One look at review sites like Yelp, and it’s pretty evident. We take the restaurant experience very, strangely personally. The above statements are from real Yelp reviews.
At the DMV, we’re forced to sit in hard plastic school chairs for three hours among the fermented scent of humanity only to be told rudely once it’s our turn that we don’t have the correct paperwork for it to be our turn. And yet we slough it off. It’s an organization with a long history of epic failure, we rationalize. It has nothing to do with us.
Not in restaurants. Slowly delivered zinfandel is ****ing personal.
Why do we take it so personal? Maybe because service is part of the contract. We’re not paying $18 for a roasted chicken breast. We’re paying $18 to sit in a pretty room, have a (usually attractive, young) person bring us water and wine, guide our decision-making, fold our napkin when we depart to tinkle, clean up our mess as we make it so that we don’t have to sit in our own crumby filth, deliver us hot food, clean the dishes, converse with us if we so wish, pack any remaining food to go, and bid us a very good night as we walk out the door. Any service failures, in that view, would be a violation of contract.
Why’s it hurt so bad? Because restaurants are not restaurants. They are structural evidence of our good taste. Our dining companions—friends, family, coworkers, church fellows, people we’d like to bed—are usually important to us. Choosing a good restaurant is how we prove to them our cultural acumen, our refinement, our instinctual GPS system for the best things in life. When a restaurant fails, we internalize it as being an unimpressive person who shouldn’t be trusted with such decisions. Our condo probably has bad décor, too. And our cars are dirty. We suck.
Why does it feel like fingernails on the chalkboard of our psyche? Because we spend 90% of our lives serving others—our bosses, our creditors, our spouses, our children, even stop lights and silly signs that direct what we can and cannot do. We walk through Le Bistro’s doors expecting to flip the script. We’ve run a deficit of servitude, and being pampered is our way of balancing out. We’ve been let out from under society’s thumb for a couple hours and we’re pretty desperate to be treated like the most important person in the room. So if a server ignores us for too long, if our food is cold, if our drink forgotten at the bar—our turn at the filling station of servitude is disrupted. The pump is cut off. Our servitude tank is left half-empty and gurgling with anger.
Thankfully, there’s a cure for all of this. It’s called the Internet. Highly aware of our acute sense of inadequacy and injustice, the Internet has given us multiple platforms to rage against the tyranny of the restaurateur (or any small business owner, for that matter). Review sites are jam-packed with purgative screeds against bad restaurant behavior.
“How do I know this person who Yelp-mugged my favorite bistro isn’t just another hungry sociopath? A dog kicker?”
At this point the Internet is the psychologist’s office. Review sites are the couch upon which we lay and unleash our mental fury. We have created the greatest communication and information device on the planet—and mostly use it as a landfill for our psychic baggage.
The result? Restaurateurs have never been so thoroughly abused at any point in American history. Maybe it’s because mainstream media has an established tradition of criticizing restaurants. It’s public sport. Given the opportunity, why wouldn’t someone try their hand at this dark craft?
Indeed, some restaurateurs might be assholes. But here’s the thing: We’re all assholes. So why does the “He Or She Is An Asshole” info stream only travel one direction? Yelp is like a giant billboard lording over a city—reserved exclusively for us who don’t own businesses to broadcast our accusations against those who do.
How do we consumers get off scot-free? How come our behavior isn’t reviewed and catalogued with a simple search function and held against us on a public website? How do I know this person who Yelp-mugged my favorite bistro isn’t just another hungry sociopath? A seething pustule of unchecked moral depravity? A dog kicker?
I would say with 1,000 percent certainty, that diners are much, much larger assholes at a much higher frequency, than servers, bussers or restaurateurs. By and large, diners curate a much more pronounced brand of entitled, embittered vitriol. We act like spoiled, exiled royalty who have lost their iron-fist authority and yet still attempt to wield it on the common folk.
It’s time. There needs to be a review process for reviewers. For myself, for Good Sir Yelper, for Mr. Restaurant Tweeter and Instagram Food Assassin94. Does a certain reviewer have a reputation for showing up at 7PM on a Friday night without a reservation and berating hostesses when they refuse to accommodate their party of five? Does that other reviewer ask for 37 psychosomatic dietary adjustments to a dish and then tip 12 percent?
Right now, the “Review Site Info Flow” only goes one direction—a constant hailstorm of aggression toward small business owners. (Applebees doesn’t get too many reviews. It’s mostly new, creative businesses that attract the criticism). The public court of judgment needs to be balanced out.
