The Controversy: Death for Food

Some San Diego meat eaters were going to kill animals for food. A vegan activist lawyer staged an international campaign to stop them. That’s how Death for Food became one of the most controversial food events the city has seen in years. It made national news, and resulted in this cover story in San Diego CityBeat.

I’m highly biased in this debate. Months ago, I agreed to collaborate with Death for Food creator Jaime Fritsch because I believe in the educational philosophy driving his project. You can read why here, and read my initial reaction to Pease’s campaign here.

Basically, Death for Food invites omnivores to humanely kill their own dinner. Not for alpha-species thrill or Ted Nugent-esque blood sport. The idea is to reconnect meat-eaters to the life behind their meat, and let the emotions of that process guide their food decisions from that point on. It’s a movement against how meat is currently produced in America: anonymously and industrially.

Vegan activist Bryan Pease started an international Change.org campaign to stop the event, set to be held at one of the city’s most progressive and ethical food compounds, Suzie’s Farm. Without contacting the farm or organizers to see what the event was truly about, Pease made his best guess and portrayed the event very negatively, including the term “torture animals.” The hate mail and hate phone calls flooded into the farm and Death for Food creator, Jaime Fritsch. It caused financial harm to both. Since the protest, Fritsch has been accused of some pretty vile things. Animal abuse. Damaging children (a father brought his son to participate). Profiteering off animal slaughter. Insanity.

What’s been missing in the press coverage of the event is in-depth insight from Fritsch himself. The basic questions: Why invite people to a farm to kill their own dinner? Is that a progressive way to educate omnivores and promote responsible meat consumption? Or is it just sick in the head?

Here is Fritsch speaking about Death for Food, in his own words:

Why are you doing this?

I really don’t like answering this question. When you tell people what your purpose is, you pre-ordain their experience. It defeats the entire concept of Death for Food. Which is—by immersing yourself in the process, you fully experience it and integrate it, instead of having a preacher at a pulpit telling you how to feel. Now I feel I have no choice. My hope for the participants is that they integrate the process of meat back into their lives. That includes knowing about the life the animal lived, smelling the fresh air and the sunshine it gets, knowing it was a living, breathing, sentient being—and then understanding the magnitude of killing it. In my experience, afterward many people will slow down a lot, even just how they physically eat meat. They’ll chew it more, taste it more, think about where it comes from. By doing that, they’ll actually assimilate the food and nutrients more efficiently.

Sounds like some hippy dippy bullshit.

That’s science. When you think about food and concentrate on what you’re eating, you start to salivate and activate your digestive system. And what happens if you’re assimilating your food more efficiently? You need less. I’m not saying people should eat less meat. I do believe that—but I don’t preach that. After experiencing Death for Food, they tend to eat less meat. But not because I or anyone else told them to. Because they experienced killing first hand and felt the magnitude of it. Integration.

Can’t I just intellectualize it? Is it necessary to kill the animal myself?

I feel direct experience is the only way to experience that magnitude. It’s contagious, too—taking that brave step of looking at things and experiencing things in a real way. This is about self-trust. I’m going to jump in and I’m going to figure it out myself. We live in a world where things like the food pyramid tells us what to eat and what not to eat. Religion tells us that humans are innately greedy and bad and sinful and that we can’t be trusted. Science tells us that our bodies are not amazing and regenerative, but unreliable and in need of medicine and technology to regulate and improve them. A big part of what I’m saying is—you can be trusted. If you’re like me and feel a need to eat animals, you can trust yourself to eat them. You don’t need some professional to endorse your decision.

What made you start doing this?

For years I ate only humanely raised, very high quality meat—the best I could possibly find. But it would still come just wrapped up cold. And I started wondering if chicken was ever actually a chicken. If pork was actually ever a pig. I realized there’s a big disconnect between the life of the animal and the meat in the grocery store. One of the most shocking things about Death for Food is when you kill something and you remove the fur or the feathers. It starts to look like meat again. But there’s one key difference. It’s warm. The body temperature is warm. I needed that.

Why is that so important?

All meat we touch in a typical American kitchen is cold. When you touch it as you’re eviscerating just after killing it though, it’s warm. There’s still energy—actual caloric heat energy. It just had a heart that was pumping blood. It’s a shattering moment. It looks like meat, but it feels like life. It’s this in-between state. That’s when you associate meat with the live sentient being that it was.

