San Diego Magazine’s Celebrating Women 2022 Nominations

Ann Sim is telling me about her children. She says she has 50 of them, give or take, and her main job is protecting them and providing them everything they need to succeed. 

It’s not uncommon to hear restaurant managers refer to their staff this way, but, unlike most of them, Sim has a necklace that I noticed when we sat down: a thin chain with “Callie” written in gold, like some people wear with the names of their actual kids. You get the sense Sim really means it. 

Sim is the general manager of Callie. She opened the East Village Mediterranean-style gem with chef Travis Swikard in the middle of 2021, and now they’re joining forces again for their second location, a to-be-named French restaurant in La Jolla Commons. Much has been made of Swikard’s experience, and rightfully so—more than a decade alongside Daniel Boulud in New York tends to draw eyes—but in terms of pure tonnage of resume fireworks, Sim might have him beat.

She’s worked at some of the most well-respected places in New York and Los Angeles, including a marquee stint as a captain at Eleven Madison Park, what was—at the time, by every metric available—the best restaurant in the world.

You wouldn’t know it to talk to her. The SoCal native is approachable with an easy laugh. But to watch her at the restaurant is to witness a pro at work. You see it in the way she adjusts a napkin or pushes in a chair, the way she glides between tables or opens a bottle of wine. But you also sense it in the warmth with which she greets guests, touches tables, and coaches her staff. 

The front of house at Callie is, like the cuisine, a union of world-class refinement and California vibes. The synthesis of these apparent contradictions is a big part of why Callie is such a local treasure—and why it has earned it national and international recognition (as well as this magazine’s award for Best Restaurant two years in a row). It’s an impressive CV for a woman whose main professional goal throughout college was to get out of restaurants for good.

The daughter of Korean immigrants-turned-restaurateurs, Sim was born and raised in Orange County. As a kid, Sim was “free child labor,” she quips—she worked the counter, grilled chicken, waited tables, whatever her parents’ business needed that day. She stayed in restaurants through college, serving and bartending, and graduated from UC Irvine sans debt. The tradeoff: They were bad places with toxic cultures. She had different ideas of success.

After college in 2011, she took her meager savings and moved to New York, something she had wanted to do since she was a kid. Though she had planned to change industries, she needed a job, so a friend got her an interview at Daniel Boulud’s celebrated Mediterranean restaurant, Boulud Sud, as a host.

For all her experience, she was completely unprepared. “I didn’t know who Daniel Boulud was,” she says. “I didn’t know what fine dining even meant. I never heard the phrase.” What she did know, however, was how to work hard and learn. She absorbed everything she could, bouncing from the host stand to the events team to management. 

It was there that she first met a young Swikard and other high-caliber restaurant pros, and it opened her eyes to what this life could be. “They were so good at what they did that I was like, ‘Oh, this is actually a career. This is a profession. This is actually something very respectable,’” she recalls.

Her next job was at Eleven Madison Park. The restaurant already had three Michelin stars, and, during her tenure, it earned an exuberant review from the New York Times, a James Beard Award for outstanding service, and the title of Best Restaurant in the World from the World’s 50 Best. 

When Eleven Madison Park closed for renovations, Sim took the opportunity to come back to California. She arrived in LA at the end of 2017 to open the area’s NoMad Hotel, and did a stint as the GM of Maude in Beverly Hills. After the start of the pandemic, she got a random text from Swikard, her old Boulud Sud colleague, who was trying to open a restaurant in San Diego and had just lost his GM. Did she know anyone who might want the job?

Callie is theirs. It is her and Swikard’s united vision of hospitality and what a restaurant should be. She’s not courting the 50 Best awards—she’s too “old and jaded,” she says, and those things come at too high a human cost (she still can’t watch The Bear, for example). To her, success comes from working hard, taking care of her people, and connecting with the community. Nearly two and a half years after she and Swikard opened the restaurant’s doors, the reservation list at Callie is still full pretty much every night.

“I genuinely care about the business as well as every single one of my employees,” she says. “So I don’t care if anyone’s like, ‘Oh, you wear a necklace with the name of your job?’ I don’t think it’s weird, because for me, it’s like, ‘I also pushed this baby out.’”

And with her and Swikard’s second culinary progeny incoming, she may have to add another charm.

According to Tootris founder Alessandra Lezama, the fight for childcare is also one for women’s rights: Thanks to an ongoing national childcare crisis, more than two million women have left the workforce since the onset of Covid. That number will likely increase with the recent drop-off in federal funding previously allotted for childcare providers (92 percent of whom are women and 44 percent of whom are people of color).

Far from being a pandemic-specific issue, childcare has been a stressed industry for decades. San Diego Montessori-teacher-turned-technologist Lezama experienced this as a single parent trying to climb the corporate ladder while feeling increasingly anxious about securing care. Lezama, who helped grow four tech companies before turning her sights on childcare, was sure that her experience could help disrupt one of the most fraught industries in the country, which in turn would help keep women in the workforce.

From that hunch, Tootris took shape. Founded in San Diego in 2019 and now operational in all 50 states (and in many cases partnering with local governments), Lezama’s platform claims to be the only technology solution uniting all key childcare stakeholders—parents, employers, agencies, and more than 200,000 providers—in one interface.

This helps care become more accessible, affordable, and on-demand, and ensures that providers have the management tools to effectively run their businesses and retain employees. Previously, all of these entities had no streamlined way of interacting, which created significant gaps in the marketplace and further fueled the high turnover and low pay in the industry

Shannon Dove, co-owner of Hillcrest candy store The Candy Pushers, isn’t a sweets person—but she assures me that digging sugar isn’t a requirement for running a candy shop. What you have to love, she says, is selling candy. “It’s the most amazing thing to see somebody come in and you can tell they’ve had a bad day, and by the time they get their bag of candy and come to the register, they have a smile on their face,” Shannon explains.

