The feast at Kingfisher starts in Vietnam and France, winds through the Philippines, China, even Baja.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
The Perfect Order: Congee, Beef Tartare, Roasted Duck
Fish sauce is a hell of a magic trick. Unscrew the cap, and its bottle releases one of the most violent aromas in the modern food world. A real, “Oh-dear-god-what.”
But that funky bottle of soda-colored, salty fermented fish liquid has been the secret sauce of cooks for more than 2,000 years. The earliest forms were found in ancient Greece and Rome, where they removed the bones and marinated the meat in salt and herbs, then squeezed it to release its concentrated serum. Called garum, that elixir sold for obscene amounts to the wealthiest foodies of Caesar’s realm. It was the truffle of the sea.
Why? Because fish sauce is essentially pure liquid glutamates (the “G” in the unfairly maligned MSG)—the savory compound central to umami, one of the five basic tastes of the human mouth (and arguably the best one). Glutamates are the reason black truffles taste like a forest intoxicant. They’re why Parmesan cheese, tomatoes, mushrooms, and ribeyes inspire food lust.
Use fish sauce as the base of a more complex sauce, or in a marinade or vinegary dip, and its seafood-case-gone-wrong scent mellows. What’s left amplifies every flavor; adds a resonant meatiness to each bite. It’s a staple in many Asian kitchens and my own, and most Americans have tasted its charms whether they realize it or not, since Worcestershire is at its core, a bottle of anchovies.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
Kingfisher in Golden Hill is a showroom for fish sauce from chef Jonathan Bautista. It’s in the shrimp, poached in Thai flavors (makrut lime leaf, lemongrass) and tossed in fish sauce, lemon juice, palm sugar, and an un-shy amount of Thai chiles. It’s in the crispy chicken wings, that famed Viet specialty.
They’re marinated for a full day in fish sauce, palm sugar, and black pepper, then dipped in a slurry of Sauternes, potato starch, and wonder flour—the result turns chicken wings into a creation that brings to mind the phrase “saucy kettle corn.” They are not yet serving fish sauce Negronis, though I have to guess it’s imminent.
The indoor-outdoor space is in Golden Hill, looking west over East Village and downtown. It’s the gray box around the corner from the Cricket Wireless store, an elegant improv of a space lined in brass. Inside, the wallpaper is floor-to-ceiling flowers and tropical green and lime green with some pink petals—a motif I’m calling Golden Girls goth.
Chef Jonathan Bautista puts the finishing touches on the congee—the greatest porridge in San Diego.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
This place is also a prime example of a welcome trend in San Diego: Asian and Mexican chefs and those from other non-European/Western cultures who learned to cook in well-regarded French-Californian kitchens taking their training and applying it to the food they grew up eating.
For decades, French was just about the only cuisine that seemed available for serious chefs in the U.S., so it became an established training ground. In Kingfisher’s case, Bautista is Filipino, and he was the chef de cuisine of George’s at the Cove. Tara Monsod is doing the same at Animae, and Wormwood’s success hinges on the chefs spiking Baja into the food of central France (the cream-saucy part, like Nouvelle Aquitaine).
Hell, zoom out a little more and find the trend has wider legs in our region. The entire Valle de Guadalupe and its restaurants came up via this very concept—chefs like Jair Téllez of Laja, Roberto Alcocer of Malva (and Valle Oceanside), and David Castro Hussong of Fauna are all French-trained, as are others in Baja.
This sells out every night—a Peking/Mallard hybrid duck, dry-aged in house for two weeks, then glazed with palm sugar and pepper.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
French-Asian food gave the world one of its best sandwiches (bánh mì, which combines French liver paté with Vietnamese pickled veggies). At Kingfisher, you see the connection in the beef tartare, a French-Polynesian classic. It’s said to have originated with Genghis Khan, whose army was too busy conquering things to pause and cook their meat.
Kingfisher gives it a fresh spin by swapping out English fish sauce (ahem, Worcestershire) for the various Asian versions, which are more elegant, less doctored, and more fish-forward. The egg yolk is cured in the fish sauce, the raw beef tossed with Thai chiles and herbs, and bitter greens, then given a Pop Rocks texture with puffed quinoa and crispy shallots.
