Restaurant Review: Vulture in University Heights

The Perfect Order: Vulture Martini | Potato Pavé | Crab Cake

Kory Stetina is a long way from learning what vegan food was through a pamphlet at punk-rock shows in his teens. He stands in his dream restaurant, Vulture, wearing a non-sportsy sports coat. He’s married with a child. There’s a very non-punk potato pavé on the monogrammed plate, the servers are in tux-adjacent attire, and this whole building in University Heights has been turned into a plant-based funhouse with formidable, obsessive style.

Despite the earmarks of midcentury continental formalism, five out of 10 people in here wear arcane t-shirts. Word got out early on that Vulture was a fine-dining experience, and while there’s a tableside Caesar and velvet curtains and soft, artful furniture, that was never the intent. Stetina had to do some PR legwork to pop the “special occasion” balloon that floated over the project—another collaboration between himself and Arsalun Tafazoli of CH Projects—and it seems to be working.

One of the t-shirt people I recognize: Justin Pearson of The Locust and Three One G Records. A thoughtful and progressive punk force in SD, he’s seated at a corner table with individuals who look like they’ve at least dabbled in if not dedicated their lives to graphic design and can casually play a theremin near a rare fern. Vulture captures that same dinner-party-for-creative-people mood that the Middletown bar Starlite first brought to the city.

It’s a place for grown-up punks, for ideas and ideals.

(Obtrusive but important note about punk rock and plant eaters: The rather genuine punk music of the 1970s and ’80s that eventually birthed Green Day and Nirvana and even, I guess, My Chemical Romance emerged from a philosophical and creative instinct to challenge status quos, which often meant expressing unpopular and political opinions in an excessively loud and urgent manner—pretty much exactly what Simon & Garfunkel were doing but far more invigorating and annoying. There were plenty of bands who got big because they had great hair and a good producer; there were other bands who got cult-famous based on the holy-wow way they expressed uncomfortable ideas, making people question the way they lived. Eating only plants was a part of this live-different worldview, and, like any good movement, it got co-opted by the tad too righteous, moral, and shame-mongery. It should be said that Stetina made his name in San Diego by being a philosophical vegan who’s un-mongery.)

To get to Vulture, you enter through Dreamboat, a well-lit, bright, Mr. Clean-ish, ’60s-era, plant-based, romantically American diner that’s all white and chrome and charm—poodle-skirt notions and connoisseur coffee and smoked potato latkes and Impossible burgers and baked goods and milkshakes and cocktails. Seating occupancy: one-and-a-half people on Ozempic (fine, it’s 10).

In the back corner of this tiny diner is an antique host stand. The host takes you through a velvet curtain, down the short hall, and through a door, until you enter into, what?

Some will call it a speakeasy, but it’s really just a fun surprise restaurant (“speakeasies” do still exist, but they’re not on OpenTable, and almost everyone with a project they call a “speakeasy” will, on their most honest days, admit it’s not a speakeasy).

You’ll step into cavernous, amber-glow, lava-lamp darkness. So, the first experience Vulture offers all of us is temporary blindness, followed by the opportunity to behold the shockingly slow ability of human eyes to adjust to radical shifts in light. The music is on point, a mix of obscure indie tracks and guilty-pleasure soft-rock bangers. Thanks to listening bars, restaurants have become the stereo-system showrooms of America. Remember that guy in high school who one day showed up with box speakers in his trunk and a $6,000 head unit, an amp, subwoofers, and EQs, and his car sounded like Dr. Dre’s and Rick Rubin’s place of business? That guy is restaurants.

No windows in here. It’s essentially a long room with lights exactly the temp and hue of orange burning coals—the color of hypnotism and Matthew McConaughey’s opium den. Under giant, tall ceilings, the walls are lined with plus-sized, underlit, white-plaster busts. It’s regal and cheeky, a cross between Greek philosopher fetishism and Clash of the Titans lunchbox culture. Plush carpet underfoot. A series of half-shell, velveteen booths and marble tables with brass edges. It’s lovely, and it feels both half-asleep and energized, like that 3 a.m. in-between state of existence when your dreams are viscerally wacky and feel so real you start to fear your own mind. The upper half is wallpaper-core—a print of various nontraditional flowers in a sea of black (like if Georgia O’Keeffe had weirder taste in blooms and was a bit goth).

