“I wanted nothing to do with my own culture as a kid,” says CH Projects founder Arsalun Tafazoli over a plate of kebabs and manakish and a greatest hits parade of Middle Eastern sauces (toum, amba, zhoug, garlicky yogurt elixirs of all kinds) in the movie set that is Leila, his new restaurant in North Park. “It wasn’t cool to be Middle Eastern when I was growing up. Then 9/11 happened. I tried to disappear into SoCal American culture.”

In Leila’s open kitchen, a vertical log fire licks glistening fat off kebabs on massive skewers. Steam rises from a custom-made tabun, stuffed with naan and pita and barbari. The air is starchy and caramelized with rice. The ceiling is blackened, with pinhole lights conjuring stars. Every surface has been decoratively rugged, amber-lit with oil lamps. A life-sized lion head is etched in the synthetic rock staircase leading to the bar on the second level.

June 6, 2023

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“You have all of these ideas to try and create something meaningful, and you never know when you’re going to go too far,” Tafazoli says. “Even as we were installing the ceiling—this massive thing we’ve built because we hope it will make it a more immersive place—I was thinking Is this the thing that will make it look cheesy?”

Tafazoli’s parents immigrated to San Diego from Iran when he was young, his mom raising him largely on her own in University Heights. As both survival instinct and escape, he read—books, culture mags, music blogs, art leaflets, everything, obsessively, all the time. He forged documents to get into La Jolla High, the revered “good school” in the affluent nearby neighborhood. That self preservationist nerding manifests in the art-project hospitality concepts of CH: Craft & Commerce, Born & Raised, Polite Provisions, the LaFayette Hotel, and many others, including Leila.

When his mom passed a few years ago, Tafazoli allowed himself his own history. He went back to the Middle East (not Iran, for reasons), loitered in night markets and bazaars, and took notes on culture and how cities and towns and villages built inspiring environs. “Everywhere I went, there was water, whether a stream or a fountain,” he says, pointing to water cascading down a 30-foot rock wall into a lagoon and the creek that runs through the restaurant. “So we made sure you could hear water from every seat in here.”

Tafazoli’s base instinct is selfmockery, so he shares his favorite story. His plan was to find merchants and artists, pay them well, pack everything onto shipping containers, and build Leila out of Middle Eastern handiwork. “So, I’m at a small market, explaining my whole international shipping system to this man,” he recalls. “He looks at me kind of weird and says, ‘Why don’t you just order from our Etsy page?’”

CH brought in exec chef Wesley Remington Johnson, who led Portland restaurants (Tusk, Ava Gene’s) and worked under Michael Solomonov at the James Beard Award–winning Zahav. Even with the pedigree, they often enlist local Middle Eastern cooks, point to a bread or a batch of rice that’s not quite as good as mom’s, and ask for help. 

“I’m very clear to say we’re not claiming it to be the most authentic; we’re just inspired by the dishes and doing it our way,” Tafazoli adds. “Because no one is ever going to make tahdig as good as your mom. My mom used to say about Persian food, ‘Only men are allowed to work in restaurants, so restaurants suck.’”

They’re trying not to suck… and succeeding. In one corner, there’s a space, all flowy with gorgeous fabric, pictures, and paintings—his mom’s things, which are his things. 

The post Inside CH Projects’ New Persian Restaurant Leila appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Finca is clairvoyance as a dining experience. Dishes seem to arrive before the words come out of my mouth, as if the server is doing the ol’ “pull the roasted bone marrow from behind my ear” trick. It is the most efficient kitchen I’ve witnessed that doesn’t have a drive-through window or promotional kids’ toys that, years later, will be recalled for crimes against humanity.

You expect speed when you order food in nugget form. But when ordering something like New York steak tataki in a fermented scallop ponzu at a modern wine bar run by three people who’ve been at the top of San Diego’s food scene, you expect to wait a bit for such exotica.

And, yet—whoosh. There it is. The expediency is very nice. No one who’s not a complete stain has ever grumbled about having their wishes granted too promptly. Plus, the servers make sure to mention, just because their kitchen is back there giving noogies to the space-time continuum, that doesn’t mean there is any rush. This is a wine bar with an accomplished chef, after all. Take your time; cue up the photos of you in Barcelona, albariño-eyed; and lather up a dissertation on Iberico stuff.

That bone marrow is some kind of nice, with a sweet-and-sour red pepper spread served with charred toast from Companion Bread in City Heights (which grinds their own flour, resulting in bread that tastes how the gods and old-world grandmas intended it to taste). For all its decadent hype (of which I’m culpable), bone marrow is kind of wallflower fat. It needs supporting flavors, and this romesco-ish pepper jam is it.

Finca is the start of North Park’s incoming wave of “oh-expletive” restaurants—along with the imminent arrival of a Persian-centric concept from CH Projects, a French thing from Brad Wise (Trust), and the first San Diego spot from star Baja chef Drew Deckman. Finca’s three owners are San Diego vets, two from Juniper + Ivy (Dan Valerino and chef Joe Bower) and one from The Hake (Ricardo Dondisch), which, RIP, was known for obsessively good hospitality.

If you’ve ever Googled “going to Spain, love the hell out of tempranillos, help me” and followed that with a search of “best hotels in Rioja,” this is your place. It’s exclusively California and Spanish wines—leaning biodynamic from harder-to-find, smaller houses—plus the Spanifornia food that bedfellows them. For whites by the glass, a hondarribi zuri (a Basque specialty from the northern Spain region of Bizkaiko Txakolina) is listed with a Sonoman 2022 trousseau gris (a crisp one, AKA gray riesling, usually not seen but tasted as a supporting addition in other whites).

When it comes to reds by the glass, you’ll find a prieto picudo (a pride of Leon, Spain) and a Conde de Hervías (the star tempranillo of Las Arenillas Vineyard—one of Riojas’ most storied wineries, it predates the phylloxera outbreak that pushed a bleak reset on European wines).

They’ve got about 90 bottles—bubbles and vermentinos and chenins and mencias and heavy garnachas and zins. Most are priced for neighbors and repeat explorers ($30–$60 range), topping out at $180 for the 2016 D’acan from Vega Clara, a winery in the famed “Golden Mile” of Ribera de Duero, Spain’s top red region. In the current economic bonkersville where the cost of chicken is neck-and-neck with a bottle of Screaming Eagle, Finca’s saying a hard no to the wine-culture gouge and looking to find long-term, varietally promiscuous friends.

Chef Bower’s tapas, made with these fermented juices in mind, are simply plated, un-tweezed. His yellowtail crudo’s so delicious, my daughter eats it. She, a devout white-carbs-and-cheese practitioner. It’s a healthy lump of fresh sushi-grade hamachi tossed in picholine olive oil (famed for being crisp and buttery) with avocado, orange, Fresno chili ringlets, and red onion.

My daughter stops eating as a concept when she realizes the dish I’m moaning over is chicken liver mousse. It’s a casual spin on the old foie-gras-and-Sauternes dish that ruled all high-end menus in the ’90s. The mousse is whipped with cream cheese, criss-crossed with strawberry jam, and served over a cinnamon roll made with Japanese milk bread. The milk bread is nearly dry, a small ding, but all the flavors together are fantastic.

What they’re calling patatas bravas are some good-tasting lies. Local potatoes are fried and tossed with pickled sweet peppers and jalapeño crema and tons of herbs. Finca got their California all over the Spanish classic (traditionally made with a smoky tomato-paprika sauce), and it sure as hell isn’t patatas bravas, but it’s good for those with a casual pickle fetish (it’s a tangy, high-acid affair).

