San Diego Magazine's Happy Half Hour

They got weird with it, and it worked. Understory is a concept bar in the middle of a Noah’s Ark-looking food hall called Sky Deck in Del Mar, where it is surrounded by nine sit-down restaurants. “Understories” are the natural world of shade-craving trees, soils, and organisms in any forest. And so, this bar—along with its own barrel-aged boozes (their Woodford Reserve is used to make a fantastic Old Fashioned)—is filled with plants and plants and plants and white pseudo-tree limbs that look both modern and apocalyptic. It has tables made out of trees millions of years old. When fossils become bars. It’s the shared botanical booze vision of two San Diegans who’ve had success in other food realms. Scott Slater, an SDSU grad who launched his food empires in the many parking lots of Home Depots, eventually coalescing all that R&D into the better-burger enterprise known as Slater’s 50/50 (half the burger patty was beef, the other half was ground up bacon—an oh-duh idea that a billion people couldn’t believe t