You’ll note that our big, obsessively researched “50 People to Watch” feature is devoid of the folks who make our food and drink scene sing. Worry not—we save our sermons on the local seafood geniuses and ramen magicians for our annual Best Restaurants issue, but also for this, our monthly roundup of the best things we put in our mouths lately. Often, we’ll tell you a little about the people who combine years of culinary school and/or sous-chef apprenticeships with the county’s bounty to make those things. This time, there’s a taco with a Michelin pedigree, an eye-poppingly good egg, a sandwich that keeps it simple, and more really good stuff. Go get some.
Books & Records
Crispy Brussels
I really thought the return of Brussels sprouts would be a quick one—just an ironic casino reunion tour before farm senescence. Generations of our ancestors cooked these things wrong, boiling them into a biological-smelling state of food regret. Cooked the like a smear campaign. But we pulled the nose of the Brussels-sprout plane up just before it hit the trees, learning how to char them and what a bit of sweet sauce could do (starting with the Great Balsamic Drizzle Renaissance of the early 2010s).
And there’s a hell of a version here at Books & Records. This room is a seminal one in San Diego’s food culture—the first serious indie restaurant space to occupy the no-man’s land between Hillcrest and Little Italy. Alone on an island of its own cool. It started as the stylish art-lounge eatery Modus Supper Club, then Terryl Gavre of Cafe 222 and James Beard Award nominee Carl Schroeder reinvisioned it as an offshoot of Market Del Mar. Now the urban-sexy room—brick, concrete, steel, and windows, an early adopter of the construction-site-chic trend is live-jazz supper club Books & Records.
Owners Brian Douglass and Anderson Clark are Yale and Cornell hospitality grads who ran operations for the prolific high-end restaurant juggernaut Hillstone Group (Houston’s, R+D Kitchen, The Honor Bar) before coming to town. The point is, go on a jazz night (Friday through Saturday) and get drinks and the sprouts, which come tossed in a peanut butter dressing (PB, sweet chili sauce, rice vinegar, soy) and topped with yuzu Kewpie; black sesame; and a heap of Thai basil, mint, and cilantro. Soupy-good. –Troy Johnson
Puesto
Wagyu Suadero Brisket Taco
After doing light time with James Beard Award–winning chef José Andrés, then six years at Joël Robuchon in Vegas, Tijuana-born-and-raised chef Raul Casillas came back home to help chef Roberto Alcocer open the Michelin-starred Valle. Now he’s been tapped as head creative chef at Puesto (and Marisi), which means a Michelin guy’s tinkering with tacos. From his new menu, the Snake River Farms Wagyu brisket taco is the absolute star. He prepares a belly-cut suadero-style—a classic street vendor technique of slow-cooking beef for hours in its own fat, then searing it hard to caramelize and brown it. The result is essentially the duck confit of Wagyu beef, served with a fruity, tart, spicy chile manzano salsa over a soft, blue-corn tortilla. –Troy Johnson
Piacere Mio
Make Your Own Pasta
Chilly winter nights and a 200-ish-episode season of Love Island Australia call for comfort foods. To prepare for an evening of marathoning, it seemed reasonable to carbo-load with pasta from Piacere Mio in South Park. Opened in 2013, the quaint Italian restaurant became known for its expansive design-your-own homemade pasta menu. While you can add a variety of sauces and proteins to your creation, I went simple with the gamberi e arugola (shrimp and arugula) sauce with gluten-free penne. Rich and creamy, with a little bit of smokiness, the dish has a big personality—one that is definitely worth coupling up with. –Nicolle Monico
Lucien
Banana, Buckwheat, N25 Oscietra Caviar
A bigger feature on Lucien is coming in our next issue. But, essentially, a few grads of New York’s Michelin-star culture (honestly, it feels like half of Thomas Keller’s staff up and moved) came to La Jolla and opened this 12-course tasting menu experience showcasing the skills of chef Elijah Arizmendi (Per Se, L’Abeille). Dinner is an hours-long journey of bonsai-sized food creations—imagine it as an indie version of Addison or The French Laundry—with the requisite amount of ceremony and rare-ingredient obsession.
