Finally, some good news: You don’t have to figure out what to make for dinner tonight. (It’s too hot to cook, anyway!) We’ve stuck our hands in enough bread baskets around town to know what’s worth going out for, whether you’re eating light (a soup that’s pretty much pure zucchini) or balling out (caviar-topped ice cream at San Diego’s newest Michelin, anyone?). Here are a handful of the best things we’ve eaten recently. Go get some.
Bistro Du Marché
Escargots De Bourgogne, Beurre D’ail & Herbes Potagères
Chef Jean-Michel Diot is one of the greats and somehow still feels like a secret. In NYC in 1989, Diot and his partners—well-known French maître d’ Max Bernard and restaurateur Philippe Lajaunie—ran the groundbreaking Park Bistro in NYC, the first bistro ever awarded three stars by The New York Times. Striking while hot, they opened another acclaimed restaurant, Brasserie Les Halles (two stars, NYT), a year later. Diot and his wife Sylvie eventually sold their shares to Lajaunie and moved to San Diego.
Chefless, Lajaunie would hire a struggling journeyman named Anthony Bourdain, who would write Kitchen Confidential in the kitchen Diot helped make famous. Diot’s escargot—a 200-year-old recipe handed down through chefs for generations, eventually reaching chef Amélie Gadoum at La Jolla’s Bistro du Marché—is unbelievably delicious. Each nub comes in a private plunge pool of warm garlic, butter, chervil, tarragon, and the anise-flavored Ricard liqueur, topped with a perfect-circle, semi-soft crouton. It’s the dish that breaks people who say, “Nope, won’t eat snails.” –Troy Johnson
Forchettabouddit
Vellutata Di Zucchine
New Encinitas Italian restaurant Forchettabouddit feels like something right out of the Netflix movie Nonnas, where Italian dialogue bounces through the dining room as background music. I am a sucker for all things blended, and the restaurant’s vellutata di zucchine—zucchini soup—is a green- smoothie lover’s (hot) dream. It won’t set your mouth on fire or change your life, but the simple purée of zucchini, olive oil, and seasonings is something I could drink right out of the bowl. –Sloane Moriarty
Lilo
Ossetra Caviar
Expectations were seismic for the tasting menu–only Carlsbad restaurant from chef Eric Bost and restaurateur John Resnick, the duo behind Michelin-starred Jeune et Jolie. And Lilo jumped out the gates as expected, earning its first Michelin star within months of opening. Expect one or two more. Dishes like this blow expectations away: almond-flavored orgeat ice cream and a bushi of grated celery root (cured in brown sugar, tamari, and salt for two days and smoked over almond wood for another two days), topped with Kaluga Queen caviar and drizzled with almond oil pressed before each service. Sweet, savory, smoky, salty, a barrel of umami—if you’ve ever enjoyed caviar and crème fraîche, this is that times a hundred… as a dessert. –Troy Johnson
Gravity Heights
Lemon Chicken & Kale Salad
After a Pilates class one Sunday, I stopped into Gravity Heights’ Mission Valley location for some healthy bites and UV rays. On its patio, GH offers a lounge area with couches that (with enough imagination) may make you feel like you’re sitting poolside. Order the lemon chicken and kale sala with za’atar cucumbers, avocado, chickpeas, dill, feta, romaine, and creamy sesame dressing—for a meal so good you don’t even need a side of fries. Pair it with a Golden Hour Spritz (Cynar, passion fruit Giffard, lemon, cava, soda) and cheers to the incoming locals’ summer. –Nicolle Monico
The Marine Room
Risotto
Listen, I’ll be the first to advocate for giving those poor truffle-sniffing dogs a rest following years of fancy fungus over-proliferation. But, despite ill-advised Hinge dates with microwavable popcorn, vodka martinis, and aioli, truffle does have a true soulmate: risotto. Iconic, so-oceanfront-it’s practically-Atlantis La Jolla restaurant The Marine Room’s take is fungi all the way down, with wild mushrooms, mushroom jus, and dark threads of Australian winter truffle, their musky funk mellowed by creamy starch. It tastes (comfortingly) like the earth—a delightful contrast to the sea endlessly knocking against the floor-to-ceiling glass walls. –Amelia Rodriguez
