INCOMING: Kafe Sobaka

Dora Ristorante

His ascent has been stealth and humble, which fits the man. When Liberty Station was struggling to convince people it existed over a decade ago, Sicilian chef Accursio Lota’s food at Solare Ristorante was a tractor beam for food people who sniff out hidden talent like truffle dogs. In 2017, he won the World Pasta Championship (a legit competition from global pasta brand Barilla) and struck out on his own, opening his and his wife’s from-scratch pasta trattoria in North Park (Cori Pastificio). Gambero Rosso—the Italian version of Michelin, the most respected source—has clamored for the restaurant since it opened, naming it “New Opening of the Year” and this year giving it their highest award, “Tre Forchette” (Three Forks), only knighted on a handful of US restaurants.

So this year, Lota opened his grandest thing—Dora Ristorante—and it pulls everything together. Steps from San Diego’s world-class theater, La Jolla Playhouse, it’s laden with brass and large-format murals, tile work and mosaics—like the one on the wood-burning oven that blisters, chars, and smokes a good portion of the menu. Their housemade focaccia is a new street drug (try it with the puttanesca, his grandmother Dora’s recipe). The olive oil-cured sardines make “sustainable seafood” and ethics not taste like a compromise. Dora might finally be the one to solve the “where do I eat before the world premiere at LJP” dilemma.

Bacari

The yuzu-colored building that helped build North Park’s modern food culture is alive again. Years ago, the ornate French Quarter–inspired spot on 30th Street was home to chef Matt Gordon’s Urban Solace (duck macaroni and cheese). Then it laid conspicuous and fallow until a few months ago when Bacari took it on. It’s an LA transplant, but they’re proving forgivable of that trespass. Chef and co-founder Lior Hillel cooked at Jean-Georges before opening the first of this Venetian-style restaurant in 2008 with brothers Danny and Robert Kronfi (Bobby started his food venture with a pop-up dinner series in his college apartment at USC).

For dinner, it’s house-baked bread, crudo and shrimp ceviches, Mediterranean street corn, lamb hummus, shawarma, and glazed pork belly. Weekend brunch is bellinis and French toast and burekas (famed Jewish stuffed puff pastry), and chef Noa’s cauliflower (caramelized with chipotle). It’s Italian-ish with a heavy dose of pan-Mediterranean and Middle Eastern. Doesn’t hurt that they left the iconic exterior as is, adding chandelier-farmhouse insides with charm that echoes two of the city’s dearly departed (Jayne’s Gastropub, Cafe Chloe).

À L’ouest

Much tolerance for friends who hate mussels because they look too biological. But if they manage to dislike À L’ouest’s—served over ice with vadouvan curry aioli and chili crisp—then you’ve successfully identified your brokemouth friend and should try bicycling or crafting with them to bond instead of eating in public places. It should be on everyone’s short list for dish of the year.

Chef Brad Wise and his team have earned their rep over multiple concepts—Trust, Fort Oak, Cardellino, Wise Ox, Rare Society. But he’s been eyeing this corner of North Park since before he opened his first (Trust, in 2016). North Park has been rising for a while, and À L’ouest feels like the missing piece—an indoor-outdoor brasserie stunner on the marquee spot of 30th and University, which long sat boarded up and vacant like a neighborhood missing a front tooth.

As with his other concepts, woodpile is king; smoldering red oak boosts the flavor of just about everything. Get the spätzle with braised rabbit, maitake mushroom, secret de compostelle (the famed Basque sheep’s milk cheese), and black truffle. Or the chicken liver parfait with persimmon, fennel aigre-doux (sweet-sour), and chives on toast. Or, like everyone else in there—the steak frites.

Fleurette

Chef Travis Swikard’s first solo restaurant, Callie in East Village, proved how details can make the most composed of us blubber a little in fine places—from citrus left in ovens overnight to blacken and transform, to the Scripps Oceanographic Institute saltwater he keeps his spot prawns thriving in until ordered, to the days-long fermentation and stone-ground dukkah that turn carrot shavings into a statement piece.