Does the experience end there? Are there repercussions?

I think people come to Death for Food for an initial experience to get them started. We provide participants with resources for procuring locally raised, whole animals and help them meet local farmers and ranchers doing good things. We’re also starting a meat collective in San Diego where people can continue to take classes on slaughter, butchery, charcuterie, etc. It’s not a one-time “Get your Death for Food shot, and you’re good for life!” It’s a highly rewarding path to continue along after the event—to reconnect with the process of your food. On a very basic level, what participants have said about the way they think about and eat meat afterward: More thought, more responsibility, less meat.

Did you expect a protest like the one from Bryan Pease?

No. When I was in Portland, I had significant dialogue with hardcore animal rights activists—guys who have broken into places to set animals free, set fires to places doing animal research. And they were down with Death for Food. They said, ‘If you’re going to eat animals, please take a look. Please be honest with yourselves.’ I actually thought that was what we were going to get. I thought we’d get some heat from people who didn’t understand it, but I could talk to them and explain it.

Did it make you angry? Sad? Vengeful? 

I see Death For Food as a question, not an answer. The Change.org campaign denied people the means to ask that question. I was shocked, because while I know it wasn’t a perfect scenario for animal rights activists—they’d prefer we just don’t kill animals for food at all—my experience has been that it’s a step in the right direction for them. Even though Bryan Pease fundamentally disagrees with what I’m doing on the basic level of killing animals for food, I think he knows I’m not the real enemy. Hopefully someday he will launch a campaign against factory farming and I’ll have his back in that fight. I respect his position that animals have unique personalities and feelings and we should not kill them. I’m not asking him to pat me on the back or anything. Our feelings on fighting animal cruelty overlap in many places but, like he has said, you have to draw a line somewhere. He does, and I respect that.

What sort of people are objecting to the event?

Objections are coming from hardline animal rights activists who believe humans shouldn’t kill animals for food, period. Honestly, I can respect where they’re coming from because I’ve entertained that sentiment myself and still wrestle with it sometimes. One guy told me he signed the petition because he felt like it should be held at a ranch, not a vegetable farm. And you know what? In retrospect, he was right. Suzie’s was not the right venue for Death For Food. From what I can gather, hardline animal rights activists also take the stance that “humane ranching” advocates like myself are even worse than industrialized ranchers because we raise these animals with the same care as pets and then betray their trust when we eat them.

Is this worse?

You really have to ask me that?

Yes.

I don’t think anything could be worse than a factory farm system. It’s hell on earth. The fact remains, though, that I want meat and I want it on what seems like an almost cellular level. I understand the desire to not hurt animals. That’s how this entire project began. For me, the abstinence solution just didn’t work. Treating animals well during their lives—and giving them a quick, as-painless-as-possible death—does work.

What about the more extreme objections to Death For Food? That meat eating is a fundamentally bad thing—both environmentally and health-wise?

Those arguments are based off the factory meat system, with good reason. Death For Food that promotes local, holistic farms that mimic nature and utilize plants and animals to restore functioning, food producing ecosystems. That’s dangerous for vegan activists because it undermines the core arguments of vegan activism. We advocate a deeper connection with food in order to find a resonant system of eating for yourself. Daeth for Food usually results in people eating far less meat, and far healthier meat. We require humane treatment of animals in life and in death both within the project and beyond, when we use our dollar power to purchase ethically produced food. By eating a more reasonable amount of meat and taking part in the process ourselves by sourcing whole animals from local farms, we make healthy meat affordable to all.

And you think activists are threatened by this?

I hope not, because logistically I think a network of local, omnivorous food systems is the only thing that’s going to feed Earth’s population without completely destroying its ecology. I don’t want to hinder any implementation of that by further inflaming the current vegan vs. omnivore fight. This planet evolved over four billion years around local, omnivorous food systems. That’s just what works for us, environmentally speaking. But removing factory farms from the discussion seems to dismantle every pragmatic argument for a wholesale, global conversion to veganism. I can see how that alone could be a catalyst for a whole new round of arguments. The bummer of it all for me is that I’m 95-percent vegetarian. Ironically, it’s this tiny bit of meat I’m fighting about eating.

