Review: Little Victory Wine Bar in Carlsbad

The Perfect Order: Beef Tartare | Crudo | All the Wine

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We take really good food and don’t f*** it up. And food from right over there tastes better than something older and further away.”

That’s former rapper and current chef Elliott Townsend’s simple lyric explaining why he and his fellow chef/partner/wife Kelly are so whoop-whoop on local food. I stare through the window into their petite cooking sauna at Little Victory Wine Bar in Carlsbad, where the two of them are surrounded by it—melons from Escondido’s JR Organics sliced into juicy scythes, Thompson Heritage Ranch pork chops from Ramona, bluefin tuna from Shane’s Seafoods. All they’ve got is an induction burner and two ovens to handle the orders of a wall-to-wall Friday night crowd, but they have mutually accumulated grit and Motown singalongs.

There are a couple dozen feel-good philosophical reasons to buy melons at peak, juicy, seasonal ripeness from places like JR Organics: supporting local farmers (in this case, Joe Rodriguez and his family), reducing food waste (fresh food is a melodramatic and fairly terrible traveler), lowering your carbon footprint (debatably and depending on the case).

But when it comes to the simple, simian joy of eating—in almost all taste tests, food picked at peak season down the road and served as immediately as possible puts a total ass whipping on food picked when it’s not-quite-ripe and shipped across the country or continents. Think of how you look and feel after a long road trip. Ripe, but not in the right way? Same.

Great chefs can make canned asparagus—the wet paper towel of food, nature hitting its Coldplay-kiss-cam rock bottom—and turn it into something pretty good. But true enlightenment comes when great chefs start with local ingredients that don’t suck. Plus, story matters.

“It just respects the microclimate and the small aspect of terroir in San Diego, which is why I fell in love with natural wine,” says Elliott, whose Instagram handle is @nattywinechef.

Little Victory is his and Kelly’s new home. After years of study at some of the city’s top restaurants (Juniper and Ivy, Cowboy Star, The Fishery), the duo launched the raved-about pop-up dinner series Long Story Short at places like Little Italy’s Vino Carta and now-shuttered North Park wine bar Little Thief, cheffing as house guests. Local dirt dictated their menus.

“We weren’t dope chefs, and we’re not now,” Elliott lies. “We’re just cooks, and we’re like, ‘Okay, where do we want to work?’ We’ve done so many pop-ups out of random places that were illegal. It’s really about just making it happen with what you got. But I was tired of stuffing an entire kitchen into my wife’s trunk.”

Now they’re in a permanent spot, having teamed with another married couple, Little Victory creators Jeremy Simpson and Kirsten Potenza. Potenza is the CEO of now-global fitness brand Pound, which may explain why the crowd is 20- and 30-somethings with flexible muscles: young surf lads with firefighter-wall-calendar mustaches and wetsuit tans; women who’ve mastered the art of using the sun as whole body foundation makeup, not a rookie sunburn in sight.

Potenza designed the wine bar/restaurant/general store (one wall is packed with local food and drink provisions, sold to-go). Things are crammed in all the crannies, but you largely can’t tell. There’s probably wine under your seat. There are antique wicker chairs and mismatched things, the décor of people with good instincts, winging it. And that’s what any new restaurant from first-timers is: a relentless winging.

Simpson was the bar manager at LA’s James Beard Award–nominated, Italian-ish spot Bestia. He came to San Diego as the beverage director for San Diego’s Michelin-starred Jeune et Jolie and its sister restaurant, Campfire. He’s a level-three certified sommelier who’s fallen hard for the natural wine scene, which is the language of Little Victory.

Natty wines—AKA lo-fi wines, raw wine, or zero-zeros (zero things added, zero things taken away)—aren’t groomed or modified or clarified or dolled up in any major way. They are the closest expression of what that specific grape (grown in that particular soil, on that hillside, with that hillside’s specific cast of honeybees and supporting pollinators, activated by whatever yeast is loitering in the air) tastes like when it ferments.

Most commercial wines are started with commercially dependable yeasts, then hit with preservatives (sulfites) and “fined” (things like gelatine and isinglass are added to remove proteins and tannins and clarify the wine). Sometimes producers age those wines with oak chips instead of in oak barrels, and sometimes they chaptalize them, or add sugar. None of these are inherently negative things, and some are good (aside from maybe chaptalization, which kinda sucks in all circumstances except in cold climates where grapes can’t develop enough of their own sugar). It’s just a matter of preference, and Little Victory prefers peak ingredients, relatively untweaked.

“There’s a pursuit in the American food system to have everything taste perfectly the same every time,” Simpson says. “There’s something good to be said about consistency, but with natural wine, the unpredictability is kind of the beauty of it. You can chase a different expression based on whether there was excessive rain. Or if there was something happening with the soil… Maybe it was better that year.”

What traditionalists might call blemishes, natty champions call charms. Natural wines use wild yeasts—no preservatives, no fining. “Winemaker is a term that they use, but a lot of times in natural wine, I look at them more as stewards for the grapes,” Simpson says. Lo-fi winemakers are the bumper on the grapes’ bowling: just making sure it stays out of the gutter. 

