When Matt Hoyt passed in 2021, the record scratched on San Diego’s culture.
His cocktail bar and restaurant, Starlite, was the low-lit cocktail haven for kids who loved odd music and art and graphic novels and time-period clothes and kitschy vinyl concept albums and Japanese documentaries exclusively in black and white. The kind of people who loved the conspiratorial comfort of shadows. I’m making all of these details up based on things the most creative people I know love. A stereotypical pastiche of people of a remarkable, admirable quirk.
And Starlite was their home. Opened in 2006, it was the dream project of three music-scene vets: Tim Mays, who architected the city’s underground music scene with his clubs, The Casbah and Soda Bar; Matt, artist and musician and filmmaker and bartender and, according to Mays, “The smartest man I ever met, he could see the future;” and Steve Poltz, a miracle of a singer-songwriter who’s band The Rugburns had some national radio play, and who’d just achieved a more stable form of success by co-writing Jewel’s debut album, which sold over 12 million copies.
We often joked that Starlite became the post-graduate hangout after you completed your undergrad at The Casbah. Or dinner before a Casbah show. Any night, you’d see some of the city’s top musicians, artists, and creatives huddled around that sunken bar with copper-mugged mules in hand (unless someone can prove me wrong, I’m nearly certain it was the place that started San Diego’s copper-mug vodka mule revolution in the late aughts, and Matt once told me those mugs had become almost too popular, people were stealing them right and left). Musicians worked the bar, artists were given jobs in the kitchen. Shifts were often scheduled around employees’ tour dates.
In the kitchen, they made a hell of a burger and had a series of chefs (the earliest anchor being Marguerite Grifka, later Ted Smith) who did farm-to-table right, gave a damn. Matt “Hurricane Hoyt” ran the day-to-day of the joint. He was the fixture, host, in-house creative, bartender, janitor, soul. He helped launch a guild of San Diego’s next-wave of bartenders, who were critical for the city’s then-emerging craft cocktail scene. He was a centerpiece of a city’s food and drink culture.
And then Matt died. It happened fast. A whole community gut-punched.
To lose him and Starlite felt like too much. But who would run it now, keep that legacy?
“They asked me and I told ’em I’m too old to run it,’” says Mays. So Matt’s wife, Allison, was left to make the decisions.
“I’ve been a school teacher my whole life,” she says. “Matt did everything on his own. We had to figure out all the things he was doing.”
Matt had considered selling for years. The industry was getting harder, the work was grueling. When it fell to Allison, running it was far outside her skill set; she knew she had to find a buyer who both had the financial ability to take the risk and also cared about the meaning of the place.
“The risk was that Starlite would’ve been gone forever,” she says. “It has a liquor license where it doesn’t need to serve food. And it can be developed. It could become condos. I had people who were interested in it, but not as Starlite. I wanted it to keep it going and have it exist.”
Though it was iconic, it was also in a weird location, next to the 5 freeway in Middletown, just below Mission Hills, next to a Brake Stop and a collision repair center. You don’t just stumble onto Starlite, you have to want to go there. So on behalf of Allison, commercial real estate agent (and deep restaurant culture guy) Nate Benedetto, called Arsalun Tafazoli, owner of CH Projects.
Tafazoli knew Matt, knew the legacy, knew the risk. Its kitchen needed upgrading, certain things needed to be modernized. But if he tweaked it too much, the never-change culture critics would disembowel him for trampling on a local treasure. He almost didn’t do it for this reason. But he didn’t want to see someone do something goofy or soulless with an iconic spot, and didn’t want Starlite to go away. So he took it on.
“Matt and I have always loved CH Projects, we respect what Arsalun does,” Allison says. “He was willing to keep the brand the same and keep a majority of the staff—basically everybody who reapplied with him was hired. He hired the same designers, Bells and Whistles. He’s just been very respectful of Matt’s and my preferences with things. He talked with Tim and I, and listened to us on what we wanted.”
The people were the big thing. Employees had worked with Matt and Mays and Allison for years. And in CH, Allison felt they’d have a better transition.
“When I found an owner and had to tell everyone, it was like a second death,” she says. “We’d been open for 15 years, and we couldn’t offer them the same career pathways that Arsalun can. It’s wonderful to be this indie mom and pop, but it’s tough on employees because you’re pinching pennies all the time. When you have a group of restaurants and you have a down month or a down year—you can help your people get shifts at other places.”
So when Tafazoli finally did have to close Starlite for renovations last year (he held off for months at the request of Allison), he moved chef Ted Smith to Born & Raised, and then to LaFayette Hotel. Longtime GM and honorary fourth owner Jack Reynolds was placed at Craft & Commerce.
When it reopens, Reynolds will be there as GM. Original Starlite designers Bells and Whistles were called back to do just the right amount of respectful improvements to the space. When news broke that CH had taken it over, blogs and online forums immediately threw the expected barbs. CH has become a cultural force in San Diego, and there’s a direct relationship between the amount of success and the amount of haters.
“It’s a place where there’s going to be some strong feelings because it’s been our clubhouse for so long,” says Allison. “But people don’t understand. I had to sell it. Me holding onto it, I wouldn’t be able to sustain it. So I had to figure out what the best decision was for my employees, for the customers who love it. Arsalun is keeping San Diego places open that might go away. He makes things really nice. They can’t stay exactly the same. Someone who’s pinching their pennies would’ve turned it into a bar with a food truck in the back. There’s no reason to do that. The world is changing. Matt died.”
The new Starlite will open this week with chef Ted in the kitchen. Reynolds is running the show. The major touch points are there (that hexagonal entrance, that sunken bar, those booths). Bells and Whistles spent two years digging back into the original vision from Matt, Mays, and Poltz, to complete the restoration. The biggest change is the back patio, which now looks like a moss-laden version of Dr. No’s underground lair in that James Bond film. I could tell you more design details, but some things are better left experienced yourself.
The crowd will undoubtedly change, as crowds do. What matters most is this: Earlier this week, Mays got a tour of its new form. “I was nervous, it was emotional,” he says. “But I immediately walked out excited and called my wife. I told her, ‘They knocked it out of the park.’ They did all the things we wanted to do if we had the money. ”
Yesterday, Tafazoli sent me the note he was going to post somewhere about why they did it. He wrote:
“Starlite was never just a bar, or even just a restaurant. From the moment it opened in 2006, it was something bigger… one of those rare places that immediately felt like an institution. It was the kind of place that made the city feel a little more like the version of itself it wanted to be. Starlite isn’t our vision. We are stewards tasked with carrying it forward, doing our damnedest to ensure its legacy lives on. The goal isn’t to change it, but to keep it alive—so that the stories, the memories, and the feeling of being there, can live on for a new generation of San Diegans to discover for themselves.”
In April, they’ll host a fundraiser for the SDSU college fund Matt’s mom set up in his honor.
Starlite soft opens this week.