Somewhere in Bautista’s kitchen, there is a lever. When pulled, the trap door in the ceiling releases the herbs. It rains mint here. Tiny rainforests of basil. This pile of flavor leaves is one of my favorite signature markers of Vietnamese food (think about the fresh garden that arrives with a bowl of phở). Kingfisher’s owners—the Phan family, who also own beloved-local restaurant, Crab Hut—have posited the concept as modern Vietnamese. But it’s also a bit Filipino and any (mostly East Asian) influence the kitchen sees fit to incorporate.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
At the long, oval bar anchoring the center, there are craft cocktails with various Asian riffs, like a Vietnamese Spritz with jujube and lychee; a gin sour with banana and lemongrass; a “Saigon Moped” with gin, debittered bitter melon, sesame leaf, and lime.
The smoked duck is the marquee entree that sells out every night—dry-aged for two weeks, glazed with palm sugar and pepper, sliced out on a massive dish, with enough salty-sweet meat to feed four. I’ve had it perfect and I’ve had it a tad dry. The diver scallops are tragically good, lightly poached in salt water, then served in a broth made of pineapple juice and fish sauce. That combo sounds like a prank, I realize. But break down the elements—sweet, salty, acidic—and that’s the formula for most perfect dishes on the planet. A dish of roasted eggplant shines on a duo of sauces—a vegan seaweed-mushroom XO sauce and vegan demi.
The biggest hit of the menu, though, is the porridge. Bautista’s congee. Asian grits. A humble dish that many remember eating their whole lives, but never like this. At the risk of offending moms the world over, Bautista’s does what some of the best restaurants do: take a dish you have an emotional connection with and make it better than you ever remembered. His rice porridge is topped with chanterelles, crispy garlic, garlic chives, egg yolk for richness, and housemade sambal. Mix it up. It’s soul-resuscitating stuff.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
My chief complaint about Kingfisher has to be the thing that makes it so compelling—yeah, the fish sauce. With great power comes great responsibility. Like anything with such a potent taste (truffles, kimchi, blue cheese), it can be a tad exhausting.
For dessert, Bautista does a riff on a silky jiggler almost every culture has a version of: flan. Mexican versions tend to be heavy, with condensed milk; the Vietnamese version is light, with Filipino flan right in the middle. Kingfisher’s Vietnamese coffee flan splits the difference between the latter two, resting the custard in a pool of coffee syrup with a quenelle of Maldon salt-miso cream. Light and dark in the same bite.
One thing’s for sure. The arrival of this restaurant has kicked off a very important question: What is the best restaurant located in a strip mall next to a 7-Eleven? With both Kingfisher and Sushi Ota, the city’s Slurpee-adjacent food scene has never been so alive.
Ocio Design Group created a gilded bird cage, replete with gothy Golden Girls wallpaper.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
The full bar serves craft cocktails highlighting some iconic Asian flavors (lemongrass, lychee, lime leaf, papaya, bitter melon).
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
Fall salad with Asian pears, roasted golden beets, radish, butternut squash vinaigrette, whipped Laughing Cow Cheese, rice powder, lemon verbena and Thai basil. Whew.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
The scallops rest in a sauce that sounds ghastly on paper—pineapple and fish sauce—but in execution is a study in the ideal combo for a dish: salty, sweet, acidic.
Troy Johnson is the magazine’s award-winning food writer and humorist, and a long-standing expert on Food Network. His work has been featured on NatGeo, Travel Channel, NPR, and in Food Matters, a textbook of the best American food writing.
The Perfect Order:Vulture Martini | Potato Pavé | Crab Cake
Kory Stetina is a long way from learning what vegan food was through a pamphlet at punk-rock shows in his teens. He stands in his dream restaurant, Vulture, wearing a non-sportsy sports coat. He’s married with a child. There’s a very non-punk potato pavé on the monogrammed plate, the servers are in tux-adjacent attire, and this whole building in University Heights has been turned into a plant-based funhouse with formidable, obsessive style.
Photo Credit: James Tran Visitors stroll through the white-and-bright diner Dreamboat before stepping into Vulture’s moody bar.
Despite the earmarks of midcentury continental formalism, five out of 10 people in here wear arcane t-shirts. Word got out early on that Vulture was a fine-dining experience, and while there’s a tableside Caesar and velvet curtains and soft, artful furniture, that was never the intent. Stetina had to do some PR legwork to pop the “special occasion” balloon that floated over the project—another collaboration between himself and Arsalun Tafazoli of CH Projects—and it seems to be working.
