Behind the Lens of La Jolla Native Eric Wolfinger

Need help deciding which of La Jolla’s seemingly endless beaches to lay your towel out at today? Each little sandy sliver between the neighborhood’s sea cliffs has its own name and character: the Cove for swimming, Children’s Pool for seal-watching, Wipeout Beach for skim-boarding. Head to La Jolla Shores for that wide, sandy, picnic-with-the-family feel, and if you know what you’re doing, go surfing at Windansea or Bird Rock (if you’re a beginner, opt instead for the Shores, where most of San Diego learned to surf).

Of course, beachy isn’t La Jolla’s only vibe. The Village (locals don’t call it downtown anymore, says La Jolla resident and senior editor of lajolla.ca Elisabeth Frausto) is La Jolla’s most walkable area—highlighted by the main drag, Prospect Street—with a wide radius of shop-lined roads sloping down to the coast.

At long standing neighborhood staples like Warwick’s bookstore and Harry’s Coffee Shop, “old-timers still belly up to the counter and talk politics,” Frausto says. Art enthusiasts visit to peruse through its many galleries, including Quint and Joseph Bellows, and check out what’s on at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD). Shoppers wander Girard Avenue, picking out activewear at Lululemon and Vuori and fancier digs at Thread + Seed and Sigi’s Boutique. Friends gossip and sip coffee at locally owned outposts like Flower Pot Cafe and Il Giardino Di Lilli.

Once isolated from the rest of San Diego, La Jolla became a popular resort destination when the San Diego, Pacific Beach, and La Jolla Railway arrived in the 1890s and made the area more accessible to visitors (who wanted to spend time there so badly they stayed in tents during the summer). Some of those tourists got creative, too.

“Our tradition of supporting the arts goes back to the days of the Green Dragon Artist Colony that was founded in 1894,” says Athenaeum Music & Arts Library Executive Director Christie Mitchell. Anna Held started the Green Dragon Colony to attract visiting artists to La Jolla for a weekend getaway; it quickly became a venue for ad-hoc performances and bohemian artists’ salons.

However, it was Ellen Browning Scripps more than anyone who shaped La Jolla into the neighborhood we know today, commissioning buildings like the structure that now houses MCASD. The arrival of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1907 laid the foundation for the establishment of UC San Diego 53 years later at the longtime site of the military base Camp Matthews. All of these developments helped establish La Jolla’s layered identities: high-dollar beach town, arts magnet, academic research hub.

Facts About La Jolla, CA

• Ellen Browning Scripps commissioned Irving Gill to design a building for the La Jolla Woman’s Club in 1914; it still meets today in the same building.
• La Jolla’s scenic beauty is a backdrop for many movies, including Thor, Gattaca, Traffic, Mr. Jones, and Andy Warhol’s 1968 experimental film San Diego Surf.
• Every summer, thousands of pregnant female leopard sharks gather in La Jolla’s Marine Protected Areas to incubate their pups.
• Zillow reports the average home price in La Jolla is $2.3 million.
• Old Hollywood film star and La Jolla native Gregory Peck was one of the founders of La Jolla Playhouse, which opened its doors in 1947.

Locals’ Guide to La Jolla, CA

Athenaeum Music & Arts Director Christie Mitchell is a bona fide La Jolla local, having grown up in the LJ neighborhood of Bird Rock. Her dad still surfs, and Mitchell met her own surfer husband at La Jolla High (their toddler has already tried surfing, too). Mitchell’s mom still lives in Bird Rock, and “it’s gotten a lot livelier and more pedestrian-friendly,” she says.

On weekends, she makes sure to hit Wayfarer Bread for “the gooiest, heaviest, stickiest cinnamon loaf—definitely preorder because there’s always a line,” she advises. Friday and Saturday are pizza night at Wayfarer, and the bakery’s industry collabs produce some unique pies. For coffee, head to Bird Rock Coffee Roasters, of course, where you can grab a cup and hang out in the open-air seating or stroll to La Jolla Hermosa Park for ocean views (and a skate park and bike paths for little ones to tire themselves out on).

