The border is a huge part of why San Diego’s food culture took off. The kitchen exchange of chefs and ideas and burning wood and seafood acid parties across San Ysidro built a Mexican-American style that’s unlike anywhere else in the US.
That bordertown verve is the topic of conversation for the dinner party this week on Happy Half Hour. Hosts Troy Johnson and Jackie Bryant welcome back Claudette Zepeda—Imperial Beach–raised, border-crossing kid, plus Top Chef and Iron Chef Mexico alum—to talk through the stories in her debut cookbook Cooking the Borderlands: Spice and Smoke Between Mexico and the States, out June 2.
They discuss how cartel violence around 2008 accidentally transformed San Diego’s food scene when Mexican chefs came a few miles north and brought live fire, ash, char, and high-acid cooking into North Park and Little Italy kitchens with them. Claudette shares about manifesting her way into Bracero (the short-lived, highly acclaimed Mexican restaurant that earned a James Beard nomination for Best New Restaurant in America), and how getting fired forced her hand into a new way of cooking.
In food news, Urban Kitchen Group’s new Bankers Hill restaurant debuts in 2027, Lucien earns a Michelin Guide recommendation, Fleurette launches chef Travis Swikard’s first-ever tasting menu, Sugarfish opens in Little Italy, and the story of how Candy Land was invented in a Talmadge bungalow by Eleanor Abbott, who died in 1988 with $1.8 million in royalties and never once left her house.