We need a forum where restaurants can review diners—just like the alt-taxi service Uber does with its riders. Currently, restaurateurs can “respond” to a Yelp review. But that’s merely an exercise in damage control. Very few restaurant owners are going to publicly give honest feedback to a Massive Dining Asshole, for fear of backlash. It violates basic customer service tenets, no matter how justified the feedback might be. We’ve trained small business owners that, when kicked unjustly, it’s best to smile and turn to face our attacker so they can continue kicking.
We need a website where restaurateurs can leave anonymous, real criticisms of diners. We should create Restaurant Diner Profiles for everyone, regardless of whether or not you post reviews to websites. Are you fond of ass-grabbing servers or using the term “Toots”? That should go in your permanent file. Is your child basically Mt. Saint Helens, spewing food everywhere within a ten-foot radius and yet you only tip 15 percent? Permanent file.
If you review restaurants (or any business for that matter) in a public forum, this website of the future should pull your profile and send it to the restaurateur. With integration into tools like OpenTable, it will help the restaurant identify who the reviewer is, what day and time they dined, where they sat, who their server was. Then the restaurant will be allowed to add notes/comments/perspective to the accusation. You as a diner get a star rating.
This isn’t just to shame the diner for their antisocial behavior. It could be a valuable tool to identify whether or not a restaurant has a problem server. Or help them realize, yes, a line cook had gotten arrested the day PastasOvercooked69 posted their bad review, and maybe the restaurant should comp a return visit. Or it would help the restaurant remember that PastasOvercooked69 came in fighting with his wife and would have negatively reviewed puppy smiles and the rapture.
Because after all—what’s the point of reviews? To provide valuable information and enact positive change, right? Or is the Internet the toilet, Yelp the toothbrush, and we The Great and Loquacious Purgers?
We’re all assholes. It’s far past time the asshole accusation meter applied not only to small business owners—but to us assholes, too.
The bird has a plan. You stand between that bird and that plan. For the remainder of your ceviche, you’ll identify as collateral damage.
There are many other nearby birds with the same plan, absolutely sucking at trying to be nonchalant about it. The pigeons are by far the boldest on account of what we can all agree just by looking at them is sheer stupidity. They come right up and ask with their red murder clown eyes: “Can bite?”
Pelicans are the silverback gorillas of this bird gang, hulking and alpha. They periodically flaunt the acreage of their wingspan in the same way a schoolyard bully puffs out his chest. One could casually land on your plate and maintain constant eye contact as it slowly enjoyed your fish taco. You share this tacit awareness with it. But it doesn’t approach because there are always a couple off-duty fishermen eating at Mitch’s Seafood. Those salty dogs have been forced to beat the shit out of a pelican or two in their day, and they and the pelican also know that.
The snowy egrets pretend to not really want your food. They seductively lord on the tops of the sportfishing boats moored in front of the restaurant, fully aware of how hot they are—svelte fashion models, Ozempic with wings. They just turn their faces to the wind so that it blows their fabulous hair. They seem to expect tourists to be overcome by their avian Brad Pittness and just throw swordfish sandwiches to them in tribute. They refuse to demean themselves like the gulls do.
Photo Credit: Dee Sandoval
The gulls are shameless menaces. The linebackers of seabirds—a lot quicker than you expect given their big butts, full of schemes and microaggressions. They stand at a distance and mad-dog everyone, intimidate with their beaks the color of old bananas. Fear is not a seagull emotion. When they take a plate—and they will take a plate—there is so much flapping and fighting. They desperately bite and claw at fishermen’s stews like zombies who finally caught up to Rick Grimes. We see one that’s missing a foot.
At some point you will hear a baby cry. It’s not a baby. It’s a gull, who has learned to mimic the sound of human babies in distress so that parents feel the great evolutionary ache—and throw fries at the crying.
“Watch out for the crab cakes,” says a server to every person she drops them to. “Those are their favorite.”
The birds have opinions on the menu. And their presence at Mitch’s is better than any Yelp review. Think they’d risk life and limb for some recently unboxed frostbite tilapia down at the local skate rink? Yeah, probably so.
Photo Credit: Dee Sandoval
But these birds know the backstory of three longtime local fishing families who own Mitch’s: Brian Kiyohara and his wife, Viola; Randy Toussaint and his wife, Tracy; and namesake Mitch Conniff. Conniff cut his teeth as a young sous chef at Jsix (a long-gone restaurant that was, 20 years ago, a slow-food star under chef Christian Graves). Then he was executive chef of American Angler, the long-range Baja fishing vessel co-owned by Kiyohara.
It was on the Angler that Mitch reportedly looked at the restaurant that was previously in this location—on stilts over the water at Point Loma Sportfishing Dock—and said to Kiyohara, “Wouldn’t it be cool if a restaurant in that space used local fish from local boats and local people like us?”
And that’s how Mitch’s was born. Its doors opened in 2008.
