The Perfect Order
Smoked Deviled Eggs | Manilla Clam Crostini | Roasted Duck
There are many ways employee lounges can go awry. Volume chewers, nuked tuna, the person who zeroes in on a premium snack and becomes the oligarch of what were supposed to be communist Cheetos. Famously, Ballast Point employees lost their lounge when then-brewer Yuseff Cherney turned it into a hobbyist distillery. That booze would become Cutwater Spirits, so society writ large won.
Yet sometimes employee lounges don’t suck. San Diego’s life sciences giants have given their employees restaurants from top purveyors, like Gold Finch Deli (Urban Kitchen Group) and California English (Richard Blais). For its newish HQ, San Diego athleisure god Vuori offered its people a yoga temple and, in my dream for them, a vending machine full of chakras.
Office furniture in the wild.
And, tucked into a business park in Serra Mesa, the San Diego–based staffing agency TCWGlobal has BoujieMana—a quite lovely restaurant headed by Dante Cecchini, a San Francisco transplant named one of Zagat’s “30 Under 30,” as well as Rising Star Chef by the San Francisco Chronicle.
“Hopefully, people wander down this little Aero Court cul-de-sac and find us,” Cecchini says.
They are now. Last year, Yelp named BoujieMana one of the top restaurants in the country. Whether you ascribe to the review giant’s recs or not, there’s no denying the gravity of its star system. At the very least, the thick-credentialed people at BoujieMana—Cecchini, plus a director of hospitality formerly of L’Auberge Del Mar, a GM with time under Michael Mina, and bartenders from Sbicca and L’Auberge—are creating a fairly special, welcoming, fascinating place between the airport, a Little League field, and a day job.
Marinated clam crostini show off the chef’s San Francisco roots.
To get there, turn right where you think you shouldn’t and enter the parking lot that looks like you’re going to do some taxes. It’s on the left. Head in through the automatic glass doors or through the side louvers that rise to essentially remove the walls of the place, opening up to a patio. Note the massive wall of textured teak jutting out at various depths like a three-dimensional game of Tetris. Note the radiant chandeliers hung over the live-edge wood tables (cut from a single fallen tree), the ornate glass tiles colorized like a peacock in heat. The restrooms have bidets.
Chef Dante Cecchini and owner Samer Khouli.
At the long table in the center, most likely, you’ll find Samer Khouli— founder of TCWGlobal—surrounded by six or seven friends.
“That’s my favorite spot, where I can see everyone enjoying themselves,” Khouli says. “My family is Arabic, so the whole idea of hospitality and inviting people over and having a big table with lots of different food is second nature. My mom was the cook. My dad would come home, and there was a full table. The communal-ness is the best part about a meal. We built this restaurant so our employees would have somewhere nice to eat, but also for the community.”
Community’s huge for Khouli. Three percent of gross revenue from BoujieMana goes to a rotating nonprofit.
The dry-ager is a centerpiece of the dining room.
Behind Khouli is an illuminated fridge that the chef stocks with crimson duck, brined and then rested for 15 days on display. Next to that fridge are two lanky and immaculately groomed boxer dogs with kind, pet-me eyes—Khouli’s pets and BoujieMana’s most famous regulars.
Some people of tense lower musculature might balk at dogs in an upscale restaurant, let alone next to the dry-aging fridge. Rare is the Michelin inspector who raves about the cuddliness of pets on the premises. But the dogs—Cooper and Minnie—are a statement of purpose.
“I love the idea of feeling like it’s a beautiful and elegant place, but it doesn’t keep you away, it invites you in—families, kids, dogs, everyone,” Khouli says. “There’s going to be somebody that goes, ‘Ew, there’s a dog there.’ Hey, that’s cool. I’m sorry. If they love BoujieMana, they’re gonna love it the way it is.”
The showstopper whole duck, with skin that cracks like Hollywood glass.
Cecchini’s background is a big part of what defines the place. He started as a cook at Citizen Cake, the famed San Francisco café and sweets emporium of baker and chef Elizabeth Falkner. “I told my parents I wanted to go to culinary school and they said, ‘Nope, we’re not going to pay for you to learn how to cook—do it for a few years, and then we’ll talk,’” Cecchini recalls.
He remembers screwing up Falkner’s cheese, so she took him to the farmers market to help him fall in love with ingredients. “I was letting the cheese sweat too much, not handling the ingredient right,” he says. “It was my first time at the market—and the whole message was like, ‘Look at the amount of effort that goes into this produce and this cheese, and look at these people.’ That’s when it really started to sink in, what our craft actually is.”
He found his on-the-job culinary school at Marlowe—the iconic spot from restaurateur Anna Weinberg and chef Jennifer Puccio—working his way up to chef de cuisine. He became Weinberg and Puccio’s go-to guy to run and open restaurants like Park Tavern, The Cavalier, and Leo’s Luxury Oyster Bar. He cooked at the James Beard House alongside Jonathan Waxman. He left to open Fiorella, an Italian-American concept—which shares a kinship with BoujieMana, because it was in a restaurant dead-zone.
Arguably the best deviled eggs in the city—smoked with pickled jalapeño and chili-oil chimichurri.
“There, I realized really awesome food didn’t have to be precious all the time,” he says. “BoujieMana reminds me of those places. I walked in and was like, ‘Wow, this place is gorgeous—and so strange, because of the location.”
The dishes he excels at include that duck, lightly smoked then roasted and served whole with plum sauce. The skin is deeply browned and lightly sweet from the brine and cracks like glass, the fat perfectly rendered to melting temp. And then there are the deviled eggs, arguably the best I’ve come across: The whites and yolks are house-smoked, then mixed with cayenne, pickled shallots, herbs, and aioli and topped with pickled jalapeño, crispy bacon, and a chili-oil chimichurri. But the dish that nails BoujieMana’s high-minded humble ethos is the clam crostini—a very San Francisco, simple, lovely thing with perfectly crusted sourdough, aioli, and clams marinated in lemon, garlic, and chili.
Sugar-cinnamon-chipotle donuts with a touch of heat, cooled in a vanilla créme anglaise.
The menu also expresses the food Khouli—whose family came to the US from Syria when he was five—grew up with. Particularly the beef kibbeh, his mom’s traditional Lebanese recipe: an excellent beef tartare with cinnamon, mint, and house-baked pita.
“I remember watching my grandma pounding the meat down with the mortar and pestle,” Khouli says. “We just make it in a blender as opposed to on a rock.”
BoujieMana is still evolving and finding its focus; there are some dumbfoundingly delicious dishes and a few imperfections. Cecchini’s okay with that, because, to him, it matters that a good portion of his staff is from the culinary school in Tijuana, learning on the job like he did.
There are seemingly acres between each table at BoujieMana.
“I love working with them because I’ve always wanted to open up a school,” he says. “With everything going so casual in restaurants, we’re at risk of losing those real cooking skills. Not just opening a bag of sauce and deep-frying some frozen fish, but taking real pride in cooking.”
On the way out, you see the residential towers in various states of construction—hundreds of them, a neighborhood about to swell with new hungers. And this staffing agency, this overachieving employee lounge, has set the table for them.
