San Diego Magazine's Happy Half Hour

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