San Diego Magazine's Happy Half Hour

So much history in this place. It’s where brewers came up with one of the beers that put San Diego on the national map. It’s where a person signed a deal for a billion dollars and sold to a multinational corporation. And it’s where an indie brewer bought it back, and took it into the new age. The place is the palace of beer that is Ballast Point in Miramar. The beer is Sculpin IPA. For this podcast, we sat down with five evolutions of Sculpin in front of us—from grapefruit Sculpin to a Aloha Sculpin—with one of our favorite people in the city, Jeff Lozano. Technically the “ambassador” of Ballast Point, Jeff is the voice you hear in the Ballast Point commercials when you’re watching the Padres games. His voice is made for this, like if a cigarette and a late-night radio DJ had a lovechild. Ballast Point just made a serious investment on the food side of the house at all their locations, too, hiring culinary director Tommy Dimella. I’ll say this. Go to Miramar. Work your way through the evolution of Sculpin lik

Lake San Marcos is such a mystery to me. Like if you took the water feature from a miniature golf course and expanded that over a couple miles—that’s what it would be. A human-made oasis. Fake? You bet. Kinda magical? Also that. And that’s the kind of hokey water hocus pocus I live for. I’m the kind of guy who thinks sequins is the height of American culture. This podcast we recorded live from the Mister A’s of Lake San Marcos—Amalfi Cucina Italiana. Chef Marcello Avitabile is a six-time World Pizza Champion (read the review here). The four owners are all Italian, all friends who met while working at another one of the top Italian food spots in the city, Buona Forchetta (Avitabile was the longtime exec chef). It’s the second stop on our Delicious IPA Tour with Stone Brewing. (Note: These have been great events where we gather and sip and taste, available to those of you who join our Insiders program… you should sign up). One of the first “Beer vs. Wine Dinners” I ever went to was hosted by Stone. Wine has alw

When I went to Padres games as a kid, a man stood 30 feet away from you and hurled a hot dog at your face. Maybe you got some popcorn whose best attribute was that it looked yellow and had enough salt to turn your insides into prosciutto. Oh, and you got some flat Coke. If you only drank sodas at baseball games in the 80s, you wouldn’t know the product came with bubbles. To be honest, I kinda miss that hot dog throwing man. But I don’t miss the food. Modern baseball food is worlds better. You got sushi and acai bowls and brisket sandwiches and designer tacos. The Padres have made a lot of great acquisitions of late, but one of my favorites was when they brought in Barrio Dogg and Grand Ole BBQ and Puesto—giving people a taste of some of the best local restaurants. And today David and I sit with an old friend and crush some of our favorite eats from Petco Park. He’s a favorite human. Constant sayer of funny things. Mark “Mudcat” Grant has been a Padres broadcaster for 27 years. He and Don Orsillo are in the bo

Not sure how many San Diego restaurants have a real, bonafide Shepard Fairey art piece—sanctioned by the artist, famous for his propaganda art like the Obey (Andre the Giant) and Hope (Obama) series—but Shank & Bone in North Park is one of them. So technically the Vietnamese restaurant is a pretty notable art gallery. Their pho sure is some art. So are their fish sauce chicken wings, salty and sweet. In our June “Best Restaurants” issue, Shank was named readers’ choice for Best Vietnamese and my pick for Best Pho. And on today’s podcast Han Tran comes on to share her story—how her parents came over as refugees from Vietnam. She grew up in City Heights, where her mom ran a bakery and cafe. “It was known for the strongest Vietnamese coffee in town,” she says. “Just rocket fuel. In our culture, the cafe scene is mostly men. Women walk in and the needle on the record scratches. But mom ran it. She’s tough. Cafes are really popular in the Vietnamese community, but ours was different because we had good food.”

This meat looks geological. Like lovely, delicious geodes. In the refrigerated case, huge racks of Brandt Beef just lay there at Ranch45—have been laying for a while (40 days, says one tag). When meat is dry-aged like this, it begins to look prehistoric and unlocks a whole new universe of flavors. Excess moisture is drawn out of the meat over time, breaking down the protein, tenderizing it and concentrating its steakness. It works the same way as when you “reduce” a stock or a soup to crank up the flavor. In the cooler next to it, Ranch45 chef Aaron Schwartz is aging bone marrow. That’s right. Ranch45 is dry-aging bone marrow. At the performance kitchen in the middle of the butcher shop/deli/restaurant/gourmet general store in Solana Beach, Schwartz roasts one of them; serves it simply on a plate with salt, pepper, chives, microgreens; and a dash of oil. As a marrow adherent (it is meat butter), it’s the first dry-aged marrow I’ve had. And it’s that much better. “Any meat has to age at least a bit to be any g

