San Diego Magazine's Happy Half Hour

Long before “pivot” became a silver-lining buzzword, Tracy Borkum made a career out of it. For instance, the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla recently spent $105 million and tapped one of the top architects in the country to recast its iconic building into an ocean-facing art compound. And Borkum—a San Diego restaurateur who years ago got her BA in art history from UC Berkeley—became a big part of it. It was a dream, really: a merger of what she loved and studied (art) and what she made her name doing (restaurants). She and her chef-partner Tim Kolanko created an outdoor dining concept around the edge of the museum called The Kitchen. “We opened it, and now it’s been raining for three weeks,” Borkum says, with a roll of her eyes, on this week’s episode. Borkum has adapted, dealt with things, rethought, reconfigured so many times. She started with Kensington Grill in the ’90s, a charming-as-heck bistro (she still has the space; it’s now Cucina Sorella) where Troy served briefly as the world’s worst barte