One of the t-shirt people I recognize: Justin Pearson of The Locust and Three One G Records. A thoughtful and progressive punk force in SD, he’s seated at a corner table with individuals who look like they’ve at least dabbled in if not dedicated their lives to graphic design and can casually play a theremin near a rare fern. Vulture captures that same dinner-party-for-creative-people mood that the Middletown bar Starlite first brought to the city.
Photo Credit: James Tran Every upholstery in Vulture is tufted, every bust underlit for drama, every detail obsessively detailed.
It’s a place for grown-up punks, for ideas and ideals.
(Obtrusive but important note about punk rock and plant eaters: The rather genuine punk music of the 1970s and ’80s that eventually birthed Green Day and Nirvana and even, I guess, My Chemical Romance emerged from a philosophical and creative instinct to challenge status quos, which often meant expressing unpopular and political opinions in an excessively loud and urgent manner—pretty much exactly what Simon & Garfunkel were doing but far more invigorating and annoying. There were plenty of bands who got big because they had great hair and a good producer; there were other bands who got cult-famous based on the holy-wow way they expressed uncomfortable ideas, making people question the way they lived. Eating only plants was a part of this live-different worldview, and, like any good movement, it got co-opted by the tad too righteous, moral, and shame-mongery. It should be said that Stetina made his name in San Diego by being a philosophical vegan who’s un-mongery.)
Photo Credit: James Tran The Vulture martini, the result of a year of tinkering—a near-frozen booze concerto of three different gins and four vermouths.
To get to Vulture, you enter through Dreamboat, a well-lit, bright, Mr. Clean-ish, ’60s-era, plant-based, romantically American diner that’s all white and chrome and charm—poodle-skirt notions and connoisseur coffee and smoked potato latkes and Impossible burgers and baked goods and milkshakes and cocktails. Seating occupancy: one-and-a-half people on Ozempic (fine, it’s 10).
In the back corner of this tiny diner is an antique host stand. The host takes you through a velvet curtain, down the short hall, and through a door, until you enter into, what?
Photo Credit: James Tran Bedecked in red velvet, Vulture was five years in the making.
Some will call it a speakeasy, but it’s really just a fun surprise restaurant (“speakeasies” do still exist, but they’re not on OpenTable, and almost everyone with a project they call a “speakeasy” will, on their most honest days, admit it’s not a speakeasy).
You’ll step into cavernous, amber-glow, lava-lamp darkness. So, the first experience Vulture offers all of us is temporary blindness, followed by the opportunity to behold the shockingly slow ability of human eyes to adjust to radical shifts in light. The music is on point, a mix of obscure indie tracks and guilty-pleasure soft-rock bangers. Thanks to listening bars, restaurants have become the stereo-system showrooms of America. Remember that guy in high school who one day showed up with box speakers in his trunk and a $6,000 head unit, an amp, subwoofers, and EQs, and his car sounded like Dr. Dre’s and Rick Rubin’s place of business? That guy is restaurants.
Photo Credit: Arlene Ibarra The “crab” cake, made with hearts of palm.
Troy Johnson is the magazine’s award-winning food writer and humorist, and a long-standing expert on Food Network. His work has been featured on NatGeo, Travel Channel, NPR, and in Food Matters, a textbook of the best American food writing.
It had been open six weeks when it got the Michelin star. At six weeks, a restaurant is a newborn. Newborns wail and struggle to breathe. They’re cracking open their first panic attack. Nine months in the flotation tank of the mom spa, then—blammo—the landlord shuts off the water and fairly traumatically evicts them into a drafty world that has no clue about mood lighting.
It’s old food critic wisdom that restaurants need six months to get running and ready for real analysis. Crew members will have lied on their resumes, narcissists will find themselves bored, the strangely emotional demands of diners will break newbies. It’s a fresh organism dedicated to executing nightly public theater, and it takes time for all the parts to learn how to operate as a fluid whole—develop mutually beneficial roles, nail the timing, speak the unspoken language.
Granted, the team at Lilo in Carlsbad aren’t newcomers, and they’ve had way more time than they ever wanted to plan this out. Plus, the partners—restaurateur John Resnick and chef Eric Bost—helped earn their restaurant across the street, Jeune et Jolie, a Michelin star (and they run its raved-about sister restaurant, Campfire, down the block).
Photo Credit: Elodie Bost Analog music helps set the mood in here.