The birria flatbread at Stone World Bistro & Gardens is one of those dishes that’s gone in minutes. On this podcast, we huddle around it. Poke at it. Demolish it with chef Israel Ortiz. It’s the kickoff of our new video series with Stone, which will highlight a few local restaurants and our favorite dishes that their cooks and chefs and food people have created. It’s a celebration of Stone’s Delicious IPA. After years of tinkering on the recipe of the ultimate beer that pairs well with food, Delicious is the result. Izzy walks us through what makes the flatbread sing, and we talk about how birria has overtaken the fish taco as the official food of San Diego. Our other guest? She was working at a branding agency in San Diego. At company events, she’d bring her salsa. Everyone loved it. On a lark, she tried out to be a contestant on Masterchef—that massive cooking competition on TV with Gordon Ramsey. She told her job she’d be gone for a bit. She wasn’t allowed to tell them anything about how well she was d

We’ve been here for two weeks and I’d like to stay another thirty. I’ve brought my overnight bag and a note from my wife. Gonna make my case. We’re at Park Hyatt Aviara, a 200-acre resort, one of the classic San Diego properties built far above a wetland preserve in Carlsbad. The ocean is right over there. We’re sitting at a long dining table in Ponto Lago, their Baja-inspired restaurant and a star of the recent $50 million makeover of the property. You can smell the crackling red oak and the char on various excellent proteins. I see a mezcal collection. I’m talking with chef Christopher Carriker about the magic of woodsmoke. David’s talking to him about the magic of heavy metal music. There is a hamachi and blackberry aguachile, a Sinoloan specialty, with sliced fresno chiles, green onion, and mint. There’s a charred octopus zarandeado with chorizo aioli, chicharrons and kumquats. It’s Baja ideas mixed with French sauce skills and the unbeatable San Diego seafood and produce. Carriker is from Portland, which

This is a fun one. I’ve known Richard Blais for a long while, and we tend to bring the best stories out of each other. Like golf foraging. When most of us lose our golf balls in the bushes, we venture into the brush and come out with scrapes and a handful of profanities. When chef Richard Blais sucks at golf, he goes into the brush and comes out with wild fennel and some carrots for dinner. When he opened his first restaurant at Park Hyatt Aviara in Carlsbad—Ember & Rye, a modern steakhouse with a wood-burning grill that’s always on fire above the 18-hole course—he took up the clubs. “So maybe occasionally my ball would go into the bushes,” he admits. “I go in there to get it and I found all this wild fennel and carrots and radishes and garlic and nasturtiums.” Over the last year, fans who know Richard through Top Chef and Guy’s Grocery Games and his new show on Fox, Next Level Chef, may have looked at his Instagram and wondered if he was training for the PGA. “I became a golf influencer,” he says. “I got

During the day, Michael Vera cooks at standout Pacific Beach restaurant, The Fishery. In his off time, he grows delicious bacteria. The words mold or fungus may not make your mouth water, but they should. They’re the gateways to fermentation, which gives us bread, coffee, miso, chocolate, beer, kimchi, wine, cheese, soy sauce, other forms of dear-god delicious. And right now, no fungus is hotter than Japanese koji—rice grains cultured with aspergillus oryzae. “It’s a sweet, funky marinade that tenderizes and intensifies with umami,” says Michael Vera, owner of West Coast Koji, a company he created during the pandemic by using Home Depot racks to ferment various things in the living room of his North Park apartment. “My wife was not happy with the state of our apartment for a very long time. It was a huge laboratory full of funky stuff.” Now he sells his koji to Michelin-star restaurants like Jeune et Jolie and Rustic Canyon, plus Juniper & Ivy and Consortium Holdings. Koji is famous for its umami-cranking

I must stop talking about the cabbage. I won’t shut up about it. So I figured if I brought chef William Eick to talk me through it, it will resolve my lingering emotional fixation on what is one of the best dishes I’ve eaten in a very long time. Eick opened Matsu about six months ago. It’s a minimalist ode to modern Japanese cuisine. He’s been a talent in San Diego for a long time, and this is the big idea, what he’s been working for. In a spare room in Oceanside, where the “biggest” design element seems to be a single white orchid on a bar top, he’s serving 8- and 10-course tasting menus. And the cabbage is the shocker. “I’ve been obsessed with Japanese culture since I was five years old,” says Eick. “Everything about it. A modern Japanese restaurant with a tasting menu, there are probably only a handful in the country that I can think of.” For this episode, Eick walks us through some of the magic tricks that make Matsu stand out. For instance, he creates various dashis (Japanese broth, a cornerstone of the

