Bars Charging for Ice?!

Westfield UTC mall is adding yet another “first” to the ever-growing roster of restaurants. The first US location for China’s stir-fry sensation Chef Fei is on the way later this year, Japan already reinvented crispy rice pioneer Katsuya by opening the first Katsuya Ko, and now, it’s Spain’s turn—Telefèric Barcelona opens early this summer. 

The family-owned, Barcelona-based tapas joint first opened in the US 10 years ago in Walnut Creek, California, but co-founder and CEO Xavi Padrosa says they’ve had their eye on San Diego for years. Westfield UTC “just clicked,” he says, pointing to the burgeoning collection of world-class eateries already within the mall’s walls. Plus, La Jolla’s breezy vibe echoes Spain’s easygoing tapas culture.  

June 10, 2026

Where is Coral Strong Now?RELATED ARTICLE

The indoor/outdoor space spans 5,526-square-feet, with seating for 150 inside, 60 on the patio, and 16 more at the bar. Xavi’s sister and co-owner Maria Padrosa designed the Mediterranean-inspired space as a contemporary take on coastal Catalonia, using imported furniture and materials from Spain like hand-glazed tiles and wood accents. And if all the dining spaces are planets, the center of the suite’s universe is the bar.

Padrosa points to signature favorites like patatas bravas (fried potatoes drizzled with a spicy red sauce and house aioli), jamón ibérico de bellota (Spanish ham from free-range pigs raised on acorns, cured for 38 months and sliced to order), gambas al ajillo (garlic shrimp), pulpo Telefèric (octopus with potato purée and pimentón XO, a spicy Spanish/Cantonese fusion sauce), and croquetas (a popular fried tapas dish coated in breadcrumbs and made with béchamel mixed with fillings like jamón or king crab.

There are a very small handful of legit paella spots in San Diego (Costa Brava in Pacific Beach and Cafe Sevilla in Gaslamp Quarter come to mind), so I’m personally looking forward to giving Telefèric’s a go—especially the squid ink paella negra, which is perhaps the most goth paella of all. Every location also offers different weekend specials, La Jolla’s being seafood-driven and meant to pair with beverage director Alex Serena’s drinks. There are over a hundred Spanish wines, Spanish-inspired cocktails, sangria, and of course, plenty of twists on the iconic gin and tonic. The restaurant will also have a gourmet market called The Merkat with imported Spanish sundries. 

With more US locations in the works (Newport Beach will open soon after La Jolla), Padrosa says the company hopes to open more across California, but are open to anywhere in the country that feels right. “We don’t know exactly what new cities will appear on our map in the coming years,” he says. But in true Catalan fashion, anywhere they go should be ready for big plates of hearty Spanish cuisine.   

Telefèric Barcelona La Jolla opens early summer 2026 in Westfield UTC. Opening hours will be Monday through Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m.; and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.

May 14, 2026

Team Behind Same Same Launching Amor Y Magia This JuneRELATED ARTICLE

San Diego Restaurant News & Food Events

Arcana In Encinitas Is Now Anigma

Most of the time, you have to be 18 years old to change your name. In Arcana’s case, it was about a month. The immersive speakeasy behind Archive in Encinitas updated their moniker to Animga (a play on “enigma”) earlier this month, after what one can only assume was an upset letter from a similarly-named business. However, partner Paula Vrakas promises that the concept remains the same—mystery, cocktails, and a forthcoming bottle locker membership club. Since the only constant is change, Anigma is off to a good start!

Beth’s Bites

• It’s not a salad bar—Mary’s Gourmet Salads is a salad experience. And soon, Bankers Hill will get a taste of the green when the local eatery opens its third location at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Upas Street in the Park Summit building. Yes, that’s the same building as Cowboy Star’s new venture She Rode West, so it sounds like veggie lovers and carnivores alike will be covered. 
• Speaking of expansion plans, La Corriente is likewise on a roll. The Mexican seafood concept opened its first location in the US in La Jolla in 2024, followed by Coronado in 2025, and announced plans to open a third branch in Oceanside in the Freeman Collective. With neighbors like Tanner’s Prime Burgers and Little Fox ice cream, the culinary collective is only getting more ridiculously tasty.
• One delicious event that will occur before both of the aforementioned openings is a honey + cheese + focaccia tasting at Pastaria Vivi on July 17. With the help of Good Honey (which took top honors as the highest-rated honey in the U.S. at the International London Honey Awards) and Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company (easily one of the best artisanal cheesemakers in California), the Encinitas-based pasta shop and market will host a free pairing event from noon to 3 p.m. And if you’re an aspiring apiologist, don’t miss Good Honey’s on-site observation hive to watch these busy bees in action.