One of Mitchell’s favorites for lunch with coworkers in the Village is Peruvian-inspired Pepino, owned by one of her high school classmates. “The sweet potato bowl is really good,” she says.

She also cherishes La Jolla institutions. The Ascot Shop, a longtime men’s clothing boutique, is a go-to for gifts; founded by a local fisherman, El Pescador Fish Market is the place for the freshest seafood and fish tacos; and The Marine Room is for special occasions, with on-point service against a backdrop of crashing waves. “And nothing says ‘La Jolla’ like George’s at the Cove,” Mitchell adds. “With the John Baldessari mural and the view, it’s a great mix of the arts and the ocean.”

There’s a surprising amount to do on the weekdays in La Jolla, Mitchell says, with free live music every Monday at the Athenaeum (and weekly ticketed events), late-night DJ sessions at Le Coq, acts at The Comedy Store, concerts at the The Conrad (home of La Jolla Music Society), and the monthly First Friday Art Walk.

What’s About to Happen

The biggest talk of the town for La Jollans? Possible secession from the city of San Diego, Frausto says. Proponents want to separate so La Jolla can maintain its own infrastructure and make decisions about development (critics say La Jolla should contribute taxes to the rest of the city). If the initiative advances, final say would come down to a city-wide vote.

Additionally, locals and visitors alike are witnessing a genuine culinary explosion. Restaurateur Sami Ladeki’s Roppongi, a Japanese fusion and sushi favorite that closed in 2015, reopened in December 2025 under returning chef Alfie Szeprethy. Michelin-starred chef Elijah Arizmendi launched tasting-menu-only restaurant Lucien last year, and chef Accursio Lota of North Park’s Cori Trattoria Pastifico opened his new spot Dora in November. Local designers Paul Basile and Jules Wilson are building Roseacre, 5,000 square feet of culinary concepts on Girard Avenue. And one of La Jolla’s favorite restaurant families is opening a completely new eatery near Torrey Pines Golf Course in summer 2026: From the guys behind Puesto and Marisi comes an Eastern Mediterranean spot called Ikaria.

Back in the Village, a new boutique hotel by Orli is landing in the old nurses’ quarters (now condos) next to the original 1924 Scripps hospital (the institution moved to Genesee Avenue in 1964). La Jolla is also getting in on the thrifting trend—Goodwill opened a shop on Herschel Avenue in early 2026.

Pedestrian-friendly changes are afoot in two of LJ’s walkable areas. At La Jolla Shores, look for enhancements to Avenida de la Playa from El Paseo Grande to Calle de la Plata, where the street has been closed to vehicles since 2020 for outdoor dining. The Village Streetscape Plan is coming to Girard Avenue between Silverado Street and Prospect Street, bringing expanded walking areas, corner parks, improved lighting, new seating, public art, and landscaping to create shade canopies and gathering spaces.

Also look for beautification projects along the coast. The 1920s stairs leading down to the tide pools at Whale View Point are finally getting a redo; Ellen Browning Scripps Park will receive fresh sod and much-needed widened sidewalks. And ADA trail improvements and a new restroom facility are on their way at Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve, making the beloved natural area more accessible.

As for housing, Frausto says, affordable units are hard to come by, and that probably won’t change soon. Most new homes and apartments are geared toward the luxury market, like La Jolla’s first new gated community in 40 years, Foxhill, which broke ground in October 2025 on the site of a former golf course—with empty lots selling for more than $8 million.

Where to Eat in La Jolla

Le Coq

Marisi

Catania

Where to Shop in La Jolla

Mitch’s Surf Shop

Mood Indigo

Gracie James Co.

More Things to Do in La Jolla

Birch Aquarium

Torrey Pines Gliderport

La Jolla Kayak

With all the splashy free-agent acquisitions, the La Jolla spot that seemed to slip under the radar was Comedor Nishi from Pancho Ibáñez and his wife Daniela.