“We’re lucky,” Resnick says. “About 80 percent of the people on our team, we either worked with immediately or they came back because they were excited about this project.”
The project is a 22-seat, tasting menu–only restaurant featuring Bost, longtime chef de cuisine Dusan Todic, wine director Savannah Riedler (formerly of Post Ranch Inn and two-Michelin-starred Saison), and beverage director Andrew Cordero (Jeune et Jolie and Campfire). It’s four years in the making. When a 10,000-square-foot building became available on State Street in 2021—the last of its kind on one of Carlsbad’s most up-and-coming drags—they jumped at it. The plan was to build a massive all-day restaurant (Wildland, now open) and, behind it, tiny Lilo, where they could showcase what their vision of the ultimate San Diego dinner experience could be. It’s the kind of James Beard Award and Michelin bait that ambitious restaurateurs dream of and makes basic sense when they have a chef-partner like Bost.
“Campfire and Jeune—from the time leases were signed to opening doors—took about 12 months,” Resnick says. “So I kind of felt like, alright, 18 months should be doable.” He pauses. “It was not.”
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos Your meal begins in the serene courtyard.
At that time, the pandemic was still slowly releasing its chokehold. Supply chains had been shot with a billion tranquilizer darts. Building two restaurants at a time while exhibiting a noble American amount of ambition was no picnic. The week after the project finally broke ground, the construction lead on the project—“the only person more essential to the buildout than us as owners,” Resnick says—departed. A fun idiosyncrasy of construction in North County is that most contractors live 40 minutes away and prefer freelance gigs closer to home. So, finding help was hard. Plus, a new ordinance had been passed in Carlsbad since Resnick opened his first two restaurants.
“I was down in Baja having lunch when I got an email about needing a ‘minor site development plan,’” Resnick remembers. “I was like, ‘Well, it’s got the word minor in it; it’s probably not a big deal.’ That one thing added nine months to the project.”
Project costs ballooned. Hems were hawed. The buzz on this project had been loud, and now the scene wondered and whispered. I ask Bost and Resnick if there was a time they considered giving up or drastically reducing the vision.
“It came up, yeah,” Resnick says. “At the end of the day, it was a ‘the only way out is through’ type of thing.”
They thought they’d launch in July 2023. The doors opened in April 2025.
Photo Credit: Elodie Bost A tartlette made with vin jaune, or “yellow wine,” a dry French white aged for years under a film of yeast.
The Redemption
For Bost, the unveiling of that restaurant was especially redeeming. In 2020, he’d lost what felt like everything. He’d spent 20 years working his way through some of the world’s best kitchens: Le Cirque, The Ritz-Carlton in St. Thomas, Alain Ducasse, and both The Lodge at Torrey Pines and The Inn at Rancho Santa Fe in San Diego. He hit the top when he was named executive chef for Guy Savoy, launching the famed French chef’s elaborate Vegas restaurant and then overseeing his places in Singapore. In 2017, ready to do his own thing, he returned to SoCal and spent two years developing the idea for his dream restaurant. He finally opened his unpretentious tasting-menu place, Auburn, in LA in 2019.
Troy Johnson is the magazine’s award-winning food writer and humorist, and a long-standing expert on Food Network. His work has been featured on NatGeo, Travel Channel, NPR, and in Food Matters, a textbook of the best American food writing.
Every year for the Best of San Diego issue, we ask readers to nominate and vote for a San Diego classic restaurant they want food critic Troy Johnson to review. Whichever they vote for, he goes. Last year, they sent him to Rocky’s Crown Pub. This year… Mexican classic, El Indio.
The Perfect Order: Taquitos with Everything | Chicken Tamale | Mordiditas
When you’re credited with inventing the entire concept of the taquito, pretty much every other dish you create is going to pout in that cigar-shaped shadow. Unless you sous vide a couple narwhals, the taquito is gonna dominate your story.
San Diego’s El Indio is widely cited as the global birthplace of the taquito. (Note from our nonexistent legal team: Like any food origin story, it’s contentious—many will tell you a small, rolled taco had been a staple in Mexico for generations; others claim an LA taco stand beat SD to it. But by and large, El Indio has been granted paternity for the word “taquito” and cited as the first in the US to both sell and widely popularize the iconic thing—which happens to fit our narrative nicely, so we’re leaning in.)
