South Park’s Newest Tenant Is an Ode to Midcentury Furniture

Abutting Balboa Park and situated between North Park and Golden Hill, South Park might be best described as a marriage of those neighborhoods’ greatest charms: North Park’s linger-worthy restaurants and shops with Golden Hill’s slower pace and envy-inducing homes. A pleasant place to gather with friends or wander solo, this idyllic neighborhood offers much to eat, see, and buy. 

South Park, San Diego Restaurants and Bars

Shawarma Guys

Once highlighted on Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, Shawarma Guys’ popular Middle Eastern food truck is a South Park staple, with plans to open a brick-and-mortar store in the area soon. Yelp also named Shawarma Guys the top place to eat in the country in 2020. 

3012 Grape Street

Communal Coffee

Slinging lattes, teas, matcha, and café bites (sandwiches, toasts, pastries, and bowls) out of a vintage trailer, Communal Coffee invites those passersby to stop, sit, and sip on the shop’s sprawling patio before browsing the thoughtfully curated onsite boutique.

2221 Fern Street

Il Posto

An Italian-born trio founded Il Posto, an airy eatery serving pasta and pizza for happy hour and dinner. The robust vegan pizza menu makes this a friendly spot for plant-based diners. If you’re down with a little meat and dairy, try the lasagna. 

2145 Fern Street

Dark Horse Coffee Roasters

At the corner of Juniper and Fern sits Dark Horse Coffee Roasters. The popular San Diego coffee shop brews pick-me-up drinks (try the salted maple latte) and serves sweet treats from sister company Mutual Friend Ice Cream.

3004 Juniper Street

Rad Habits Juice Co.

A one-stop shop for futuristic-sounding wellness products (quinton shots and “neuro gum,” anyone?) and healthy bites, Rad Habits Juice Co. is best-known for its smoothies, boosted with hard-to-find ingredients like cordyceps, bee pollen, and sea moss.

2967 Beech Street

Curryosity

In addition to Indian classics like butter chicken and veggie korma, Curryosity cooks up fun fusion dishes, including chicken tikka poutine and naan bruschetta. Diners can also order creative craft cocktails made with Indian spices.

3023 Juniper Street

Kindred

Plant-based eats for hardcore peeps. Guests at Kindred will hear heavy metal while sipping thoughtful bevs and chowing down on seasonal, animal-free brunch, dinner, and late-night bites that make interesting use of standby vegan ingredients such as seitan and Gardein “meat.”

1503 30th Street

Whistle Stop Bar

A fun neighborhood hang, Whistle Stop Bar is a great place to grab a drink with friends. Divey in the best way, the watering hole hosts live music, DJ-driven dance parties, and raucous Saturday night shindigs dubbed “Booty Bassment.”

2236 Fern Street 

Seven Seas Roasting Co.

Seven Seas Roasting Co. specializes in direct-trade coffee, meaning that the team buys their beans directly from farmers (a more transparent process that gives more money to the source). They use ’em in tasty lattes like the choco-cherry-cinnamon Cherry Bomb.

1947 Fern Street

Station Tavern

South Park restaurant Station Tavern dwells in a building that was a trolley stop from 1929 to 1948. The restaurant has incorporated that history into its design and theme. Stop by for burgers, sandwiches, and salads, plus a full bar.

2204 Fern Street

Fernside Bar & Kitchen

The food can sometimes be an afterthought at laid-back bars like Fernside, which slings boozy slushees and cocktails both inventive and classic. But you can’t go wrong with anything from the kitchen here, especially the fried chicken sandwich and citrus salad.

1946 Fern Street

Buona Forchetta

Italian spot Buona Forchetta opened its first location in South Park in 2011, with numerous other San Diego outposts following. With a fun build-your-own pasta option and more than 30 different pizzas (including vegan and gluten-free pies), options abound here.

3001 Beech Street

Matteo

A member of Buona Forchetta’s family of restaurants, Matteo is a nonprofit eatery and bakery that donates all profits to community and educational programs for local kids. Matteo serves breakfast classics, coffee, and pastries in the morning, then switches to Italian bites at night. 