Now, he’s focusing on French food with a fitter, less buttery San Diego heart. Fleurette is his doubling-down, a SoCal riff on the food he learned under mentors Daniel Boulud and Gavin Kaysen. The French gave us the mother sauces, and Fleurette showcases the lightest and brightest evolutions. Like the anchoïade on his beef tartare, which uses famed Italian anchovy sauce colatura di alici, mixed with cured egg yolks over tiny, uniform-sized cubes of raw, USDA Prime Flannery beef.

There is soubise (onion sauce), a sauce vierge (tomatoes and herbs), and a fennel marmalade on the duck liver and bone marrow pâté. Although the structure is stunningly pure glass, Fleurette’s in a location—an office park on the edge of La Jolla, near UTC—that few chefs would be able to pull off. But Swikard’s Michelin-bound house of saucework pulls hard.

Mesa Agrícola

The Escondido taqueria from Rosarito-born-and-trained chef Juan González and farmer Megan Strom took the county by storm this year. The married couple started as a popup four years ago, hosting farmside dinners before taking up residency at Vino Carta in Solana Beach. Strom was working a small, 5-acre heirloom bean farm in Valley Center owned by Mike Reeske (aka “The Bean Man”) when he retired and sold them the plot.

The huge bonus was that the sale included Reeske’s famed collection of beans, curated over 20 years. The couple planted other things and now grow much of what they serve in the form of tacos and burritos at a permanent spot in Escondido: Mesa Agrícola.

The menu’s bone simple: housemade tortillas in your choice of taco or burrito norteños (which are smaller, like burritos de hielera) that change constantly and often topped with guisados (Mexican braises or stews) like lamb and garbanzo, birria, chicharrón, mushrooms al ajillo, rajas, you name it. And, of course, some of the best beans honoring the local legend of Reeske.

Lucien

San Diego is now the recipient of national food buzz. The dark ages—during which we learned how to sear ahi and asada some carne and called it a day—felt prolonged, and they were. The problem was never ingredients. San Diego County always had the best raw dinner materials (more small farms per capita than any county in the US, seafood right there); it just didn’t have a critical mass of highly trained chefs to do them justice. Easy to understand the chef dearth.

For a very long time, if you wanted to be a serious chef you had to go to the restaurant superplexes of New York, San Francisco, or Chicago (which imported their raw ingredients from places like San Diego). But now—credit farmers or Alice Waters or Dan Barber or Michael Pollain or the reasonable conclusion that food picked right here tastes better than food picked way over there—some of the most talented chefs are moving to the ingredients, not the other way around.

In San Diego, we got Richard Blais, Swikard, and now Elijah Arizmendi, who cut his teeth in Vegas with Joel Robuchon (plus Boulud and Thomas Keller) and was chef de cuisine at NYC’s L’abeille when it got its first Michelin star. His debut restaurant in La Jolla—with partners Brian Hung and Melissa Yang—is a dark, moody multicourse tasting-menu hideaway with one of the best egg dishes in the city.

Some keep lists of favorite books, of quotes, of enemies whose time shall come. At SDM we keep vast, nuanced, hotly debated lists of the best food and drink in the city. Menus are our smut novels. From Michelin stars to mom and pops, our list constantly evolves over hundreds of new bites tried every year. Here’s the 2026 list from food critic Troy Johnson and 129,000-plus votes from our readers, who really, really know their food.

Scroll down for the full list of Best Restaurant winners

John Lennon believed all you need is love, but one restaurant team wants to provide guests with love and magic. This June, Shawn Seaman, Mike Mayaudon, and Ryan Mencik will open Amor y Magia (“love and magic”) next to Little Victory Wine Bar in Carlsbad. 

The group has been working on the concept for two years, building a Latin American–inspired menu that takes cues from Mencik’s Filipino and Mayaudon’s Venezuelan heritages, as well as San Diego’s proximity to Mexico. 