For about a decade, Ibañez was the right-hand man of chef Enrique Olvera at Pujol in Mexico City-which has been hailed by nearly every food media outlet as one of the best restaurants on the planet. Daniela, meanwhile, was pastry chef at the revered Máximo in Mexico City (another “Top 50″ spot).

Ibáñez was hired full time as the culinary director of Showa Hospitality (The Taco Stand, Convoy Music Bar), and Comedor Nishi is his and Daniela’s Mexican breakfast-brunch-lunch spot-he soaks triple-cut brioche French toast overnight and house-cures salmon with yuzu kosho-spiked guacamole, and she bakes the pan dulces and cookies and incredible Mexican candies.

Weirdest thing. Travis Swikard didn’t open a French restaurant.

When he returned home to San Diego after 10 years as the right-hand to world-famous, very French chef Daniel Boulud, we all just assumed Swikard’s first restaurant would have some fermented riff on coq au vin. Instead, he went Mediterranean, North African, and Middle Eastern with gangbusters-good Callie. He needed to step out of the shadow before digging into his roots—which is what he’ll do when he opens the modern French spot Fleurette this fall at La Jolla Commons.

La Jolla is officially the Los Angeles Dodgers of San Diego’s food scene. After a long dip and some yawns, the village has started gobbling up an unreasonable amount of top-tier talent, Michelins and James Beards and Top 50s. It harkens back to the ’90s, when LJ and Hillcrest were the peak of the food scene.

Lucien opens this month, a third-floor, 30-seat tasting menu from chef Elijah Arizmendi, who worked in some of the best kitchens (Per Se, Daniel) before heading to l’abeille, where he earned a Michelin star as the chef de cuisine. Obviously hoarding restaurants as it preps for its secession, La Jolla also gets Roseacre, owned and built by two of San Diego’s most well-known designers, Paul Basile and Jules Wilson. The chef? Erik Anderson, who went through Noma and The French Laundry before helming the three-Michelin-starred Coi.

And, finally, up in Leucadia, San Diego will get a local-heroes collaboration on the more casual side of life: Chick & Hawk, the fried chicken sando concept from chef Andrew Bachelier (Atelier Manna, ex-Jeune et Jolie) and Tony Hawk, will finally open. Praise the merciful and hungry gods.

A couple decades ago, San Diego’s food scene had too much ho in its hum. A handful of standalone restaurants and chefs were doing good work (like Bertrand Hug at Mister A’s, Michael Stebner with Region, Trey Foshee of Georges at the Cove, and Jeffrey Strauss of Pamplemousse Grille), but most world-class food was being made at hotels and resorts—especially at The Lodge at Torrey Pines’ A.R. Valentien.

That’s where Bocuse d’Or USA winner Jeff Jackson was one of just a few people doing tip-to-tail and farm-to-table cooking, essentially becoming the test kitchen for famed Chino Farm. In many ways, the restaurant was ground zero for San Diego’s modern food ascent, laying the groundwork for the French-trained, Mediterranean-ish, market-driven style now called California cuisine. Kelli Crosson trained under Jackson for over a decade, taking the reins two years ago.

One problem: The kitchen she inherited was 23 years old, cramped, wilfully un-modernized. So, for eight months starting last year, A.R. Valentien’s dining room shut down. Crosson and chef de cuisine Tiffany Tran cooked in trailers while The Lodge built their dream kitchen: a massive pastry operation, a whole-animal butchery outpost, all new gadgets and toys (including combi ovens, which most chefs will tell you is the single most crucial restaurant invention).

Now fully equipped, the kitchen—a new engine for the place that kickstarted a city’s food movement—reopened this May. This is the year to see what Crosson can do with a full arsenal of tools. “It may not be the sexiest story, but we’re over the moon and counted down the minutes until we could get back there,” she says.

