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Eating world-champion pizza in the secret alterna-world of Lake San Marcos
The famed Stefano Ferrara pizza oven burns anywhere from 700 to 1,000 degrees.
Photo Credit: James Tran
This lake has racy secrets. I can just tell. It’s lined with unassuming single-story homes that have their own tiny docks, pontoon boats moored until the next martinis. Martinis tend to be plural on lakes. A giant inflatable unicorn suns in one of the yards, its vinyl rainbow mane lightly bleached. In the middle of the lake, a 30-foot-tall fountain blooms, like an indie version of the Bellagio water show. There is a man standing in a gondola with a striped shirt and a flat-brim hat, guiding his love canoe with his love oar. I call down to ask him how big the lake is. Says about a mile. Says there’s a little waterfall at the end. Says for a price he’ll show me a sunset.
I have wandered onto the set of Ozark. It all feels too suspiciously idyllic and hidden in plain sight to not have one or two versions of Jason Bateman running illicit lake schemes. Someone tells me Lake San Marcos is unincorporated, a word that’s always had an appealing “Timothy Leary of real estate” ring to it. No boat is allowed to have an engine over 9.9 horsepower, so it’s a nice, safe lake full of buoyant golf carts.
Forty-eight years a native and I’ve never been here. How did this manmade wonderpond of suburban serenity escape me for so long?
The puffy unicorn suggests a younger crowd is moving into Lake San Marcos, which has primarily been a golden-aged community. To be fair, it still has a strong elder scene, but an influx of new blood is also suggested by the fact that I’m eating some bruschetta and drinking a gigantic Aperol spritz on the deck of an impressive modern restaurant—Amalfi Cucina Italiana—overlooking the man in the love boat trying to sell me sunsets.
From the coast of Amalfi to the coast of San Marcos—a feast.
Photo Credit: James Tran
Lake San Marcos was created in 1946 when the landowner built a 50-foot dam on San Marcos Creek so he could have year-round access to water for his onion, tomato, and walnut crops. In the late ’50s, the lake was bought by three brothers—Bob, Don, and Gordon Frazar. More than a few thought Gordon (the lead dreamer) was nuts—a neighborhood on a glorified pond? A community in a then-rural area too far from San Diego and much too far from LA? They drained the lake, increased its size to 80 acres, and built the first master-planned lakeside development in California (also one of the first in the country). It was the first housing community to have built-in cable TV (no gaudy antennas on rooftops), and one of the first to have all utilities underground.
They put in a couple golf courses, a community center, and a grand two-story restaurant hanging over the water (originally called The Quails Inn, now Amalfi). They filled the lake with bass. The first houses were sold in 1963 for $30,000. And by god, it worked. Locals called it “the compound.”
Over the decades it’s had its share of issues. Mostly with water quality, due to agricultural runoff and algal blooms. The water can look muddy in spots and the algae can stink. It’s no Crater Lake. But in recent years a few municipal entities have taken to cleaning it, adding water purifiers. On the two days we dine here, the only scent we catch is the lusty musk of wood-fired pizza.
Imperfections aside, I love it here. Far as I’m concerned, this is boat-ramp La Jolla.
Amalfi lit up at dusk for the martini pontooners.
Photo Credit: James Tran
I also love Amalfi’s artichokes. Full stalks and hearts and tender leaves, lightly pan-fried in olive oil and served on a bed of arugula and shards of Grana Padano Parmesan.
The dish looks spartan, like just a few great things rested on a plate. But it’s incredibly delicious, proof that sometimes the best cooking technique is restraint. Amalfi imports them from Civitavecchia, Rome. In Rome, artichokes rank somewhere between carbonara and the Pope.
Amalfi opened here in summer 2020, a timing best described with many curse words. And yet, here they are. The main dining room—with its window-rich A-frame overlooking the lake—is jammed on a Saturday for lunch, packed for Tuesday lunch, stuffed for Wednesday dinner. This fact isn’t surprising given the team: four Italian friends and former leaders of the Buona Forchetta group. Chef Marcello Avitabile was the executive chef of Buona Forchetta, and is a five-time World Pizza Champion.