Bower takes some of the best local tomatoes—San Diego’s bright and shiny stars of summer—and funks them up. He tops them with capers, anchovies (the protein bar of the Iberian peninsula), a condiment made of roasted cippolini onions, and a blizzard of sheep’s milk cheese. If you’re looking for a breezy caprese note, this isn’t it, but it’s delicious in a weird, almost unsettling way.

Bower cooks like he voted yes on recreational cannabis, as suggested by the dish I just can’t get behind: his seared pork belly. It’s cooked sous vide for 12 hours, then pan-roasted with fresh dates and simmered in a miso sweet-and-sour sauce, then served with a savory-chewy Rice Krispies treat. It’s like eating lightly fried pork fat with a Chewy bar—surely some sort of interstate crime.

The tataki, on the other hand, is for me—as someone who fell hard for the fish sauce arts. Those who do not appreciate the charms of one of humankind’s first flavor amplifiers will have a less enthusiastic reaction. Finca uses scallop powder and blends it with barrel-aged fish sauce, agave, and rice vinegar, which forms a fermented scallop ponzu. In that pool, they lay NY strip, seared raw. For a restaurant built around pairing solid food with quality liquids, this dish may as well be their mission statement.

Now, listen. Currently, the sun is treating Finca like an ex who cheated and refused split-custody of the dog. They’ve adapted, installing shades on their floor-to-ceiling windows. Once the building (which is new) gets permits, they’ll be able to add a patio on the west side with umbrellas, which should provide relief. Until then, I recommend coming near dusk or later, after Finca’s been released from solar tyranny.

And a note about your final bite, which should be the cheesecake. Most self-respecting European-leaning kitchens will end with a cheese course. But Bower, being Bower, tweaks it for fun and the David Lee Roth amount of California in his heart. He mixes goat cheese with some cream cheese and sugar and shapes it in the form of cartoon cheese with a pretty delicious seasonal compote (when I was there, it was peaches) and graham crumble.

Finca is a heck of a neighborhood restaurant, a duet between juice nerds who speak great wine Spanglish and a high-end chef who’s been freed to take the piss out of some tweezer-food totems. Some tinkering works, some hurts the brain. But here’s the thing. On a lowly Monday, all three owners are in the small house, and they’ll win you one way or another—through crudo, through carignan, through welcome.

The post Restaurant Review: Finca Tapas & Bottle Shop appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Before burgers became national sport, before they got brioche top hats and aiolis made of garlic and spices found only on stalactites in verdant equatorial caves, before the meat was aged Wagyu blessed by the prayers of José Andrés, before tomatoes were heirloom and had adorable names, before the bacon was triple-cut and candied in hibiscus-jalapeño-bee-pollen glazes, before duck eggs oozed their yolky mother lode to emulsify with truffle oil… there was Rocky’s.

Theirs is a spartan workman’s delight, with meat and cheese and a bun that is a kissing cousin to Wonder Bread. This burger flies coach by choice. When San Diego was nearly all fast food—that heatlamped drive-through generation from the ’60s through the ’80s, whose people associate burgers with smog emissions— Rocky’s cooked-fresh, luscious, lumpy pincushion of ground beef—served in a dark, womb-like bar within washing distance of an ice-cold beer—tasted like deities. Still does.

Rocky’s Crown Pub is 46 years old. At this point, it’s hard to separate the objective quality of the burger from the connective quality of the nostalgia. In nearly five decades, almost nothing has changed about the place or the burgers, which is all they serve (with fries and good beer and pretty bad wine). Their ordering system is sticky notes (yes, sticky notes, which they slap on the bar… you’ll see them lined up with shorthand chicken scratch and thumb smudges of grease), and they only take cash, for chrissakes. Go tap your doohickey somewhere else.

Even the pure-carnivore eating experience feels time-portally, especially now as plant-based apostles are storming the omnivore gates, quoting jackfruit scriptures. In the current probiotic and carb-phobic dining culture, Rocky’s almost feels like a meat speakeasy—a lovely, safe place to eat a burger as if several generations of medical reports were never issued.

Even if you’re entering Rocky’s for the first time, you can feel the lives lived on these stools. Unless your commuter horse smells of freshly churned butter, some website has told you of its legend. You don’t just wander into Rocky’s. You follow decades of superlatives. You are very purposefully icon-diving.

It’s in Crown Point, the little neighborhood you drive through on your way to frolic in the SPF skin circus of Pacific Beach. It’s named after original owner Patty Rockwood (AKA Rocky). A few years ago, when she decided it was time, she could have sold it to the highest bidder. (I’m not privy to the balance sheets, but the ever-present crowd and bone-simple menu—plus a beer-and-wine license—suggests one of the most stable restaurant business models in the city’s history.) Instead, she sold it to longtime employee Nick Vendetti. As loyal to him as regulars were to her.

No surface in here is stain-vulnerable. It’s all lacquered wood and vinyl, a very wipe-able design motif. The carpet can be best described as “luxuriously cleanable.” There’s a dusty wine rack behind the bar. Instead of cabernets, it’s full of remote controls for the TVs that are broadcasting various sports. One is almost always tuned in to WGN, home of the Chicago Cubs; the other to the Padres (Rocky’s occupies a Chicago-San Diego duality, with Bears and Chargers memorabilia lining the walls). The bartenders are more astute than ESPN commentators, opining on the day’s most impressive stats and orating deep dives into existential sports issues.

Rocky’s has always been as dark as a curtained van down by the river. A major plus. As San Diegans, we are stalked by sunlight, so its absence feels like a vacation. During Covid, they added a patio like everyone else. To serve the patio, the side door now stays open. And so Rocky’s has entered its (relatively) sunshiney era, which is emotionally conflicting.

Locals tend to hang at the far end of the bar, so they can greet friends and suss up newcomers. As for the crowd—it’s mostly t-shirts and sunburns. The kind of place where everyone is beautiful because no one here is trying to be beautiful. Besides, possibly, the bartender who looks fresh off a soap opera involving yoga and lesser-known martial arts.

The cash-only thing is inconvenient and impressive. That’s a market advantage earned only by the most iconic of San Diego restaurants (à la Las Cuatro Milpas)—institutions whose demand is so ravenous and continuous that they pull rank over the evolution of capitalism and commerce, immune to the grabby talons of credit card fees. There’s an ATM near the back, in a “hallway” only big enough for two people to pass if they go butt-to-butt.

At the end of the bar is the “kitchen,” best described as “the one from your first studio apartment.” It’s basically a tiny alcove off the bar with no door, so everyone can watch. The tiny box fits exactly one cook. He or she stands in front of a single small flat top, which is loaded with sizzling patties, enshrouded in chuck steam. The heroic burger jockey goes it alone. For sure these weary cooks leave work every day only to be hunted by neighborhood dogs.

The insanely constant burger-sizzling of that flat top is key to the magic of Rocky’s. It is loaded up as soon as doors open, and it almost never slows down. On weekends, every inch of that flat top will be blanketed with third-pound or half-pound patties, steaming and browning, cheese lava-flowing over the edges.

So forgive me the hubris, but I think I’ve pieced together the Rosetta Stone for understanding why Rocky’s burger—despite ignoring every chance at “premiumizing” or improving itself for decades, despite the fact that it should have been lapped by the “better burger movement” by now—still ranks among the best.

First, when you cook a burger on a flat top, the whole patty comes in contact with the heat source (creating a patty-wide browning and maillard reaction that cranks up flavor). It also renders out the fat, which creates a bath around the burger— essentially shallow-frying the beef. Each successive burger benefits from the previous burger’s brown bits and juices. So it almost functions like a wok, transferring nepotistic burger wealth to the next burger in line, building and building flavor as the day goes on.

Plus, the only thing that is cooking on that flat top all day are these nepo-burgers. Burger burger burger burger burger. Which means the last burger of the day cooked here just might be the burgeriest-tasting burger in the country.

