If you’re not familiar, allow us an impassioned briefer. Starlite wasn’t a bar or a restaurant but the low-lit aorta of the city’s creative culture. A haven for kids who loved odd music art and graphic novels and time-period clothes and kitschy vinyl concept albums —you get the picture.
It opened in 2006 by three key players in San Diego’s music scene: Matt Hoyt, Tim Mays, and Steve Poltz, an alien-level talented singer-songwriter who’d just finished co-writing Jewel’s debut album.
Hoyt ran Starlite, was host and steward and soul, and when Matt passed in 2021, a whole lot of us were gut-punched. His wife Allison, a lifelong schoolteacher, knew she needed to find not just a buyer—but the right buyer, who could keep Matt’s dream alive.
On her behalf, a friend reached out to Arsalun Tafazoli of CH Projects. Arsalun knew Matt, knew how rare-special Starlite was. He almost didn’t do it because he also knew the risk—if he mussed up a local icon, critics would key multiple random cars hoping one of them was his. But he consulted Allison and Tim on what direction to take with it, and got to work.
OG GM and soul part Jack Reynolds is back, as is chef Ted Smith. Mays toured it last week: “I was nervous, it was emotional,” he says. “But I immediately called my wife and said, ‘They knocked it out of the park.’” Starlite opens this week. A fundraiser will be held in April for the SDSU college fund Matt’s mom set up in his honor.
