San Diego Magazine's Happy Half Hour

As a kid growing up in La Jolla, Annemarie Brown-Lorenz had swordfish bills sticking up out of the ground in her backyard. Her dad was a fifth generation local fisherman who believed in using every part of the fish. If you take a life from the sea, have the respect to use every part of that life. And Annemarie’s grandmother (a first-generation American from Slovenia) grew all her own food; believed if you stuck swordfish bills in the garden it would lend its nutrients to the soil. So forget the garden gnome. That ethos—sustainable fishing, old-world farming (now they call it biodynamic)—was what The Fishery was built on. Annemarie’s parents, Judd and Mary Ann, opened the restaurant in 1996. Judd had already built a successful business delivering seafood caught by local boats to San Diego restaurants. For The Fishery, they just knocked a hole in the wall of that seafood warehouse (called Pacific Shellfish) and passed the day’s best catches into the kitchen. The Fishery turns 25-years-old this month. During the