As such, natural wines take some getting used to. I avoided them for years, based on my “vinegar-and-AA-batteries” impression of their early years. Now I’m hooked. Partially because winemakers have gotten exponentially better at this hands-nearly-off process, sure. But also because natty wines’ non-commercial otherness, their charming juice funk, is just plain exciting. Things you have to learn to love are usually the things you love the most. (For instance, big, fluffy, NASA-engineered pop hooks are spontaneously singable but quickly become too clingy and annoying, whereas the taciturn charms of Radiohead and Frank Ocean take longer but hit deeper veins. Natties are the indie record stores of wines.)

Simpson starts us with a cooled Florèz Wines ’24 Lovebirds, a co-ferment of organic Santa Cruz pinot noir and chardonnay. It’s a “glou-glou”—a French term meaning “glug glug,” it denotes easydrinking wines not to be fussed over or preciousized. Then comes the Frisant Bianco from il Farneto, a pear-tasting pet nat (naturally sparkling wine) made from sauvignon blanc and spergola, an ancient grape from Emilia-Romagna, Italy.

Next, the Haus Weiss from Weingut Brand in Pfalz, Germany. A blend of Weissburgunder (pinot blanc) and Sylvaner (a spicier grape with an opinion). The final is a feinherb (meaning “off-dry,” or lightly sweet) riesling from Max Kilburg, the 20th-generation winemaker on his famed family estate in Mosel, Germany. Tastes like peaches.

Simpson’s skill is that he can tell a story of why each hilltop is unique, what farm animals are puttering around, why it’s fun to give a damn about those things and how they affect what you’re drinking without sounding like a doctoral student forcing a dissertation rehearsal on friends who would have canceled had they known. Or like a tent revival for fringe juice religions. Pretension is the poison of any potentially awesome newish cultural obsession, and Little Victory avoids it.

“This is Stagiaire,” Simpson says. “The winemaker is Brent Mayeaux, based out of Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay. All chardonnay from Sonoma Mountain, from a very biodiverse vineyard. Sheep grazing, cover crops. It’s beautiful. He says it tastes like a gooseberry margarita.”

Knowing the story of the grower, rancher, or maker is dawn-of-time stuff, since almost all food was local food until the industrial revolution. It just got lost for a while in the US with the nationalization of food production (winter tomatoes from Florida, plastic-encased blueberries from a distribution plant in the middle states).

Local-food energy got new wattage around 2010 when Noma in Copenhagen was named best restaurant in the world thanks to its chef’s penchant for foraging and cooking exclusively what grew around the restaurant (a feat, because in frozen-earth Scandinavia it’s easier to grow seasonal affective disorder than food).

If René Redzepe could achieve chef sainthood by cooking reindeer moss, pine cones, and ants from nearby fields, imagine the possibilities in places where the soil was less handcuffed by the vagaries of Celsius.

Since then, the idyll for more and more cooks and drinks people has been to have what’s on the plate or glass tell you a story about the nature in a place. Ideally a place down the road. Let food be a true expression of soil and sky and microscopic cellular bugs and rain or lack of rain. Go forward by going back. Instead of serving crappy versions of fruit grown in its off-season through science and might, pick that fruit at peak season, can it, save it for later, pickle it, ferment it, koji and miso it. “Terroir” has been poked and sullied as a food snob virtue signal, but it really just means (my interpretation) “food that tastes like what it’s supposed to taste like.” Tastes like the soil in Escondido. Like the salty clouds over the pinot noir grapes in Santa Cruz.

So the Townsends’ food shares a storytelling jones with Simpson’s wines, and that’s what makes Little Victory such a thrill.

A killer roasted romanesco with pistachio crema and pesto hits the table, a pretty simple preparation that happens to be vegan. The green, spiral vegetable—a crucifer in the ballpark of broccoli and cauliflower—looks like an acid trip, as if Ken Kesey grew it in L. Ron Hubbard’s personal loam. Char tastes so damn good on crucifers because they have a natural bitterness (due to sulfur-happy compounds called glucosinolates), and high heat not only produces the Maillard reaction (that buttered popcorn–tasting marriage between amino acids and sugars), but it also disables those sulfur bombs.

In my line of work, I’ve eaten a lot of raw beef cubes tossed in various sauces, but Little Victory’s tartare—Thompson Heritage Ranch sirloin in a house-made Caesar—rivals Kingfisher’s in Golden Hill for the best I’ve had. Why hasn’t every cook tossed their tartare in Caesar? Feels like a “duh” no-brainer. The crudo—raw bluefin in a watermelon consommé with a Thai-inspired salsa (herbs, chiles, lemongrass, barrel-aged fish sauce)—is excellent. And a plate of rigatoni gets a sauce of gold bar squash, saffron, and miso with roasted tomatoes. Like San Diego summer on a plate.

Halfway through our meal, we spot Simpson’s and Potenza’s son—a long-haired, moon-blonde, 4-year-old energy dispenser who acts as maitre’d. Little Victory is his after-school extended learning program. The couple sold their house in Bonsall and moved into a condo 50 feet from the restaurant’s front patio. Simpson will disappear around 7 p.m. to walk him across the street and kiss him good night, then return to talk about pet nats.

“He’ll ask, ‘Are we packed tonight?’” Simpson says. “Yeah, buddy, we’re packed tonight.”