Some pretty famous Italian speck and sausage on a blistered pie.
Photo Credit: James Tran
Visitors see his oven when they first walk in—a custom Stefano Ferrara (the Ferrari of pizza ovens) built in Naples, golden tile, formidable, hot as hell, designed to do one thing perfectly in its lifespan. So no surprise Amalfi’s pizza is instantly in any “what’s your favorite in the city” conversation, thin crusted, leopard spotted, laden with famous ingredients. For instance, the Valtellina has speck imported from Alto Adige Sudtirol, the revered mozzarella provola di Agerola, Brie, caramelized onions, and Italian sausage flown in from Campagna. Or just get a Margherita, or have them stick a plain dough circle in the oven and eat the crust by itself. It’s that good.
Amalfi is far more than a pizza joint with fancy light fixtures. It’s a whole ode to the culinary scene of the Amalfi coast, with housemade pastas, apps, seafood, and specials. Start with the fried eggplant, tossed with San Marzano tomato sauce and topped with burrata cheese—a recipe that’s been passed down through Chef Avitabile’s family for three generations. The bruschetta is bright and beautiful, even if I wish it were toasted more—baked in the wood-fired oven, spread with burrata, topped with heirloom tomatoes, Meyer lemon zest, and olive oil chosen by Italians who know what great olive oil tastes like. The team grinds the beef for their polpette (meatballs) in house, but the key is that sauce. The meatballs rest in the San Marzano sauce for hours, trading flavors back and forth until everything is right in the world.
The house-ground meatballs rest in San Marzano sauce for hours, trading secrets.
Photo Credit: James Tran
The pizza in a jar is cute, but it’s a bit of a jumble. I don’t care if the pizza is on a plate or in a jar or on a bed of $100 bills, but I’m a stickler about wanting char on that crust and I didn’t get any. I calmed down about this immediately when I saw just how massive their bar program is—cocktails and Italian wines and beers of all stripes. It’s part Italian restaurant, part beverage emporium. Try the Amalfi Spritz (Aperol, Solerno blood orange liqueur, Prosecco, soda water) or the Four Seasons (Bacardí Superior rum, Giffard pamplemousse, cinnamon-bark syrup, lime, pineapple, and a stick of torched cinnamon).
Mind if we smoke? The Four Seasons cocktail is rum, grapefruit, cinnamon-bark syrup, lime, and pineapple, topped with torched cinnamon.
Photo Credit: James Tran
For seafood, the dish that sounds terrible on paper but absolutely works is the ravioli—filled with shrimp scampi and Buffalo mozzarella, then sautéed in a pan with butter and basil. The intimidating part is that they then airlift a whole heap of Baja ahi tartare atop. Sounds odd, but I’ve had raw tuna tossed in browned butter at a sushi restaurant and it’s a revelation. This is basically that, plus handmade pasta.
PARTNER CONTENT
They take two days to concoct their Bolognese, and it’s about as classic as they come (Chef Avitabile cooked in Bologna for most of his career). It’s 100-percent grass-fed beef (no pork), ground the day before to let it dry-age overnight. Chef does the same thing with the veggies for the soffritto (Italian mirepoix)—dices and then rests them, which he says removes the acidity and water. The sauce is slow-cooked for six hours. Also try the boscaiola, a pink sauce (tomato, touch of cream) with farmers’ market veggies and two kinds of imported meats: sausage from Campagna and prosciutto from Emilia-Romana.
Even if San Diego’s drought one day drains the lake and it turns into a museum explaining to future generations what lakes were—I get a feeling Amalfi will still be right here.
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.
Inside the plant-based steakhouse from the creatives behind Kindred and Mothership
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.
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
After two decades of work and four years of waiting, the Carlsbad restaurant's opening came with a big splash
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).