The real story of Mitch’s is the wheelbarrows. Every morning, the crew rolls them along Driscoll’s Wharf down to Tunaville—the market also owned by local fishing families (including Conniff). The shop has a parking spot for local boats, who bring their daily haul there every morning. Mitch’s crew fills the wheelbarrows with fresh fish and wheels them back to the kitchen. Within hours or a day or so, some of it will be lunch, dinner, and bird crack.
Photo Credit: Dee Sandoval
There are no reservations at Mitch’s. More often than not, there’s a long line snaking out the door. It moves fast. Their tiny kitchen is remarkably efficient. Locals know to go for breakfast (get the crab avocado toast) or in the off-hours (11 a.m., 3 p.m.—just not noon and 6 p.m.). There’s a small-ish indoor dining room, tables that appear more lacquer than wood. It’s a shrine to local fishers, the wall’s a family photo album of tan locals beaming with pride over a record catch, pleasantly fatigued boat captains, sun-gnarled deckhands. Leave your partner in the line, and go peruse, get a sense for the humans out there in local waters, leaving their families for days and weeks and months at a time to provide. It’s a core San Diego way of life that built this city (tuna money poured the concrete at Point Loma High), once robust and now rare.
The prized seats are on the deck. Thirty or so metal bar stools are ponied up to a small counter attached to the wooden rail. Bendy metal rods cascade from the roof like eyelashes. “They were put in to deter the birds,” a server tells me. “It worked for about a week.”
The swordfish sandwich is just about perfect and a mission statement of the place—humble and simple, like fishing. A big-ole torta, a grilled filet not cooked to sawdust like American restaurants once did, with tomato, tartar sauce, and cilantro. It shouldn’t taste as good as it does, but clean local fish cooked well on bread is satisfying in an essential, basal way. Plus, that tartar sauce blows lesser tartars away. Conniff swaps out the pickle and onion for garlic, fresh parsley, and cilantro, so that it tastes closer to an herbed Baja crema. It should be criminalized and governed by people who make laws to atone for the lack of our own self-regulation.
Photo Credit: Dee Sandoval
The bowl of mussels and clams are the can’t-miss of Mitch’s—somewhere between French moules marinières, New England steamers, and Baja shellfish pots. The science: As shellfish steam, they release their own briny liquor, meaty ocean broth in a shell. The chef’s job is to complement that gift without clobbering it. Mitch’s uses white wine for acid and leeks (a milder, sweeter, more flavorful onion), Dijon, and butter. Their clams and mussels are bigger than normal, which brings stronger flavor, making that broth one of the best in the city, sopped with the baguette.
From the cold case, get the shrimp aguachile with housemade chips—a small bowl, green as radiator fluid, the chili water a light-pain blend of habaneros (the best tasting chili by a long shot), serranos, lime, and the soft, fat glove of avocado. They also serve a campechana—a Baja mariscos specialty with shrimp, Dungeness crab, octopus, and oysters in cocktail sauce and clamato. Important note here: Don’t eat either of these dishes right away. They come out fridge-cold (there are laws about storing raw seafood), which muzzles the flavor. Order them to sit. After 20 minutes, dig in.
The crab cakes get mixed reviews, but ours are delicious. They lean cake more than crab, which isn’t what you’d expect from a fisherman-chef’s stilt house, but that’s personal preference.
Photo Credit: Dee Sandoval
You’re going to order the fresh fish plate, blackened, because you’re good at ordering. It’s the truest expression of fisherman and fish. And what you’ll receive is a shockingly spartan plate—a paprika-crusted filet, a ramekin of slaw, some herb pistou. It is excellent, even if the universal governing body of wooden-spooned grandmas would suggest it needs a rice, a tater, a proper side dish.
My argument is that the slaw is side dishing. Coleslaw is, by and large, the great American fail. Most restaurants treat it like the younger sibling their parents made them bring along on a date. At Mitch’s, they treat slaw with respect. Starts with traditional cabbage, but then gets both fresh orange and lime juice, jicama, grilled corn, and cilantro. It’s Baja meets San Diego picnic food.
If, as dictated by the most basic laws of food criticism, I needed to find quibbles with Mitch’s, fine. I’ll be that guy who walks into a runaway hit dream of three local fishing families and pretends everything isn’t entirely perfect. I’ll express them in wishes.
I wish the baguette with the clams and mussels was lightly charred. The broth is nearly sweet, and sweet loves a good burn.
Photo Credit: Dee Sandoval
I wish there was an obscene amount of slaw with the fish plate. It’s that good, and the plate looks a bit bare.
