This year, the California Restaurant Foundation and San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E®) announced the winners of their 2023 Restaurants Care grants, a program meant to support locally owned food service establishments. SDG&E invested $200,000 in shareholders’ dollars toward this program, marking the company’s 3rd year of making this economic recovery fund possible. 70% of winning restaurants are run by women, and 78% by people of color. Funds are meant to keep these local establishments successful by focusing on equipment needs and staff retention.
Get to know two of the resilient small business owners who are keeping their dreams cooking with the Q&A they shared with us upon receiving these grants.
Cocina Del Carmen
Carmen Colon, the owner of Cocina Del Carmen in Vista, is a single mother who immigrated to the US from Oaxaca, Mexico. Carmen has loved sharing delicious meals since she was young, cooking for large church events and parties. By opening her restaurant in May of 2020, she was able to realize her dream of being a restaurant owner and teach her children life skills through her experience. Carmen will be using the grant she received for appliance upgrades which will help her business grow and be more energy and water efficient.
Can you tell us about your background?
I have raised four children, learned to speak English and became a U.S. citizen. Many people don’t realize that Oaxacan people are foodies, and the cuisine is extraordinary. The country is located in an area of rich soil and many different herbs and spices.
What is unique about the cuisine that you serve?
We serve authentic Oaxacan Cuisine from recipes handed down from my grandmother. Our customer base is diverse with one thing in common: they all love good food! We take a lot of pride in serving a high-quality meal along with local craft beers. We make all our food fresh, hence our slogan “Always Fresh, Naturally Healthy”.
What was your experience opening Cocina Del Carmen?
We opened right at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. We had spent a lot of time and money designing and building this beautiful restaurant with such charm and ambiance and at this point in the pandemic, we could only offer takeout since there was a restriction for indoor seating. I had no choice but to keep going and with my children at my side, we have been able to be a successful addition the City of Vista.
What is your favorite dish on the menu?
I get asked that question often and my answer is: anything in the Carmen’s Favorites section of our menu. I love it all, we cook food fresh when it’s ordered, so it is always tasty!
Come visit Cocina Del Carmen at 1350 East Vista Way, Vista, CA 92084 and try one of the amazing Oaxacan dishes from Carmen’s Favorites menu!
Banana Dang
Thanh-Thanh Dang and Mario Jimenez brought the coffee shop dream that began in Puerto Rico here to Oceanside, co-creating Banana Dang. The grant was essential in helping them pay for software and online maintenance as operating costs are high. Honoring the cultural connections and history of bananas and coffee throughout the world, Banana Dang brings people together with a fun surf environment. Thanh-Thanh shares how her coffee and banana obsession has a personal history.
Why Banana Dang?
Coffee is our first love. Bananas are the world’s most perfect fruit. Our intention at Banana Dang is to creatively showcase the bean and the banana in almost all our products—from specialty coffee drinks, smoothies, to signature toast offerings and pastries. We also love surfing, so we made it a goal that all Banana Dang! shops are located near a beach, or close enough to it!
What is the story behind Banana Dang?
Banana Dang was born in Rincon, Puerto Rico, in 2007 before relocating to Oceanside, California. At the original Banana Dang location, we had over 20 banana plants in our backyard. One day, we discovered a coffee plant growing next to a banana plant! Turns out, farmers have researched benefits from growing both on the same land.
Dubbed the “World’s First ALL Banana Smoothie and Specialty Coffee Bar,” our café operated on the island from 2007-2014. After selling the property in Rincon, PR—we returned to our Cali roots and opened the second Banana Dang shop in Oceanside in 2015.
Did you source inspiration from your personal life?
I was born in Saigon, Vietnam—the highest production and biggest exporter of Robusta Coffee Beans in the world! My first taste of coffee was in the motherland where it’s prepared with super dark roast, hot water through a Phin, and served with lots of condensed milk. This was my first introduction to coffee, engrained in my brain forever. Also, Vietnam is a BIG banana producing country. So, you can see where my obsession for bananas and coffee comes from!