3015 Juniper Street

Meraki

Another Buona Forchetta–owned business, Meraki is a new addition to the South Park neighborhood. The bar, restaurant, and event venue draws upon global influences, offering beef cheek empanadas alongside Wagyu burgers and Roman flatbreads. 

1648 30th Street

The Rose Wine Bar

The Rose Wine Bar is a local favorite for date nights or friend group catch-ups. The woman-owned spot lays down natural wines by the glass and the bottle, plus bar snacks, small bites, and more robust entrees like the “salad pie,” a pizza loaded with greens on top.

2219 30th Street

Secret Sister

Eat

Since our last guide to South Park, the neighborhood’s impressive roster of eats has expanded with newcomers, rebrands, and pandemic pivots. Order a wagyu beef shawarma pita or plate of lemon cream chop fries at Shawarma Guys to see why this food truck was ranked no. 1 on Yelp’s list of top places to eat in 2019. Buona Forchetta’s Matteo is a 100 percent nonprofit eatery where you can shop freshly baked goods, pastas, sauces, and more to raise money for educational programs for San Diego’s youth.

Down the street, Grant’s Market recently relaunched as Grant’s Coffee Room to better reflect its standing as a favorite for a caffeine fix. (It still offers beer and wine!) And when it’s time for your next homebound happy hour, sip one of Kindred’s to-go cocktails, like the lemon-basil Palace of Certainty.

 

Shop

Stop in to Thread + Seed to see owner Melanie Michaud’s refreshing rebrand. In 2020, she transformed her clothing boutique Graffiti Beach into a second location of her Bankers Hill home goods shop. Here you’ll find clean beauty products, decor, and curated gift boxes fit for every occasion.

Vintage enthusiasts will want to set aside some time to sift through Bad Madge & Co.’s expansive collection of vintage, resale, and locally made fashion and home goods. In addition to its regular business hours, the shop also offers appointments for private shopping. At Vinyl Junkies, by Eric Howarth and the Casbah’s Tim Mays, crate diggers can add to their record collection in a fun and funky setup.

 

Support

In a year already full of tough challenges, cherished local haunt Hamilton’s Tavern suffered a major blow when a devastating fire broke out in November. But when owner Scot Blair estimated the damages at around $1 million, dedicated patrons rose to the occasion. A GoFundMe was launched, raising money to go directly to Blair and his efforts to keep Hamilton’s, and its neighbor South Park Brewing, afloat. Show support for this longtime small-business owner here: gofundme.com/f/help-hamilton039s-tavern.

 

Get Outside!

Nearby Switzer Canyon hugs the east side of Balboa Park in an easy—albeit a little rocky—out-and-back trail. Plan your trip during the spring season and you’ll be treated to a bounty of bold wildflowers.

Matteo Cattaneo has eyes the color of Kalamata olives, and right now they’re brining in his tears. That sounds maudlin, I know. But it’s true. It’s not a full breakdown. He doesn’t bawl into the carrot cake (with a killer orange-zest icing). Too much work to do for that. But just sitting here with me for a few minutes at his new restaurant, Matteo, the idea of this place gets him a little misty. 

Matteo is a nonprofit breakfast and lunch restaurant in South Park, the part of town where Cattaneo made his name with Buona Forchetta, one of the city’s top pizza restaurants. What is a nonprofit restaurant? It means any profits made at Matteo after operating costs (salaries, food, overhead, etc.) will not go to Cattaneo or investors. It will go to “early childhood development” for San Diego kids (ideally, those in low income areas who need it). 

Restaurants already have micro-thin profit margins. So the joke when people first heard about it was, “Aren’t all restaurants nonprofit?” 

“We’ve been very lucky,” Cattaneo says over a prosciutto-burrata breakfast pinsa (a pizza made with rice flour as well as wheat, for a lighter, more digestible crust) created by his chef Luca Zamboni. “The community has really supported us and our business. We’ve got enough. How much more do you need?”

How much is enough? In San Diego, where the median home price is $606,000, the answer is a lot. But Buona Forchetta has done exceedingly well. They’ll open their fourth location, Garage Buona Forchetta, in Coronado this month; a pizza stand in North Park called Gelati & Peccati; and Carbón, a barbecue joint in South Park. 

