The weekly guide to San Diego's food + drink scene, hosted by award-winning food writer and Food Network host Troy Johnson and San Diego Magazine's culture brain, Jackie Bryant. Field notes and perspectives on restaurants, bars, and chefs—including dishes and drinks you gotta try, restaurant openings and closings, events worth your time, and laugh-cry interviews with chefs, restaurant owners, farmers, brewers, and makers who make San Diego's food + drink scene hum.
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If you've been to a big San Diego food event and there's a whole tuna getting broken down in front of a crowd, there's a good chance Jeff Roberto is somewhere nearby. Roberto has been making sushi in San Diego for 38 years, back when there were only seven sushi restaurants in the county. Now, through Sushi on a Roll, he and his nephew Austin have become one of the city's go-to teams for high-end…
Glass Box isn't your typical sushi restaurant. Tucked inside the Sky Deck in Del Mar, chef and owner Ethan Yang serves omakase from inside a literal glass box—a transparent kitchen built around the idea that what you see is what you get. It's a fitting philosophy for a third-generation restaurateur whose food is rooted as much in family as technique. On this week's Happy Half Hour , Yang joins…
The Remy occupies a building that's been serving San Diegan's steaks for more than 50 years. Longtime locals remember it as Hungry Hunter. Today, it's been reimagined as a modern American steakhouse—one that still nods to its past while carving out a new identity of its own. This week on Happy Half Hour , Troy Johnson, Jackie Bryant, and Bebemos co-founder Preston Caffrey head to a…
There's a new very serious skincare brand for men coming out of San Diego called... 4-Skin? Host Troy Johnson interviews founder Arturo Kassel—one of the city's top restaurateurs (Whisknladle, Catania, Gravity Heights) who watched a friend get fool-level sunburnt, made a joke about what it would take to get men to pay attention to basic skincare—and that's how he ended up launching a high-quality…
Behind every great cocktail is at least one terrible idea. Sometimes it's a French onion soup martini. Sometimes it's setting a drink on fire inside the Casbah. And every once in a while, it's the kind of experiment that lands you on a list of America's best bartenders. This week on Happy Half Hour, Troy Johnson sits down with Dominique Muñoz of Polite Provisions, who was recently named one of the…
Sometimes the best restaurant is the one everyone tells you not to open. This week on Happy Half Hour , Troy Johnson and Jackie Bryant sit down with chef Mario Cassineri, who left Michelin-starred kitchens behind to make handmade pasta in Barrio Logan. Raised in Milan, he trained under Italy's first three-Michelin-star chef before trading fine dining for a burned-out building everyone else…
Fresh fruit, pillowy mochi, and a philosophy rooted in slowing down. This week on Happy Half Hour, Troy Johnson and Jackie Bryant sit down with Gemma Matsuyama Yamada, the pastry chef behind Kimochi, whose seasonal fruit mochi has quietly become one of San Diego's most sought-after pop-ups. After honing her craft at some of the country's most celebrated restaurants—including Blue Hill at Stone…
Encinitas just got its first-ever speakeasy — or rather, its first hidden cocktail den — and the Happy Half Hour crew couldn't even find the front door. In this week's episode, hosts Troy Johnson and Jackie Bryant broadcast live from inside Anigma, the stunning new bar tucked behind the legendary Roxy on First Street, joined by Bebemos tequila CEO Preston Caffrey to sip on some of San Diego's best…
We tried 18 dishes across savory and sweet categories, these are our favorite dishes Every year, the San Diego County Fair becomes the city's biggest pop-up restaurant with 150+ vendors, a million visitors, and one very serious food fight. In this episode of Happy Half Hour, Troy Johnson and Jackie Bryant go behind the scenes of the Fair-tastic Food Competition, now in its fourth year. Troy and…
It's Switchfoot Bro-Am week. The epic, annual, San Diego-est thing—one of the best free beach parties in the country that does good for kids who need a community to rally around them. Doesn't just raise money, but makes the kids part of it. For this episode of Happy Half Hour, we asked Switchfoot lead singer Jon Foreman and drummer Chad Butler to take us to one of their favorite local spots—and…