I wish there was one housemade sauce in the condiment basket. You’ve got Heinz, Tabasco, Tapatío—all of which are fine and should stay. While I realize the kitchen is limited and the line of customers is eternal, Mitch’s would go up an even higher notch if there were squeeze bottles of one killer original dressing—housemade crema, a mojo, macha, or just an unending supply of that garlicky tartar. It feels a tad crimey to go through all this effort to source local fish and cook them well, and then top it with a sauce that has no San Diego or Baja or Mitch in it.
I honestly didn’t expect Mitch’s to be as good as it still is. Everything we ate (except maybe an octopus taco with tentacle bits fried into nubs) was good to excellent. The constant onslaught of locals and tourists and the excruciating intricacies of operating a business in California should have exhausted the will to live by now, let alone cook.
There’s a reason the birds are still outside, with crimes in their eyes and menu preferences.
Troy Johnson is the magazine’s award-winning food writer and humorist, and a long-standing expert on Food Network. His work has been featured on NatGeo, Travel Channel, NPR, and in Food Matters, a textbook of the best American food writing.
The Perfect Order:Vulture Martini | Potato Pavé | Crab Cake
Kory Stetina is a long way from learning what vegan food was through a pamphlet at punk-rock shows in his teens. He stands in his dream restaurant, Vulture, wearing a non-sportsy sports coat. He’s married with a child. There’s a very non-punk potato pavé on the monogrammed plate, the servers are in tux-adjacent attire, and this whole building in University Heights has been turned into a plant-based funhouse with formidable, obsessive style.
Photo Credit: James Tran Visitors stroll through the white-and-bright diner Dreamboat before stepping into Vulture’s moody bar.
Despite the earmarks of midcentury continental formalism, five out of 10 people in here wear arcane t-shirts. Word got out early on that Vulture was a fine-dining experience, and while there’s a tableside Caesar and velvet curtains and soft, artful furniture, that was never the intent. Stetina had to do some PR legwork to pop the “special occasion” balloon that floated over the project—another collaboration between himself and Arsalun Tafazoli of CH Projects—and it seems to be working.
One of the t-shirt people I recognize: Justin Pearson of The Locust and Three One G Records. A thoughtful and progressive punk force in SD, he’s seated at a corner table with individuals who look like they’ve at least dabbled in if not dedicated their lives to graphic design and can casually play a theremin near a rare fern. Vulture captures that same dinner-party-for-creative-people mood that the Middletown bar Starlite first brought to the city.
Photo Credit: James Tran Every upholstery in Vulture is tufted, every bust underlit for drama, every detail obsessively detailed.
It’s a place for grown-up punks, for ideas and ideals.
(Obtrusive but important note about punk rock and plant eaters: The rather genuine punk music of the 1970s and ’80s that eventually birthed Green Day and Nirvana and even, I guess, My Chemical Romance emerged from a philosophical and creative instinct to challenge status quos, which often meant expressing unpopular and political opinions in an excessively loud and urgent manner—pretty much exactly what Simon & Garfunkel were doing but far more invigorating and annoying. There were plenty of bands who got big because they had great hair and a good producer; there were other bands who got cult-famous based on the holy-wow way they expressed uncomfortable ideas, making people question the way they lived. Eating only plants was a part of this live-different worldview, and, like any good movement, it got co-opted by the tad too righteous, moral, and shame-mongery. It should be said that Stetina made his name in San Diego by being a philosophical vegan who’s un-mongery.)
Photo Credit: James Tran The Vulture martini, the result of a year of tinkering—a near-frozen booze concerto of three different gins and four vermouths.
To get to Vulture, you enter through Dreamboat, a well-lit, bright, Mr. Clean-ish, ’60s-era, plant-based, romantically American diner that’s all white and chrome and charm—poodle-skirt notions and connoisseur coffee and smoked potato latkes and Impossible burgers and baked goods and milkshakes and cocktails. Seating occupancy: one-and-a-half people on Ozempic (fine, it’s 10).
In the back corner of this tiny diner is an antique host stand. The host takes you through a velvet curtain, down the short hall, and through a door, until you enter into, what?
Photo Credit: James Tran Bedecked in red velvet, Vulture was five years in the making.
Some will call it a speakeasy, but it’s really just a fun surprise restaurant (“speakeasies” do still exist, but they’re not on OpenTable, and almost everyone with a project they call a “speakeasy” will, on their most honest days, admit it’s not a speakeasy).
You’ll step into cavernous, amber-glow, lava-lamp darkness. So, the first experience Vulture offers all of us is temporary blindness, followed by the opportunity to behold the shockingly slow ability of human eyes to adjust to radical shifts in light. The music is on point, a mix of obscure indie tracks and guilty-pleasure soft-rock bangers. Thanks to listening bars, restaurants have become the stereo-system showrooms of America. Remember that guy in high school who one day showed up with box speakers in his trunk and a $6,000 head unit, an amp, subwoofers, and EQs, and his car sounded like Dr. Dre’s and Rick Rubin’s place of business? That guy is restaurants.