Vulture took Stetina and CH five brutal years to bring to fruition. After two incredibly successful food and drink concepts in South Park—Kindred (true punk-rock vegan) and Mothership, an alien space bar that made Esquire’s “Best Bars in America”—he and CH took a stab at building their big plant-based idea and retrofitted the whole building. They signed the papers and started paying bank notes, and then the pandemic hit, and supply chains just sat off to the side smokin’ a cig. It got pretty hairy.

All of this explains why Stetina looks simultaneously tired, relieved, and ambitious standing in the middle of the room.

Photo Credit: James Tran
Cocktail art from the team who made Esquire’s “Best Bars in America” list.

Every meal starts with a tiny glass of bubbles—such as the cava, spiked with simple syrup and bitters, the dirty Spanish wine you didn’t know you needed. Parker House rolls should hit the table first, with cultured “butter” and fennel pollen. It’s a very good but denser Parker (there many potential reasons why, but it’s most likely because, while vegan replacements have come a long way, the fluffy-bread power of eggs is hard to beat). There are fantastic crab cakes made of hearts of palm, possibly the best thing on the menu (“I like these better than real crab cakes,” Claire says). Rivaling the cake is the potato pavé: Whole potatoes are smoked overnight on the dwindling embers of the wood-fired grill, sliced dental dam–thin and stacked, pressed with a giant weight until they form a brick, and deep-fried golden brown. It’s all served with a Calabrian chile aioli that’s made with Veganaise and hot stuff.

Vulture (along with Dreamboat) is one of the few vegan restaurants to have a wood-fired oven, which adds a whole new flavor realm (burning wood has about 400 flavanols that you don’t get with a gas stove). That may explain why the French onion soup has such a deep umami to the broth.

We gotta talk about the Caesar, done tableside. “It was a weird family tradition,” Stetina says. “Grandpa always made Caesar salad for the family on Sundays. And so, when I was growing up, my dad did the same thing.”

When a young Stetina started tinkering in his new plant-based life, he had to try to figure out how to carry on the family tradition without using eggs, parm, or anchovies. The solution was an amalgam of nutritional yeast and capers. The family didn’t excommunicate him.

“I think Grandpa Joe got a little accidentally offended, you know, like, ‘How do you know that lettuce does not have feelings?’” he remembers. “I had no idea how to actually answer that question at that time. I was just, like, a 14-year-old punk-rock kid.”

For Grandpa Joe’s Caesar at Vulture, chef Pancho Castellón (who formerly cooked at San Francisco’s Michelin-starred steakhouse Niku) mashes up capers for salinity, then makes a garbanzo-flour, fermented hard “cheese” that servers can actually grate atop.

Kindred and Mothership have always been known for world-beating cocktails. At Vulture, that rabbit-holing is shown off in the martini. “It has to be the most fussed-over martini in the city,” Stetina laughs. “We spent a year on it.” It’s three different gins (Suncliffe, Tanqueray No. 10, and Widges) and four vermouths (French, Spanish, and two Italians). The bar team makes it ahead and stores it in the freezer so that it’s arctic in the glass. For the dirty martini, bar director Lucas Ryden tops the base blend in an olive oil float spiked with everything-bagel seasoning, which should be a standard in all self-respecting martini houses.

There’s a steak sampler—two massive filets. One is a lion’s mane mushroom (the ribeye of the forest, though I’ve never really cared for it) and the other a Beyond Steak filet. The latter is wild, and Vulture is among the first in California to serve the plant-based meat giant’s latest creation. The flavor is fairly great (there are billions of dollars and some of the country’s best chefs working on this project, so that’s not a surprise); the texture is far more steak-adjacent than any plant effort I’ve ever seen, but chunkier. Eat it with the chimichurri.

For dessert, it’s all about the baked Alaska. It arrives looking like an elaborate floral corsage, with white tufts of “meringue” made of aquafaba, the white starchy liquid left over after cooking chickpeas (like magic, it perfectly mimics egg whites and makes a hell of a meringue). It’s torched tableside, and beneath the charred, fluffy sweetness is sponge cake and pistachio ice cream (pistachio is the flavor that translates near-perfect to vegan, because even the dairy version is using nuts as a fat).

The “whoa” of the room and drinks of Vulture were never in doubt. Those are sweet-spot, best-skills realms for CH and Stetina. The food would always be the wild card, and after the second visit, I gotta say—it’s pretty damn good, even for a guy with a glaring omnivore bias.