Spain colonized the Philippines from 1565 to 1898 and Mexico from 1521 to 1821, leaving a deep influence throughout both countries’ cuisines. “I want to balance tradition with creativity by honoring the roots of Latin America and Latin cuisine, but also pushing the boundaries with experimentation,” says Mencik, Amor y Magia’s executive chef.

The group’s past projects, Same Same in Carlsbad and Good Enough Cocktail Club in Little Italy, give a taste of that boundary-pushing ideology. (One is a proudly irreverent technicolor Thai-fusion extravaganza, while the other is a listening bar cosplaying as a tattoo studio and pleasantly affordable cocktail lounge. Both are worth a visit.) 

Amor Y Magia’s menu will include a rotating raw bar with fish crudo and ceviche caught by local fishermen, as well as a few salads and sides like elote, pao de queijo (small Brazilian cheese rolls made with Oaxacan cheese, garlic aioli, and chives), and tajadas (fried plantains with nata, a sweet dairy cream, and queso llanero, or “cowboy cheese.)” 

Since most Latin American cultures prize the ritual of gathering together as much as the food itself, Mencik says the menu will lean on shareable plates—around seven or eight starters and entrees, a few of which come directly from his and Mayaudon’s childhoods. 

“The dish that I’m most excited about is a dish that I grew up eating when I was a kid—and you don’t really find it anywhere around here. It’s called a cachapa,” says managing partner Mayaudon. “A cachapa is like a corn savory pancake, usually topped with queso de mano.” Queso de mano is a soft, fresh cheese from Venezuela with a mild flavor similar to mozzarella. 

Over the past two decades or so, people have begun folding the cheese in the middle, but he prefers it the more traditional style—the pancake served flat, with butter and cheese on top. “We’re still working out whether or not we want to add the pork to it, but for me, that’s a great core item.”

Mencik points to the grilled half chicken dish as one of his highlights, served with pickled mango, jalapeño, bell pepper, lime, Merkén (a traditional Chilean spice blend with salt, toasted coriander, and smoked cacho de cabra chili peppers) and humita (an Argentinian corn purée). Despite Merkén’s popularity in Chile, the team hasn’t been able to source the chili peppers in the US. So, they’re currently growing their own—around a 100-day process, he estimates. 

Amor Y Magia’s beverage program falls under a similar fusion theme, with plays on traditional cocktails like Jaguar’s Milk, which riffs off a Brazilian Batida de Coco, or house-made Peruvian chicha morada,  with purple corn, fruit, spices, and Oaxacan whiskey. Seaman, who will be the general manager as well as a managing partner with Mayaudon, adds they also plan to have a global wine list that extends beyond Spanish and Latin American wines, with selections from California, France, and beyond. 

Most of the tables in the gothic, Spanish Revival-inspired restaurant are on the covered patio, which seats 60 guests. Inside, there’s a 12-person bar and four-person chef’s counter. Amor y Magia will feel different from their other projects—intentionally, Seaman says. “Our goal is to open a bunch of different places with different vibes and different settings,” he says. With some luck, and maybe some magic, this is just the start for the team.

Amor Y Magia opens at 505 Oak Avenue, Suite C in mid-June 2026. Initial operating hours will be Monday through Saturday, 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. (subject to change).

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The day I spoke to chef Travis Swikard, his furniture had been stuck at the border for weeks. Upholstery detained, a uniquely modern snag. The biggest restaurant opening of Swikard’s life was a couple days away, and there were gaping holes in his dining room where the sort of significant, vibe-defining furniture would go. There are many reasons people enjoy restaurants, but sitting is one of them.

“This project has tested our patience in every way,” he says. “But we figure it out.”

Add to that a broken foot. He smashed it the day before Thanksgiving. Dropped an employee locker on it. He spent the next day not getting a cast and justifying whiskey as therapy. Instead of going to the ER, he worked a full holiday shift at his first restaurant, Callie, the one that made his name in San Diego.

