there if you head over. It’s one of the best and most fun upscale meals I’ve had in a while.

Over in Long Beach, I tried the tiny, family-run (I presume) Korean place Sura, sparsely furnished but featuring the dish I was after, bibimbap. (They also have short ribs and bulgogi, which are the only other authentic Korean dishes I really know.) The bibimbap was good by my ignorant standards, with fresh ingredients and the egg brought tableside for me to crack directly into the hot bowl. Service was a little weird – the meal came with four small plates of “sides,” mostly pickled and/or fermented vegetables, which I tried, but since I hadn’t cleared them my server said, “oh, you haven’t even touched them.” I guess I missed the pre-meal contract obligating me to clean every plate. But I’d go again for the food.

Moving on to San Diego … I finally got to Neighborhood, which many of you recommended last year when I was taking the family there while I covered a Padres series. I love their philosophy, but wasn’t sold on the execution. The Local Animal sandwich is a good microcosm of the problem – what’s not to like about two kinds of pork (sausage and braised pork, presumably shoulder), caramelized onions, and gruyere on a crusty roll? Well, the fact that it’s not a sandwich, for one, but has the remaining ingredients, including a mustard/molasses glaze, sitting on top of bread that can’t be picked up or closed. And the piling of flavors just left the whole thing muddled, sweet and slightly tangy but with the pork, which should be the star of the show, left somewhere in the second or third row. The fries, which come with garlic mayo (they claim to have no ketchup on the premises), were extremely hot and so greasy that a package of Viagra wouldn’t have helped them. Neighborhood does have an outstanding beer selection; I went with the Alesmith Speedway Stout, which at 12% had its intended effect rather quickly.

I also met up with a couple of readers for lunch at the Burger Lounge location in Hillcrest on University. It’s a solid-average burger, made from high-quality local beef (their site claims it’s all from one farm where cows are grass-fed and are “well treated”), but without many choices for toppings (just two cheeses, white cheddar, which I don’t like, and American, which is just nauseous). The fries were solid-average as well, crispier a garlic-herb mixture sprinkled on top. And they have ketchup. I do actually like ketchup on my fries, crazy American that I am.

I can still vouch for breakfast at The Mission in North Park – rosemary bread, rosemary potatoes, perfectly cooked eggs, and a great atmosphere – but a return visit to the downtown Cafe 222 after many years was disappointing – their pumpkin pie waffle was just a mushy mess and tasted of stale spices, not pumpkin or pumpkin pie.

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→ October 4, 2010
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San Diego eats + ESPN linkage.

My hypothetical awards ballots are up, and some of the comments are priceless – mostly whining about bias or calling me an idiot. You can also see my briefer-than-normal scouting reports on the eight playoff teams:

Minnesota Twins
New York Yankees
Tampa Bay Rays
Texas Rangers

Atlanta Braves
Cincinnati Reds
Philadelphia Phillies
San Francisco Giants

I hope to resume regular dish blogging now that those playoff previews are done. Thanks for bearing with me.

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We didn’t make it to my old favorite, Cafe 222 (waffle heaven), but did get to The Mission, recommended by readers and by a scout as well. It pushes a hipster vibe but on Sunday morning the place was full of families with young kids, so all the talk about “revolution” seems a little silly. All of the food was fresh with bright colors, and the egg dishes come with two slices of light, airy rosemary bread that I’d probably buy by the loaf if I lived in San Diego. The blueberry-cornmeal pancakes were a disappointment, as they’re not cornmeal pancakes but regular pancakes with some coarsely-ground cornmeal thrown on the griddle – dry – with pancake batter poured over them, resulting in an unpleasant, pebble-like texture that ruined what was otherwise a soft, fluffy pancake. The meats, both bacon and chicken apple sausage, were better, while the rosemary potatoes were hit or miss, with some pieces perfect but others overcooked. I’d like to try them again while ordering differently.

Our other breakfast spot was Brian’s 24 on 6th, offering huge portions of solid-average food (eggs, pancakes, french toast) but nothing spectacular. It had the advantages of being fairly quick and walkable from our hotel, but I’d rate it behind the Mission and Cafe 222.