Photo Credit: Arlene Ibarra The “crab” cake, made with hearts of palm.
Troy Johnson is the magazine’s award-winning food writer and humorist, and a long-standing expert on Food Network. His work has been featured on NatGeo, Travel Channel, NPR, and in Food Matters, a textbook of the best American food writing.
It had been open six weeks when it got the Michelin star. At six weeks, a restaurant is a newborn. Newborns wail and struggle to breathe. They’re cracking open their first panic attack. Nine months in the flotation tank of the mom spa, then—blammo—the landlord shuts off the water and fairly traumatically evicts them into a drafty world that has no clue about mood lighting.
It’s old food critic wisdom that restaurants need six months to get running and ready for real analysis. Crew members will have lied on their resumes, narcissists will find themselves bored, the strangely emotional demands of diners will break newbies. It’s a fresh organism dedicated to executing nightly public theater, and it takes time for all the parts to learn how to operate as a fluid whole—develop mutually beneficial roles, nail the timing, speak the unspoken language.
Granted, the team at Lilo in Carlsbad aren’t newcomers, and they’ve had way more time than they ever wanted to plan this out. Plus, the partners—restaurateur John Resnick and chef Eric Bost—helped earn their restaurant across the street, Jeune et Jolie, a Michelin star (and they run its raved-about sister restaurant, Campfire, down the block).
Photo Credit: Elodie Bost Analog music helps set the mood in here.
“We’re lucky,” Resnick says. “About 80 percent of the people on our team, we either worked with immediately or they came back because they were excited about this project.”
The project is a 22-seat, tasting menu–only restaurant featuring Bost, longtime chef de cuisine Dusan Todic, wine director Savannah Riedler (formerly of Post Ranch Inn and two-Michelin-starred Saison), and beverage director Andrew Cordero (Jeune et Jolie and Campfire). It’s four years in the making. When a 10,000-square-foot building became available on State Street in 2021—the last of its kind on one of Carlsbad’s most up-and-coming drags—they jumped at it. The plan was to build a massive all-day restaurant (Wildland, now open) and, behind it, tiny Lilo, where they could showcase what their vision of the ultimate San Diego dinner experience could be. It’s the kind of James Beard Award and Michelin bait that ambitious restaurateurs dream of and makes basic sense when they have a chef-partner like Bost.
“Campfire and Jeune—from the time leases were signed to opening doors—took about 12 months,” Resnick says. “So I kind of felt like, alright, 18 months should be doable.” He pauses. “It was not.”
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos Your meal begins in the serene courtyard.
At that time, the pandemic was still slowly releasing its chokehold. Supply chains had been shot with a billion tranquilizer darts. Building two restaurants at a time while exhibiting a noble American amount of ambition was no picnic. The week after the project finally broke ground, the construction lead on the project—“the only person more essential to the buildout than us as owners,” Resnick says—departed. A fun idiosyncrasy of construction in North County is that most contractors live 40 minutes away and prefer freelance gigs closer to home. So, finding help was hard. Plus, a new ordinance had been passed in Carlsbad since Resnick opened his first two restaurants.
“I was down in Baja having lunch when I got an email about needing a ‘minor site development plan,’” Resnick remembers. “I was like, ‘Well, it’s got the word minor in it; it’s probably not a big deal.’ That one thing added nine months to the project.”
Project costs ballooned. Hems were hawed. The buzz on this project had been loud, and now the scene wondered and whispered. I ask Bost and Resnick if there was a time they considered giving up or drastically reducing the vision.
“It came up, yeah,” Resnick says. “At the end of the day, it was a ‘the only way out is through’ type of thing.”
They thought they’d launch in July 2023. The doors opened in April 2025.
Photo Credit: Elodie Bost A tartlette made with vin jaune, or “yellow wine,” a dry French white aged for years under a film of yeast.
The Redemption
For Bost, the unveiling of that restaurant was especially redeeming. In 2020, he’d lost what felt like everything. He’d spent 20 years working his way through some of the world’s best kitchens: Le Cirque, The Ritz-Carlton in St. Thomas, Alain Ducasse, and both The Lodge at Torrey Pines and The Inn at Rancho Santa Fe in San Diego. He hit the top when he was named executive chef for Guy Savoy, launching the famed French chef’s elaborate Vegas restaurant and then overseeing his places in Singapore. In 2017, ready to do his own thing, he returned to SoCal and spent two years developing the idea for his dream restaurant. He finally opened his unpretentious tasting-menu place, Auburn, in LA in 2019.