So? you may say. Many burger joints use flat tops— what’s different about Rocky’s? Well, this: proximity. The constant burger steam floats from that tiny cubby kitchen into the tiny bar, essentially creating a fairly intense (but not oppressive) burger weather system that permeates the whole place. Sitting in that burger aromatherapy waiting for your order, your desire for it nears a frothy zeal (and often the wait is not short).

By the time your meal hits the table, you’re one or three beers in and you’ve never been more amped to eat a burger in your life. Also, since smell is critical to how well and how intensely we taste something, the burger haze cranks up how much “burgerness” we taste when we finally do dig in. It’s like eating a tub of freshly buttered popcorn as the popcorn machine lightly blows the smell of freshly buttered popcorn around you.

Intense.

Another key, suggests a longtime employee who spent his first year as the cook, is the relatively low temperature of that flat top. The low temp allows the burger to baste in its own juices, which explains why Rocky’s burgers are among the juiciest in town and will not be rushed.

In my two nights spent here, the burger (a half-pounder with grilled onions, a third-pounder with raw onions) was every bit as glorious as I’ve romanticized. My only complaint is the friendliness of the staff. Part of the joy of Rocky’s had always been Stockholm syndrome, in which you’re kidnapped by an arcane system of sticky notes and aloof or surly employees.

There’s no shortage of places to be treated like an asshole in America, but Rocky’s was always my favorite. Hothouse flowers who came here to be doted on often left driving their car fast in the direction of a strongly worded Yelp review. Now the staff seems more polite, conversational, at ease. It’s nice, but also kind of bullshit.

For the perfect order, get a half-pounder with cheese. Skip the lettuce and tomato, but keep the pickle and raw onions (the fat of the burger and cheese need all the acid). Then, halfway through eating, ditch the fixings and just eat the bun, beef, and cheese. That’s the nude heart of the legend.

In a modern society where we’re forced to change our passwords more frequently than our underwear, flipping the bird to rapid-fire and often unnecessary modifications makes Rocky’s feel like an escape room to a time when we didn’t have to give a damn about falling behind and having our souls scavenged by the vultures of tech or truffle oil.

The post Review: The Legend of Rocky’s Crown Pub appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

That’s what makes Lala’s setup so strange or appealing or both. You hear the buzz about this pretty new thing and set out to find it. You pass the al fresco dining Guernica that is Piazza della Famiglia. Pass the stately brass-and-walnut, building-as-Ayn Rand-book cover, Born and Raised. You nearly get pulled into the influencer-swan dining orgy of Barbusa. And then you run smack-dab into the rarest of ugly-beautiful gems, a parking lot on India Street that somehow hasn’t yet been turned into a negroni farm.

You nearly stop, feeling catfished by your GPS. But in the way-back of this lot, you spot a woman standing in the dark portal of a tiny structure. She is wearing business-martini attire, holding a clipboard. There is a velvet rope. This is Lala, which appears to be a speakeasy for ACE Parking.

First, the power of the clipboard must be acknowledged, a small but essential detail. No matter how ornate or neon-bedazzled, a hostess stand doesn’t convey the gatekeeper lure of a good old-fashioned clippy. The clipboard suggests the night’s list of invited people has been made, the list is small enough to fit on a single sheet, and this woman controls it and the fate of all who approach.

As she takes your name and scans for its presence, you will feel that same nervous pre-shame from your days of trying to get into the nightclub of the moment, where a serious person in a fitted suit performed once-overs of every person in line, making snap judgments of your social merit and value to humanity. You wonder if your jeans are casting the right cachet to make it into the club, or if you should have pleathered.

Plus, that velvet rope. At 5pm when we arrive, it seems a tad ridiculous, a cheeky throwback to the highly selective era of “bespoke” debauch. But then you consider Lala was built as an ornate spillover space for the always-bustling Barbusa (both are from the next-gen of San Diego’s first family of Italian, the Busalacchis). And you get a peek inside Lala, and realize this place is an architectural hiccup, barely enough space to park a couple Rivians. So there will be a line at Lala, and the Busalacchis are not the kind of people to deprive their line-people that Mann’s-Chinese-Theater magic of a velvet rope.

The Busalacchis brought unselfconscious and unrepentant sexy back to Little Italy. Their social media is a sultry parade of pasta, Aperol, and pheromones. Their clientele is not short on eyelashes or watches. Everything they do is glammed and sensualized. And though my heart is made of black t-shirts, Chuck Taylors, and wardrobe apathy… though I usually eye a dolled-up social scene as espresso-martini cosplay that lacks the casualness of a life lived in the real… I admit to being seduced by it.

Because after the last few years I’m running overstock on verité, and craving escapes that Apple or Meta have no say in. Also because in chronically casual San Diego, where our fashion shrugs can vacuum the flirtatiousness from any space, a roomful of urban pageantry feels like a true night out.

To create the cozy magic of Lala, the outside world has been smartly shut out (it is, after all, a parking lot). It is secrets-dark. A small lounge to the left is adorned with plant life and wicker chairs. On the right, an ornate bar with stool and bench seating below a curved wall-to-ceiling situation. The drinks are all libido- and scandal-named (Stiletto, Mistress, Sidepiece, Forbidden Fruit, etc.). There is marble and tassels and more velvet and Venetian plaster and Renaissance nudes.

On one wall, an art installation of stilettos, all of which seem to have lost their counterparts. They’ve replaced the standard kitchen-door window with stained glass, so God is here somewhere. In the restroom, there are various countryside oil paintings that folk music–loving parents from the 1970s adored; except, look closer, and you’ll see the sign for iconic San Diego strip club Les Girls near a bucolic barn. In another, a peaceful snowy river is populated by a bikini model in a party innertube.

Lala’s food was designed to be Italian snacks-plus. A spicy Caesar salad with Calabrian chiles plays to San Diego’s desire for capsaicin on everything, and it’s good. Instead of a seafood tower, they have an antipasto tower with prosciutto, salamini, mortadella, cheeses, marinated artichokes, olives, eggplant Parmigiano. A high-rise of gourmet Italian deli snacks.

Their bacon-and-date skewers are something straight out of the 1980s playbook, the leg warmers of appetizers. But they’re almost impossible to dislike in a gorgonzola sauce whose funk keeps the dates’ sweetness from over-acting. The best bite we have are the chargrilled oysters—butter, garlic, breadcrumbs, Parmigiano, pecorino, and Sriracha caviar.

Start every night here with the oat milk espresso martini, which has become the official hydration of the Busalacchi world (so popular they launched their own bottled version of it, called Busa). The bar is the major focus at Lala. A heavy but not overwhelming array of amaros add bitter charms to drinks, rather than being the entire idea. The delicious Sidepiece has no Italian at all (reposado tequila, lime, grapefruit, ginger root, mint).

They also barrel-age a couple of cocktails: a house-made negroni tweaked with peach bitters, and an Italian old fashioned that swaps the traditional bourbon for red wine from the mother country (Montepulciano). The drinks shine, but it’s the food here that puts that velvet rope to work.

The “loaded” potato gnocchi is a swooner. Chef Nino Zizzo (also a Busalacchi) could make killer fresh pasta while operating a motor vehicle or binge-watching Montalbano, and gnocchi is always a good test. Should always be like potato clouds, not potato density, and his are puffy white cumulus. It’s a riff on the baked potato, and his cream sauce shames traditional sour cream into hiding.

However, if you’re gonna call it “loaded” (a fun idea), I want to see a very American amount of surplus. A rock quarry of crispy-tender pancetta, a lawn-clippings pile of chives, cheddar cheese just wildly loitering on the plate. And ours is mostly just the cream sauce. Tastes just about perfect, misses the creative brief.