“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.”
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.
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.
French-born pastry chef Christophe Rull will debut his first eatery this September
If you don’t know the name Christophe Rull yet, you will soon. Born and raised in Marseille in southern France, Rull started his apprenticeship at age 15 before five years of culinary school where he studied cooking and pastry. He bounced from Michelin-starred kitchens to luxury hotels to the École Nationale Supérieure de Pâtisserie (ENSP), the prestigious pastry school that Alain Ducasse (record holder for most awarded Michelin stars on the planet) founded in 1999.
After France, Rull opened Aria Resort & Casino in Las Vegas and worked at MGM Grand. He won season 7 of the Food Network’s Halloween Wars, followed by another win on Holiday Wars. He appeared on Bake Squad and then topped it all off with the title of U.S. Chocolate Master in 2021 and a fifth-place finish in the 2022 World Chocolate Masters.
So, all of this is to say, the guy can bake. And he’s about to open his first shop of his own. Christophe Rull Patisserie opens later this month in San Marcos.
Rull can bake, sure. But he’s smart, too—he knows San Diego is the place to be for the best food and quality of life. After six years in Las Vegas, he accepted the role of executive pastry chef at the AAA Five Diamond Park Hyatt Aviara Resort, Golf Club & Spa in Carlsbad from 2016 to 2021. “I fell in love with this area,” he says. But after he quit to pursue his dream of competing at the world championship, he came back to the US jobless and unsure of what to do next.
“It’s the same high as athletes—you go to the Olympic Games, and you’re sacrificing two years of your life to prepare for that big event, and once the event is done, then you’re done,” he laughs. So he asked himself “What am I doing now?” He ended up at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles as the executive pastry chef for a new concept, which allowed him hands-on decision making from development all the way to opening. Basically, it was a dress rehearsal for launching his own place.
Rull decided on San Marcos for his first patisserie for a few reasons. One, he loves North County’s chill vibe. Two, he sees all the development potential over the next few years. Getting in now will pay off later, he’s betting. The North City suite is on the small side—around 1,200-square-feet total, with around one-third as kitchen space and the remainder front of house. But he doesn’t need a ton of space to realize his ethos of “simplicity well done.”
“I like to stay really fundamental, and to the classics, such as a good butter croissant or almond croissant,” he explains. His menu will include his famous cinnamon roll and sourdough bread, plus around a half dozen different breakfast pastries, croissants, French macarons, danishes, eclairs, chia seed pudding, cookies, and some sandwiches like a classic French ham and cheese and chicken pesto, all made with imported French butter and flour.
He’ll offer around 10 eclairs at a time, ranging from classic vanilla and lemon meringue to passion fruit mango, salted caramel, tiramisu, and more. Coffee service will be simple, featuring Lavazza drip coffee and traditional espresso.
It’s a family-run business, with his wife Wilma working side-by-side with him. They both decided to leave the luxury hotel world to take a chance on the dream, something that Rull says takes risk and sacrifice. “[This] is where I wanted to be,” he says.
Christophe Rull Patisserie opens late August or early September at 251 North City Drive, Suite 121 in San Marcos.
For one-night only, everyone who has yearned for the return of University Heights’ Small Bar will get their wish. Better still, the pop-up is going to feature its famous fried chicken as orders of either half or full birds, and it’s all going down at Grand Ole BBQ in North Park on Monday, August 25 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. I strongly suggest arriving beforehand, because my inner psychic is predicting a ridiculously fast sellout.
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Beth Demmon is an award-winning writer and podcaster whose work regularly appears in national outlets and San Diego Magazine. Her first book, The Beer Lover's Guide to Cider, is now available. Find out more on bethdemmon.com.
The annual event honors middle market companies creating jobs, scaling up, and investing in the region
San Diego is known for its startup culture and innovation economy, but what happens when the company moves beyond its early-stage years? The San Diego Business Impact Awards aim to answer that question, spotlighting the middle market businesses helping drive the region’s economy.