The Perfect Order: Mussels À La Paris | Rack Of Lamb | Creamed Spinach

We gotta address the name. Yeah, it means rooster in French. And, yeah, it’s pronounced the way you think it is. How I feel about that doesn’t matter as much as how La Jolla feels about it. Let’s not over-stereotype. I know many advisory-boarding La Jollans who don’t wilt under the burden of a porny curse word. But there is a deep culture of manners and social restraint here; you get the feeling that tawdry newcomers find themselves with a surprising amount of audits and parking tickets.

Yet the name is true to Puffer Malarkey, the restaurant group behind Le Coq and three of the city’s best spots of the last decade: Herb & Wood, Herb & Sea, and Animae. From the get-go, its MO has been to build elaborate, high-end restaurants and then lightly or cartoonishly mock the haughty decorum of high-end restaurants. (Herb & Wood famously has a middle-finger sculpture, handed to the worst guest of the night with much fanfare.)

Le Coq is the group’s final grand effort, a victory lap from an operator (Chris Puffer) and chef (Brian Malarkey) unafraid to make sex a central theme. (The duo’s other restaurants will continue to evolve, but Malarkey told SDM this is their last one as a team in San Diego.) The Parisian steakhouse features James Beard nominee and Animae exec chef Tara Monsod. Monsod is a formidable talent and force of good in San Diego’s food scene. And the location brings Puffer Malarkey full circle. When the duo started almost 20 years ago with restaurants named after textiles (Searsucker was the first), they turned this former auto shop—a lovely, spacious hangar—into Herringbone. That concept was sold, but the gents always wanted it back, standing outside its window like boombox-era John Cusacks.

Inside, erotic art photos line the walls. Surprisingly, they’re not large-format, but small prints, clustered into little lust farms. The restraint is unexpected. It must have killed them not to turn one of Robert Mapplethorpe’s most socially fire-setting nudes into 3,000 square feet of wallpaper and shrink wrap the whole shebang. And the carpet—Le Coq has casino flooring, so thick and luxurious it might have a sleep number. I haven’t seen a carpet this loamy since the ’80s, when a padded bottom was a restaurant status symbol. The softer the underfoot, the more spendy the baked Alaska.

Designers removed those famed Herringbone trees from the dining room. Honestly, I’d ask for them back. Without them or something like them to create distinct parts of the room, it feels like an ornate wedding hall—one giant eating space, wide open with all of us kind of rawly looking at each other. It seems they only changed the bottom half of the restaurant, keeping the top rustic-historic Herringbone (wooden rafters, exposed air ducts, faded brick walls) and turning the bottom into what looks like a very nice Golden Nugget (velvet booths, a massive curtain that appears to be mylar or Bjork’s dress from Coachella). It’s a design mullet: hard-working Americana up top, glitzy flesh party below.

Resist the urge to complain about Le Coq’s prices on the internet. Too late for some of you. This is a high-end steakhouse in an era when the cost of ingredients has never been higher, with one of the country’s top young chefs, and the group spent millions on creating a memorable space. Cross-checking menus, it’s reasonably priced for the game being played—around the same as Steak 48 and maybe even a bit lower than indie favorite Cowboy Star. (For PR’s sake, I’d probably not charge $20 for a taste of four sauces. While I respect the art and time that goes into them—a thick bearnaise, a silky chicken glacé, a potent anchovy herb oil, and an incredible bordelaise—some steakhouses automatically include sauces. Tuck that cost into the steak itself. Proclaiming in print you’re charging five bucks per drizzle feels like an optics issue.)

Assuming restaurants are sourcing the best dry-aged money can buy and know how to sear and properly temp, steaks don’t differentiate steakhouses. Apps and sides do.

Dinner starts with a warm baguette with Pamplie butter. Made in western France, slow-churned in a barrel, fermented for 48 hours using a recipe that’s been unchanged for 120 years, and protected by the French government—well, it’s one of the best butters on the planet, with more fat than most American butter (84 percent versus 81). The restaurant offers chicken-skin butter as well, but I’d stick with the pure form.