For instance, Arizmendi uses dozens of droplet bottles filled with housemade tinctures (aged soys, koji shoyu, green peanut oil, the works) and four kinds of salt from across the globe, each tasting wildly different. The show-stopper dish is a hollowed-out farm egg, the bottom half filled with warm custard made of egg and dashi, followed by a layer of chantilly cream mixed with maple syrup and topped with caviar. Served alongside grilled banana buckwheat toast, it is the richest thing you’ll ever eat—a pleasure that dislodges your eyeballs from their eyeball strings. –Troy Johnson
Le Coq
Bing Bread
Bread is in the midst of its glory days, in part because it’s fallen out of favor. As the words gluten and carbs became America’s boogeymen, waiting for our midsections in their creepy van full of inflammation, we all started avoiding sandwiches and bread baskets. There was a time when nearly every restaurant meal started with free bread—which, at the height of glutenphobia, seemed to be a personal attack. Now, bread is rarely served and rarely free.
What happened in the mass de-breading (especially in SoCal, a geographical body-shame) was that the few remaining practitioners began digging deeper into the bag of baking tricks—sourcing rare grains and milling them onsite, yanking little-known recipes. Take La Jolla’s Le Coq, for instance, where three-time James Beard Award semifinalist Tara Monsod and her chef de cuisine are serving the rarely seen cong you bing, a Chinese flatbread that’s made with very light dough that’s rolled flat and infused with French butter, garlic, chives, and soy sauce.
It eats like a thicker, fluffier scallion pancake, folded into pull-apart swirls and served with a salmon rillette. Monsod offers it on her date-night menu: bing; a Snake River Farms Denver-cut Wagyu with giant prawns, pommes purée, and haricots verts; and a chocolate mousse with fish-sauce caramel for under $100. –Troy Johnson
LuckyBolt Kitchen + Bakery
Chicken + Cheese Sandwich
Thank you, LuckyBolt, for not overthinking a good thing. While the other guys are busy reinventing the wheel with 17 sauces, over-mayo’ed slaws, thick-cut bacon, Dutch crunch rolls, and deep-fried thighs, LuckyBolt knows that honest ingredients from local farms—prepared with a light hand—hold the secret to a more connected food economy and a superior lunch. Nestled between two fluffy slices of house-baked sourdough, the chicken sandwich contains nothing but roasted pasture-raised white meat, a few slices of Tillamook cheddar, pickled onions, a simple dijonnaise, and some crunchy greens from Hakuma Produce. Everything you need, nothing you don’t. Those who work near LuckyBolt’s Sorrento Valley kitchen: I’m jealous of you. –Samantha Lacy
La Corriente
Arabe Shrimp Taco
When I was looking for lunch in La Jolla, Arturo Kassel—a highly opinionated food person and the owner of one of the city’s best Italian joints, Catania—pointed me to La Corriente. On my way in, I stopped by one of my favorite cheese shops, Small Goods, and told ’em where I was headed. “It’s fantastic,” said the owner, a transplanted New Yorker with an “I’m walkin’ here” approach to all life choices.
High praise from two people allergic to BS. And the small seafood café—a concept that started in Tijuana and rode acclaim to Mexicali, Mazatlán, Monterrey, Mexico City, and now, finally, the US—lived up to it. It’s famous for the rockfish tostada, but I wasn’t a huge fan (too dressed in aioli). The arabe shrimp—a taco that looks more like a teeny burrito, considering it’s a flour tortilla browned just enough so it’s crispy and chewy, then folded over and stuffed with sautéed shrimp, crema, poblano pepper, and queso—won the table. A close second is the grilled cauliflower tossed in ponzu and parmesan. La Corriente just opened a second location in Coronado. –Troy Johnson
Vinum Locus
Ahi Lettuce Cups
There was always a wine bar–sized hole in Ocean Beach. Sure, OB is more of a stiff-drink-and-beer hamlet, but wine hasn’t been a fancy thing for fancy people in years. Plus, a diet of only craft beers isn’t drinking; it’s an expansion project. The good news is that the owner of Pizzeria Luigi took over an old tattoo shop and put in this sliver of a wine bar. In the kitchen is Nick Vassari, who was previously the chef de cuisine at Nobu. That explains why his lettuce cups are so damn good—seared tuna in a chalice of little gem lettuce with sesame crunch and a sweet onion soy dressing. That sesame crunch is the killer. –Troy Johnson
PARTNER CONTENT
Mirin Cafe
Volcano Ramen
With San Diego deep into its so-called chilly months, I can’t think of anything that will keep you warmer than this soup from Mirin Cafe in Escondido. It combines your choice of tender chicken or juicy pork with tonkotsu broth, spicy volcano paste, spicy ground pork, a soft-boiled egg, and tender wheat noodles that soak up the heat. The fact that it comes with a soothing side of “complimentary hugs” should clue you into the fact that this is not for folks who break a sweat at the mere mention of sriracha, but if you have fantasies of becoming famous just to show off your spice tolerance on Hot Ones, this might become your winter supper of choice. –Sam Pfoser