Hosted by San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation (EDC) and JPMorganChase, the second annual awards celebration takes place on Thursday, July 23, from 4:30 to 7:00 p.m. at Scripps Research Auditorium. More than 200 executives, entrepreneurs, and business leaders are expected to attend the networking and cocktail event honoring some of San Diego County’s fastest-growing companies.
Businesses headquartered in San Diego County that have operated for at least two years are encouraged to submit their nomination by Thursday, June 18 at 4 p.m. Companies across industries—from technology and life sciences to tourism and consumer products, as well as pre-revenue startups—are eligible for recognition.
For EDC President and CEO Mark Cafferty, the event is as much about building connections as celebrating success. “We’ve had a longtime partnership with JPMorganChase; their work aligns with our efforts to support underserved communities and drive talent development,” says Cafferty. “And the networking was invaluable last year. I’m still in touch with people I met at last year’s awards.”
EDC is an independently-funded nonprofit that works directly with San Diego companies to help them grow the local economy, make the region as a whole more competitive, and attract and retain top-tier talent with quality jobs. Through EDC, companies can get help starting or expanding their business with support for things like site selection, permit navigation, and regulatory guidance, plus connections to local resources and potential business collaborators.
The San Diego Business Impact Awards began as an idea with one of EDC’s longtime strategic partners, JPMorganChase. The two organizations share a commitment to San Diego and are dedicated to bolstering middle market businesses.
“We’re blessed with a robust innovation economy and startup community,” says Aaron Ryan, San Diego Region Manager for JPMorgan’s Commercial and Investment Bank and vice chair of the firm’s’ San Diego Market Leadership Team. “But one of the segments of the business community we felt was overlooked was emerging middle market companies—the businesses that are no longer small but not yet large.”
Ryan says supporting those companies is critical as they scale and decide where to invest, hire, and grow.
San Diego’s high cost of living remains one of the region’s biggest business challenges, making talent recruitment and retention increasingly competitive. But local leaders point to the region’s quality of life, climate, and collaborative business community as advantages that continue to attract employers and workers.
“In order to support thriving households, there has to be enough high-quality jobs for people to be able to afford to live here,” Cafferty says. “Once a company grows and excels past that middle market point in their growth cycle, they become much more likely to pay higher wages and compete globally.”
Both Cafferty and Ryan proudly tout the unique collaboration that exists among San Diego County businesses. Bringing together top universities producing high-quality talent, cutting-edge research institutions, a robust military and defense presence, leading ocean science and environmental organizations, and a binational, cross-border identity creates a distinct business ecosystem that defines and strengthens the San Diego region.
Last year’s San Diego Business Impact Awards celebrated nearly 60 honorees from 49 industries, representing a total of 8,232 jobs across eight sectors, including: software and technology, healthcare and life sciences, consumer goods, professional services, finance, construction and manufacturing, defense, and hospitality and tourism. On average, honoree companies doubled their revenues over the previous year, employed more than 145 San Diegans each, and offered an average annual compensation of $192,415.
Top honorees included defense contractor Innoflight, environmental consulting firm Bancroft Construction Services, life sciences startup Element Biosciences, defense technology contractor GALT Aerospace, organic grocery store chain Jimbo’s, and biopharmaceutical company LENZ Therapeutics. During the event, Innoflight Founder and CEO Jeff Janicik held a fireside chat offering his insights on investing in the community and embracing San Diego culture.
This year, organizers hope to continue highlighting the middle market players driving economic impact across the region. Nominations are now open through June 18 at 4 p.m. Get your tickets to the San Diego Business Impact Awards celebration to enjoy drinks by Snake Oil Cocktail Co., light bites, live music, and networking.
The Middletown restaurant reminds us that when you invent something as iconic as the taquito, you’re allowed to rest a bit on your laurels
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Food critic Troy Johnson heads to Juan Jasper Kitchen & Wine, an eminently lovable and literal hole in the wall in his latest review
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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