“We were scraping by, praying that we were going to have a busy weekend to make rent and—not only that, but payroll,” recalls chef Brad Wise.
Thank god his food was good and his wife had a job.
It’s been 10 years since his first existential terrors as a restaurateur. A decade of woodsmoke in nice places. When Wise and team first opened Trust around the corner from the main drag in Hillcrest, there wasn’t anything like it. I’m sure there were outliers, but it sure felt like the only San Diego restaurants setting wood on fire were pizza joints and barbecue stands.
Trust was San Diego’s first to do Culinary Institute–style cookery over a blaze. Charred leeks. Smoked whole fish. Burning pineapples for cocktails. There is science behind the charms of this approach (woodsmoke gives off 400 or so more phenols and flavor compounds than food cooked on gas). And now it feels like every top restaurant has a pile of wood next to the kitchen.
But back then, Trust was alone on that fire island. And it nearly didn’t make it.
Word eventually gets around. I named Trust my “Best New Restaurant” that year, because it was a perfect mix of cave people food and hoity-toity food. Eight years later, I named him my chef of the year because he’d dotted the map with some pretty great concepts—Fort Oak, Rare Society, Cardellino, Wise Ox, and the brand new smokepoint-French brasserie, À L’ouest.
He’s our guest in the studio for our Happy Half Hour podcast this week. In honor of him being a Jersey deli kid, we do a fantasy draft of our favorite sandwiches from across San Diego.
