Rady Shell
North County Fair landed like a mothership, and just in time for puberty. I was 13 years old, and its arrival on the cultural dandruff of suburbia was like a ticket to a better universe. It had a food court and a Sam Goody (first two CDs purchased with my own money: MC Hammer and Ziggy Marley). Just like that, we had a neon wonderland where we could walk around in herds, walk past girls in their own herds. Every time, we’d pretend we had the courage to talk to them. Every time, nope.
I remember when they put a skate park in Ocean Beach. It felt like our entire childhood had been decriminalized.
I remember when Nobu opened in San Diego. I sat in a room with chef Matsuhisa and his business partner Robert De Niro, asked them hard-hitting questions about wasabi. I was Don Lemon of the rainbow roll. At one point in the conversation, Robert’s eyes got real wide and he wildly reached out at me from across the table. I remember thinking, “How cool is this? I’m gonna get strangled by Robert De Niro.” A quarter-second later, the tall TV light he was trying to save me from would land square on my skull.
I remember when Region opened in Hillcrest. It wasn’t the first time a chef cooked exclusively in-season food from local farms, but it sure felt like it. The term “farm-to-table” was so new then, so full of hope, not yet gutted for commercial gain and left for dead on the side of the marketing campaign. I remember discovering the pho at Phuong Trang, realizing what I’d been told was “good soup” all my life was a lie. I remember finding Voz Alta, a Latin art-and-performance space in Downtown where creative 20-somethings drank beers in paper bags and sweated on each other to DJs and poets.
I remember seeing my first concert at Copley Symphony Hall, how regal I felt, how I desired a monocle. I can still smell the stage fog from my first plays at The Old Globe, La Jolla Playhouse. I remember when Petco Park opened, that old LEGO- looking building as the foul pole. Felt like the Padres would never lose.
And I remember when I read the first “Best of San Diego” issue of SDM. I was working as a music writer at the time, so the only thing I thought was cool was the Casbah. As a fairly pretentious New Yorker subscriber and KPBS listener, I remember scoffing because it wasn’t an 80,000-word literary opus on the cultural significance of the Slinky. But as I read it, I found myself saying “oh, cool” and “oh, cool” and “that’s right, that happened.”
That’s what this issue is. An annual almanac of San Diego’s now. A yearbook for the city. A celebration of compelling things that happened this year; things that will happen. Places that in some way enlivened our city, making it more compelling, weird, world-class, or just our kind of class.
Like the Rady Shell. It’s as if Red Rocks mated with the Guggenheim. A mind-blowing altar to music and our famous weather. It gave our symphony a new home, and in its off time gave the rest of us a public park for yoga and roller skating or just fooling around on the grass. It’s our version of the Sydney Opera House.
For this issue we asked over 20 writers—whose job it is to constantly scour the city—for their favorite things about San Diego right now. It’s our way of shining a light on the people and places doing and creating the remarkable. Things that, years from now, we’ll remember.
Our cover of this issue is Seneca Trattoria—the rooftop restaurant that feels like a jungle grew inside of a wooden cruise liner, where they hand-pull fresh mozzarella at your table. It’s atop the Intercontinental Hotel at the corner of PCH and Broadway, which is important. From this vantage point, you can look down on the corner of San Diego where all next things are happening. Where billions of dollars and massive ideas will soon transform our waterfront forever: the tension point of new directions, equally full of promise and apprehension.
You can stand at the edge of Seneca, Negroni in hand, and see the future.