It didn’t seem like there was a “tiny bit of meat” set to be served at Death for Food. It seemed like a feast.

Right. It was a family-style meal with many different types of local and seasonal produce, fish and meat. But the idea was you could eat as little or as much as you wanted as an exercise in learning to be your own barometer with what you need in your diet. I tried not to talk about that too much because, again, I didn’t want people to come in feeling like they had to take a half a bite of everything and pretend like they were being “good, responsible omnivores.”

Some vegans have argued that no sane person would willingly kill an animal.

With Death for Food, sane citizens experienced responsible animal slaughter and reported that it was challenging but worthwhile. Most of them also decided to continue eating meat, but do so with more responsible parameters. Is that the action of an insane person? Or are certain parts of life merely challenging, and Death for Food attendees are people willing to face that challenge head on.

You say animals are humanely killed at Death for Food. How so?

We use a process where we blood-let very close to the jawline and position the animal so that the first blood that comes is from their brain. We use a razor sharp knife. They lose consciousness in two to six seconds. I’d compare it to when you’re cut with a scalpel and you don’t even know until you see the blood. When done by a professional, the animal doesn’t even realize what happened.

How do you know that’s the best way, for, say, the lamb that you were going to kill at Suzie’s?

That’s advice from holistic ranchers. The other way is to shoot the lamb in the head. But they have such small brains you can easily miss, causing needless pain to the animal. You also destroy the head, which is a lot of food. Stun guns are also controversial. It mostly works, but it can also just hurt the animal and not render them unconscious. I’ve seen the killing process at holistic, small farms and ranches from Washington to Mexico—and the most ideal method I’ve seen is a professional wielding a sharp knife and going for the bloodline close to the brain.

But you’re having regular people kill their own dinner. Not professionals.

We have a very good support staff with a lot of experience. I’m there with you. That’s to keep you and the bird from injuring yourselves. That said, there is potential for it going wrong. I can’t insulate people from that. Life is messy. Even the best, most humane ranchers I’ve ever met will admit it’s not always a perfect process and that occasionally a humane kill goes badly. In America we’ve taken this sort of hyper-sterile, ultra-safety path to everything. I actually see that as part of a larger problem—the refusal to engage with anything dangerous. The process at Death for Food is not only dangerous for the animal—it’s dangerous for the participants. One of those turkeys could easily break your nose with its wing. It could take an eye out with a claw. Death for Food is a larger idea of going headfirst into life and embracing the challenging parts along with the good parts. Typically when we say ‘embrace life,’ we mean hug your neighbor. Well, part of embracing life is embracing the challenging parts, too. Like holding your loved ones’ hands as they die. Not as they ‘pass on.’ As they die. Or spending time with the terminally ill. Whatever you want to do. Embracing life fully means embracing death. Conversely, denying death means denying life.

People have complained about the cost. They’ve said it’s astronomical and accuse you of profiteering.

The max possible sales for the event was $12,900. There were only going to be 75 attendees. And there were only a handful of higher-cost tickets–$200-$300, where people were able to take the morning class to kill their own chickens and turkeys, and take them home for Thanksgiving. Let’s break it down with our projected costs: venue fee ($1,000); food service staff ($2,000); tables/chairs/linens/wares ($2,200); food ($2,500); beverages ($2,500); harvest chickens ($500); harvest turkeys ($1,000); decor ($200); cooking equipment ($750); kitchen staff ($480); lighting ($250); A/V and sound ($200); harvest station construction ($2,000); photo exhibition ($1,000); wood for fires ($150); contributor flight/hotel ($500); menu printing ($200). That’s $17,230 and we hadn’t even yet budgeted security because I wasn’t thinking we’d need it until things got crazy. It’s also worth noting none of the chefs, speakers, or my event coordinator were receiving a cent. They were all doing this for free.

So you would’ve lost over $4,000.

I don’t think so. People support this project. Donations come in, vendors politely refuse payment or give me a big discount to show support. I bet in the end I would have at least come close to breaking even. I guess I just trust life like that.

If this is about education and not profit, couldn’t you silence critics by becoming a nonprofit?