Who is your biggest supporter?
My husband, Mario Jimenez. We are both equal partners in life—and in business. We joke and say, I’m DANG. He’s the Banana! He is in charge of all coffee quality control and the entire Barista training program at our shop. I take care of training the banana (smoothie) side of it, and merchandising. No decisions have to go through big obstacles. It just has to be approved by the “banana” and the Dang.
Come visit Banana Dang at 115 South Coast Highway, Oceanside, CA 92054 and try one of their specialty drinks and pastries.
SDG&E Empowers Small Businesses
At San Diego Gas & Electric, our employees feel a strong sense of purpose beyond delivering clean, safe and reliable energy services to over 1.4 million customers in our region. As part of our commitment to the communities we serve, we support a variety of initiatives through shareholder contributions, employee giving programs and volunteerism. We understand that in order for our region to thrive and become more equitable, it’s important for all of us to do our part to ensure no one is left behind. Through our commitment to advancing regional economic prosperity, we have worked with the California Restaurant Foundation to empower local business owners.
“With the generosity of San Diego Gas & Electric, the Resilience Fund helped California’s independent restaurant community for a third consecutive year,” said Alycia Harshfield, Executive Director of CRF. “It’s apparent that there is still a significant need for restaurant assistance, as we received 25% more applications this year than last. While these grants will allow local restaurant owners to build more resilient businesses, we also hope to inspire Californians to support their vibrant local restaurant community in any way they can, whether that’s through dining, sharing on social media or spreading the word to friends and family.”
The Restaurants Care® Resilience Fund
The nonprofit California Restaurant Foundation (CRF), which invests in and empowers California restaurants and their workforce, has proudly awarded 184 independent restaurants with $5,000 grants in 2023. This is the third year, CFR has provided these grants as part of its Restaurants Care® Resilience Fund. The $2.1 million fund, supported by multiple utility companies, is the largest to date in terms of overall funding, individual grant sizes and grant utilization. Seventy percent of this year’s grant winners identify as female, and 78% identify as people of color.
Recipients can use the $5,000 assistance for equipment and technology upgrades, unforeseen hardship, employee retention bonuses and employee training, all of which allow California’s independent restaurant owners to invest in the longevity of their business and employees.
Eighteen restaurants received grants in the San Diego and Southern Orange County communities served by SDG&E® .. Since 2021, the Restaurants Care Resilience Fund has awarded grants to 972 independent restaurants throughout California. That’s 972 burger joints, taquerias, bakeries, and more at the heart of our communities.
The Resilience Fund is committed to providing California’s vibrant restaurant community with the financial support needed to build stronger, more resilient businesses that will continue to feed and contribute to their local communities for many years to come. All winners can be found at www.restaurantscare.org/resilience.
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JULY 7, 2026
Xplosion Box: A Customized Keepsake Your Loved Ones Won’t Forget
A customized memory-filled explosion gift box is a creative way to show someone you care
Finding a gift that feels truly personal can be surprisingly difficult. In a sea of generic options — flowers, gift cards, candles, and the like — Xplosion Box offers something more lasting: a customized keepsake built around the photos, messages, and memories that matter most.
Founded by Southern California entrepreneur Jay Vijay, Xplosion Box LLC creates fully customized explosion gift boxes that arrive professionally designed, printed, assembled, and ready to gift. Each box opens layer by layer to reveal personal photos, heartfelt messages, pull-out albums, origami-style photo pockets, and hidden notes, turning a simple gift into an emotional reveal.
The brand was built for people who want to give something meaningful without spending hours printing photos, cutting paper, folding cardstock, or assembling a DIY project. Customers simply choose a box, upload their favorite photos, add personal messages, and the Xplosion Box team transforms those details into a polished keepsake that feels thoughtful, personal, and beautifully made.
Xplosion Box offers personalized gift boxes for birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, graduations, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, proposals, bridesmaid gifts, long-distance relationships, and thoughtful “just because” moments.
