I just had one of those meals at Deckman’s in North Park that tilts your pleasure machine, sous vides your dopamine center. It reminded me how damn good of a chef he is, and how the launch of his first restaurant in San Diego went wrong. Until now.
I mean that in the kindest way. Point is, now he’s nailing it. He listened to the neighborhood, changed the whole thing, brought his famed Baja wild to it. This is how it shoulda been all along.
Let’s back up.
Deckman trained in Europe under masters Paul Bocuse, Jacques Maximin, and his true mentor, Madeleine Kamman. He was in charge of Restaurant Vitus in Germany when it earned a Michelin star. He went to the Four Seasons, who sent him to Hawaii and Mexico. Then he ditched it all to go and cook on some boats for fishermen. Then, the dominos fell: Deckman saw the massive food waste, bit hard into sustainability, found an old science door from USD as his cutting board, and set up his restaurant under some foliage in Valle de Guadalupe, the Baja wine region 90 minutes south of the border.
Deckman became an icon there. Here was this Michelin-starred chef who set up a glorified camping stove under some wine-drunk trees in the Mexican desert, started a fire, and began cooking pretty brilliant food. In Mexico, he stands there like a Viking in a cloud of woodsmoke with his goggles on and giant tongs in hand. The flavors are big and charred and alive. Sure, the sauces are refined, proteins are marinated and fermented in rarefied ways, and the ingredients were sourced nearby and obsessively prepped.
But the experience is wild, fine-dining feral. I usually alternate “Best Restaurant in Baja” between his place and Javier Plascencia’s Animalon. Both excellent.
For years, people begged him to open a spot in San Diego. In 2025, he finally did—31ThirtyOne. A large portion of locals had only heard raves about Deckman, because it’s a minority of us who go down to Valle (a shame). In North Park, they’d finally be able to taste his food. All of us who’d experienced Deckman’s in Valle were hyped to have the smokey tong-lord part of San Diego.
And Drew gave San Diego a very quiet, serious, white-coated, two Michelin–style tasting menu restaurant. An urban food monastery. He stood behind the line, head-down in his buttoned-up chef’s coat. The food—largely thinking-man’s seafood, with rare and sustainable parts pickled and fermented in various ways—was far more delicate, refined, subdued, and challenging.
It was understandable. Deckman’s a heady chef. He didn’t want to repeat himself. He wanted to spread his wings, be un-bored. And that kind of Michelin-food is in his Euro DNA.
Put simply—it didn’t hit. It jarred his longtime fans. And it’s easy to understand why. He needed to bring that Baja magic north first, let people who’d only heard about it actually experience it. Then after the trust was earned and his fan base north of the border was as strong as it was south—then he could go for a wildly different kind of Deckman experience.
So he came out of the kitchen, out of his own head. Now he’s doing what’s made him a star of the desert. It’s now called Deckman’s North at 3131 team .
That charred guinea fowl over a bed of polenta made of local corn they mill in-house, fixes it. That crudo with yuzu-ponzu with barrel-aged soy, fixes it. That burger with Carter Country beef and seaweed aioli and lacto-fermented pickles and New School American Cheese, fixes it—my wife would like seven. The fact that he’s roaming the dining room in a t-shirt and an apron and a bounce in his step, fixes it.
It’s the Deckman’s it always should have been. I urge you to go see for yourself.