So, El Indio’s mordiditas are that almost-famous entourage dish that deserves more applause. Sliced segments of taquito, about the size of pigs in a blanket, are assembled in a heap on a plate and absolutely waterboarded with nacho cheese and pickled jalapeños. They’re essentially loaded taquito nachos, an idea whose glory, in a just world, will outlive us all and echo in Valhalla. They solve a longstanding problem with every single batch of nachos that has been made in humankind—that each and every chip is denied an equitable amount of cheese or load.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
Most nachos are built as an altar to American capitalism: The top couple of chips accumulate a vast majority of the cheese and the rest of the chips just keep hearing rumors of a trickle-down until they protest. If our species ever gets cut from the roster of the universe, the fact that we put a man on the moon but could never equally dress our nachos should be examined by our successor species as a possible cause.
El Indio’s taquito rubble comes in a biblical flood of nacho cheese. It’s a snack-bar treat for people whose therapists have listened to their fantasy of placing their open, eagerly receptive mouths beneath the queso pump—albeit with far better taquitos made from scratch.
The dish isn’t gonna knock your socks off, but it’s satisfying in a calorie-gargling way, a celebration of the fact that merely entering a taco shop releases us from acknowledging the physical limits of human arteries. Would El Indio’s mordiditas be better if the cheese was scaled back and partnered with a crema, or if the cheese was lovingly dirtied with chipotle in adobo, or if they came topped with a lawn-sized pile of cilantro and onions and activated charcoal ash from the sacred cenotes of Chichén Itzá? Shut up and eat your naquitos.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
It feels simultaneously excessive and absolutely correct to say El Indio is a San Diego legend and global food icon. In 1940, Ralph Pesqueira Sr. was working in one of the many aerospace headquarters that surrounded Lindbergh Field (the SD International Airport’s original name), building planes and war machines. As a side dream, he started making and selling fresh corn tortillas by hand on the corner of Grape and India Streets.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
As with most food success stories, there was a key moment of technological innovation (consider In-N-Out’s invention of the two-way speaker or Pizza Hut introducing online ordering to the pie masses). Around 1945, Pesqueira—who we might call the Thomas Edison of Mexican food—invented San Diego’s first tortilla-making machine. By hand, he could whip up 30 dozen a day; with the machine, he cranked out 30 dozen an hour. A full-fledged tortilla factory was born, the effect of which was massive for putting training wheels on the local Mexican food culture that would boom decades later.
When aero coworkers asked him if he could make a handheld, good-travelin’ food for lunch pails, he thought of flautas (a Mexican staple with global roots—a flour tortilla usually wrapped around meat and rolled into the shape of a flute, then fried).
He did a smaller version with fresh masa corn tortillas. The taquito entered the world. He sold each for 18 cents.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos A slice of El Indio’s storied past.
Troy Johnson is the magazine’s award-winning food writer and humorist, and a long-standing expert on Food Network. His work has been featured on NatGeo, Travel Channel, NPR, and in Food Matters, a textbook of the best American food writing.
For Executive Chef Emily Brubaker, Omni La Costa Resort & Spa feels like home. She grew up just a mile-and-a-half away from the 400-acre property and fondly recalls walking the golf course perimeter as a kid. Though her ambitions led her away from San Diego for nearly two decades in which she honed her craft in some of the highest of high-profile Las Vegas restaurants—including triple Michelin-starred Joël Robuchon at MGM Grand—they ultimately brought her back to North County.
Courtesy of Omni La Costa
Today, the classically French-trained chef, who’s fresh off a victory on NBC’s Yes, Chef!, judged by Martha Stewart and José Andrés, oversees Omni La Costa Resort & Spa’s seven distinct dining concepts. Her goal is to elevate the resort’s culinary program with her creative, hyperlocal ingredient-driven approach while maintaining the Spanish- inspired flavors and fresh California coastal cuisine that are the bedrock of its culinary identity.
“The San Diego food scene is really growing, and in North County alone, it’s really exploded in the last five years,” Brubaker says. “There are Michelin stars, beautiful tasting menus, craft bakers, and all this food—when I was growing up in La Costa, it was fish tacos. Now there are really cool things popping up, and I’m so happy to be here to see where it’s going to go.”
Brubaker gives chefs de cuisine at each individual restaurant autonomy, however, her influence is evident across the resort.
For example, lobby restaurant Bar Traza serves as Omni La Costa’s culinary centerpiece and features bold Spanish flavors in a lively, social atmosphere. Brubaker overhauled the menu to be more consistent and centered on casual bites with that signature vibe. Think smoky paprika, vibrant citrus, and Spanish meats and cheeses.