Listen Now: The Latest in San Diego’s Food and Drink Scene

Have breaking news, exciting scoops, or great stories about new San Diego restaurants or the city’s food scene? Send your pitches to [email protected].

The day I spoke to chef Travis Swikard, his furniture had been stuck at the border for weeks. Upholstery detained, a uniquely modern snag. The biggest restaurant opening of Swikard’s life was a couple days away, and there were gaping holes in his dining room where the sort of significant, vibe-defining furniture would go. There are many reasons people enjoy restaurants, but sitting is one of them.

“This project has tested our patience in every way,” he says. “But we figure it out.”

February 11, 2026

Restaurant Review: Lucien in La JollaRELATED ARTICLE

Add to that a broken foot. He smashed it the day before Thanksgiving. Dropped an employee locker on it. He spent the next day not getting a cast and justifying whiskey as therapy. Instead of going to the ER, he worked a full holiday shift at his first restaurant, Callie, the one that made his name in San Diego.

Swikard has that old (and endangered) grin-and-bear-it nature—no doubt at least partly seared into him by the restaurant world he came up in. He learned in some of the world’s most revered kitchens under some of the most devout, old-school chefs. The only promise for a young, serious cook was that the work would be grueling, highly instructive, repeatedly humiliating, and character-building.

Swikard got all that and some restaurateur renown as well. Fleurette in La Jolla is the restaurant that should put him on the national stage for good. He’s already there, but the cement’s still wet.

The final pieces of furniture finally cleared customs a month after opening. Fleurette is the peacock at the base of La Jolla Commons—a LEED-Platinum glass tower filled with enterprises in finance, life science,and capital-L law. Now, it also houses a deadly good beef tartare in anchovy sauce and a cocktail that tastes weirdly like a refreshing pesto. Once you get lost trying to park, walking through the Commons’ immaculate courtyards makes you want to throw a few bucks at cryptocurrency, cure cancer, and work up a hunger for gougères with 21-month Prosciutto di Parma and black truffle fonduta.

For the latter, search for the yellow doors. Among all the very official, floor-to-ceiling glass, those doors look like a portal to a wonderland where Alice is sharing suspect tea with Aldous Huxley.

Swikard’s concept here is a southern French one, built on the “cuisine du soleil” movement that’s credited to legendary French chef Roger Vergé. Vergé opened his restaurant Moulin de Mougins in a village near Cannes, the famed coastal town in Provence (in the southeast corner of France). While the rest of France was cream-and-buttering its way to culinary glory, here was this village chef cooking light, fresh, seasonal fare (mostly seafood) dressed with olive oil and herbs. His bouillabaisse was the stuff of legends. In many ways, cuisine du soleil was mere practicality: Provence is mainly cliffs, and it’s hard to raise a dairy cow on a cliff.

“This is the way I’ve been cooking my whole life,” Swikard says of what he’s doing at Fleurette. “I feel like classic is the new nouveau.”

Let’s back up.

Born and raised in Santee, Swikard did what most chefs with big dreams do—headed to Europe for a bit and wiggled his way into the doors of the greats, like bad-boy Marco Pierre White. Then he went to New York to serve as a chef de partie (station-specific cook) at Café Boulud, a Michelin-starred spot from one of the most renowned French chefs in the world, Daniel Boulud. There, he worked under Gavin Kaysen—a former San Diego chef who was Boulud’s right-hand. After Kaysen’s departure (to Minneapolis to become a regional food capo with James Beard Awards and multiple restaurants, most famously Spoon and Stable), Swikard became Boulud’s go-to guy and culinary director.