Troy Johnson is the magazine’s award-winning food writer and humorist, and a long-standing expert on Food Network. His work has been featured on NatGeo, Travel Channel, NPR, and in Food Matters, a textbook of the best American food writing.
A perfectly designed home rarely happens by accident. Those kitchens that feel effortless and rooms that seem to tell a story the second you walk in? They’re usually the work of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing.
It’s knowing which ideas will actually work, which materials will hold up over time, and how to turn a collection of choices into a space that feels intentional. That’s where a professional interior designer comes in.
For the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) California San Diego Chapter, the goal is to help people see interior design as more than just the finished look. Behind every well-designed space is a process built on technical expertise. Designers are educated in everything from professional software and construction details to building codes, space planning, materials, and functionality.
Courtesy of ASID
“People don’t always realize how much goes on behind the scenes,” Kirsten Recce , current president of the ASID California San Diego Chapter, says. “Our designers are not just doing furniture placement and color selection and picking out new fluffy pillows. That’s not what they’re trained for.”
ASID members bring formal education, continued learning, and industry knowledge to their projects, helping create spaces that are not only beautiful, but designed to work. A paint color that changes completely depending on the lighting. A material that looks beautiful in a showroom but doesn’t make sense for everyday life. A layout that photographs well but doesn’t function for the people living there. These are the details where professional guidance can make all the difference.
Still, one of the biggest misconceptions about hiring an interior designer is that it’s reserved for massive renovations, luxury homes, or people who already know exactly what they want. The process can feel intimidating. Where do you begin? Is a designer worth the investment? What if you only need help with one room?
ASID’s answer: start with one hour.
ASID’s Spruce Up events break down one of the biggest barriers between homeowners and professional design: knowing where to begin. Held twice a year, the community program gives homeowners the chance to work directly with an ASID designer through a one-hour, $125 consultation in their own home. Whether you’re looking for advice on furniture placement, window treatments, kitchen and bath updates, remodeling ideas, vacation rentals, color selections or something else entirely, the upcoming September 2026 event offers an approachable way to get expert guidance before committing to a full project. Signups are open through Sept. 7, with consultations taking place Sept. 21 through Oct. 31. Proceeds benefit ASID San Diego’s educational and community programs. Register here!
Courtesy of ASID
“It’s a great opportunity for people who are in that exploratory phase,” Recce says. “Maybe they’re not sure they want to hire an interior designer yet, or they think it sounds daunting or expensive. This gives them a chance to discover what working with a designer is actually like.”
Design is personal. A good designer isn’t just creating a beautiful room; they’re helping create a space that fits the way someone lives.
“We’re a resource to all of San Diego County,” Recce says. “It doesn’t cost anything to pick up the phone and call and ask. We’ll answer.”
Every year for the Best of San Diego issue, we ask readers to nominate and vote for a San Diego classic restaurant they want food critic Troy Johnson to review. Whichever they vote for, he goes. Last year, they sent him to Rocky’s Crown Pub. This year… Mexican classic, El Indio.
The Perfect Order: Taquitos with Everything | Chicken Tamale | Mordiditas
When you’re credited with inventing the entire concept of the taquito, pretty much every other dish you create is going to pout in that cigar-shaped shadow. Unless you sous vide a couple narwhals, the taquito is gonna dominate your story.
San Diego’s El Indio is widely cited as the global birthplace of the taquito. (Note from our nonexistent legal team: Like any food origin story, it’s contentious—many will tell you a small, rolled taco had been a staple in Mexico for generations; others claim an LA taco stand beat SD to it. But by and large, El Indio has been granted paternity for the word “taquito” and cited as the first in the US to both sell and widely popularize the iconic thing—which happens to fit our narrative nicely, so we’re leaning in.)
So, El Indio’s mordiditas are that almost-famous entourage dish that deserves more applause. Sliced segments of taquito, about the size of pigs in a blanket, are assembled in a heap on a plate and absolutely waterboarded with nacho cheese and pickled jalapeños. They’re essentially loaded taquito nachos, an idea whose glory, in a just world, will outlive us all and echo in Valhalla. They solve a longstanding problem with every single batch of nachos that has been made in humankind—that each and every chip is denied an equitable amount of cheese or load.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
Most nachos are built as an altar to American capitalism: The top couple of chips accumulate a vast majority of the cheese and the rest of the chips just keep hearing rumors of a trickle-down until they protest. If our species ever gets cut from the roster of the universe, the fact that we put a man on the moon but could never equally dress our nachos should be examined by our successor species as a possible cause.