Shannon found her passion for vending treats at Hillcrest shop Candy Depot, where she was a sales associate for three years. She departed Candy Depot to launch a mobile candy business with her wife, Melissa Dove, slinging sweets at Pride events and music festivals—then the pandemic struck.

But as stores started to open back up, the Doves received a call from the owners of Candy
Depot, who told them that they’d decided to pivot their careers. “[They said,] ‘Would you be willing to take over a brick-and-mortar?’” Shannon recalls. “I turned to Melissa and I said, ‘Is it absolutely irrational and impulsive right now to just say yes?’”

“I said, ‘F- no,’” Melissa chimes in. “‘This is our dream knocking on the door.’”

The couple became the first LGBTQ owners of the 27-year-old Candy Depot in 2020, eventually renaming it The Candy Pushers and moving to a larger location on University Avenue.

Beyond treating sweet tooths, the couple aims to provide a sober, LGBTQ-friendly space in a bar-heavy gay scene. They host game nights, comedy shows, open mics. “Having something for [LGBTQ youth] to do in Hillcrest is so important,” Shannon says. “They can be around other gay people and see that it’s going to be okay, that there’s a community for them.”

Sativa Murray wasn’t feeling well. After months of struggling with brain fog and chronic fatigue, she was diagnosed with Lyme disease, but conventional treatments weren’t relieving her symptoms. “I started looking into my skincare, oral care, haircare,” she recalls. “I gutted everything.”

Aiming to avoid potentially harmful additives, Sativa began crafting her own personal care products—and started feeling better. She shared her creations with family and friends, making more and more stuff until “her house started feeling like a warehouse,” remembers her sister Martiza Murray.

Sativa tapped Maritza and their sister Kaya Murray-Banks to help transform the fruits of her personal health journey into a business, and the trio launched their company at Balboa Park’s EarthFair in 2017, calling themselves Dirt Don’t Hurt in a playful nod to their merchandise’s natural origins.

They focus almost solely on one whammy ingredient: activated charcoal. Their roster of charcoal-based goods includes a face mask, body soap, and tooth powder, a clay-and herb-boosted alternative to
traditional pastes.

Dirt Don’t Hurt products are available at local farmers markets, SD and NorCal Whole Foods stores, and boutiques around the country. They recently signed a massive deal with Hyatt to distribute their brand’s earth-friendly wooden toothbrushes in hotels throughout SoCal. And, as recent graduates of Dr. Bronner’s small business mentoring program, they’re poised to expand to more large retailers.

With seven children between them, the sisters hope to leave behind a thriving business for their little ones. “We often talk about them working for the company,” Maritza says. “We’re creating generational wealth.”

Brand identities are often complicated. Companies want to be known as changemakers, earth-shakers, wunderkinds, something so much more than the sum of their products. But if you ask Bitchin’ Sauce founder Starr Edwards what her brand’s story is, she’ll tell you, “We are an iconic dip. We are the American Dip. We want to be around hundreds of years from now, like ketchup.”

Bitchin’ Sauce comes in more than 20 rotating flavors—from a spicy chipotle (Edwards’ favorite) to a Thai-inspired panang and sweet stuff like apple pie and salted caramel—but the same almond base forms the core of each. They’ve mastered the art of doing one thing really, really well. It’s a move that’s clearly paid off, considering that, according to Edwards, the company now hauls in about $50 million in annual revenue.

Of course, that’s not to say they don’t bring strong, health- and family-focused convictions to the table, values rooted in Edwards’ self-described “hippie” upbringing in Oregon. She invented the recipe that would become the original Bitchin’ Sauce as a teenager, blending together staple ingredients in her family’s raw, vegan household. She was tossing nutritional yeast into liquid aminos at a time when much of America was still fearful of Boca Burgers.

After Edwards and her husband, Luke, married and had the first of their five kids here in San Diego, she carted her childhood snack to local farmers markets, offering samples as a way to promote a fledgling personal chef business. “But I could see even from that first market that [selling the sauce] had so, so much potential. People loved this one product,” she recalls.

They expanded to more markets, calling in friends and family to help produce, package, and vend Bitchin’ Sauce all over San Diego. At their peak, they were slinging sauce at 26 markets. The couple decided to bring their products to stores in 2011. It’s now available at major shops nationwide, including Walmart, Target, and Costco. “I remember selling 30 tubs of sauce at the farmers market and being so shocked,” Edwards says. Today, she adds, the brand sells about 30 tubs a minute.

Every Bitchin’ Sauce flavor is vegan and gluten-and soy-free, and several varieties are 100 percent organic. Their SD headquarters offers employees paid time to volunteer with partner orgs and free, onsite childcare, saving the company’s team a combined total of more than $1.5 million in daycare costs.

The success of their company has allowed the couple to invest in other passions. They formed a record label, Bitchin’ Music Group, in 2020, inspired by Luke’s other career as a touring musician.

The company recently launched in Canada, Mexico, Korea, and Australia. Edwards is curious how the product will be received abroad. “These really are American ingredients. The US is the number-one producer of almonds. We have citrus, garlic, everything right down the road from our headquarters,” she muses. “I’m excited to see how it works on a global level. Is this something everyone’s gonna be excited about? Is this gonna be a world- domination situation?”

If so, they might have to change their identity to the International Dip.