Customers can choose from flexible customization options starting at $27. The Mini Surprise Box includes 10 photos, three message cards, and one hidden secret note, while the Mega Surprise Box offers a fuller keepsake experience with 40 photos, three message cards, and one hidden secret note.
What sets Xplosion Box apart is its high level of customization combined with convenience. Filled with personal photos, custom text, decorative details, and layered surprises, each box gives customers the freedom to create a gift that feels one-of-a-kind — without having to make it themselves.
At its core, Xplosion Box helps people turn favorite photos, stories, and words into something tangible: a keepsake that can be opened, revisited, and remembered long after the occasion has passed. asion has passed.
If you’re anything like us, it can be easy to get so caught up in taking care of everyone else, that your own needs get lost in the ether. But while this may be a cliché, that doesn’t make it any less true: You can’t give your best self to other people unless you’re taking care of yourself.
Sometimes, that looks like stopping in for your regular acupuncture or chiropractic appointment. Other days, it means giving your body the fresh, organic fuel it needs to truly feel and function at its best. And some other times still, it involves leaving your responsibilities behind for a weekend to pamper yourself at an incredible resort and spa.
Only you can decide what your truly need. We’re just here to help you find the best ways to get it.
Tommy Bahama Miramonte Resort & Spa
Island living meets desert luxury at the Tommy Bahama Miramonte Resort & Spa in Indian Wells. When you step onto the 11-acre property, you’ll be surrounded by sweeping view of the Santa Rosa Mountains with olive trees and fragrant citrus groves decorating the grounds. In other words, everything about this relaxed but refined resort is primed to help you let go of the stress from home and enjoy easy sun-soaked days and gorgeous starry nights.
The rooms blend calming, woven textures with Tommy Bahama’s signature tropical prints and feature private lanais, making it easy unwind the moment you walk in the door. If you book one of the four Villa Suites, you’ll be treated to exclusive Tommy Bahama furniture and unique personal touches to further that feeling of instant ease.
At the award-winning Spa Rosa, the expert team will help reset and recharge your body and mind using methods and rituals inspired by the desert. The 12,000-square-foot retreat includes outdoor soaking pools, eucalyptus steam rooms, and outdoor cabanas, as well as massages, facials, and body masks—all aimed at creating a day dedicated to you. We’re particularly partial to the Day Long Escape, an indulgent all-day affair of CDBs soaks, renewing scrubs, life changing massages, and transformative facials.
Following your treatment, continue the experience with a meal on the patio at Grapefruit Basil. We love the Hamachi Crudo, a light, citrus-forward dish featuring premium yellowtail, house-made ponzu, creamy avocado, and fresh seasonal garnishes.
Whether you’re strolling the gardens, relaxing beside its saltwater pools, or indulging in a restorative treatment, you’ll be able to escape in style and relax in luxury at the Tommy Bahama Miramonte Resort & Spa.
Healcove Chiropractic
There’s no shortage of ways to stay active in San Diego—but if you really want to enjoy everything the city has to offer, you’ve got to make sure you’re giving your body its tune-ups. Enter: Healcove Chiropractic. The board-certified chiropractors and wellness professionals at Healcove are experts at addressing that stage where you’re not injured, exactly, but you’re not at 100%, either. Maybe you’re feeling a bit tense or stressed out. Or it could be that you’re not quite moving the way you want to. Sometimes, it’s just that the accumulation of days, weeks, or even years of daily strain is starting to take a toll. No matter what stage you find yourself at, the Healcove Chiropractic team can provide integrated, preventative care centered on long-term, science-backed approaches that ensure you can always stay active and live the life you want to live pain-free.
This starts by providing truly individualized care. Every patient can expect a thorough 60-minute consultation session that includes a posture and movement screening. This allows the team to develop a completely personalized plan. That plan might include chiropractic care, acupuncture, or massage therapy, as well as functional fitness training, vibration and sound therapy, and Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization, a clinical rehabilitation method that retrains the body’s stabilization systems. Whatever the team recommends, you can be sure that it’s tailored to meeting your body’s needs today and the future.