It doesn’t matter to me if Death for Food is labeled a nonprofit. It’s a negative profit. It hemorrhages money.

There were accusations that you weren’t using USDA-approved meat, and that’s partly why the event was canceled because that would be illegal.

My top priority is using the most humane, best meat possible. I wouldn’t put on an illegal event. If there were questions of the legality, I would have properly addressed them.

Have you heard from people who attended the first event and how it affected them?

Dozens. People tell me it changed their lives.

The Controversy: Death for Food

by Jaime Fritsch

There are two types of people: those whose cookbooks remain clean and crisp, and those whose cookbooks are dog-eared, stained with flecks of oil and butter, and graffitied with handwritten notes scrawled on each page. 

Courtney Geilenfeldt falls in the second group. Sure, it’s easy to go to TikTok or Instagram to figure out what to cook on any given day. “But there’s something about a physical, analog book, where you can see the photos and get pasta sauce splattered on it,” she says. “I just have always loved that.” 

In the spirit of sharing that love, earlier this year Geilenfeldt opened Patine, a cookbook micro-shop and grocery with an itty-bitty selection of curated goods. And when I say micro-shop, I mean it literally—she runs it out of her one-car garage in University Heights that’s too small to even fit her car.

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What she lacks in square footage, she makes up for with unique offerings. “If I know that there’s this very specific ingredient in a cookbook that I’ve had to hunt down, then I will try to have that in the shop to just make it a little bit easier,” explains Geilenfeldt. Patine’s shelves are lined with items like specialty beans, a handful of wines, and fresh baked goods like loaves of sourdough, but the main attraction is her collection of new and used cookbooks on cuisines ranging from the Caribbean to Japan. 

Her garage shop is only a placeholder. Later this year, Patine will open as a brick-and-mortar on Fifth Avenue and Nutmeg Street in Bankers Hill, across from Heavenly Bodega. That space will be “much, much bigger,” she promises, with an expanded selection of books and goods, plus space for cooking classes, author events, book club meetings, and other events. 

The educational-plus-retail approach is something she missed from her years in Seattle, where bookshops like Book Larder have been combining the two since 2011. Although Geilenfeldt is a San Diego native, the Pacific Northwest is where she really began to cut her teeth in the world of professional baking. From there, she bakery-bopped to Germany, where she learned the art of European-style baking and embraced the more methodical, slowed-down culture. 

“‘Patine’ is the French word for patina,” she explains. Items only acquire patina, or a polished look of something well-used and cared for, over years. It’s not something you can fake or make new, and it was the idea that inspires her in both baking and business. 

That’s not to say Geilenfeldt doesn’t create new things. Actually, quite the opposite—she’s launched a micro-bakery cottage food business, hosted a supper club series, worked as a recipe writer, food stylist, private chef, pop-up host, book club host, and pretty much every other food-related entrepreneurial route you can think of. And if everything falls into place, Patine’s future storefront will open in August or early fall, bringing people together for the love of food and each other.

Patine’s micro-store currently operates at 4673 Alabama Street in University Heights. Check Instagram for current hours of operation. 

San Diego Restaurant News & Food Events

Beth’s Bites

• Neptune may be the tempestuous god of water, but even his famously volatile temper can be soothed with a plate of fresh sushi. (I’m just guessing, I’ve never spoken to him personally.) His namesake restaurant, Neptune Sushi, opens this summer (or maybe fall, you really never know) at 3015 Adams Avenue in the former Tajima space. One of Neptune’s partners, Michael Harrison, says guests can expect a modern interpretation of temaki-style hand rolls with locally caught fish, utilizing influences from Asia and Latin America alongside San Diego. The team isn’t ready to announce many details yet, but the 1,500-square-foot space fits around 60 guests and Harrison says there will be table seating, plus multiple sushi bars. “We do have plans to expand the Neptune concept in the future,” he says, so may the gods be with them.
• At long last, New Wave Bagel is ready to serve its signature bagels alongside breakfast and lunch sandwiches, open-face toasts, pastries, and full espresso bar starting on Saturday, July 18. Baker and co-owner Cheryl Storms says they’ll finally be able to fulfill one long-requested update: toasting bagels. “We’ve gotten a lot of flack for not being able to toast bagels this whole time,” she says. (It’s a pop-up! There are limits!) “On the 18th, that changes—we will be able to toast all bagels all the time.” New Wave will be open Wednesday through Sunday from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. with Tuesdays coming soon. 
• If you can’t wait for Neptune, there’s always Nobu. Nobu del Coronado is one of the best-known upscale sushi chains in the world, and now, you can get a bento box full of goodies for $70. Grab a Summer Bento Box Lunch special between noon and 3 p.m. daily and get a Matsuhisa salad, three pieces of tuna, chef’s choice for three pieces each of uramaki and nigiri, rock shrimp tempura, and the iconic miso black cod, plus steamed rice and vegetables tossed in a spicy garlic sauce. Considering the black cod miso dinner portion costs $65 by itself, this is legitimately a pretty good deal (IMHO). Plus, those Coronado views!