We try the cioppino, and it’s a bit of a miss, the broth so deeply stewed that it overwhelms the dainty charms of the seafood. So, sure, Lala joins the long line of us failing to swish every shot we take. But they make up for it with enough hits, a killer bar, and a parking lot speakeasy that, in the loud-voices party that is Little Italy, chose to be the one who just did something quietly interesting off in the corner until we all couldn’t help but gather ’round.

The Perfect Order from Lala

Chargrilled Oysters | Loaded Gnocchi | Espresso Martini

The post Review: Lala in Little Italy appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Crapshoot either way.

I don’t know anything about this art piece and I don’t want to. Art is whatever the seer is seeing. And personally, I see the story of Manna and chef-owner Andrew Bachelier. The youth represents an unfatigued optimism, maybe less sophisticated but also more pure (just like Manna’s kitchen, which is about one square foot, and the chefs’ tools are glorified camping gear, tasting spoons, and a healthy dose of F-it).

The blindfold represents the “see with your gut” risk Bachelier took when he left Carlsbad’s Jeune et Jolie, the kind of restaurant he’d worked his whole life to helm (it’s partially named after his daughter, and it would win a Michelin star a year after his departure, a nod he no doubt deserves partial credit for). And the heart is why he stepped away from a career apex—to be with his three daughters and wife during the pandemic.

Manna is Bachelier’s return, and it is a hell of a return. It’s less a restaurant than a very lovely porch on the side of Highway 101 in Leucadia. A nothing-but-brunch alcove that feels like the restaurant version of glamping. Bachelier and his wife designed the whole thing using materials from restaurants whose time on this earth has passed. Estate-sale chic, with some paint splotches on one wall. (“We just started throwing paint at it after a couple beers one night,” chef says.)

This is a brunch restaurant without booze, which feels about as natural as a sober cruise ship or doing body shots of gingko biloba in the rave tent. Day-drinking and general enthusiasm for excess is the coin of the brunch realm. The brunch industry is irresponsibility as a group project—a social stiff-arm to household chores, magically turning to-dos into to-don’ts.

Email an investor your idea for a nonalcoholic brunch restaurant, and any self-respecting spam filter would intervene on behalf of that person’s money. And yet, there is seemingly always a line at Manna. Because of the food. Like their albacore tostada—raw cubes of line-caught tuna, marinated like a traditional poke (white soy, sesame oil), then criss-crossed with jalapeño crema (fermented for 14 days, emulsified with avocado and cilantro) and pickled Hungarian pepper sauce. Looks like a pack of Fruit Stripe gum, tastes like you’re making quality life decisions.

Back to the drinks, because I have misled you into thinking the beverages here were somehow fraudulent sans alcohol’s benevolent toxicity. Without the breakfast charms of Champagne, they have created one of the most ambitious zero-proof drink rosters in the city.

On their “vitality tonic” menu, the “Bronze” is coffee from Carlsbad roaster Steady State with five-spice, fenugreek (it’s like nature’s bitters), and lemon, clarified with milk and poured over a single giant ice cube. Give it a few minutes to dilute (it’s a tad thick on the pour), and it’s one of the better iced coffee riffs around.

They also have three wellness shots. To make their fire cider, they treat organic apple cider vinegar like a whiskey, aging and fermenting it for a month. Then it’s steeped with alliums (which, according to the National Institutes of Health, have “antioxidant, anticancer, hypolipidemic, anti-diabetic, cardioprotective, neuroprotective, and antimicrobial activities”), lavender, rosemary, jalapeño, clover sprout, and honey.

Drinking hippie bartender vinegar is the new Frenet. The server warns me it’s intense, and he’s right, but it’s also delicious, and, placebo or not, I can feel recent iniquities leave my body.

Light jazz plays on the overhead speakers. My server (who was with Bachelier at Jeune et Jolie, as a few other members of the team were) is wearing a Panama hat, and his beard is so wild he will one day not have to shave it, but clear-cut it. The couple next to me are wearing Lycra. Not the Kardashian kind, the bicycle kind.

North County’s biking scene is very, very serious, and so Manna may one day become the first Michelin-starred restaurant where the dress code is shorts with crotch pads and sheeny shirts with so many logos the diners look like NASCAR drivers.

They serve a çilbir, which you don’t see often. It’s a Turkish specialty whose magic is spiced butter (much like Ethiopian niter kibbeh). Poached eggs come atop herbed yogurt, a pile of torn herbs, and that sassy butter. Mix it all up and use the Prager Brothers toast as your edible utensil.

Their beef tartare gets an Asian spin, with black garlic, Asian pear, and nori combining for a deeply rich, lightly sweet-spicy note next to the natural sauce of a quail egg.

Humble porridge is getting velvet-roped in San Diego right now. Kingfisher’s killer congee has been one of the city’s must-try dishes for a couple years now. And Manna’s bowl of beautiful grain sludge is a knockout—toasted buckwheat cooked in mushroom stock, then served with foraged mushrooms, deeply caramelized brown miso, seared Hokkaido scallops, an egg yolk, and herbed cheese. Putting sautéed mushrooms with miso is almost unfair; the only thing that could unlock more flavor is if you braised the whole dish in a slurry of truffles and MSG. It eats like a risotto-paella.

Of course, no brunch is complete without a couple dishes that spike your insulin, and Manna’s star is the torrija—Spanish French toast. It’s a two- to three-day process. They start by making a butterscotch custard, then they cut huge chunks of sourdough, pipe that custard into the bread, and let it set for at least a day so that it’s not too mushy. It’s served with hunks of applewood-smoked bacon in maple syrup. Cut through, and the inside is like a butterscotch tres leches.

Bachelier’s arrival is smelling salts for Leucadia’s food culture, and Manna’s just the start. Soon, if various gods and city regulatory boards finally deign to offer their blessing, he’ll be opening the fried chicken sandwich concept Chick & Hawk with local icon Tony Hawk (who is secretly one of the biggest restaurateurs in the city).

If my napkin math is correct, that will be the economic driver that will allow Bachelier and his crew to do something truly irresponsible and open a Michelin-star-gobbling dinner thing. I’ll Lycra up and go on that ride.

The post Review: Breaking Brunch at Atelier Manna appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

If you feel lost, you’re probably on the right track. Turn left at the 7/11, resist the urge to get sassy with your GPS. Look for a woman checking her mailbox, a bike in a yard, a man working on a “project” in his garage with a serene, glossy escapism in his eyes. None of those things will help you, of course, but they are probably the most common sights in the vicinity of this restaurant. No signs are permitted, per the city or county or whichever jurisdictional body governs this kind of experience. Stay moderately alert and you’ll see the A-shaped structure towering above a side fence in this suburban Serra Mesa neighborhood.

That is it. The hut you’ll have a pretty remarkable meal in tonight.

Dave Sims will meet you at the gate. He will likely be wearing something tropical, a fashion portal to his former wanderlust surf life in Indonesia, where he worked at a resort at the top of a cliff overlooking a famed surf cove. Where, he’ll tell you, the waves echoed like thunder, creating a shocking natural white noise that put traveling surfers to sleep. Where he first spotted his now-wife, Rie, an Indo native full of sass and life, outside a local bar. Where he braved a hello. And why he’s here, welcoming us to an elaborate six-course Indonesian feast inside a gigantic remodeled rice hut in their backyard.

Built in 1935, the hut floated for a month on a cargo ship across the Pacific until it landed here and became the symbol of an entirely new form of restaurant in San Diego.

Dave will show you their food plants—spiky dragonfruit (which, later, we’ll eat as a sorbet), makrut lime leaf shrub (it flavors the soup), bananas, a hopeful little coffee plant, a verdant wall of passion fruit vines that separate his grow area from their single-story home, where he and Rie live with their two boys. The home Dave grew up in.