Ortega’s Mexican Bistro in Hillcrest was the huge dinner find, authentic homestyle Mexican cooking in a more upscale setting. The restaurant is in what looks like a converted two-story house with funky internal architectural features and lots of distressed wood, but really, who cares about that when you have someone in the back making fresh flour tortillas by hand? I might fly to San Diego once a week to grab a bag of those things – the texture and fullness was amazing, and if you told me they used lard in there I’d believe you. The roasted-tomato salsa that came with the chips before the meal was also outstanding, thick but not unwieldy and not in the least watery, and they make a very solid jamaica agua fresca. The sopecitos appetizer was rich, a little too dense for me (that’s a comment on my tastes, though, as “dense” may be authentic for all I know), and didn’t need the sour crema laced over the tops. Their carnitas were superbly done, no hint of dryness with lots of crispy edges, and with the sides of rice and charro beans it was more than either of us could finish. That whole Hillcrest neighborhood looks like the kind of place I’d love to live.

We had one dinner in the Gaslamp district – I got a lot of suggestions from readers, but many weren’t appropriate for dinner with a four-year-old – so we called an audible and went to Trattoria la Bocca, offering well-made if overpriced Italian food. My wife’s mushroom risotto was perfectly cooked, just al dente with a creamy (texture, not flavor) sauce that didn’t overwhelm the rice or mushrooms; I had a sauteed veal dish with artichokes, sun-dried tomatoes, and zucchini where every element was cooked properly but the dish as a whole had too many competing flavors. For what it’s worth, of those reader recommendations, the most intriguing one was a bar-restaurant called Neighborhood, which will be at the top of my list of places to hit the next time I’m in San Diego by myself.

Right near Petco is a small boutique shop called Cupcake Heaven that sells … well, you know. We tried several kinds over the 48-odd hours we were there, with the chocolate-chocolate and peanut butter ones my favorites; the peanut butter frosting had a texture somewhere between mousse and buttercream, and there were peanuts in the cupcake itself, resulting in something like the lightest peanut butter cookie you’ve ever had. The pumpkin cupcake’s frosting was very gingery, fine for me but lost on my ginger-hating wife. And the cupcakes were still fairly moist the second day.

I only tried one concession stand at Petco, Randy Jones’ BBQ, which was nothing more than standard, boring ballpark Q drowned in a sticky-sweet sauce. I hope there’s something better there for Padre fans.

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→ August 13, 2007
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San Diego eats.

First dinner was at Sadaf, a Persian restaurant in the Gaslamp area. The food was good, but it wasn’t quite the homey, downscale ethnic place I thought I was entering. Like every restaurant I saw in the area, it was upscale, with upscale prices to boot, not really justified by the food. I went with chicken barg, a marinated, grilled chicken dish served with a huge mound of rice. The chicken was moist and mostly flavorful – again with the lack of salt; I’m starting to think it’s a state law out here – and the rice was delicious. But $20 for that? I don’t see it.

Café 222 on Island Street does waffles, and it does them really well. They had several options on the menu – I remember the “basic” waffle, a cornmeal waffle, and a pumpkin waffle that was listed in ALL CAPS, so it must be good – but since I’m a waffle purist at heart, I went for the basic. It was outstanding – crispy exterior, light and airy inside, a classic Belgian-style waffle in a world that thinks that the crap they give you at make-your-own waffle stands in hotel lobbies is good. The basic waffle was $6.25; that plus a big side of sausage patties (generic) and tea ran $13 before tip.