Finally, thanks to San Diego restaurateur David Cohn, Swikard came home in 2019. Cohn (who is a semi-secret investor in what feels like a vast majority of boldfaced San Diego restaurants) had visited Boulud Sud and eaten Swikard’s food. He offered to financially back a restaurant for Swikard if he returned and built it in San Diego. Not a Cohn restaurant—a Swikard restaurant, run by Swikard and his team, including his operational partner Ann Sim (formerly of Eleven Madison Park) and his wife Mia.

March 7, 2025

Callie Chefs Launch Mexican and Vietnamese Pop-Up SeriesRELATED ARTICLE

Swikard agreed. When Callie finally opened in 2021, it was the closing of a circle, since Cohn’s business partner—chef Deborah Scott—had given Swikard his first restaurant job as a line cook 20 years prior at Kemo Sabe in Hillcrest. Cohn and Scott are integral partners in Fleurette, as well.

Here’s the important part: Callie had been scheduled to open long before it did. Due to a prolonged global shitshow that included wet bats, bleach shooters, and an ideological cage match between politicians and scientists, it was delayed. That delay was at least the partial key for just how special Callie became. Swikard spent that awkward couple of years going to meet farmers, fishers, ranchers, small shop owners, and people tinkering with rare foods in San Diego garages.

This is why boat captains will call Swikard to report they’re pulling up to the dock with a line-caught bluefin. They’ll bring it to his back door. At Callie, he serves what looks like a heap of damn carrot shavings—pre-compost as fine dining. Except, instead of shoving that fresh tussle down the garbage disposal, he pickles and ferments it for days and tosses it with a housemade burnt-orange cashew cream (he slow-bakes an orange until it’s charcoal-colored, and the flavor is wild) and a house-ground dukkah. He keeps his spot prawns (a California delicacy) in a tank of perfectly calibrated seawater that he gets from Scripps Institution of Oceanography and only ends their journey when they’re ordered (most restaurants will kill them, then store them in the walk-in, which does some mushy damage to the texture).

The point of all this Callie talk is to note the iceberg of process under what looks like simple dishes, which also happens at Fleurette. Swikard tends to source raw ingredients from people as obsessive as he is. Consider the anchoïade sauce for Fleurette’s tartare. The key is colatura di alici, a revered Italian fish sauce made by resting layers of anchovies and salt in a barrel for months. He adds just enough (fish sauces are like cologne—a dab is perfect and two dabs are a public menace). It’s mixed with a confetti of egg yolks (cured, which means they’re rubbed with salt and sugar and rested until they become a firm umami bomb that can be shredded like golden Parm). Both explain why what looks like a pretty simple pile of raw beef (albeit the very best beef, from Flannery, one of California’s most sought-after first families of beef, known for USDA Prime Holstein cuts with a snow-flurry of marbling) tastes so wildly alive.

At Fleurette, the sauce work is textbook heritage—from soubise (onion) to vierge (tomatoes and herbs) to garlic persillade and a fairly mind-blowing fennel marmalade Swikard serves with a duck liver and bone marrow pâté (when foie gras became the PETA homing beacon of the restaurant world, he learned how to replace foie’s trademark fatty magic with marrow).

His kitchen setup is the same one that Daniel Boulud has in New York—a French Athanor, the Aston Martin of chef suites with all the bells, whistles, and flux capacitors (“We clean it with fresh lemon juice every night,” Swikard says). But the classic French in him meets the San Diego lifestyle in him here. The ingredients are mostly local (A-list produce is chief among the reasons to be a chef in this county, since it has more small farms per capita than any other in the US and the growing seasons are laughably long).

“[Boulud] would buy all the best produce from across the world,” Swikard once told me. “So, every morning I’d come in and see the boxes of produce, and every time, on the side of the box it said, ‘San Diego.’”

There’s not much gluten on the Fleurette menu, nor dairy. It’s classic French food with fewer naps—more olive oils and poached fish than heavy cream and fat-bathed proteins.

“People think French food is heavy and rich,” Swikard says, echoing French predecessors who introduced nouvelle cuisine and cuisine minceur (“slimming cooking”), both styles based in less unctuous takes on the mother sauces. “Fleurette is not rich. It’s lighter, brighter, cleaner—the way I like to eat.”

