Chef Davin Waite cooks local carrots tendercrisp, blanches them in a seaweed dashi, then beer-batters them with tempura—tucked under a lime pepper slaw, yum-yum sauce, and housemade taco sauce.
This is The Plot in Oceanside. Badass plant cooking.
Plot co-owner Jessica Waite has been plant-based most of her life. Early on, her food options lacked a certain, um, edibility and joy. “Especially 15 years ago—it sucked,” she says. “I had to carry condiments in my purse.”
Then she met Davin, one San Diego’s top sushi chefs (he owns the excellent super-sustainable punk-sushi joint, Wrench and Rodent). He started packing her plant-based lunches for grad school, and they both kinda saw the light. The Plot was created around those snacks that wooed his wife.
There’s a hefty garden out back for the chefs. The idea is not just zero waste (there’s only one trash can in the whole place—a small one in the kitchen that’s rarely used), but seeing how much mileage the chefs can get out of every single fruit or veg or plant.
“How do you look at an amazing vegetable and get every ounce of flavor out of it?” says Davin. “Sometimes that’s using it two, three, sometimes even six different times, six different ways, six different parts.”
Plant-based cooking is often a philosophical choice, an environmental one. That can draw some holier-thans and pulpit pounders. The Plot runs far away from that. If you’ve got a mouth and you eat with it, this is your place.
“ It doesn’t have to be this big, academic thing and it doesn’t have to be extreme,” says Jessica. “It can just be, ‘Oh, this is frickin’ delicious, I want to eat it more.’”