So Cattaneo isn’t done making profits. He and his team—which at Matteo includes baker and general Joanne Sherif, who owned North Park’s Cardamon Cafe before closing last year—will sell more food, more drinks, make more jobs. But Matteo is one for the community. I don’t know the exact recipe for restaurant success, but I know part of success in any business is giving along with taking. Just look at TOMS shoes, Patagonia, Warby Parker, etc. You almost have to build it into the model now. Whether that’s just a PR move or not I’ll leave to the cynics. 

“This spot was perfect,” he says of the large corner space on Juniper & 30th Streets, across from Station Tavern and Whistle Stop Bar. “But this space has always been a place for the community. I saw it was available and knew it didn’t belong to a business, it belonged to the community.” 

The nonprofit process sure wasn’t easy, Cattaneo says. The biggest concern was having a say in where the money goes. Schools, god bless them, are run by a bureaucracy. If he funneled the money directly to that machine, some funds would end up going to a school that didn’t really need it (schools in Del Mar and Rancho Santa Fe are probably OK on funds, for instance). So Cattaneo set up a foundation where they can analyze which communities—beyond just South Park—and make their own decisions about who needs help. 

“With the foundation, we can work directly with the schools and see where there’s the most need,” he says, noting they’re starting with Chavista Cesar Chavez Service Clubs, which put on a lot of after-school enrichment programs for kids. “They help in areas where a lot of moms and dads are working 12 hours a day. They can teach them how to eat well, how to study, give them more opportunities.”

Matteo will rotate its beneficiary a few times a year. 

This isn’t a half-assed restaurant, either. Along with Sherif, who has a great name as a baker (try her almond croissant or coffee cake), Zamboni has a hell of a track record in pizza. For five years, he worked under Gabriele Bonci, known as the “king of pizza” in Rome. The menu is full of benedicts, toasts, frittatas, croissant sandwiches (the smoked salmon is excellent), bowls, pastries, and those breakfast pinsas. They’ll also start offering kids’ takeaway school lunches parents can pick up daily, with vegan and gluten-free options. 

I know the “why” of the project. I just wonder about the hours. I want to know “how” he can pull it off. 

“It just added four hours to my work day,” he smiles. “I didn’t sleep at night anyway and was up at 4AM looking for something to do.” 

Matteo officially opens Saturday, March 7. 3015 Juniper St., South Park. 8AM-3PM.

If this is vegan brunch, I might bid a pretty unemotional farewell to bacon some day. If this is the vegan scene, it’s drastically more awesome than haters would like to believe. For years, I’ve considered veganism a very good thing and reflexively generalized vegans as smug, sanctimonious blowhards.

To be fair, the badgering went both ways. Vegans (some, not all) accused omnivores of being murderers driven only by our own gluttony, environmental nihilists ushering in doomsday with every callous bite. Omnivores (some, not all) in turn belittled vegans as sickly looking crusaders, just another wacky religious sect, the Scientologists of food. Eventually, I assumed we’d get to a less judgmental middle ground. Someone would give San Diego an exciting vegan restaurant and bar that was less a territorial pissing and more of a come-all plant party.

Kindred in South Park is that place. It’s a restaurant for any human, really, who likes cool things. I’ve been a fan for years. I hadn’t, however, ventured in with their late morning crowd and seen the full evolution. Now that the food is catching up with (or caught up with) the cocktails, Kindred is a force.

Their breakfast strudels are some intoxicating carbs. Our favorite is the savory shaved seitan with tapioca mozzarella and pickled peppers. It’s spicy, meaty, cheesy, bready. The cinnamon and brown sugar strudel with candied pecans and coconut syrup is flaky on the outside, pure molten, thick, and gooey cinnamon roll inside. The pancakes with bruléed bananas, bourbon butterscotch, and whipped coconut cream aren’t good for your waist size, but they are good for your soul. Their hash is also very good, with fried potatoes, black beans, smoked coconut (vegan bacon), soy curls, maitake mushrooms, charred kale, jicama salsa, and Creole aioli.

