Being here is to be highly stimulated and stim-deprived at the same time.
A skinny shadow restaurant tucked behind a stark-white tiny diner, scarce visible signage save for a concrete engraving on the sidewalk along Park Boulevard and an amber-lit sign in the back of Dreamboat. Fully cut off from its University Heights neighborhood, it’s got no windows and is both dark and color-flamboyant (an amber skylight harkens to photography dark rooms and The Godfather Don Corleone’s office at night), with some lightly Alex Grey/Yayoi Kusama-ish fungal wallpaper, giant plaster busts of presumably epic dead people, brass, checkerboard tiles, a chandelier with fancy ghosts in it, a giant plant lording in the heart of the place, an incredibly obsessive martini, sporadic flambée fires torching cherries tableside, and real or imagined memories of utopianistic 1960s Americans going out on the town in grand fashion.
It’s Vulture, the newest restaurant art project (I want to say restaurant but that feels lamer than Vulture looks) from the creatives behind Kindred, Mothership, and Dreamboat (the recently opened, aforementioned tiny diner—which every time I mention I can’t stop singing to the tune of “Tiny Dancer”).
“Five years,” says co-conspirator Kory Stetina, sighing with terror and relief about how long Vulture has been in the works. “Every little detail has been fussed over. We’re not religious, but my wife says this project has angel wings. I always had an itch to do a little more on the elevated side of things. But I don’t really force it. I let opportunities reveal themselves.”
To reduce its charms to stereotypical sentences: It feels like a hidden Great Gatsbian restaurant made entirely of plant food. It’s being hailed as “continental,” which is how our grandparents expressed fairly approachable, familiar entrées (steaks, potatoes, vegetable sides) that had been fancified with then-new things like French sauces and dramatic tableside preparations and finishes.
“I wasn’t around in that era,” Stetina says. “But my grandparents would celebrate at these kinds of places, the ‘fancy’ places of the time, right when American chefs were starting to dip their feet into European culinary tradition—French, Italian, Spanish. A lot of the food that was served would be pretty approachable.”
As for that martini. The perfect martini sounds so easy and never has been. Vulture’s is a blend of three different gins and four vermouths tested at dozens of temps and served at the one that tasted best. Its dilution rates are calibrated with biotech zeal. The bar team serves a regular version, a teensy cocktail version, and “The Works:” a larger, moon-cold portion served on an ancestral tray stacked with pickled treats, plus its own potato pavé topped with horseradish crème fraîche and truffle caviar. Cocktail poobah Lucas Ryden (Kindred, Realm of the 52 Remedies) has 38 cocktails joyriding the nostalgia: highballs, manhattans, Rob Roys, French 75s, Vieux Carres, gimlets, daisies, knickerbockers, you get it. And six zero-proof versions of the same (plus a Shirley Temple)
To eat (see full menu), it’s things like the Diane. A giant lion’s mane mushroom is grown by El Cajon’s Mindful Mushrooms specifically for Vulture’s specs, then grilled over wood fire by exec chef Pancho Castellón (who cooked at San Francisco’s Michelin-starred steakhouse Niku) and served in Diane-style creamy mushroom sauce. For the Oscar, Vulture is the first restaurant on the West Coast to have Beyond Steak Filet, which the kitchen seasons and tweaks, then serves with hearts of palm, plant bearnaise, and asparagus. There will be Parker House rolls with cultured “butter;” kelp caviar with French onion dip and kettle chips; date and black garlic pâté; beet tartare; “Rockefeller” minus the oyster, plus the artichoke, sunchoke, and spinach dip. The Caesar will be tossed tableside in “Grandpa Joe’s” dressing.
“There was a tradition in my family of gathering and making Caesar salads on Sunday nights,” Stetina says. “Grandpa Joe made it, then my dad made it. When I became the black sheep that turned vegan, I had to figure out how to make it taste the same… nutritional yeast, capers. I always added capers to the top, but chef ground it into a paste like an anchovy, then created a house parmesan out of garbanzo flour. We make it in blocks and shred it over the salad tableside.”
For dessert, chef Amy Noonan will douse cherries in booze and set them on ceremonial fire throughout the dining room for jubilees. There will be cheesecake.
And there will be relief for Stetina. He and his wife bought this building five years ago, leveraged everything they had, barely held on through the pandemic, and obsessively pulled it off. “We opened Mothership thinking that Vulture might never happen,” he says.
And then Esquire named Mothership one of the top 50 bars in the country. Vulture seems poised for similar realms.
Vulture soft opens next week.