At VUE, the focus is on seasonal offerings, California coastal cuisine, and Baja-inspired dishes. She and Chef de Cuisine Cameron Dixon change the menu biannually, which heading into summer, will highlight farm-fresh produce and hyperlocal ingredients—the resort even has its own herb garden and honeybee hives.
Courtesy of Omni La Costa
Poolside dining options are leaning into the country’s 250th this summer with a selection of classic American dishes with an Omni La Costa twist. And Bob’s Steak & Chop House (Brubaker is a trained butcher) offers a classic steakhouse experience with elevated service.
The chef and company also plan menus for special events at the resort where her creativity can really shine. For an upcoming National Ski Association dinner, the banquet hall will be transformed into an Alpine-themed winter wonderland complete with a snow machine, savory sausages, and melty, decadent raclette. A recent dinner was built around the Carlsbad Flower Fields and each course was matched to a color of ranunculus (Did you know pink dragonfruit are grown in North County? You do now.).
“It’s my zen to be in the kitchen playing with food,” Brubaker says.
Omni La Costa’s culinary program is a key part of the resort experience. And with Brubaker’s leadership, it’s becoming a draw for visitors and locals alike.
“These aren’t just hotel restaurants, these are restaurants that you should go to. They’re destinations, and I’m really hoping for the future that’s where we’re going,” Brubaker says.
Courtesy of Omni La Costa
Brubaker is also channeling her experience on Yes, Chef! into the culture at Omni La Costa—more emphasis on teamwork and collaboration, empowering her staff to share constructive critiques, and embracing different perspectives. Alongside her leadership role, Brubaker has become an advocate for mental health in the hospitality industry, serving as chief ambassador for the Burnt Chef Project and serves on the Board of Advisors for the Apex Culinary Program, where she mentors and develops future talent.
The Perfect Order: Wedge Salad | French Fries | Steak of Choice
Don’t come here.
If you do, locals will TP my place of residence. If you’re going to go, go at 4 p.m. If someone waddles over in their bathrobe with that feral need-a-steak look in their eyes, consider offering your seat as a tribute to their OG-ness. Or maybe they’ll sit on your lap. This feels like the kind of place where strangers become fast, lap-sitting friends.
Juan Jasper Kitchen & Wine isn’t a restaurant as much as it is a porch with a stove, a pop-up that stayed popped. It’s a granny dining flat in Golden Hill, a clubhouse with ribeyes and wine. It started with the old-school butcher shop next door, Sepulveda Meats & Provisions. Opened in 2016, Sepulveda is run by John Sepulveda and his nephew Nick Swing.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
The shop serves the regional gold-standard Brandt beef (drug-free, source-ID’ed, ethically raised) in all its forms and in various marinades (prime cuts and off cuts, pâtes, bones, tri-tip, carne asada, sausages, ground beef, the whole meat rainbow), plus chicken and quail and turkey and pork and all the things, including housemade pastas and sauces. The sausages are local folklore, made fresh every Thursday (try the jalapeño-cheddar). Like The Wise Ox in North Park, the family-run joint is basically a house of high-quality protein consultants offering recipes and tips and tricks to people who know them by name. Indie butcher shops are a classic, more human American art form (with deep German immigrant roots) lost to the efficiencies of bulk grocering.
When the hairdresser beside Sepulveda closed, the team cut a hole in the wall, ripped out the salon chairs, and essentially built a test kitchen for the butchery’s array of goods. Named Juan Jasper in honor of the owners’ fathers, it quickly became the mighty, DIY meat-and-wine bistro that local food people tried to keep secret.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
It doesn’t have a phone number. No reservations. It doesn’t take credit cards—only Venmo or whatever “cash” is. At some places, you can rack up credit card points. Dine at Juan Jasper, and I’m pretty sure Amex deducts some.
It’s got one-and-a-half seats that masquerade as 20 or so, and it seems everyone—owners, cooks, servers, guests, dogs—lives in the apartment complex across the street, sharing sourdough starters, reverse-sear tips, and a love for Gavi wine and a screamin’ deal on good food. Some hyper-local spots like this can give off a get-off-my-lawn wariness to outsiders (hi there, Rocky’s Crown Pub), but Juan Jasper is friendly as hell. As if you were invited to crash the dinner party of a family who truly gets along and isn’t trying to salve deep generational trauma with taco night.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
We show up at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday, and we have to hurry for a seat. By 5 p.m., servers are bringing folding chairs onto the sidewalk for the crowd that’s patiently waiting. A man carries out an extra table, slaps a not-serious tablecloth on it, and makes room for a couple more.