Monsod’s tuna tartare is a fantastic taste of local waters. On paper, raw tuna in cream sounds like a fairly indigestible idea, but we’ve been slathering all kinds of dairy manifestations on seafood since the beginning of reason—mayo for a sushi roll’s krabby center, Thomas Keller’s butter jacuzzis for lobster, you name it. Monsod’s cubes of sushi-grade ahi come with crème fraîche and horseradish, then get acidified with pickled gooseberries. It’s a dinner cousin to lox and cream cheese, minus the bagel. It’s actually so soupy it could use some form of bread, like toast points (the bagel of steakhouses).

“Head cheese” is arguably the least appetizing phrase in the history of food, all due respect to “moist.” It’s an iconic art form of European food culture, rarely cooked for American audiences since we have some pretty arbitrary food hangups. It’ll always baffle me that most Americans will gobble hot dogs like baseball breath mints, but organ meats in any other form are seen as mouth crimes.

Monsod delicately fries her head cheese into a croquette. Smart move. Frying is how chefs do the “choo choo… here comes the train” trick to get guests to embrace intimidating foods (think calamari). Head meat will always taste like it just got done with a vigorous workout, and it’s up to you if you like that funk or not. I crave it. Most American food is an offensive deluge of inoffensiveness, a sleepwalking cuisine of breast meat and subs and cheese sauces and medium salsas. That boredom drives us to the pricklier charms of lamb and duck and liver and foods that taste like they have an opinion. Monsod’s croquette—Thompson Heritage pork (an incredible local ranch) with sauce gribiche (a thick, cold, creamy French predecessor to tartar sauce, a fusion of hard-boiled eggs and mustard)—is an opinion well-executed (it takes a full week to make).

Le Coq’s celery salad is a shocking winner. Welcome to the crunchiest salad you’ll ever eat. Celery is always the backup dancer for great food, an underdog sautéed into anonymity at the bottom of a mirepoix; stuck playing the plucky, uneaten sidekick to a chicken wing. Monsod gives it the stage, albeit topped with a party-wig amount of the famed semi-hard cheese P’tit Basque. With golden raisins and celery seed vinaigrette, it’s a weird, willful, Provençal kind of idea, best eaten with a cinematic slow-clap and “Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!” in your head.

Order the steak frites if only to try Monsod’s au poivre. Done wrong, au poivres can taste of booze and bitterness (sometimes from burnt butter or from cooking in reactive pans like a cast iron). Hers is textbook. Concede all your self-governance to this sauce.

Creamed spinach is simultaneously the weary foot soldier of the steakhouse industry and one of America’s warmest and deepest food emotions. Monsod’s is excellent because of the onion soubise—a thick, smooth, French sauce in which onions are cooked in butter, then puréed with heavy cream or bechamel.

Other standouts are the sweet-sour riff on a rack of lamb, which offers a far more creative take than the usual chimichurri—with kalamata olives and French sorrel, plums and pickled grapes. When it comes to the mussels, everything (meat, bread) is merely vessel for the star: the broth. Usually, it’s wine and herbs and cream and, in San Diego, chorizo. But here the chef gives us wine and blue cheese (similar to a southern France idea called Roquefort sauce). It is magic. White wine and blue cheese and silky mussel meat are like charcuterie masquerading as a warm bowl of comfort.

For dessert, you have to try the Paris–Brest—a French pastry classic rarely seen in modern rooms. Shaped like a bicycle wheel (pastry chef Louis Durand of the famed Pâtisserie Durand created it in homage to the Paris–Brest–Paris bike race), it’s baked pâte à choux (cream puff pastry) split in half, filled with pistachio crème mousseline, and studded with caramelized pistachios and powdered sugar.

Back to the sex. Feels like it belongs in a steakhouse, both being fleshy desires and whatnot. Maybe La Jolla could benefit from a touch of risqué. Or maybe the planning group’s pitchforks smell of kerosene. As of writing, there’s no external marquee that says “Le Coq,” so perhaps a treaty has been signed.