Swikard has that old (and endangered) grin-and-bear-it nature—no doubt at least partly seared into him by the restaurant world he came up in. He learned in some of the world’s most revered kitchens under some of the most devout, old-school chefs. The only promise for a young, serious cook was that the work would be grueling, highly instructive, repeatedly humiliating, and character-building.

Swikard got all that and some restaurateur renown as well. Fleurette in La Jolla is the restaurant that should put him on the national stage for good. He’s already there, but the cement’s still wet.

The final pieces of furniture finally cleared customs a month after opening. Fleurette is the peacock at the base of La Jolla Commons—a LEED-Platinum glass tower filled with enterprises in finance, life science,and capital-L law. Now, it also houses a deadly good beef tartare in anchovy sauce and a cocktail that tastes weirdly like a refreshing pesto. Once you get lost trying to park, walking through the Commons’ immaculate courtyards makes you want to throw a few bucks at cryptocurrency, cure cancer, and work up a hunger for gougères with 21-month Prosciutto di Parma and black truffle fonduta.

For the latter, search for the yellow doors. Among all the very official, floor-to-ceiling glass, those doors look like a portal to a wonderland where Alice is sharing suspect tea with Aldous Huxley.

Swikard’s concept here is a southern French one, built on the “cuisine du soleil” movement that’s credited to legendary French chef Roger Vergé. Vergé opened his restaurant Moulin de Mougins in a village near Cannes, the famed coastal town in Provence (in the southeast corner of France). While the rest of France was cream-and-buttering its way to culinary glory, here was this village chef cooking light, fresh, seasonal fare (mostly seafood) dressed with olive oil and herbs. His bouillabaisse was the stuff of legends. In many ways, cuisine du soleil was mere practicality: Provence is mainly cliffs, and it’s hard to raise a dairy cow on a cliff.

“This is the way I’ve been cooking my whole life,” Swikard says of what he’s doing at Fleurette. “I feel like classic is the new nouveau.”

Let’s back up.

Born and raised in Santee, Swikard did what most chefs with big dreams do—headed to Europe for a bit and wiggled his way into the doors of the greats, like bad-boy Marco Pierre White. Then he went to New York to serve as a chef de partie (station-specific cook) at Café Boulud, a Michelin-starred spot from one of the most renowned French chefs in the world, Daniel Boulud. There, he worked under Gavin Kaysen—a former San Diego chef who was Boulud’s right-hand. After Kaysen’s departure (to Minneapolis to become a regional food capo with James Beard Awards and multiple restaurants, most famously Spoon and Stable), Swikard became Boulud’s go-to guy and culinary director.

Finally, thanks to San Diego restaurateur David Cohn, Swikard came home in 2019. Cohn (who is a semi-secret investor in what feels like a vast majority of boldfaced San Diego restaurants) had visited Boulud Sud and eaten Swikard’s food. He offered to financially back a restaurant for Swikard if he returned and built it in San Diego. Not a Cohn restaurant—a Swikard restaurant, run by Swikard and his team, including his operational partner Ann Sim (formerly of Eleven Madison Park) and his wife Mia.

Swikard agreed. When Callie finally opened in 2021, it was the closing of a circle, since Cohn’s business partner—chef Deborah Scott—had given Swikard his first restaurant job as a line cook 20 years prior at Kemo Sabe in Hillcrest. Cohn and Scott are integral partners in Fleurette, as well.

Here’s the important part: Callie had been scheduled to open long before it did. Due to a prolonged global shitshow that included wet bats, bleach shooters, and an ideological cage match between politicians and scientists, it was delayed. That delay was at least the partial key for just how special Callie became. Swikard spent that awkward couple of years going to meet farmers, fishers, ranchers, small shop owners, and people tinkering with rare foods in San Diego garages.