You see that lightness in one of the first menu’s star entrees. Copper River steelhead trout (like the river’s equally famous salmon) is prized because these fish swim hundreds of miles against fast-moving currents to spawn; that requires massive energy reserves (loads of omega-3 fats) and causes them to develop huge muscles (those create texture). The result is a remarkable, remarkable fish, which Swikard’s team poaches in olive oil with cauliflower, pine nuts, and grape vierge. His bouillabaisse (hello, chef Vergé) employs local rockfish and spiny lobster as seasonal anchors. He’ll also use bocaccio (another local rockfish). “People call it a trash fish, but it’s one of the most flavorful fish there is,” he says.

Swikard’s dad Larry, a San Diego landscape architect, built a modest herb and citrus garden out back. The herbs are largely Provence.

For Swikard, Fleurette’s about the next gen of chefs. He wants to use that big Athanor and this new dream to help young cooks slow down, learn, drill the basics into their DNA. It’s a training ground that will, ideally, spawn more Callies and Fleurettes in the years to come. There’s a fairly big trend of cooks skipping the craft-building and going straight to wild fusion-concept cuisine.

“Stuff that I feel is pretty classic hasn’t been done in San Diego—this generation of dining hasn’t seen it,” Swikard says.

He points to French master chef Jean-Michel Diot of La Jolla’s Bistro Du Marché as the role model. “Doing classic at a high level consistently—there’s no better level of cuisine than that,” he adds. “I wanna build a foundation for cooks in San Diego and train them how to cook in this style.”

The current cast: Mia Swikard runs marketing for both restaurants. Ann Sim is director of opps for both concepts. His chef de cuisine is Roman Garcia, who was also CDC at Selby’s in Atherton, CA when it won a Michelin star. The GM is Steve Dreifuss, formerly of Little Italy’s now-shuttered Camino Riviera. Callie’s beverage team—wine director Tracy Latimer and head bartender James Roe—have made moves as well, leaving heirs to oversee Callie.

“Callie was what I felt was right for San Diego at the time, and I feel like this is what’s right for San Diego now,” Swikard says. “I couldn’t have done this without doing Callie.”

We gotta talk about Lucien’s egg show.

A staff member unveils the caviar tableside, opening the box like a jeweler presenting stones that have bedazzled some of the most famed fallopian tubes in marine history. The “25” on the inside of the lid is massive. The caviar brand, N25 (German-based; sourced from Yunnan, China), wants you to know the exact northern latitude where these eggs started their long journey to this moment, this ceremonial dispensing into your lucky mouth.

(Before we go further, it’s important to note that N25 is not contributing financially to my existence in any way. I just love a solid educational hyperventilation on food ingredients, and this one in particular is instructive of the experience-slash-obsession that is Lucien, a 30-seat, tasting menu–only restaurant in La Jolla. The three partners who own it worked at high levels of the most rarefied restaurants in New York and other parts of the country. Among them is chef-partner Elijah Arizmendi, who, before this, was chef de cuisine at L’abeille when it earned its first Michelin star.)

Anyway, each egg of N25 caviar goes through a four-part audition process. Only 10 to 25 percent of the entire harvest will make the cut. That’s fairly standard for high-quality foods and drinks—tequila, for instance. Imagine a long hose in the shape of a wave. After distillation, that entire hose is filled with booze that is technically tequila. The bottom of the hose contains enamel-stripping gasoline, and as you go up the wave, you get an increasingly better product. Gas-station brands will take the whole batch and shove it into a bottle. The result is as you’d imagine—like you crammed your used gym clothes into a suitcase with your special-occasion tux. Premium tequila makers will only bottle the very best stuff, selling the lesser liquid to brands who specialize in wince-fuel destined for rush-week bloodstreams.

N25 only selects large, fatty pearls of caviar that can stand up to the rigors of the aging process. They’re then cured in mineral salt, which draws out the moisture, intensifying the flavor—but not so much that it tastes like you’re licking the bottom of a forgotten dingy in the crime part of the harbor. The caviar is aged in sub-zero temps for three to 12 months. An ID tag on the back of the box allows you to trace the caviar all the way back to the individual sturgeon, a sort of 23andMe for the luxury food space. The ID also offers details on the size of each roe in that tin, plus color and texture and flavor characteristics—like wine-tasting notes for caviar people.