El Indio’s taquito rubble comes in a biblical flood of nacho cheese. It’s a snack-bar treat for people whose therapists have listened to their fantasy of placing their open, eagerly receptive mouths beneath the queso pump—albeit with far better taquitos made from scratch.
The dish isn’t gonna knock your socks off, but it’s satisfying in a calorie-gargling way, a celebration of the fact that merely entering a taco shop releases us from acknowledging the physical limits of human arteries. Would El Indio’s mordiditas be better if the cheese was scaled back and partnered with a crema, or if the cheese was lovingly dirtied with chipotle in adobo, or if they came topped with a lawn-sized pile of cilantro and onions and activated charcoal ash from the sacred cenotes of Chichén Itzá? Shut up and eat your naquitos.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
It feels simultaneously excessive and absolutely correct to say El Indio is a San Diego legend and global food icon. In 1940, Ralph Pesqueira Sr. was working in one of the many aerospace headquarters that surrounded Lindbergh Field (the SD International Airport’s original name), building planes and war machines. As a side dream, he started making and selling fresh corn tortillas by hand on the corner of Grape and India Streets.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
As with most food success stories, there was a key moment of technological innovation (consider In-N-Out’s invention of the two-way speaker or Pizza Hut introducing online ordering to the pie masses). Around 1945, Pesqueira—who we might call the Thomas Edison of Mexican food—invented San Diego’s first tortilla-making machine. By hand, he could whip up 30 dozen a day; with the machine, he cranked out 30 dozen an hour. A full-fledged tortilla factory was born, the effect of which was massive for putting training wheels on the local Mexican food culture that would boom decades later.
When aero coworkers asked him if he could make a handheld, good-travelin’ food for lunch pails, he thought of flautas (a Mexican staple with global roots—a flour tortilla usually wrapped around meat and rolled into the shape of a flute, then fried).
He did a smaller version with fresh masa corn tortillas. The taquito entered the world. He sold each for 18 cents.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos A slice of El Indio’s storied past.
Troy Johnson is the magazine’s award-winning food writer and humorist, and a long-standing expert on Food Network. His work has been featured on NatGeo, Travel Channel, NPR, and in Food Matters, a textbook of the best American food writing.
The Perfect Order: Wedge Salad | French Fries | Steak of Choice
Don’t come here.
If you do, locals will TP my place of residence. If you’re going to go, go at 4 p.m. If someone waddles over in their bathrobe with that feral need-a-steak look in their eyes, consider offering your seat as a tribute to their OG-ness. Or maybe they’ll sit on your lap. This feels like the kind of place where strangers become fast, lap-sitting friends.
Juan Jasper Kitchen & Wine isn’t a restaurant as much as it is a porch with a stove, a pop-up that stayed popped. It’s a granny dining flat in Golden Hill, a clubhouse with ribeyes and wine. It started with the old-school butcher shop next door, Sepulveda Meats & Provisions. Opened in 2016, Sepulveda is run by John Sepulveda and his nephew Nick Swing.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
The shop serves the regional gold-standard Brandt beef (drug-free, source-ID’ed, ethically raised) in all its forms and in various marinades (prime cuts and off cuts, pâtes, bones, tri-tip, carne asada, sausages, ground beef, the whole meat rainbow), plus chicken and quail and turkey and pork and all the things, including housemade pastas and sauces. The sausages are local folklore, made fresh every Thursday (try the jalapeño-cheddar). Like The Wise Ox in North Park, the family-run joint is basically a house of high-quality protein consultants offering recipes and tips and tricks to people who know them by name. Indie butcher shops are a classic, more human American art form (with deep German immigrant roots) lost to the efficiencies of bulk grocering.
When the hairdresser beside Sepulveda closed, the team cut a hole in the wall, ripped out the salon chairs, and essentially built a test kitchen for the butchery’s array of goods. Named Juan Jasper in honor of the owners’ fathers, it quickly became the mighty, DIY meat-and-wine bistro that local food people tried to keep secret.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
It doesn’t have a phone number. No reservations. It doesn’t take credit cards—only Venmo or whatever “cash” is. At some places, you can rack up credit card points. Dine at Juan Jasper, and I’m pretty sure Amex deducts some.
It’s got one-and-a-half seats that masquerade as 20 or so, and it seems everyone—owners, cooks, servers, guests, dogs—lives in the apartment complex across the street, sharing sourdough starters, reverse-sear tips, and a love for Gavi wine and a screamin’ deal on good food. Some hyper-local spots like this can give off a get-off-my-lawn wariness to outsiders (hi there, Rocky’s Crown Pub), but Juan Jasper is friendly as hell. As if you were invited to crash the dinner party of a family who truly gets along and isn’t trying to salve deep generational trauma with taco night.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
We show up at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday, and we have to hurry for a seat. By 5 p.m., servers are bringing folding chairs onto the sidewalk for the crowd that’s patiently waiting. A man carries out an extra table, slaps a not-serious tablecloth on it, and makes room for a couple more.