On our night there, we follow Dave through a wooden arch, past the American Ninja Warrior course he built for the kids. We weave around a stack of surfboards and mini-projects in various stages of tinkering and disarray on the back patio. Walking through a sliding glass door into the tiny kitchen, we see Rie wearing a sleeve of tattoos, a flower in her hair, and blood-red lipstick. Her smile is moon-sized and electric.

She’s putting the final touches on the elaborate, symmetrical plating of our first course: siomay ayam, dumplings filled with spiced meat with peanut sauce, a universal street snack of West Java. Behind her is a black Whirlpool fridge with Las Vegas magnets and pictures of the kids and grocery lists. If you need to use the restroom, it’s through the living room to the right. Don’t mind the toys.

This is not a Food Network kitchen. It is one measured in phone booths and modesty. And it’s where, every Thursday through Saturday night, she cooks up to a dozen six-course tasting meals that represent her native Papua and Indo culture at large, changing menus seasonally with the produce of San Diego.

Dave escorts us back up the slope of the yard, and we enter the hut. It’s about the size of a ten-person tent, but with 20-foot ceilings and a second deck (where rice farmers would sleep, above their harvest on the bottom floor) and a wooden table that fits up to six people. He asks Siri or Alexa or one of those to play his island mix. Light tropical vibes fill the hut. It’s winter, so Dave squeezes past us, fires up a small space heater that’s attached to a propane tank, and goes off to corral the first course.

This is Warung RieRie, a fine dining restaurant in someone’s home. Or behind it. And it’s the star of San Diego’s world of MEHKOs—Micro Economic Home Kitchen Operations. Warung RieRie offers two seatings a night, Thursday through Saturday, and they are booked out for a year (their reservation software won’t allow them to book any further).

For chefs like Rie, MEHKOs are a way in, or just a different way. Few people can afford to open a restaurant, which can run (at the very lowest end) tens of thousands to millions of dollars and lock dreamers into long-term leases. In 2013, California implemented the Homemade Food Act, allowing anyone to make and sell low-risk foods (granola, jam, the like) out of their homes. Hot meals were a no-go, deemed too dangerous.

But on Jan. 1, 2019, AB 626 allowed cooks in California to run restaurants out of their homes, serving all but the most notorious get-sick foods (like oysters and tartare). The new restaurants were called MEHKOs.

As always, laws come with parameters, catches, and more than their fair share of BS. To prevent neighborhoods from becoming restaurant rows, MEHKOs were only allowed to serve 30 meals a day and 60 per week, with no more than $50,000 in gross annual sales. That’s hardly a living, but it was a start. Before you could begin, your county had to sign off on AB 626. San Diego County gave MEHKOs the green light in 2022. The program was scheduled to sunset in 2024, but last November, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to not only make the program permanent, but to expand how many meals could be served (90) and how much money made ($100K). San Diego’s model for them is considered one of the best in the state.

Per the county’s analysis, the program was a wild success. None of the feared potential negative outcomes— restaurant traffic ruining neighborhoods, salmonella outbreaks, you can imagine—came to bear. And a meal at Warung RieRie is a showcase of the positive effects.

For starters, per the US census, only 25 percent of businesses in San Diego County are owned by women or minorities. Compare that to the 60-something MEHKO permits issued in San Diego: 58 percent are women-owned, and 70 percent minority-owned. The smaller scale of MEHKOs also allows restaurants to showcase food from cultures that don’t have the demand or audience of, say, Thai or Chinese.

Rie was trained to cook Indonesian food by her father, and over a couple of efficient hours she sends out sayur sop (a traditional vegetable soup with coriander, garlic, and nutmeg); a green salad with ribbons of cucumbers, citrus from their backyard, and a passion fruit vinaigrette; a sextet of scallops with pea sprouts in a triple citrus sauce, her father’s recipe for a dish from the Maluku, Moluccas archipelago; and sous vide duck confit, served in a thick Indo coconut cream curry with garlic green vegetables (for which cucumbers are hollowed out to serve as vessels for three variations of homemade sambal, ranging in spice level from mild to abusive). We finish the meal with coconut-mango-dragon-fruit sorbet topped with coconut flakes and passion fruit syrup.

It’s plated beautifully. The food is good to excellent, all far exceeding expectations from that tiny kitchen. The dumplings are among the best I’ve had. The duck is incredibly tender, its sauce nearly a gravy, undeniably great. The entire room eats the sorbet as if it’s life’s final treat.

Sitting in that hut, staring out its three windows, you can barely see Clairemont. There is passion fruit out one window, palm trees out another, the night sky the other way. You feel transported.

Warung RieRie is not cheap: $220 per person. For me, the food and wildly unique experience is worth it. I’ve paid more for less. There’s nothing like this in San Diego (had the food been bad or even subpar, I’d let you know, but it was rather fantastic).

The transaction of commerce is admittedly odd in this environment. Restaurants in homes are standard in many parts of the world, but not here. In the US, backyards have long been the realm of the potluck, of the polite Venmo or just a deep gratitude. But no friend of mine also serves six courses of delicious and elaborately plated Indo food in a nearly 100-year-old rice hut.

At the end of the night, I ask if it’s ever exhausting, inviting this steady stream of strangers into their home three nights a week. They love it, they say. Rie, leaning against one of the hut’s open windows with a beer in hand, explains this is how it’s done where she’s from. Warungs (homes that double as restaurants) are everywhere. Where people live and where people make a living are one and the same.

The post Inside the San Diego Restaurant With a Year-Long Waitlist appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

The caesar salad they serve here comes with jalapeños and an Al-Pacino-doing-coke-in-Scarface amount of Parmesan. It is glorious.

But back to the room. It is the friend whose shirt never has lint. Lint wouldn’t dare. Lint leaves the shirt of this place and jumps onto your shirt. The chairs are army green or martini olive green, warm yet also nontraditional—interesting enough to practice polyamory. Or maybe the color was invented specifically for this room because none of the rest of us could be trusted with this color. In our hands, it would’ve looked like an army surplus store.

The market oysters, meaning whichever are particularly thriving at that moment, are also very good. The accompanying yuzu kosho granité is the killer here. Yuzu is a tart Asian lemon, and yuzu kosho is a godly paste made from fermented chiles, salt, and yuzu zest. Mignonette, Tabasco, and grocery store lemons do fine, workmanlike work. This is the spiritual enlightenment of that idea.

This place used to be a piano showroom. Before Americans started buying our pianos and consumer thrills from Jeff Bezos, each American city had a glossy little piano farm. You walked in and someone was tickling the ivories beautifully, filling you with the spirit that you, too, might fancy a tickle. You sat down on one of those pianos and played the first few bars of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” and stopped after a few seconds because you never learned the rest of the song (that fact has led to more than one romantic breakup in your life). 

Large humans would deliver the piano to your house, where you played it furiously for six or seven days until you could do crimes because your fingerprints were rubbed fresh off. Then, for the next six or seven years, the piano would just kinda sit there, taking up an immodest amount of space (but looking really shiny and projecting your family’s false-front of artsiness) until you eventually forced it on some gullible relative who also enjoys musical delusions of grandeur.

Now that the place is Paradisaea, there’s still a piano in the room, and every Wednesday the principal of Rancho Bernardo High School comes down to play for everyone. After long days of contouring the brilliant and terrifying minds of teenagers, I bet playing here is therapy.

But, on most nights, the music you hear in this room is the ice being rhythmically thrashed about in the bartender’s shakers—that rocky-wet siren song of loose lips. The music is the sizzle and sear of hot pans in the open kitchen. The music is the muffled cultural discussions and gentle insider trading of Bird Rock regulars.