Oh, wait, there’s more. The caviar is not even the star of the Lucien egg show.

Because on your table in front of that unrealized school of fish is 80 percent of an eggshell, sitting upright in a bed of rare, hard, white heritage Amber Eden grains, which can be traced back to Persia, where Adam and Eve smote God with their choice in fruit. (Note: Don’t attempt to eat that decorative pile of raw wheat—apparently some guests have, to predictably WTF dental trauma.) The egg’s top has been surgically removed, revealing a bone-white cream. The server spoons a mid-size dollop of N25 onto the top, essentially giving it a zillenial perm made of caviar and producing a fertility shrine for Michelin inspectors.

December 24, 2025

Lucien Lands in La Jolla With a 13-Course, Big League Tasting MenuRELATED ARTICLE

Inside that egg is the eighth through 12th wonders of the world. Eating this should flood you with enough happiness to prevent you from posting dumb political hot takes on the internet for at least 24 hours.

The “ouef” is a magic trick pulled frequently from the hats of Michelin chefs (Thomas Keller, most famously), for good reason. First, it looks as though you’ve come to a mount of culinary talent, where food is profoundly transformed and priced accordingly, and the server’s handed you a damn egg from the fridge.

The egg is the single most humble, farmy object—one that us average so-and-sos cook very averagely multiple times a week. But, here, inside that raw grocery pellet is the most un-you concoction imaginable: a multi-layer dip of silken, fluffy food clouds (okay, fine, it’s just dashi custard and chantilly cream) and possibly the highest possible manifestation of the egg arts, all due respect to chawanmushi.

Scrape your spoon inside; make sure to get all of the layers. It is rich, so rich, and I want some bread with it. Lucky for me, there’s a bite-sized loaf of buckwheat bread (made with Amber Eden) topped with grilled banana and nori, which is the second-most delicious thing you will have at Lucien—if it ever appears again, since Lucien’s menu changes with the wind and seasons and is never really the same.

June 23, 2025

How San Diego’s Food Scene Has Evolved in the Past YearRELATED ARTICLE

Here’s why I spent so much time reviewing a damn egg: Placing that humble American farm totem in the art spotlight that hangs above each table of this highly ambitious restaurant—and metamorphosing it in such a remarkable way—says just about everything you need to know about Lucien; Arizmendi; and the other partners, Brian Hung and Melissa Lang.

Dinner here is meal as manifesto. Arizmendi and his kitchen crew (half of whom seem to have moved from New York to San Diego to join him on this venture, which says something either about Arizmendi or, more boringly, about our weather) are crafting a 12- to 16-course tasting menu of tiny treats using the most peak-of-peak-season, rare, raw ingredients from farms that specialize in things grown in sacred loams and eggs laid by hens with self-care instincts, probably. The Lucien experience is less of a meal and more of a live-action, audience-participation documentary about sublimely good ingredients from across the globe but mostly from local dirt and waters and whatever field Arizmendi wanders to forage.

Okay, so now let’s talk about Lucien’s highly interesting design mistake or genius way to facilitate overhearing insider-trading tips during dinner.

The booths in the restaurant are half-domed, as if you’re dining in exactly half a snowglobe or a moody cantina booth suited mostly to hiring Han Solo to fly your mercenary ship. Visually, very cool. And each half-dome is the most wildly successful whispering gallery in the world—a more delicious version of St. Paul’s Cathedral. A man seated 25 feet away from us murmurs something to his dining companion, and I hear every syllable as if I have bugged his table and am listening through an ear piece. Secrets are slutty here. Sweet nothings become sweet everyones. I can hear the chefs on the line having what used to be hush-hush conversations, which must suck for them (complaining about diners is one of the prized relief valves of a fairly grueling industry which, to the chefs’ credit, they don’t do). By the end of the meal, I am clairvoyant. I can hear synapses forming thoughts.