Listen Now: The Latest in San Diego’s Food and Drink Scene

Have breaking news, exciting scoops, or great stories about new San Diego restaurants or the city’s food scene? Send your pitches to [email protected].

It wasn’t his mother who inspired Juan Lopez to start baking. Nor was it pandemic boredom. It was Ina Garten. Lopez remembers it clearly—he was in third grade, watching TV at home in San Diego when the Food Network’s Barefoot Contessa appeared on the screen. She was in Paris, France, making profiteroles, which are essentially French cream puffs. He’d never seen them before. “That stuck with me forever,” Lopez says. 

Forever, or at least present day. It was enough inspiration for him to launch his own pop-up bakery this June: Poppy Bakeshop, which now appears every weekend from 7 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. (or sellout) at Moniker Coffee in Liberty Station. 

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But let’s not fast-forward how he went from a third-grader to burgeoning bakery entrepreneur. After falling under Garten’s spell—I mean, who among us hasn’t at one point or another—Lopez decided to try his hand at making cookies, which proved equal parts satisfying (making something from scratch) and frustrating (not actually knowing what on Earth he was doing). But that itch never went away through high school, when he decided to pursue culinary school. But before enrolling, prospective students had to complete a six-month internship in a professional kitchen.

So Lopez went to the first French restaurant he ever visited—Cafe Chloe in East Village, where chef Katie Grebow took him under her wing. School didn’t pan out, but his education was just beginning.

In the early 2010s, San Diego’s culinary scene was still an afterthought on the national scale. Lopez recalls Grebow encouraging him to move to San Francisco to really hone his skills. “I was 18 and was like, ‘Well, I’ve got nothing else to do,’” he laughs. He walked into the one Michelin-starred La Folie in the Russian Hill neighborhood, resume in hand, and asked chef Roland Passot for a job. He started the next day.

After a few years in San Francisco, he returned to San Diego with the intention of moving out of restaurants and focusing on perfecting the foundations of pastry. After stints at Con Pane Rustic Breads, Herb & Wood, and Hommage Bakehouse, he landed at Wayfarer Bread & Pastry in 2023. 

The Bird Rock bakery was already well on its way to national acclaim—it was named one of the best 100 bakeries in America by Food & Wine Magazine in 2020, not to mention the Critic’s Pick for “Best Bakery” by San Diego Magazine in 2022, 2024, 2025, 2026, runner-up in 2023, critic’s pick and runner-up in 2021, and then I stopped counting (because I’m pretty sure we all get the picture). 

He still works part-time at Wayfarer while growing Poppy, but Lopez says he hopes to increase his pop-up schedule and collaborate more with other local makers. “The ultimate goal is to get a storefront,” he says. Normal Heights would be ideal, but he’s flexible on location and timeframe. 

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One thing he’s not flexible on is boxing himself into one type of pastry or flavor profile. “I really want Poppy to be this overwhelming abundance of items with different colors and different textures… I don’t want to be known for one thing,” he says. French-inspired, Mexican-influenced, and yes, even taking cues from the fashion industry. Take his plum cornbread, for instance. It’s an homage to Belgian designer Dries Van Noten’s vibrant palette. 

“They had this one outfit that had this very, very bright kind of burgundy with this khaki-ish color. Then I went to the farmer’s market, and one of my favorite farmers, Heritage Family Farms, they had these gorgeous, gorgeous plums, and I was like, ‘Well, those are literally the color of that.’” The result? A sweet slice of rich reddish-purple plum cake. 