Choi’s
Hotteok With Vanilla Ice Cream
In South Korea, the air around street vendors selling hotteok is the equivalent of a Cinnabon in US airports: an inescapable, dear-God-what-is-that sweetness. It’s a pancake made with wheat flour, makgeolli (Korean rice wine), brown sugar, demerara, and cinnamon. The one at Choi’s in the East Village is crispy outside with a warm, gooey center, topped with vanilla ice cream and a seasonal berry compote. South Korea à la mode. A must-try. –Troy Johnson
Smallgoods Cheese Shop & Cafe
Sobrasada Sando
A Spanish delicacy made on Spain’s Balearic Islands, sobrasada is a paprika-spiked, spreadable cured pork sausage that’s like a pâté with a punch. It’s often used to flavor stews, but at La Jolla’s husband-and-wife-owned cheese-and-meat shop, it’s spread on toast with melted Vermont alpine cheese, a small-batch San Diego mustard (Big Bill’s), red onion, hot honey, and arugula with your choice of Golden Nugget ham, salami, turkey, or mortadella. It’s a hell of a sandwich, and Smallgoods is the spot in San Diego to discover the best small-batch cheese being made in each US state. –Troy Johnson
Mille Fleurs
Traditional Duck Confit
Modern America’s clinical obsession with new-new-new restaurants leaves many of the best parts of a food and drink culture for the rest of us. Like the iconic duck confit at Mille Fleurs in Rancho Santa Fe. Opened 40 years ago, this is where one of San Diego’s most accomplished restaurateur—the very French Bertrand Hug—first truly made his name in the city. After owning and operating Mister A’s for 20-plus years, he sold it a few years back to his longtime GM, beat cancer twice, and returned home to Mille Fleurs. An unrepentant raconteur (an endangered breed of restaurateurs), Hug entertains guests with wild stories on the shaded patio and hosts a “lunch bunch” with longtime regulars every Friday (they each have to bring a rare bottle of something).
His duck confit is a dish from his childhood in France’s Dordogne Valley, an area famed for its foie gras. In producing foie (the delicious and controversial delicacy of fattened duck liver), farmers had tons of leftover duck breasts and legs—and refrigeration hadn’t been invented yet. So they cooked the meat and bones for hours on very low heat and stored it in its own fat in earthen jars in the cellar, and the meat stayed good for a month or more. The desperate move to save food from spoil created one of the greatest delicacies in the culinary world—incredibly moist, fat-saturated duck meat that leaps off the bone, tucked under crispy, caramelized skin. Hug’s mother taught this recipe to one of his first chefs decades ago, and it will never go away. Usually served in a quercynoise sauce (duck fat plus garlic plus jus), it’s a Mount Rushmore dish in San Diego’s food story. –Troy Johnson
Dreamboat
Potato Latke
The plant-based lucid dreamers behind Kindred and Mothership have hatched their newest hangout in University Heights. Dreamboat is a tiny, shiny-white, meatless diner with 1940s and ’50s California paper-hat DNA, using a wood-fired oven for breakfast, lunch, and late-night desserts. It’s got serious coffee (get the orange cream latte) and cocktails (the Dirty Shirley with strawberry grenadine is the hit of the summer). But the star is the giant latke.
Idaho potatoes are roasted beneath the coals, shredded, and seasoned, then pressed in a Belgian waffle iron for a crisp exterior and soft innards. It’s served with a seasoned citrus coconut sour cream and a killer apple compote: grilled apples milled with a blend of hot toddy spices and bourbon. Down the hallway from Dreamboat, through a curtain, lies Vulture—another wildly designed super-experience à la Mothership. –Troy Johnson