The bartenders make a damn good martini. Drink it while eating the carrots in smoked yogurt—a dish made well in many places around town (Fort Oak famously does a great one), simultaneously smoky and tangy and creamy and carrot-sweet. It’s a dish that makes us moan, tottering on that thin threshold between eating dinner and soundtracking smut.

Dry-aging fish is a fringe kitchen art that’s catching on (it’s honestly an ancient thing—sushi only gets its trademark silkiness by aging a bit). When you age it, it doesn’t get “fishier” in that moldy-dock sort of way; it’s just more rich and luscious. Paradisaea’s amberjack crudo comes with oro blanco (grapefruit-adjacent), shaved fennel, charred avocado, and burnt citrus oil. Fresh, bright, and burnt. That’s a good thing. 

I didn’t much care for the Ora King salmon. That was a tad fishy. But the 28-day ribeye with potato pave and morel mushrooms is an old song played well.

The steak knives are engraved with their island–Def Leppard logo on the side of the blade. That couldn’t have been cheap. You should probably just order the chefs’ tasting menu (at $105 for five courses, it has to be one of the best deals in the city)—each bite seems to come with its own custom utensil.

The post The Prettiest Restaurant in San Diego (& Some Delicious Carrots) appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Steakhouses are a place for birthdays with zeroes in them and wrap parties for long careers. They’re where big-deal clients are ornately wooed. They’re home to proposals both sacred and profane, where trusty anniversary gin is properly dirtied. All our various big life things are toasted, individually but simultaneously, through blood and bottle, under a single roof with a lot of butter.

In other words, more than the usual or recommended amount of emotions are pinned to dinner at the new Steak 48 in Del Mar. It’s a house of cheers and tears.

Sure, some come just because they’re hungry and like nice things. There are regulars who, through achievement or the natural flow of money down a bloodline, can casually dine in this strata of $500 checks and $100 tips. You often see them at the bar, their radiant epidermises the result of skin creams rare and exotic, some combo of shea butter and narwhal breath that’s illegal in many countries.

The rest of us have not yet victoriously pinned NASDAQ to the mat, are not collectors of infinity pools. But we’d like to try that on for size for a moment, and that’s important for the steakhouse. We’re middle-class Janes and Joes who have socially agreed to suspend economic disbelief for one night of carnivore dinner theater. In our daily lives, we responsibly count and monitor the outflow of our chits and eat our crucifers. Tonight, we take capitalism for a fleshy joy ride.

There are moments of pause. For instance, the waiter suggests my wife, Claire, try a Bernie Madoff–priced glass of Dom Serene Evenstad pinot ($68). I politely tachycardia.

Not because I’m cheap—I am cheap, but my cheapness knows its place. Looking for deals at a steakhouse is like trying to score drugs in church. Tonight, we’re gonna spend like we’re all launching SpaceX from our porticos at dawn.

All of this is why the most important thing about a steakhouse is the hospitality. Most of us spend our lives dutifully attending to demands, be it from bosses or banks or our lord-savior smartphones. At steakhouses, we’re splurging to be obsessively yet unobtrusively taken care of.

And Steak 48—the new arrival from Scott Troilo and the Arizona-based Mastro family (brothers Jeffrey and Michael and father Dennis), which first made its name with the wildly popular Mastro’s before selling it to Landry’s in 2013—are determined to serve you within an inch of your life.

A million people work here. Four attendants greet us at the host stand—less a welcome than a help ambush. You are swept up in a mild tornado of excellently trained wish caddies.

I recognize the bartender; she used to manage one of San Diego’s Michelin-starred restaurants. She’s getting her PhD, she explains—but, the point is, few restaurants have bartenders who used to run a Michelin.

Another night, our server is exactly who a steakhouse server should be—formal but not taxidermied, opinionated in all the right ways, a Vegas kinda funny. He has memorized every menu item and the perfect preparation and most common alterations. He may have invented steak.

Near the end of our meal, I ask if they’ve got the warm butter cake—Mastro’s famed dessert—and he says, “Have you ever opened a cease-and-desist letter? We have the warm vanilla cake, sir.”

The dude is a delight. And Steak 48 will win every service award.

Perched on the corner of Del Mar Highlands Town Center, Steak 48 is massive (12,500 square feet), with a wing built for corporate buyouts that includes its own bar and video screens. You enter first into the sunken main lounge, past a wall hung with hatchets, which is the edgiest thing about the design.

I’m a fan of minimalism or maximalism; Steak 48 casts their vote for in-betweenism. It won’t wow or offend. Granted, this place once housed Burlap, which was designed like a burlesque dinner party trying to entice a vice raid. Pendulums gotta swing.

There is a glass booth that stares directly down the line of their cold bar, which gives you a nifty view into the kitchen. The lights in the main bar and dining area are set to deep dusk with a billion LED candles. It’s like dining in a midnight Catholic prayer service, which sets a dreamy mood.

You know the Steak 48 concept—apps, chops, raw bar, caviar, “other” mains (Chilean sea bass, lamb, veal, scallops), potatoes five ways, volume-play desserts. A 3,000-bottle wine cellar (heavily West Coast reds and international whites and sparklings, both little-knowns and superstars like Opus and Quintessa). Their pours are benevolent and house party–sized (nine-ounce glasses of wine, five-ounce martinis—and they make a perfect dirty).

Your dinner plate lands at 300 or 400 degrees—the idea being that your first bite is as warm as your last. (But the reality being that any nicely pink cut of meat set down will not sear but turn a boiled-gray hue.

This is a longstanding hole in this approach—because, while I’m sure this next sentence will unsettle plant-based friends, I need the sight of blood on my steak. It activates something ancient in my marrow, and that lizard-brain bloodlust makes the steak taste better. Gray steak just looks like a mistake that only presidents prefer. Plus, just-warm beef is better than hot beef.)

We order the New York strip, their base model. Anyone with a heating surface can make a Miyazaki A5 Wagyu taste like euphemisms. The trick is working magic with the lowly gateway steak. And it’s good, seared and cooked to temp. Steak 48 specializes in corn-fed steaks— which are more marbled, sweeter, and richer than grass-fed (your mouth will always say yes to more fat).

We top the meat with soft, whipped truffle butter. It’s the river Styx of Steak 48: Whatever you dip in it becomes a bit closer to godliness. The greatest sauce, though, is “officially” served with seafood, but you should use it everywhere—olive oil with herbs and tomato.

Sides are hot and cold. The crème brûlée corn is topped with turbinado sugar, torched and caramelized. It is soup candy, a delicious bugle call to insulin manufacturers. Also try the whipped praline sweet potatoes. Again, they are a dessert in an appetizer costume with mascarpone cheese, candied pecans, and streusel crisp.

The wild mushrooms aren’t sautéed nearly enough. If not sizzled into submission, the forest sponges retain their bland, unseasoned moisture. And the creamed spinach would be more honest if named “spinached cream”—too heavy on the gloop.

That speaks to a weakness that pops up a lot on Steak 48’s menu. The big hits are so dependent on cream, butter, cheese, and sugar. The Maine lobster escargot is very tasty, but you’re not really tasting lobster or anything except truffle mornay sauce (to be fair, escargot and lobster are both traditionally drowned in butter). The other issue Steak 48’s gotta figure out is temperature.

Our red wine comes so cold. It is cabernet served like it’s sauvignon blanc. Red wine should be stored at 57 degrees Fahrenheit but served closer to 68, just below room temperature. I throw no shade at how people prefer to drink their wine. If you love Screaming Eagle with a couple ice cubes in it, I’ll grab the ice tongs for you. You like it with just a touch of salt and a dash of cigar ash? Cheers, weirdo.