Whoever’s doing the wine list knows a thing or two and doesn’t care for the usual suspects, which is what you want out of a wine bar (the thrill of discovery). There are Gavis and roussannes, Blaufränkisch (a great chilled red from Austria), a red from Palestine (baladi grapes). And the staff raves about them in detail and without pretense.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
I’m not sure I’ve come across a more down-to-earth, likable, knowledgeable staff. There’s a certain “sit; chill; life’s pretty decent” that radiates from people when they genuinely dig working at a place. Solare in Liberty Station’s like that. Not since our dear, departed Cafe Chloe in East Village has a restaurant exuded so much plucky, open-arms charm. Chloe was San Francisco chic, had that art-major touch.
Juan Jasper’s charm is more “emotionally available dad in Home Depot.” You see it in the antique plates with floral patterns, in the wine bottles that have been turned into candle lamps for the outside tables (there are no inside tables, just a counter in front of the cooks). You see it in the photo of a dad teaching his son to pee on a side road (the manager’s dad and brother). Walking to the restroom, you often have to do the hands-up, “not trying to get fresh here” scoot.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
Juan Jasper changes the menu just about all the time but keeps some local favorites on there pretty consistently, like the deviled eggs with chorizo made in-house at Sepulveda. The ones that hit our table are nice, but they’re served a tad too cold and missing something. That something is definitely acid.
The “devil” in deviled eggs has always been the mustard—the note that stings in the right ways; puts some welcome sado in the mouth masochism; offsets the big, fatty bass notes of eggs. This is why eggs are almost always better with hot sauce (or ketchup if you’ve got middle-America glory in your heart and you’re kinda nasty), because they need that foil. It looks like the arugula below is decorative, but it helps to eat the eggs with a few leaves.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
There are always daily specials up on the board. The day we were there, a cook (formerly of Nolita Hall) had whipped up a skin-on mackerel filet with blistered tomatoes and chili oil on charred toast. Mackerel’s an oily little sucker, which can make it taste a bit too proud of its own musk. But this is perfectly done.
The wedge salad? One of the best I’ve had, and it is absolutely because of the decadent, slutty lardons on top (and the dressing). I’m not a wedge guy, mostly because iceberg lettuce has been bringing near-zero flavor or nutrients to the table for far too long. It’s the LaCroix of lettuce, and we’re implicit in its slacker brassica success because “it’s crunchy” and makes a cool sound when we eat it. Iceberg slow-quit us years ago and did some light embezzling and we’re still inviting it to the company Christmas party.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
But I’ll order Juan Jasper’s every time. It’s more of a “loaded” wedge, with thin-sliced red onions, tomatoes, croutons, huge chunks of blue cheese, and a rough-chopped spice blend (a sort of Juan Jasper furikake or everything bagel seasoning that’s on a lot of dishes). Does the kitchen put too much blue cheese dressing on it? You bet. Know what a decent solution for that is? Scraping some off. But those lardons—thick, tender nubs of perfectly smoked pork—are party drugs.
The house-cut Kennebec fries are dreamy: sturdy and showing some skin, but fluffy on the inside. The fry scene is pretty evenly split between steak and shoestring, and these are the truce in the middle. They’re salted as fries should be—to aortically concerning levels.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Motos
The corn and shrimp fritters are more corn and shrimp than fritters, and the moisture content of both of those things makes the interior a tad soupy rather than fluffy. But the poblano sauce underneath is a floral beaut.
Juan Jasper’s burger patty is phenomenally good, made from the ribeye and NY strip trimmings next door at the butcher shop. Order it however you enjoy your quality steak— pink, leaning bloody. If you prefer quality steaks well-done, consider corrective surgery. The burger is a Spartan thing, just a potato roll bun and melted gouda, served floating in an infinity pool of Bordelaise. It’s excellent… save for the bread. Juan Jasper is house-making the potato roll. Noble spirit and effort, but it’s a little airy—and a patty that special deserves an equally special co-host.