Whoever’s doing the wine list knows a thing or two and doesn’t care for the usual suspects, which is what you want out of a wine bar (the thrill of discovery). There are Gavis and roussannes, Blaufränkisch (a great chilled red from Austria), a red from Palestine (baladi grapes). And the staff raves about them in detail and without pretense.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
I’m not sure I’ve come across a more down-to-earth, likable, knowledgeable staff. There’s a certain “sit; chill; life’s pretty decent” that radiates from people when they genuinely dig working at a place. Solare in Liberty Station’s like that. Not since our dear, departed Cafe Chloe in East Village has a restaurant exuded so much plucky, open-arms charm. Chloe was San Francisco chic, had that art-major touch.
Juan Jasper’s charm is more “emotionally available dad in Home Depot.” You see it in the antique plates with floral patterns, in the wine bottles that have been turned into candle lamps for the outside tables (there are no inside tables, just a counter in front of the cooks). You see it in the photo of a dad teaching his son to pee on a side road (the manager’s dad and brother). Walking to the restroom, you often have to do the hands-up, “not trying to get fresh here” scoot.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
Juan Jasper changes the menu just about all the time but keeps some local favorites on there pretty consistently, like the deviled eggs with chorizo made in-house at Sepulveda. The ones that hit our table are nice, but they’re served a tad too cold and missing something. That something is definitely acid.
The “devil” in deviled eggs has always been the mustard—the note that stings in the right ways; puts some welcome sado in the mouth masochism; offsets the big, fatty bass notes of eggs. This is why eggs are almost always better with hot sauce (or ketchup if you’ve got middle-America glory in your heart and you’re kinda nasty), because they need that foil. It looks like the arugula below is decorative, but it helps to eat the eggs with a few leaves.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
There are always daily specials up on the board. The day we were there, a cook (formerly of Nolita Hall) had whipped up a skin-on mackerel filet with blistered tomatoes and chili oil on charred toast. Mackerel’s an oily little sucker, which can make it taste a bit too proud of its own musk. But this is perfectly done.
The wedge salad? One of the best I’ve had, and it is absolutely because of the decadent, slutty lardons on top (and the dressing). I’m not a wedge guy, mostly because iceberg lettuce has been bringing near-zero flavor or nutrients to the table for far too long. It’s the LaCroix of lettuce, and we’re implicit in its slacker brassica success because “it’s crunchy” and makes a cool sound when we eat it. Iceberg slow-quit us years ago and did some light embezzling and we’re still inviting it to the company Christmas party.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
But I’ll order Juan Jasper’s every time. It’s more of a “loaded” wedge, with thin-sliced red onions, tomatoes, croutons, huge chunks of blue cheese, and a rough-chopped spice blend (a sort of Juan Jasper furikake or everything bagel seasoning that’s on a lot of dishes). Does the kitchen put too much blue cheese dressing on it? You bet. Know what a decent solution for that is? Scraping some off. But those lardons—thick, tender nubs of perfectly smoked pork—are party drugs.
The house-cut Kennebec fries are dreamy: sturdy and showing some skin, but fluffy on the inside. The fry scene is pretty evenly split between steak and shoestring, and these are the truce in the middle. They’re salted as fries should be—to aortically concerning levels.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
The corn and shrimp fritters are more corn and shrimp than fritters, and the moisture content of both of those things makes the interior a tad soupy rather than fluffy. But the poblano sauce underneath is a floral beaut.
Juan Jasper’s burger patty is phenomenally good, made from the ribeye and NY strip trimmings next door at the butcher shop. Order it however you enjoy your quality steak— pink, leaning bloody. If you prefer quality steaks well-done, consider corrective surgery. The burger is a Spartan thing, just a potato roll bun and melted gouda, served floating in an infinity pool of Bordelaise. It’s excellent… save for the bread. Juan Jasper is house-making the potato roll. Noble spirit and effort, but it’s a little airy—and a patty that special deserves an equally special co-host.
Is Juan Jasper the apex culinary menu in San Diego? No. Is the food pretty effing good and the vibe immaculate, and do the people and neighborly pricing make it taste like 13 Michelin stars? You bet. Juan Jasper is not a secret. But it sure as hell feels like a shared one. I’d eat here a thousand times out of 100.
Troy Johnson is the magazine’s award-winning food writer and humorist, and a long-standing expert on Food Network. His work has been featured on NatGeo, Travel Channel, NPR, and in Food Matters, a textbook of the best American food writing.
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