But if you just enjoy red wine in the missionary position, as I do—good juice near room temp in a clean glass—then order your wine an hour before you come to dinner at Steak 48 and ask them to let it sit out on the bar for a while.

Same with the crab salad. Ours arrives nearly blast- chilled. Cold temps bury flavors. That’s a good thing when serving sorry ingredients or college beer. But this is very good crab. We ignore it and let it warm a touch, and it’s delicious—lumps of meat atop fresh avocado (another food that should never be served cold) and a slice of heirloom tomato, seasoned with a little basil pistou.

Get the hasselback potato, a 1950s Americana staple that was wrongly left for dead. It’s a whole spud, partially sliced so that it resembles an extreme-sports armadillo, baked until the exterior edges are crisp but the middle is tender and doused with truffle butter and chive cream sauce. Also order the hamachi crudo (served at the perfect temp) with hearts of palm, tapenade, and white soy.

Steak 48 isn’t out to set a new frontier for the genre. The steakhouse is a classic American song, one unexpected in San Diego, where our eating habits strike fear in the hearts of plants more than steer. But in times of uncertainty—as we finally normalize viral pandemics only to watch the formless mothership of AI ingest not only our roles in society, but our cultural identity and basic uniqueness as a species (no biggie)—an old song can soothe souls.

And Steak 48 sings it decently.

The post Review: Del Mar’s Steak 48 appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Photo Credit: James Tran

Get the tongue.

The most stunning design element of this taco shop is the line of humans that winds through the middle of it. Much more lively and interesting than a plant wall or an ostrich lamp, the line has predictable surges during meal hours, but will also just randomly appear at 10 a.m. or 3 p.m. A crushing little wave of people will materialize with a boom, corporealizing to appreciate what this family—chef Jose L. Garcia, his wife Veronica Perez, sometimes their kids helping out—can do with tortillas, meat, spices, cheese, chiles, and generational recipes (the birria is made according to abuela’s method).

Tacos are $1.99 each. They are small, simple, excellent things. You won’t get a farmers market on a tortilla here, nor cremas seasoned with bourbon and rare Indonesian herbs. Just deliciously marinated meat of your choice (carne asada, adobada, carnitas, al pastor, suadero, cabeza, lengua… you get it), onions, cilantro, and three salsa options from that little buffet cart over by the Takis snack chips, to the left of the toilet paper, near the three Virgin Mary statuettes.

Photo Credit: James Tran

For 13 years, Mi Rancho Market has been the taco dispensary for Escondido. One of the riskiest risks a person can take—defying their wife—paid off for Jose. The couple immigrated to California from Jalisco as teenagers in the ’80s. They’d worked in a grocery store in Pasadena—Jose was a butcher; Veronica, a cashier. In 2007, they bought this little box in a parking lot, right next to beloved donut shop Peterson’s. They merely intended to be the neighborhood convenience store, where you stopped real quick if you forgot tortillas or paper towels at the main supermarket.

Jose had cooking in his blood. He kept bugging his wife to let him make and sell tacos. The store had a built-in kitchen, he pleaded. No, no, no, she said. Then, one day, she showed up and carne asada was sizzling on the plancha. “He only sold $16 worth of tacos all day,” she recalls. “And I was like, ‘SEE!?’”

But Jose’s tacos were very, very good. Word spread.

Photo Credit: James Tran

San Diego’s biggest Latino communities are mostly clustered at the fringes of the county, both south (Chula Vista, National City, Bonita) and north (Vista, Escondido). Since 2010, Latinos have made up the largest part of Escondido’s population (52 percent). Escondido’s large agricultural community has at least something to do with that, since 92 percent of California farmworkers are Latino. This is where San Diego grows most of its avocados and citrus and wine (agriculture in Escondido accounts for 20 percent of the county’s total output).

Mi Rancho became an unofficial town hall, where whole families regularly commune over al pastor, between soda coolers. Affordability is a crucial, key element for any place to become a cultural hub (think churches and donut shops)—and at two bucks a taco, Mi Rancho excludes very few. Sitting here over two days, I watch friends, families, coworkers spend not the big moments of life, but the small, mundane, connective-tissue moments that make the strongest human bonds.

Again, get the tongue, or lengua. It’s the best taco at Mi Rancho (and also at most other taco shops), long boiled in aromatics until tender, almost silky, in consistency. Tongue doesn’t bother those raised near the deeper end of Mexican food culture (or cuisines including, but not limited to, Portuguese, British, German, Albanian, Russian, and Jewish). But it’s fairly easy to understand why those who are unfamiliar flinch. “I don’t want to French-kiss my food,” is the common dissent.

Photo Credit: James Tran

This is because many of us in the US have a complicated, almost farcical relationship with our meat. Humans are far from the only species on the planet that eats meat (63 percent of species are carnivores), but we are the most burdened with our bucket-sized brains and that organ’s ability to philosophize about eating animals and bum ourselves out about it.

That bleeding-heart function is crucial, keeping us from consuming gross amounts of meat, inspiring us to respect the life that was given for our steak (and its impact on the environment), making us give a damn about not being a quadruple-cheeseburger, top-of-the-food-chain jerkwad. But where the brain goes wrong is to overcompensate, to rationalize, to fake us out.

Case in point: We smoke-and-mirror the process of eating meat. Most American grocery stores moved the butcher sections out of sight around the 1980s. (We also stashed them away because customer-facing butchers were expensive.) Then we yanked them from the stores altogether. We butcher in secrecy, then present perfect pork chops and thighs and ribeyes wrapped in packaging on the shelf, neatly stacked as if they’re just another consumable product, no different than an iPhone.

I’ve long had a lot more respect for markets in other cultures, where animals are hung on display—not as a dumb flex of food chain supremacy, but as a tacit acknowledgement of the realities of this transaction.

Photo Credit: James Tran

In the corner of Mi Rancho, there are great piles of marinated beef in a case, un-preciously pressed up against the glass. In a smaller terrarium there are piles of deep-fried pig skin—glorious chicharrones, the original snack chip.

In the US, too, we tend to steer away from anything having to do with the “face” of food animals, only eating the back (sirloin) and other “prime” cuts. Which is ridiculous, wasteful, and simply less delicious. Lengua and cabeza (head)—most often, beef cheeks—are rife with connective tissue, which melts and lends incredible umami to the dish, much in the same way it does in oxtail. Mi Rancho slow-cooks these cuts until the meat is like shredded short ribs, the moistest roast.

Fight your instinct to order carne asada (a strong compulsion, but you can do this). Instead, try the two dishes that feature their fantastic, tomatillo-based chile verde: the suadero taco (suadero is a leg- and loin-area meat, smooth and flavorful) and their costillas de puerco (tender pork braised in green salsa).

And then their soups. The birria de chivo—goat, the original protein of the dish that seems to have become the official food of San Diego—is redolent with chiles and oil and just the right amount of gaminess.

Photo Credit: James Tran

As for menudo, I’ve found it hit-or-miss in San Diego. The special-occasion soup and hangover cure—made of tripe (stomach) with chiles, onions, oregano, and lime juice—can be thin, rushed, pleading for more time and patience to develop its flavors. After tasting Mi Rancho’s, I took it to a family friend. Born and raised in Guadalajara, she’s a fantastic Mexican cook and very honest about any food I beg her to taste. She didn’t care for Mi Rancho’s quesabirria tacos (“too oily”).

But the menudo? “Oh, my god,” she said. The best she’s had in San Diego, she reports—and while I haven’t tried them all, I have to agree with her.

Mi Rancho’s is intensely reduced, flavorful, a genuine cure.