It is, finally, open. Almost. When Grand Ole BBQ y Asado shut down its North Park location for renovation, it was supposed to be for a couple of months. That was three years ago. In the interim, we had a pandemic. But now it’s been fully redone. It’s ready to open, soon as the last health inspections pass. This is big news because, well, Grand Ole is great. Owner Andy Harris has kept himself busy with their other location in Flinn Springs, which is about as close to a Texas backyard barbecue joint as you can get without leaving San Diego. It’s still got that backyard, wooden bench vibe. But most grandmas will like these benches. “I wanted it to be for everyone to enjoy their time there—like if your grandma wanted to come she wouldn’t think it was gross,” says owner Andy Harris. “Like my aunt came to the old one and she was like uh no.” In the spirit of everyone, Grand Ole will be the first local barbecue restaurant I can think of with a vegan menu. Andy’s also got a “sommelier type guy” for the new spot, want

In 2004, Jon Bautista made his mom cry. She spontaneously wept when he told the family he’d enrolled in culinary school. To be fair, in the same breath he also broke the news that he’d dropped out of the undergrad program at SDSU to do so. Parents have news thresholds, and hers was breached. “This was before Top Chef,” he says. “She just said, ‘You’re never going to make any money.’” Now, 17 years later, Bautista is chef of one of the city’s most raved-about restaurants, Kingfisher, a partnership with the local family who owns the beloved local restaurant, Crab Hut. It’s modern Vietnamese. It’s also a bit Franco-Californian, because Bautista spent five years as chef de cuisine of George’s at the Cove under Trey Foshee. It’s a bit Filipino, he says, because he is Filipino. Cooking has never been more borderless. The Golden Hill restaurant is booked months out, with a long waiting list (they do have a few walk-in tables). Their duck—dry-aged in house, lightly smoked, brushed with palm sugar—is the treasure for

I’m not sure how many stages of coping there are, but when Greg Hess told his wife and family they were moving to San Diego to start one of the first “nano breweries” in the country—I’d bet they ran through most, if not all of them. Probably added one or two. Harris’ brother, Mike, had the idea in 2010 to go even smaller than a microbrewery. Launched a brewery in an 800 square-foot cubby hole. It may not have sounded like a “sure thing,” but it sure became one. Now Mike Hess Brewing is one of the most recognizable names in local craft beer, with tasting rooms in North Park (the OG, opened in 2013), O.B., Imperial Beach, Seaport Village, and Walnut Creek (where the Hess clan is from). For today’s podcast, he joins us under the metallic tower of funfear that is the Emperor, SeaWorld’s new roller coaster—the fastest, tallest, and longest plunge coaster in California. To commemorate the unveiling at the tap, Hess Brewing created the Emperor Hazy IPA, which will be served exclusively at the park. A portion of the

I’m suspended fourteen stories above San Diego Bay. I am being dangled over the edge of a cliff made of metal. I smell vaguely of quality craft beer. I am an offering to the gods of amusement. Questioning life choices, my emotional state in that jittery nook between joy and terror. Just hanging there, looking directly down, wondering how good latch technology is these days. Intellectually, you know how safe this is. You know the byzantine safety measures in place. But intellect is no match for that primal scream inside you that says “WHAT THE NO.” This roller coaster’s new trick (new to me, at least) is that, instead of just plunging you down the thrill drop, it dangles you over the edge and then stops for a full 3-5 seconds. Lets you take it all in. Then it lets you go. It just drops you, at a 90-degree angle, 143 feet down, 60 miles per hour freefall. Your feet just dangle the whole wild time. The Emperor, SeaWorld’s new roller coaster, opens tomorrow (March 12). It’s been two years in the making. It’s the

Kelli Crosson bid her time, put in the work, earned this. The California native cooked alongside Jeff Jackson for 11 years at AR Valentien as his chef de cuisine (the iconic restaurant’s second in charge). Starting at The Lodge at Torrey Pines over 20 years ago, Jackson was the one of the earliest and brightest stars of San Diego’s food scene—doing farm-to-table before it was a marketing buzzword, cooking tip-to-tail when the rest of America was “just cook the sexy cuts.” Under his watch, the family-owned Lodge became a high-culinary attraction on par with the famed golf course it sits on. Still is. And now he’s stepping aside to let his beyond-ready apprentice take the reins. Crosson is now the executive chef of all things Lodge—A.R., The Grill, banquets, events. If you eat it, she’s had a say in its creation. Jackson is still very much “around.” The Evans family created an emeritus role for Jackson—corporate culinary advisor (soon you’ll see his guiding influence at the new restaurant at Evans’ family’s oth