Is Juan Jasper the apex culinary menu in San Diego? No. Is the food pretty effing good and the vibe immaculate, and do the people and neighborly pricing make it taste like 13 Michelin stars? You bet. Juan Jasper is not a secret. But it sure as hell feels like a shared one. I’d eat here a thousand times out of 100.
Troy Johnson is the magazine’s award-winning food writer and humorist, and a long-standing expert on Food Network. His work has been featured on NatGeo, Travel Channel, NPR, and in Food Matters, a textbook of the best American food writing.
The Gaslamp is the kind of place where anything goes. A country bar with a mechanical bull (Double Deuce) and a hookah lounge serving Russian food (Pushkin) share a block with a hip-hop nightclub (F6ix) and an ’80s arcade bar with boozy Capri Suns (Coin-Op).
Tourists stroll by in flip flops and shorts during the winter while locals walk over in SoCal’s version of business attire for a quick drink after work. Late night, college students don sneakers and clubwear to stalk their favorite DJs. In downtown, restaurants and shops tend to disappear as quickly as they arrive. But STK has lasted 14 years as the show pony restaurant in the Andaz hotel.
Courtesy of STK Steakhouse
Back in 2018, you’d find me on the Rooftop by STK (long heels, short dress) to pregame while overlooking the city we were about to conquer. The original STK launched in New York City in 2006 with celebrity chef Stephen Hopcraft—a modern steakhouse idea that caught fire and expanded to Las Vegas, Miami, Atlanta, and Nashville.
It earned its reputation as a sexy haven for those who liked eating quality ribeyes in a place that felt right for girl’s night rather than 60th anniversaries: white booths and chairs, dim lights, pink LEDs that cast a neon blush over white flowers in oversized vases that damn near touch the ceiling.
The night I’m here, a bachelorette party breaks out in the private room upstairs. Cheers ring out any time a bridesmaid walks up the stairs. In other words, it’s not the hushed and highbrow steakhouse model, by design.
I’m here to try a mix of STK hits from executive chef Bobby Borja Jr. (hailing from the former Prep Kitchen and Break Point), plus new material from its Bounty of the Seven Seas menu. Because to last as long as STK has, you can’t just play old songs. Future preserves the past.
Here are the dishes that won over our table, should you feel the mood for a sexier surf and turf night downtown:
Courtesy of STK Steakhouse
Dishes to Try from STK’s New Seafood Menu
Grilled Octopus
Cooked perfectly, slightly sweet (the charm of octopus) and tender, meaty but not chewy. Comes with fingerling potatoes, olives, paprika aioli, and sala verde.
Brioche Bread with Blue Cheese Butter
Between each course, I found myself reaching for the warm pull-apart bread offered with bleu cheese butter and chive off its everyday menu. That melty warm slightly blue cheese-funked butter, smothered on a brioche roll—heaven call me home, I’m ready.
Spicy Yellowtail Crispy Rice Cakes
Made with yellowtail, pickled fresno chiles and unagi sauce, this dish comes with five rice cakes. It was so good we ended up ordering another round almost as quickly as it was dropped off at the table.
Mushroom and Truffle Tagliatelle
If you’re a pasta lover, get this dish, which is also available on STK’s regular menu. Pecorino cheese, braised mushrooms, tagliatelle pasta and shaved black truffle, it’s just the right amount of rich mixed with a little bit of earthiness from the mushrooms.
10 oz. Filet
Of course, since you’re at a steakhouse, don’t skip the goods. All cuts come paired with a sauce of your choosing: STK, STK Bold, au poivre, béarnaise, horseradish, chimichurri, and red wine. The obvious answer is to order all of them and have your own sauce tasting menu.
Nicolle Monico is an award-winning writer and the director of creative projects, digital editor for San Diego Magazine with more than 16 years of experience in media including Outside Run, JustLuxe and The San Francisco Chronicle.
While glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agents have been used to treat Type 2 diabetes for more than 20 years, their recent emergence as weight-loss wonder drugs marked a new frontier in medicine. But their effectiveness has left some patients wondering what to do once they’ve reached their goal. Stopping the medication could mean regaining some, if not all, of the weight. A Scripps Clinic internal medicine physician recently conducted a small study of whether GLP-1 patients who had reached their goal weight could maintain that weight by taking their regularly prescribed injection every other week instead of weekly. Spoiler alert: 30 of 34 patients did. Read more about the study here and what that may mean as pharmaceutical companies roll out oral GLP-1s.
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