The post Review: Mi Rancho Market appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Marisi spread

Photo Credit: James Tran

America’s love affair with wallpaper has reached a lusty pitch. We’re gift-wrapping walls now with a zeal not seen since the 1920s when it seemed Victorian OBGYNs were catching newborns in the stuff. And the new wallpaper vanguard is not subtle. The wilder and clashier, the better. I’m all for it. Seemed like the last decade of restaurant design was abandoned-building minimalism.

The city’s best chefs were serving meals in rooms of slab concrete where the only design flourishes were stalactites of old carpet glue as we stared at crumbly brick walls surrounded by a Pittsburgh amount of steel. The whol scene seemed destined to peak one day when we’d find ourselves eating trendy Michelin food while sitting cross-legged on a pile of rebar.

I still enjoy that no-frills brutalism, but I’m also ready for visual riots. Something interesting, delicate, pretty.

Marisi in La Jolla is all those things. There seem to be six or seven different patterns, elbowing one another in a sort of atelier mosh pit. Moroccan tile runs into fruit-fetish wallpaper, and so on. The off-menu item that’s included with every meal or drink is increased sex appeal; humans look more tantalizing sitting here.

The main show is the high-ceilinged patio out front that’s always cast in hazy half light. With long strands of bougainvillea dangling from the rafters high above, it’s a terrarium of diners (all of whom seem to have fantastic skincare routines, their epidermises nearly liquid) sitting in soft-cloth booths of various pastels.

Like a more-ethical beauty filter, Marisi’s lush surrounds and aurous lighting lend diners a hint of boosted sex appeal.

Photo Credit: James Tran

The restaurant brews brine for its dirty martini with odds and ends from the kitchen, including milled tomatoes, mushroom jus, and parmesan rinds.

Photo Credit: James Tran

In the middle of that patio is a barrel. Get to know its insides. That’s private select Weller full proof (William Larue Weller was one of the bourbon originals, using wheat instead of rye, and he taught his employee, Julian “Pappy” Van Winkle, how to master the stuff). It’s ambitious, terrific liquid.

Ambition is in the air at Marisi—a serious stab at a rarefied, scratch-pasta trattoria from the family that created Puesto. (Brothers Eric, Alex, and Alan Adler, plus cousins Moy and Isi Lombrozo all grew up in the neighborhood—and opened their first Puesto next door.)

For the bar, the family pulled Beau du Bois from Meadowood, one of the best restaurants on the planet. Someone should paint him. He is tanned and chiseled, almost seems created by AI. He is also an encyclopedia of booze, and stashed above the semi-circular bar and along the walls are his various bottles of treats—amaros and bourbons for days. He makes his own limoncello, a personal crusade to rescue the Italian liqueur from the reputational slander of store-bought brands. His limoncello is a revelation in comparison. The house favorite cocktail is the gin and tonic, which adds white port to the classic. Port tonics are a Portugal pre-meal standard, the subtle sweet dessert wine balancing the tonic’s bitterness.

A world away from the dimpled, pizza-esque flatbread most of us know, Marisi’s focaccia arrives as a buttery, cloudlike boule. Use it to soak up the beef carpaccio’s generous toppings.

Photo Credit: James Tran

Inside Marisi, the kitchen is so “open” that it’s part of the dining room. Only difference is the team of chefs and the inferno of wood charring and smoking vegetables, meats, and snacks. There’s executive chef Chad Huff, analyzing and nitpicking dishes before they go out. Huff spent a couple of years as lead pasta chef for the renowned Felix Trattoria in Venice, then was executive chef for Malibu’s Broad Street Oyster Co. before Marisi lured him south.

Spirits VP Beau du Bois draws Weller full proof bourbon from the restaurant’s barrel of wheat-based liquid gold.

Photo Credit: James Tran

Upstairs, more chefs hover over a table in a cumuluslike huddle of flour, making fresh pasta. Nearby, they’re dry-aging fish in a temperature- and humidity-controlled chamber. If aging fish sounds somehow suspect, know that sushi only becomes that silky wonder-meat because it’s aged (the muscles straighten, becoming silky).

The Marisi experience starts with focaccia. This is not the focaccia you know. It arrives looking like a full cake, called a boule. Bread has just a few ingredients, the primary being flour. So the specialness of that flour is everything. Marisi’s is made with Red Fife flour from the Tehachapi Grain Project, a collaboration between one of California’s most respected farmers, Alex Weiser, and Anson Mills. The result is light, fluffy, buttery, salty, gorgeous. Pace yourself. Use it throughout your entire meal to scrape up sauces.

Honestly, don’t order the carpaccio without that bread. Because this is also not a traditional carpaccio. Snake River eye of round is coated with a paste of roasted garlic and anchovy, seared over the wood fire, then sliced paper-thin and spread across a very generous plate. The toppings are obscene for a thin-sliced beef dish—scallion salsa verde, pickled heirloom chiles, tufts of roasted pine nut puree, and horseradish. I ate it on its own; while delicious, the toppings were so abundant that it almost ate like a zingy-thick gazpacho. I’d love to see all those things in smaller doses. However, with the bread to balance out the toppings? Perfect.

Pasta is Marisi’s love language. The pasta itself is as good as expected under Huff, using the world’s best flour. It’s got that snap-chew, alive flavor of things made minutes ago. Get the pappardelle with Genovese duck ragu. It’s everything a dish should be at a pasta restaurant—simply good noodles, un-simple accompaniment (duck instead of beef, garnished with preserved Meyer lemon and Piave Vecchio DOP, a younger, slightly sweeter cheese that’s close to Parm-Reg).

Our three favorite dishes at Marisi are the squid, chicken, and fish. Basic dishes, done so well. The squid is from Monterrey, grilled instead of battered and fried (many US restaurants fry it because squid used to freak people out in the ’80s, and we’re slow to adapt). It’s tossed in a relish of preserved Jimmy Nardello peppers and Calabrian chiles with charred Romano beans and fingerling potatoes.

Lead line chef Taylor Houseman lays veggies out to char in the restaurant’s roaring wood-fire oven.

Photo Credit: James Tran

Always order the chicken to get a feel for a restaurant. Anyone can make duck or ribeye or lamb taste compelling. Chicken is the khaki pants of proteins, so a chef who can make it remarkable is doing good things. And Huff’s Jidori—a half-bird, deboned and marinated in citrus, chiles, and housemade shio koji (a Japanese flavor magic trick), then grilled over coastal oak and a demiglace— is a star.

Scratch-made pappardelle comes topped with tender duck ragu, preserved Meyer lemon, and Parmigiano-Reggiano relative Piave Vecchio DOP.

Photo Credit: James Tran

And finally, the line-caught fish of the day, which was halibut for us. Great fish, but at a restaurant like Marisi, the meaty wallflower is merely a supporting star of a sauce. Huff rests it on a delicious beurre blanc that’s mounted with capers and Taggiasca olives, topped with a salad of shaved fennel, charred dandelion greens, and a citrus blend of blanco grapefruit, cara cara (the sweetest of the oranges) and blood orange (more tart to counterpoint the sweet), and pickled kumquats.

We ordered the bone-in New York steak. Dry-aged for 60 days, it’s intensely delicious. (Dry-aging serves the same function of reducing a sauce—getting rid of excess moisture, making the best flavors get stronger and louder.) My only complaint is that the art of it doesn’t match the art of Marisi. It is steak on a white plate. I understand the instinct.

When you’ve got a carnivore treat of this caliber, this long in the making, the idea is to eat it as close to raw as possible. Don’t fuss it, don’t sauce-tarnish it. But throw it a garnish bone, a little color support. Rest it on a bed of charred asparagus, pierce it with rosemary spears, lower it onto the table on a bougainvillea vine, have servers carry it out on a palanquin, something.

As I sip my limoncello to digest the Italian way, I reckon that, with an abundance of talent in this wild-pretty place, such details will work themselves out.

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