He also draws inspiration from his own family. Every year, he makes coffee cake for Mother’s Day. Cinnamon rolls for Christmas. Basically, anything and everything that makes it onto his shelves is “based on what I’m craving,” Lopez laughs. 

And he’s ready to share his cravings with you. “I’ve had so many bad days, and so many of them have been made better through pastry or through food,” he says. “I think as long as everyone just takes the time to just really enjoy what’s in front of them, that’s kind of all I hope for.”

San Diego Restaurant News & Food Events

Beth’s Bites

• Partnering with Bay City Brewing Company and the Center for Plant Conservation (CPC), the ecologically-minded Good Pressure Brewing just brewed an American Wheat Beer using 100 percent California-grown barley to raise money for the plant preservation program. The 20bbl batch will be available at the Mission Gorge taproom the week of July 13, with a yet-to-be-announced release event featuring CPC reps on hand to talk about their efforts. That’s about as easy-drinking as a beer style can get, and with some plant power supporting the initiative, it’s a no-brainer to swing by. 
• For as many coffee shops San Diego has, there’s only a small number of tea houses that really focus on a genuine tea experience. (We see you, Paru.) But Chagee Modern Teahouse just soft opened its first location in the county at Westfield UTC, which will be followed by a second location at the new Zion Market later this year. Based on early reports, paying a visit to the whole leaf milk tea maker just might be worth dealing with the new parking costs at the mall. 
• Every summer break, around 240,000 K-12 students across San Diego County lose access to school-provided meals. That’s around half of the total number of students enrolled across the entire county, so yeah, it’s a problem. For the sixth year, Regents Pizzeria in La Jolla partnered with Feeding San Diego to launch the chunkily-named, but uber-generous “Dough-nate to Fuel for Summer” campaign. Following the “buy one, give one” model, the pizzeria will donate one meal to Feeding San Diego for every meal purchased through July, as well as matching any customer’s donations. I’m always happy to eat a slice of ‘za, but if I can make sure others can too, that tastes even better.

Listen Now: The Latest in San Diego’s Food and Drink Scene

Have breaking news, exciting scoops, or great stories about new San Diego restaurants or the city’s food scene? Send your pitches to [email protected].

Baker Ashley del Rosario estimates she makes five people cry every day. It’s not because she’s some salty old grump. In fact, del Rosario is such a delight to talk to that we ended up chatting in the sunshine for 20 minutes after my two-hour parking meter ran out. (I got lucky—no ticket!) It’s because her baking philosophy, which centers around spotlighting her culture as a Filipina-American and using some of her mom’s recipes as inspiration, seems to uniquely touch a nerve in her community.  

“People message me every day saying… ‘Oh my God, my mom loves your stuff. Oh my God, this made me so emotional. This reminds me of my childhood,’” she says. “I must be doing something right.”

We’re sitting outside at Michi Michi in Bankers Hill, where she finished up a two-month residency as the in-house guest baker on June 30. Her menu of Filipino-inspired pastries feature ingredients like mango, ube, pandan, calamansi, and taro leaves in items like French croissants and Italian maritozzos. But she’s also pushing flavor boundaries with pastries like a champorado tart, a Filipino chocolate rice pudding topped with a dollop of anchovy paste. 

Love it or hate it, to del Rosario, the point is that she introduced champorado to a new audience. “If you don’t like Filipino food, or you’re not interested in it, or you don’t even get it… you [still] came into this bakery and you saw Filipino desserts,” she says. So the next time you come across champorado, your brain will already recognize it and hey, maybe you’ll give it a try. 

San Diego is home to the fifth-largest Filipino population in the United States, with enclaves in Mira Mesa, National City, southeast San Diego, and Chula Vista. That’s led to a rise in popularity of Filipino food in San Diego, as well as across the country. 

In 2021, Phillip Esteban—San Diego Magazine’s “Chef of the Year” in 2020—opened the first location of his fast-casual Filipino concept White Rice, which now has locations in Normal Heights and Sorrento Valley. Kristin Cleavinger’s coffee and matcha pop-up One of One draws inspiration from her own Filipina-American heritage. Tara Monsod, executive chef at Animae and Le Coq, is a three-time semifinalist for Best Chef in California by the James Beard Awards and one of the leading champions of Filipino-American cuisine. She was also del Rosario’s boss at her first kitchen job, which was doing pastries at Animae. (Nothing like jumping straight into the fire!)