And since I started this review off with deifying praise of what mortals can do to an egg, let’s balance it out with a tempering. As I mentioned, the housemade bread uses that Amber Eden grain. It’s dense but flavorful. The cultured seaweed butter it’s served with is one of the most jarring ordeals my mouth has been through (and it’s been a lab mouth for American restaurant culture for many years). The best way I can describe it is “butter as low tide.” When you hear the word “butter,” you expect a warm, emotional embrace of semisolid milk fat melting in live-time in your mouth. Instead, you get specks of (albeit immaculately sourced) beach flotsam mucking up the hug.

Lucien doesn’t serve it cold, per se. But it’s also not that room-temp, near-melting-point pat with a dash of sea salt you expect in Michelin-style shops (likely because compound butters need to be stored cooler in order to carry their payload).

Side science discussion: The closer you can serve food to the temperature of the human mouth, the better it tastes. How our mouths detect flavors is a whole litany of biological processes. But our taste buds’ main amplifiers of three main tastes—sweet, bitter, and umami—are microscopic proteins called TRPM5 (transient receptor potential melastatin) channels. These flavor dials are real hothouse flowers. When food is not warm enough, they pretty much refuse to work. But when food is served around 98.5 degrees, it’s estimated their ability to process flavors increases by over 100 times. That’s why ice cream doesn’t taste nearly as sweet until it starts to melt in your mouth and, honestly, why soft-serve (served at a warmer temp) whoops major ass on traditional ice cream. It’s also why mediocre beer companies request that you drink their products ice-cold, so you can’t taste their mouth treason.

The reason I bring this up is because even though I’m not particularly enjoying the experience of this seaweed butter, it’s exactly what I want when I sign up for Lucien. I want risk. Lucien’s unique and pricey thrill is to pierce the safely oxygenated atmosphere of the usual restaurant experience (“here’s a flatbread and a thing with birria and melted cheese”) and get you out into uncharted food space. If you’re receiving a tasting menu and nothing makes you uncomfortable or maybe even say “oh, hell no” at least briefly, then the chef is giving you the khaki, unlimited breadsticks version of the experience.

Years ago, at famed chef and restaurateur David Chang’s Momofuku Ko, the tasting menu was, as expected, largely fantastic. And one dish tasted almost exactly a replica of hot, wet, effervescent garbage. (Note: I’m sure someone with a different mouth than my own was freaking out over this dish—like, finally, someone had heard their prayers about wanting to eat compost in a formal setting.)

The point is, seemingly half of New York’s most talented young cooks, sommeliers, and hospitality pros have moved to San Diego and are putting on a show in La Jolla at Lucien. Some dishes are sublimely good, some miss like a Radiohead b-side, and your secrets are so unsafe.

It’s been 29 years since famed Japanese chef Katsuya Uechi opened his first restaurant Sushi Katsuya in Studio City and nearly as many years since he gave the world one of the most iconic Japanese dishes in the modern world: spicy tuna crispy rice (it’s been replicated a billion times over).

Ten years ago, he partnered with global hospitality group SBE at Katsuya in Brentwood, and today, there are four Katsuyas in Los Angeles, one in the Bahamas, and another coming to Toronto in 2028.

That slow, but strategic expansion introduced Uechi’s signature brand of modern Japanese cuisine to a Western audience. With Katsuya’s 20th anniversary looming, culinary director Ben Dayag says the time was ripe for a fresh new idea—a new baby, if you will. 

And so the name, ko, which means child in Japanese.

Katsuya Ko is designed to be a more youthful, laid-back version of the original’s trademark elegance and extravagance. And La Jolla is where it all starts—the first Katsuya Ko opens at Westfield UTC on February 5, 2026. 

January 21, 2026

Dubai's Saya Brasserie to Open First U.S. Location in DowntownRELATED ARTICLE

The 3,000-square-foot space seats 80 guests inside and 32 on the patio, with shades of peach, dark pink, burgundy, cream, and natural wood throughout for a calming, upscale, feminine vibe. The open kitchen concept allows guests to watch chefs slowly smoke food on the robata grill, toss in the wok, prepare hot stone dishes like Korean-inspired bibimbap, and roll fresh sushi. 

Katsuya Ko’s Asian menu falls into three general sections, all of which are mostly shareable—salads, meats, seafood, and tempura from the robata—explains Dayag. 