There’s a reason that San Diego Magazine named Healcove the “Best Chiropractor in San Diego”—don’t wait until you’re struggling with an injury to find out why. Book an appointment today for holistic, integrated care that helps ground and heal your body before it reaches a crisis point.
Juice Holler
West Coast wellness culture meets the community feel of Southern Appalachia at Juice Holler. Juice Holler’s menu consists of made-to-order smoothies and smoothie bowls, as well as grab-and-go cold-pressed juices, wellness shots, salads, and more. It operates from the blissfully simple premise that fueling up with food and drink that’s guilt-free and good your body should be simple, accessible, and, above all else, delicious. And if you haven’t yet made it out to the Encinitas café, which opened just this year, let us be the first to tell you: Juice Holler delivers on each and every of these fronts.
We love the Supercharger smoothie, a mood-lifting and body-fueling option made with banana, almond butter, blue spirulina, maca, grass-fed whey protein, raw cacao nibs, medjool dates, and coconut milk. We’re also partial to the Thrive Alive smoothie bowl, where avocado, mango, sea moss, spirulina, mint, coconut milk, and agave are mixed and topped with coconut, chia seeds, strawberry, mango, and chocolate drizzle. The wellness shots include the Detoxifier, a cleansing blend of kale, cucumber, lemon and spirulina, plus a shot specially designed to fight inflammation (named, fittingly, Anti-Inflammation). Probiotic overnight oats, lemon turmeric bars, and strawberry shortcake chia pudding are other standouts on the grab-and-go menu.
Much of the vibe feels beachy North County chic—think green tile with orange and pink accents, grounded with greenery and natural wood—but Juice Holler founder Kelly Sergott, a longtime Encinitas local, has also enfused the space with her Kentucky roots. In Appalachia, a holler is small valley between hills and mountains, where nature reigns, community is king, and nourishment comes right from the land. At Juice Holler, Sergott has created a holler for the busy modern times, using local ingredients to create a spot for people to come together and enjoy fresh, fast, feel-good fuel for their day.
Everwell Acupuncture
We’ve all had that experience with a medical professional where we’ve felt rushed, ignored, or misunderstood—and ultimately, like we didn’t get the answers that we needed. But at Everwell, the holistic acupuncture practice located in Solana Beach, the care team wants to transform your understanding of what healthcare can look like.
Patients at Everwell experience care rooted in intentional listening and radical empathy—and trust us, those aren’t just corporate buzzwords. This place actually puts those ideas into practice. You will always be given the time you need to tell your story— initial in-take appointments are two hours long—and you can rest assured that your story will be believed. Every single question and concern will be addressed by a dedicated practitioner who wants to find the specific solutions that work best for you, and you’ll receive care that’s aimed at healing the body, mind, and spirit.
Everwell’s highly trained, doctorate-level practitioners blend evidence-based acupuncture with the practice of classical Chinese medicine. (If you’ve never tried acupuncture before or aren’t sure if the team will be a fit, we’d highly recommended Everwell’s complimentary 20-minute consultations.) Research shows that by stimulating specific points on the body, acupuncture activates a natural healing response in the body, helping to restore balance, regulate the nervous system, and improve overall wellbeing. This allows the practice to address an incredibly wide range of conditions from chronic pain and autoimmune disorders to digestive issues, from stress and burnout to headaches migraines, fertility and postpartum struggles, hormonal imbalances, sleep concerns and more.
At Everwell, you can expect to feel heard, trusted, respected, and cared for. This is a space that doesn’t want to be just another healthcare provider you visit; it wants to provide patients with dedicated partner who will be there for their entire health journey.
You’ve Tracked Your Macros, Your Sleep, Your Steps. What About Your Drinking?
