The day I spoke to chef Travis Swikard, his furniture was stuck at the border, had been for weeks. Upholstery detained. The biggest opening of Swikard’s life, his ultimate dream restaurant, was a couple days away. And there were gaping holes in his dining room where the sort of significant, vibe-defining furniture would go. Plus, people often enjoy sitting in a restaurant.
“This project has tested our patience in every way,” he says. “But we figured it out.”
Add to that a broken foot. He smashed it the day before Thanksgiving. Dropped an employee locker on it. He spent the next day not getting a cast and clarifying whiskey is therapy, but working a full holiday shift at his restaurant, Callie.
Swikard’s built in old grin-and-bear ways.
Furniture visas be damned, Fleurette is the restaurant that should raise him onto the national stage for good. He’s already there, but the cement’s still wet.
Fleurette’s a southern French, cuisine du soleil restaurant that’s going back to the classics that built his base. “This is the way I’ve been cooking my whole life,” he says. “I feel like classic is the new nouveau.”
The sauce-work will be textbook technique, Culinary Institute French. His kitchen setup is the same one that Daniel Boulud has in New York—a French Athanor, the Aston Martin of chef suites with all the bells, whistles, flux capacitors (“We clean it with fresh lemon juice every night,” says Swikard). But the classic French in him will meet the San Diego lifestyle in him. To start, the ingredients will be mostly local (A-list produce is chief among the reasons to be a chef in this county, since it has more small farms per capita than any U.S. city—the produce from that soil, some of the best in the world—and the growing seasons are laughably long).
“Daniel would buy all the best produce from across the world,” Swikard once told me. “So every morning I’d come in and see the boxes of produce, and every time on the side of the box it said, ‘San Diego.’”
There won’t be much gluten on the Fleurette menu, nor dairy. It’s classic French food with fewer naps—more olive oils and poached fish than heavy cream and fat-bathed proteins.
“People think French food is heavy and rich,” says Swikard, sounding like many French predecessors who introduced nouvelle cuisine and cuisine minceur, both styles based in mother-sauce tongues but lighter. “Fleurette is not rich. It’s lighter, brighter, cleaner, the way I like to eat.”
A modest herb and citrus garden’s been built out back by Travis’ dad, Larry, a landscape architect in San Diego. The herbs are largely Provence.
Let’s back up.
Born and raised in Santee, Swikard did what most chefs with big dreams do—headed to Europe for a bit, worked under acclaimed European chefs in hallowed kitchens, including French bad-boy Marco Pierre White. Then to New York, hired as a chef de partie (station-specific cook) at Boulud Sud, the Mediterranean spot from one of the most renowned French chefs in the world, Daniel Boulud.
There, he worked under Gavin Kaysen—a former San Diego chef who was Boulud’s right-hand. After Kaysen’s departure (to Minneapolis to become a regional food capo with Beard awards and multiple restaurants, most famously Spoon & Stable) Swikard became Boulud’s right-hand, overseeing all of his restaurants.
Finally, thanks to San Diego restaurateur David Cohn, he came home in 2019. Cohn—who is a semi-secret investor in what feels like a vast majority of bold-faced San Diego restaurants—had visited Bar Boulud and eaten Travis’s food. He offered to financially back a restaurant of his own if he came back and built it in San Diego. Not a Cohn Restaurant; a Swikard restaurant, owned by Travis and his wife, Mia.
Swikard did. When Callie finally opened in 2021, it was a closing of a circle, since Cohn gave Swikard his first restaurant job as a line cook 23 years ago.
Callie had been scheduled to open long before it did. Due to a prolonged global shit show that included wet bats, bleach shooters, and a Michael Bay-scale battle between politicians and scientists—it was delayed. That delay was at least the partial key for just how killer Callie became. Swikard spent that awkward couple of years going to meet farmers, meeting fishers, ranchers, small shop owners, and people tinkering with rare foods in San Diego garages.
At Callie, boat captains will call Swikard and say they’ve got a line-caught bluefin, does he want it? They’ll bring it to his back door. At Callie, he serves what looks like a pile of damn carrot shavings—the discard pile—except those ribbons have been pickled and fermented for days and tossed with a housemade burnt orange cashew cream (they slow-bake an orange until it’s charcoal colored, and the flavor is wild) and a housemade dukkah. For his spot prawns, a California delicacy, he’ll keep them in a tank of perfectly calibrated seawater that he gets from Scripps Oceanography Institute and then pull them out to order (most restaurants will kill them, then store them in the walk-in, which does some mush-damage to the texture).
Point of all this Callie talk is to show the obsessive process work that will inform Fleurette, too. That cavalcade of underpinning details that tweak flavors in all sorts of directions. The dishes are the part of the iceberg you see; the process is the gigantic submarine rump that makes the whole thing float. It’s why something seemingly simple—a pile of carrot shrapnel—tastes so uniquely alive.
For Fleurette, you’ll see things like a bacon-wrapped sturgeon in a coq au vin-ish sauce that’s been lightened with beet juice instead of port, along with poached beets and mushrooms. A trout (from Mt. Lassen California Trout & Seafood, one of the state’s most revered sustainable aquaculture farms) will get poached in olive oil. A bouillabaisse will use local rockfish and spiny lobster as seasonal anchors. He’ll also use bocaccio (another local rockfish). “People call it a trash fish, but it’s one of the most flavorful fish there is,” he says.
There is a statement white room for private dining. And a statement red room for private dining. The whole space is built for large-scale events—weddings, hostile takeover parties, whatever.
For Travis, it’s about the next gen of cooks. He wants to use that big Athanor, this new dream, to help young cooks slow down, learn, drill the basics into their DNA. A training ground that will, ideally, spawn more Callies and Fleurettes in the years to come. There’s a great trend of cooks skipping the craft-building and going straight to wild fusion concept cookery.
“Stuff that I feel is pretty classic hasn’t been done in San Diego—this generation of dining hasn’t seen it,” he says, while at the same time pointing to French master chef Jean Michel-Diot of Bistro du Marche as the role model. “Doing classic at a high level consistently, there’s no better level of cuisine than that. I wanna build a foundation for cooks in San Diego, and train them how to cook in this style.”
The cast: Mia Swikard, also owner, will run the marketing and a lot of the business side. Their longtime restaurant partner, Ann Sim, will be director of opps for both concepts. His chef de cuisine is Roman Garcia, who was also CDC at Selby’s in Atherton when it won a Michelin star. GM will be Steve Dreifuss, formerly of Camino Riviera. Callie’s beverage team—wine director Tracy Lattimer and head bartender James Roe—are making the move as well, with heirs at Callie.
“Callie was what I felt was right for San Diego at the time, and I feel like this is what’s right for San Diego now,” says Swikard. “I couldn’t have done this without doing Callie.”
PARTNER CONTENT
Fleurette is now open.