Del Rosario says Monsod became a cultural and culinary mentor, pushing her to explore new and bigger opportunities. When she got the chance to study at the illustrious Italian Culinary Institute in Calabria, Italy, Monsod encouraged her to go. It changed del Rosario’s life—so much so, she’s moving to Italy later this year to continue honing her pastry skills. 

In the future, she says she hopes to split her time between Italy and San Diego, continuing collaborations and pop-ups while developing what she sees as an entirely new lane within pastry: Italian pastry technique with distinctly Filipino flavors. 

Italian pastry technique is different from classic French. Take croissants, for example. The Italian version, called cornetto, is often filled with creams, jams, or savory fillings, and tends to feel softer than its buttery, flakier French counterpart. They’re also more regionally driven, with different areas utilizing local specialties like citrus for the filling—an ideal vehicle for launching a Filipino-fusion creation. 

There are plenty of globally-inspired bakeries in San Diego with their own specialties—Azúcar in Ocean Beach is Cuban, Su Pan offers traditional Mexican pastries, and Asa Bakery is modeled after Japanese kissaten cafés. There are even a number of local Filipino bakeries like Valerio’s 1979 (formerly Valerio’s City Bakery), Kababayan Bakery, and Starbread Bakery. But a Filipino-Italian bakery? Not yet. And even if there were, del Rosario says the more, the merrier. 

“There is no competition,” she says. “It’s just showing our culture.”

San Diego Restaurant News & Events

Beth’s Bites

I’m sitting in a slab of concrete under a freeway, eating a ceviche black as eyeliner.

There might be seven seats in this restaurant. Or maybe it’s 12 minus five. That area under the stairs might also be a couple seats, or it might just be a very inviting storage area with a flower vase. The restaurant is so small your core instinct is to count seats and tabulate if Alchemy – Choose Thy Poison is a real place with a sane business plan or if it’s a social art project designed to question the reality of restaurants and business plans.

There’s a large, floor-to-human-height window near our table. Through it, I notice someone didn’t make their bed this morning. It’s a decision I deeply empathize with. It’s moments like this that make you acutely aware that Alchemy is also technically the courtyard of a six-room micro-hotel called Narcissus. Not the kind of massagey boutique hotel you’re thinking of with soft woods, obscene amounts of linen, and opinions on bonsai therapy. It’s a near-Brutalist cube of base industrial materials—concrete and acrylics bent and molded into a series of alcoves, with pods to sleep in. Sculptures lie behind glass like Tilda Swinton circa 2013.

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The window to the unmade bed forcibly crams light voyeurism into the dining experience. The hotel and Alchemy feel like the parts of Mexico I love the most. Although Mexico has its multimillion-dollar restaurants, a vast majority of the best street-level places feel like you’re temporarily recreating in a very lovely construction project.

Alchemy’s location is what most people comment on (“I can’t believe a place like this exists on a block like this.”)—jammed at the bottom of the freeway embankment on the northeast side of Barrio Logan. But that makes it distinctly Barrio, the historic cradle of San Diego’s Hispanic and Chicano culture. The I-5 freeway was built through Barrio in 1963—a fairly traumatic gashing of the neighborhood—and residents responded by painting epic murals on the ugly concrete belly of eminent domain. Where some would’ve just accepted the industrial blight, locals saw shade for a park. There is a deep history here of turning concrete into art, and Alchemy carries that on.

The vision for the property came from owner Benjamin Longwell, whose company—The Society of Master Craftsmen—sounds like it wears a monocle. Longwell is part of the new guard of developers who focus on urban infill. Instead of adding to the city sprawl, they find unused or underutilized parcels of land in established neighborhoods, then build creative mixed-use spaces that, in perfect scenarios, add something of value for locals.

I’m not making a case for architectural sainthood, but there isn’t a huge list of developers who would look at the line of cars exiting the freeway in front of Alchemy and think, “We must build here.” So in that sense, Narcissus and Alchemy feel additive to the community, not extractive.