“The third section would be [the] sushi section—sushi, sashimi, makis,” Dayag says, pointing to staples like California rolls and cucumber rolls. Classics like spicy tuna crispy rice are paired with locally-inspired specials like a salmon citrus rolls with spicy tuna in the middle, topped with fresh salmon sashimi, local orange segments, and drizzled with onion ponzu “to kind of give it that umami bomb at the end.” 

“I would say, if you want to get the total experience, order a couple of dishes from each of the sections, especially coming in with a group of four people,” he suggests. “But again, you can come in by yourself and order two items, three items, and also have a great experience.”

To head Katsuya Ko’s kitchen, Dayag tapped local talent. Chef de cuisine Alex Carpio has worked at both Kimpton and Hilton hotels, as well as Ironside Fish & Oyster and Underbelly in North Park to bring a San Diego sensibility into the burgeoning new brand. Ko will also offer sake, beer, wine, soju, and cocktails.

Dayag says that while they selected La Jolla for the first Ko as a jumping-off point for the concept, it’s not meant to be the last. “We’re looking nationwide,” he says, pointing to both freestanding locations as well as opportunities within sbe’s hotel ventures. “We have some in the pipeline. [I] can’t say yet, but there are some coming very soon.” 

Sounds like Ko has some siblings to look forward to very soon.

Katsuya Ko opens at Westfield UTC on Level 1 near the corner of Genesee Avenue and La Jolla Village Drive on February 5, 2026. Hours will be Sunday through Thursday, noon to 9 p.m.; Friday through Saturday, noon to 10 p.m.

Photos Courtesy of Katsuya Ko

Listen Now: The Latest in San Diego’s Food and Drink Scene

Have breaking news, exciting scoops, or great stories about new San Diego restaurants or the city’s food scene? Send your pitches to [email protected].

If you search “crab rangoon roll” on any search engine or AI chatbot, you’re likely to get one result—Slurp in San Diego. 

The ultra-rich, decadently crabby, cream cheese-stuffed, deep-fried burrito served sliced with a side of sweet chili sauce went mega-viral last June, when a few food influencers started posting videos of themselves crunching, dipping, and moaning over the indulgent Thai-California fusion dish at Slurp’s first location in Liberty Public Market and second in Escondido. 

Views went from a few hundred… to a few thousand… up to a few million. 

“Our business exploded,” explains Gene Kim, partner and CFO of Slurp. “We used to sell 100 in a week, if that, and now we’re selling 300 to 500 per day.” 

Somebody should check on the global crab supply, because they’re probably about to sell quite a few more. The third Slurp space soft opens on Friday, January 9 at Westfield UTC, with a grand opening planned for later in the month. 

January 5, 2026

Incoming: Blank Slate in North CountyRELATED ARTICLE

Gene’s wife and Slurp CEO Bella Kim came up with the now-immortalized crab rangoon recipe and entire Slurp concept. She came to the United States from Thailand in 2018 with an F-1 student visa, and missed street food dishes like barbecue pork, wontons, chow mein, and spicy fried rice. “Every item on the menu, that’s all my favorite things from my hometown,” she explains. 

Despite the massive influx of different Asian cuisines to Westfield UTC, from Sichuan hot pot at Haidilao to Taiwanese soup dumplings at Din Tai Fung, Slurp will be the first Thai restaurant at the mall. That’s part of their calculated (and ambitious) growth plans, says Carlo Perez, the group’s third partner brought on to open UTC and facilitate their expansion across San Diego, which they hope to seriously focus on in the coming year.

The group is actively eyeing sites near colleges, universities, and in the second phase of the San Diego Airport terminal redevelopment. With a few more prime locations and some long-term social media strategy, Gene says Slurp could become an iconic local chain as ubiquitous to San Diego as Bird Rock Coffee Roasters, Phil’s BBQ, or Hodad’s. 

But the Slurp phenomenon has already spread far beyond Southern California. Perez’s niece, a student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison sent them a screenshot of a friend asking where they could get a crab rangoon roll in Wisconsin. He laughs. “You have to come to San Diego to come and get it.”

Slurp soft opens on Friday, January 9 at Westfield UTC (4545 La Jolla Village Drive, Suite E-25). Hours are Monday through Thursday, 10:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Friday through Sunday, 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.