As a young girl growing up on a farm in San Diego County, Lan Thai’s dad would hand her shrimp shells from that night’s dinner and tell her, “Go feed the trees.” Lan was too young to understand why, but she did. The trees grew gaudy with fruit. Years later, as she was becoming a chef and diving deeper into the nutritive and health properties of food, she learned you can’t grow healthy food without healthy soil. And shrimp shells are star soil-makers. Born in a Thai refugee camp as Lan’s family fled the communist takeover of Vietnam, they found their way here. Started growing their own sustenance, fishing local waters for proteins. Her father hadn’t studied soil science, or farming for that matter. “I asked my dad how he knew shrimp shells were good for soil,” she says. “He said ‘Grandma told me.’ So, in addition to science, I’m a strong believer in the wisdom of ancients.” On top of passed-down food wisdom, she started studying the scientific studies of healthy food. Her restaurant—Enclave, a small cafe insid

Why does brunch feel so good in all the right parts of your soul? It is redemptively irresponsible. It’s breakfast, if breakfast were better. If your weekend was a pinball game, brunch is that bonus ball. You’re not really sure what you did to deserve it, but it’s extending your play time, so—hey there, little bonus ball. Anyway, point is, our annual sold-out Brunch Bash is back. April 22 at Carmel Mountain Ranch Estates. You should come. Because, on a very nice stretch of grass, we’ll loiter under the expensive San Diego sun and lose the appropriate amount of composure as we sample fried chicken and waffles, house-smoked lox benedict, banana bread with espresso mascarpone, croissant French toast, Mexican donuts, polenta with pork belly, Italian meatball soup, chilaquiles, granolas, parfaits. And there will be bloody marys and bubbles and agua frescas and tequila coffees and hard kombucha and iced horchata and organic superfruit hard cider and CBD beverages. Basically, people we admire make some pretty amazin

The iconic Mister A’s is being sold (don’t worry, it’s not going anywhere, and this is a good story). Last week, we talked with Bertrand Hug—the restaurateur of restaurateurs, the don of dining and longtime steward of the rooftop restaurant—about why he chose to sell to his right-hand man. Today on the podcast, we have the man himself, Ryan Thorson. Ryan earned this (and paid for it). The SDSU grad got his first job at Buster’s Beach House in Seaport Village, then landed a low-level managers job at Mister A’s and just dedicated his life to it. Worked 100-hour weeks at times. He rose through the ranks over 11 years, becoming Director of Operations. He and Hug developed a father-son relationship, and, when Hug decided it was time to let go and focus on his original baby—the world=class French restaurant Mille Fleurs in Rancho Santa Fe—he turned down offers for more money and entrusted Mister A’s to his young partner and friend. Ryan tells us the whole story—including how he originally got turned down for the jo

Atiim “Tee” Smith is now one of the promising young cooks at one of the city’s better restaurants, Cucina Enoteca. He started his kitchen career a few years ago at Water Grill, also worked at Jake’s Del Mar. It’s quite a positive development because, in 2014, he was facing 64 years to life in prison. Smith turned his own life around, a success of his own design. But he had some help from one of the more inspiring organizations in San Diego—Kitchens for Good. KFG is a nonprofit that essentially provides a free culinary school for people who need a second shot for a variety of reasons. Their apprenticeship program offers technical skills, some life coaching, career counseling, a network of support. Their “Hunger Relief” program prepares over 100,000 healthy-side meals every year to help San Diego families, seniors, and anyone facing food insecurity. Both Tee Smith and KFG director of programs Dennis Crosby join us on this episode of “Happy Half Hour” to talk about Tee’s personal evolution and how Kitchens for G

Absinthe sure got pigeonholed. We are all aware that within 15 minutes of drinking it, you speak in tongues, dictating the next great American novel onto the bar napkin. Another 30 minutes, and you descend into madness. Such a mythologized spirit, the drink of long-dead poets and thinkers and ascenders and descenders. And now it has its own restaurant in San Diego, sort of. Wormwood just went into the space recently vacated by the beloved Jayne’s Gastropub. It’s the project of Amar Harrag, who brought a jolt of modern blood to Old Town with Tahona and its accompanied secretish bar, Oculto 477. Beverage director Ben Marquart (Ironside, Saiko Sushi) has been tasked with creating the city’s first absinthe bar, proving that the black licorice-flavored, green golbin-colored spirit is far more diverse and nuanced than once believed. In the kitchen is chef Danny Romero, a native of Calexico who moved to San Diego 15 years ago, fell in love with the fire and grit and hustle of the restaurant kitchen. He worked at two