The Unconscious Moderation app is helping health-conscious professionals take an honest look at their drinking, without pressure, and without quitting as the only option.
San Diego runs on optimization. Early mornings, clean eating, training logs, sleep scores. The people here take their health seriously and the results usually show. Most of them also have two drinks most nights, not because anything is wrong, but because the day was long and the glass is right there and it has always been right there.
That routine doesn’t get the same scrutiny as the rest of the stack. It doesn’t feel like something to examine. It feels like a reward.
Which is exactly what your brain has decided it is. When something reliably moves you from one state to another, your brain files it under things to repeat. Do it consistently enough and the cue stops requiring a decision. It’s 6pm, the laptop is closed, and some part of your brain has already placed the order.
Most habit-change tools work on the number. They count drinks, set weekly targets, send check-in texts. That’s useful for seeing what the pattern looks like. It doesn’t tell you where the pattern came from, or change it at that level.
Unconscious Moderation works underneath the habit. The app uses guided hypnotherapy sessions, structured journaling, and daily movement to address the subconscious associations that make reaching for a drink feel like the obvious next thing. The journaling isn’t a diary. It’s built to surface what your brain is actually reaching for, so you can meet that need directly rather than through a substitute.
The program runs 90 days. At day 30, you choose your own direction: cut back, drink more intentionally, or stop altogether. The app treats both as equally valid outcomes. The point isn’t to follow a rule you set on a Sunday. It’s to understand the pattern well enough that whichever path you choose, you’re choosing it clearly.
The people who tend to get the most out of it are not in crisis. They’re the ones who have tried tracking apps and found the count drifting back up regardless. They know exactly how much they drink and why. The awareness just hasn’t moved the habit. At some point, the work needs to happen somewhere the count sheet can’t reach.
San Diego’s wellness culture already knows that surface numbers tell only part of the story. What you eat matters, but so does why. How much you sleep matters, but so does the quality. The same logic applies here.
Chemotherapy and radiation have long been considered gold standards of cancer treatment, but they can cause severe side effects. A promising new approach called theranostics—a combination of “therapeutics” and “diagnostics”—could offer patients with certain types of metastatic cancers new hope. It’s a two-step process that uses a drug that binds to specific receptors on cancer cells. Advanced imaging detects this radioisotope, allowing doctors to then use a second radioisotope that binds to the cancer cells and destroys them. Click here to learn more about how specialists at Scripps Cancer Center are using theranostics.
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Daniel A. Kaplan is a founding partner of Panakos LLP with more than three decades of civil litigation experience in both state and federal courts. Mr. Kaplan pursues and defends legal claims on behalf of companies, entrepreneurs, and business owners in high-stakes disputes. He focuses on business disputes including breach of contract, unfair competition, trade secret theft, securities disputes, fraud/misrepresentations, and employment matters.
“The best advocacy combines preparation, perspective, and a client relationship built on trust and candor.” — Daniel A. Kaplan
His clients include real estate investors, private and public corporations, and individuals seeking sophisticated legal counsel. Known for practical judgment and strategic advocacy, he works closely with an experienced and diverse legal team to protect, enforce, and defend his clients’ interests.
555 W. Beech Street, Ste. 500, San Diego, California 92101 619-8000-LAW Panakos.law
At Naumann Law Firm, PC, William Naumann and his team have recovered hundreds of millions of dollars in damages litigating construction defects, insurance, and government claims. Mr. Naumann has spent his career fighting for people in their hardest moments, from winning $7 million for homeowners after landslide damage to advocating for victims of 9/11.
“We always believe in working as hard as we can to maximize the recovery for the client.” — William Naumann, Esq.
Combining a personalized approach with a results-driven strategy, he’s helped homeowners associations, property owners, and individuals win against the largest developers, builders, insurers, and municipalities. His commitment is to secure the best possible results efficiently, whether through settlement or at trial.
10890 Thornmint Road, Suite 200, San Diego, California 92127 858-792-7474 naumannlegal.com