For Friday dinner, I headed up to Pacific Beach to try the lobster tacos at World Famous. I sat at the bar, which I guess is the only way you can get the lobster tacos, and I ordered one fish taco, one shrimp taco, and one lobster taco. On the whole, they were quite good; the fish/shellfish was perfectly fried, not greasy and not overcooked, and the tortillas (flour) didn’t taste like they’d just been thawed. The shrimp taco was easily the best of the three. However, there was one huge problem: All three had cheese, probably cheddar, melted-glued to the tortillas. This is just not right. First of all, outside of a small number of Italian varieties, I despise cow’s-milk cheese. It tastes like spoiled milk, which, actually, is what cheese is. Cheddar is very high on my list of retch-inducing styles of cheese. But the bigger issue here is that even if I liked that disgusting goop, cheese should never be served with shellfish. The flavor of shellfish is far too delicate to stand up to the tangy/rancid taste of cheese. It didn’t even occur to me that they would put cheese on these tacos, so I didn’t ask them to leave it off and ended up doing the scraping trick, watching the cheese as it took some of the tortillas with it. Anyway, World Famous also gets points for serving Thomas Kemper root beer, which made up for the fact that all four beers they had on tap were pale and therefore not worth drinking.

Gelateria Frizzante is tucked away on Island Ave in the 400s; I only discovered it when I walked to a bank over that way before breakfast. I went for a small cup of chocolate gelato, which looked dark in the tray, but the flavor was very disappointing – mild and thin, like milk chocolate, failing to take advantage of the way gelato can deliver very intense flavors due to its low air content (called “overrun”) and melting speed. The texture, on the other hand, was very good, and they do make all their gelato on the premises.

I wasn’t going to give up that easily, so I tossed the last half of that gelato and walked six more blocks to Mondo Gelato on 10th, just south of Island. They actually had a flavor called “dark chocolate” that delivered – ultra-smooth, rich, cocoa flavor, like a cocoa pudding or custard, with that trademark bitterness of good cocoa. I split the cup between dark chocolate and coffee, but the texture of the coffee was grainy; I think they might have flavored it by using double-strength coffee or espresso, which introduces too much water into the mix. (The best way to make coffee ice cream or gelato is to toast a handful or two of coffee beans just until they glisten, then to simmer them in the milk and/or cream to let the liquid absorb the flavors without requiring the addition of more water. But I digress.) Mondo also had a selection of non-traditional flavors like green tea and Hilo malt (!), and about a half-dozen soy gelatos.

Saturday’s breakfast was at Richard Walker’s Pancake House, a pretty popular joint that already had a line by 8:15 am that morning. I’m still trying to figure out why. I ordered banana pancakes, which, it turns out, were make with a sourdough batter – and that’s all I tasted. “Sour” is not a desirable quality in pancakes, and drowning them in syrup isn’t really my idea of breakfast. I also ordered scrambled eggs on the side, and they were dry and clearly came from a giant pan of the stuff. It’s been a long time since I left that much food on my plate at any restaurant.

I never had lunch on Sunday so I had an early dinner en route to the airport at El Indio, a counter-service Mexican restaurant in the Mission Hills neighborhood. It was solid-average, nothing spectacular, although I give them credit for making their own tortillas (you can buy them by the bag). I had the daily special, carnitas with salsa verde, which came with Mexican rice, beans (pinto beans in a mini-tostada shell), three fresh and super-hot tortillas, and a drink for $8.25 or so. It was fine, but totally unremarkable.

So the funny part is that last year when I made this trip, I stayed in Old Town, and one night I ventured out in search of ice cream, heading first for a gelateria called Gelato Vero that has won some plaudits and at least one award for the best gelato in San Diego. I found it no problem, but couldn’t park. There are a handful of spots on the street in front of it, but nothing else close by, and the whole street was jammed because of all of the restaurants there – Saffron, a Thai/noodles shop; a “New York-style” pizzeria (no idea how authentic it was, but I liked the fake NYC subway sign over their front door); Shakespeare’s Corner Shoppe, serving afternoon tea and selling goods imported from the UK; and the aforementioned El Indio. Since I was already in the area, I wandered up the block to Gelato Vero. They had just eight flavors, and the stuff didn’t look right in the trays, but the texture was pretty good (not as good as Frizzante’s) and the flavor was nice and strong. Their espresso bean was really dark, almost like Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Coffee Buzz Buzz Buzz (still my gold standard for real coffee flavor in ice cream), and their chocolate was rich although it lacked that slight bitterness that comes from using good cocoa and lots of it. Gelato Vero sells their gelato by the ounce, which is kind of clever, given how different the “small” cups were at Frizzante (generous) and Mondo Gelato (a little skimpy) the night before.

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