I stare back at Alchemy’s ceviche negro, a glossy mound of halibut that looks inspired by the La Brea Tar Pits or melted vinyl records. Chef-owner and Mexico City–native Eddy Cortes saves all the trimmings of his dishes (garlic and onion skins, vegetable shavings), then chars them into an ash to create a recado negro—a Yucatán specialty that usually involves toasted chiles, achiote paste, vinegar, and a ton of warm spices. He tosses local halibut with squid ink, tamari, charred pineapple, and citrus. The usual charm of ceviche is that it’s light, bright, full of color. Not here.

It is fantastic—acidic but with a whole world of toasted, warm flavors, like ceviche that’s seen some things.

The menu from Cortes—a home cook his whole life, only having taken it professional a few years ago with his popular pop-up, Barracruda—is really a tour of specialties from various states in Mexico.

A crema de poblano has the blended ghost of rajas at its core: an emulsion of roasted poblanos with butter-sautéed onions and garlic, plus a touch of milk that’s topped with queso fresco, chile ancho, and morita oil. Morita—a smoky Mexican condiment made from dried and smoked red jalapeños for a less intense, fruitier cousin of chipotle—is the key here. It specializes in spiking fats (guacamole, fried eggs, burritos). Sop up the crema with house-baked garlic-rosemary sourdough, blackened from the ash of a corn husk.

Smoked tuna is a Baja gift that’s become an anchor for most San Diego taco shops, and Alchemy combines mesquite-smoked yellowtail with caramelized onions, sweet peppers, and Chihuahua cheese (the OG quesadilla filling), then stuffs it in a perfectly baked masa empanada. The result is somewhere between a TJ Oyster Bar taco, a calzone, and a tamale—but with extra flavor and more black hue from cuttlefish ink.

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Alchemy’s huaraches de res is Cortes’ ode to where he’s from. Huaraches are the New Haven–style pizza of Mexican food—thick, oblong masa flatbread layered with refried beans and a payload inspired by the Mexico City markets the chef grew up roaming with his dad: braised beef (braseado), avocado salsa, pickled vegetables, salsa macha, and jocoque (Mexico’s fermented dairy product, like a cross between crema and labneh).

Alchemy’s seared tuna crudo gets a tad abused by the riot of big flavors: charred hibiscus salsa, avocado salsa, pickled grapes, pomegranate salsa macha, and chipotle aioli. It’s a fate that also tempers the joy of the zarandeado, with the adobo marinade on the shrimp fighting a bit with recado negro and chipotle crema. Sticking with curmudgeonly food critic notes, flies are a part of the Alchemy experience, at least during our visit. They’re fairly hard to evict from the outside world, but more measures could be taken to discourage their participation.

The oxtail tetelas—like a Mexican pupusa—are a diary note from Cortes’ travels to Tlaquepaque, where they famously superboost their salsa with a touch of instant coffee. First, Cortes braises the oxtail with beer and Mexican spices. Then he blends that braising liquid into a salsa with beef tallow, guajillo, charred onions, tomatoes, and black garlic. Keeping with the goth food theme, the oxtail goes into masa negra infused with squid ink.

Desserts are where you realize just how deeply Alchemy is committed to the art bit. Rarely do you see a neighborhood bistro trying to pull off trompe l’œil—the French specialty of making pastries and other desserts look like fruit or other everyday objects. (The phrase means “to deceive the eye” and is the historical precedent for the Is It Cake? phenomenon.) Pastry chef Catherinne Avila does, though. A “Naranja” comes out in the form of a mandarin, but inside is orange blossom mousse, apricot jelly, and sablée (a delicate, crumbly shortcrust). A “Philosopher’s Stone” comes in the form of a brick of gold with a serpent on top; inside are mango mousse, mango-Tajín jelly, and a coconut dacquoise.

As Barrio Logan enters an apprehensive phase—its creative culture and restaurant scene growing rapidly, bringing economic promise face-to-face with the need to protect the Chicano way of life—this concrete tuckaway from a Mexico City kid feels like a good step. The Barrio has a long history of making art in unexpected places, and Alchemy carries that a little further.

Photos Credit: Dee Sandoval