San Diego Magazine's Happy Half Hour

On this week’s Happy Half Hour podcast… Pablo Becker named his new restaurant Fish Guts. That’s the kind of humor and gall you need to make it in life. It’s gonna make me like you. It helps that he’s using the 90 percent local seafood, the best damn things pulled off the boats a few blocks from his Barrio Logan fish sandwich-and-taco shop. “It’s crazy to me that you have the best seafood in the world right over there,” he says, pointing out of the SDM podcast studio window at the bay. “And 80-something percent of restaurants here import their fish.” I bite his sandwich. Tell him it reminds me of a Filet-O-Fish if a Filet-O-Fish used fresh local rock fish and brioche buns and the best ingredients from local farms. And if the Filet-O-Fish, all due respect, was twenty or thirty times better. It’s a fantastic sandwich, beer-battered and slathered in a just-spicy-enough Mexican tartar sauce (seared serranos, Mexican herbs). “My restaurant is like 500-square-feet,” he says. “It’s me, a plancha, and a deep fryer.” T