The vibe has always been modern art. It’s the massive shiny-black demon head that lords over the main dining area. What an elegant, imposing beast. It’s the ornate pink wallpaper that appears cute and grandmotherly until a closer inspection reveals illicit scenery. It’s the gothic windows and the two-top tables that look like desks pulled from pagan Sunday school, or sidecars for Wiccan motorcycles. It’s the sludgy heavy metal on the speakers offset by the flood of fresh, natural light pouring in.

Previously, plant-based restaurants had a reputation as antiseptic prayer rooms for self-serious wellness people. Kindred owner Kory Stetina decided not to do that, and enlisted art-restaurant makers Consortium Holdings (Morning Glory, Born & Raised) to build a noisier temple for more entertaining urges.

In doing so, he positioned Kindred to be the Casbah or CBGB of vegan food and drink.

Because the plant-based movement is not just here to stay—it’s remodeling a sizable wing of the restaurant industry. Overall, the stats are still small. Gallup reports that about 5 percent of Americans claim to be vegetarian, and 3 percent vegan. But a report by The Economist in late 2018 raised eyebrows when it reported a full quarter—25 percent—of Americans in the 25-34 age demo claim to be either vegetarian or vegan.

There’s a good chance some of those people secretly cheeseburger in the dark. But even if they’re pretending to be plant-based, that means the lifestyle is now an aspiration, a status badge for an entire age demo.

If your eyes are open, you know it’s at least partially real. Meatless Mondays have been growing in number for years. Serena Williams and Tom Brady are vegan. So are Ellen Degeneres, Bill Clinton, Joaquin Phoenix, Paul McCartney—just lots of famous people. Plant-based meat companies like Impossible and Beyond are booming. Some of the world’s top chefs have plant-based menus (at French Laundry, we preferred the plant-based menu) or even entire restaurants (like ABCV from Jean-Georges in New York).

In San Diego, Kindred is the weird and fuzzy center of the movement. It’s not a trap meant to get omnivores drunk on Prohibition cocktails and guilt them into declaring legumes the one true god. At least from an outsider’s perspective, there doesn’t seem to be any agenda aside from being an exciting restaurant. And it’s pulling this off.

Kindred’s vision of the future isn’t the only one, but it is one of them. And their brunch is excellent whether you’re omnivore, vegan, or merely ambivalent and hungry.

Kindred, 1503 30th St., South Park

Abby’s, a new NBC sitcom set in a makeshift bar in South Park aired its first episode on March 29. Wouldn’t you know it, the show’s creator, Josh Malmuth, a veteran of comedy hit New Girl, is a son of San Diego, now living in L.A. The setting—an unlicensed bar in a suburban backyard—is more “Cheers” than “Baywatch.”

“I didn’t want it to feel surf- or beach-centric,” says the Carmel Valley native. “I wanted it to be a different side of San Diego maybe people hadn’t seen before,” We caught up with Malmuth to find out more.

Abby’s airs Thursdays at 9:30 p.m. 

Why choose South Park for the setting?

I just love it there. Writing for TV, it’s more practical to live in L.A., so maybe it’s a way to keep one foot in San Diego. There’s a really interesting mix of people down there. You’ve got the strong military influence, and also the younger generations who are doing really interesting things in food and beer. South Park is really multi-generational and diverse, I knew it would be a good setting for a show of people hanging out at the bar. I wanted to create this place where an audience could come and hang out and have a good time—San Diego has that feel built in.

What are some very San Diego aspects of the show?

Abby, the main character, was a marine. That’s how she ended up in San Diego to begin with. Her stalwart regular is a guy named Fred who worked doing commercial fishing and deep sea fishing charters with tourists. Another character is an engineer who works at Qualcomm. I wanted it to feel relatable to people who aren’t in San Diego also, so I tried to balance a specific sense of place with things everyone has in common.

Are any other San Diegans involved?

A couple of people on the crew are from San Diego, and another one of the writers, Russ Finkelstein (Malmuth’s fellow graduate of Torrey Pines High School). Russ used to a do a lot fishing and spearfishing, so he was my go-to person for that stuff.

You’ve already turned heads with how you chose to shoot this show.

We shot it outside, with an outdoor audience, which has never been done before. Part of the experience was dealing with planes, and a few skunks walked through the set when we were shooting.