This is why boat captains will call Swikard to report they’re pulling up to the dock with a line-caught bluefin. They’ll bring it to his back door. At Callie, he serves what looks like a heap of damn carrot shavings—pre-compost as fine dining. Except, instead of shoving that fresh tussle down the garbage disposal, he pickles and ferments it for days and tosses it with a housemade burnt-orange cashew cream (he slow-bakes an orange until it’s charcoal-colored, and the flavor is wild) and a house-ground dukkah. He keeps his spot prawns (a California delicacy) in a tank of perfectly calibrated seawater that he gets from Scripps Institution of Oceanography and only ends their journey when they’re ordered (most restaurants will kill them, then store them in the walk-in, which does some mushy damage to the texture).

The point of all this Callie talk is to note the iceberg of process under what looks like simple dishes, which also happens at Fleurette. Swikard tends to source raw ingredients from people as obsessive as he is. Consider the anchoïade sauce for Fleurette’s tartare. The key is colatura di alici, a revered Italian fish sauce made by resting layers of anchovies and salt in a barrel for months. He adds just enough (fish sauces are like cologne—a dab is perfect and two dabs are a public menace). It’s mixed with a confetti of egg yolks (cured, which means they’re rubbed with salt and sugar and rested until they become a firm umami bomb that can be shredded like golden Parm). Both explain why what looks like a pretty simple pile of raw beef (albeit the very best beef, from Flannery, one of California’s most sought-after first families of beef, known for USDA Prime Holstein cuts with a snow-flurry of marbling) tastes so wildly alive.

At Fleurette, the sauce work is textbook heritage—from soubise (onion) to vierge (tomatoes and herbs) to garlic persillade and a fairly mind-blowing fennel marmalade Swikard serves with a duck liver and bone marrow pâté (when foie gras became the PETA homing beacon of the restaurant world, he learned how to replace foie’s trademark fatty magic with marrow).

His kitchen setup is the same one that Daniel Boulud has in New York—a French Athanor, the Aston Martin of chef suites with all the bells, whistles, and flux capacitors (“We clean it with fresh lemon juice every night,” Swikard says). But the classic French in him meets the San Diego lifestyle in him here. The ingredients are mostly local (A-list produce is chief among the reasons to be a chef in this county, since it has more small farms per capita than any other in the US and the growing seasons are laughably long).

“[Boulud] would buy all the best produce from across the world,” Swikard once told me. “So, every morning I’d come in and see the boxes of produce, and every time, on the side of the box it said, ‘San Diego.’”

There’s not much gluten on the Fleurette menu, nor dairy. It’s classic French food with fewer naps—more olive oils and poached fish than heavy cream and fat-bathed proteins.

“People think French food is heavy and rich,” Swikard says, echoing French predecessors who introduced nouvelle cuisine and cuisine minceur (“slimming cooking”), both styles based in less unctuous takes on the mother sauces. “Fleurette is not rich. It’s lighter, brighter, cleaner—the way I like to eat.”

You see that lightness in one of the first menu’s star entrees. Copper River steelhead trout (like the river’s equally famous salmon) is prized because these fish swim hundreds of miles against fast-moving currents to spawn; that requires massive energy reserves (loads of omega-3 fats) and causes them to develop huge muscles (those create texture). The result is a remarkable, remarkable fish, which Swikard’s team poaches in olive oil with cauliflower, pine nuts, and grape vierge. His bouillabaisse (hello, chef Vergé) employs local rockfish and spiny lobster as seasonal anchors. He’ll also use bocaccio (another local rockfish). “People call it a trash fish, but it’s one of the most flavorful fish there is,” he says.

Swikard’s dad Larry, a San Diego landscape architect, built a modest herb and citrus garden out back. The herbs are largely Provence.

For Swikard, Fleurette’s about the next gen of chefs. He wants to use that big Athanor and this new dream to help young cooks slow down, learn, drill the basics into their DNA. It’s a training ground that will, ideally, spawn more Callies and Fleurettes in the years to come. There’s a fairly big trend of cooks skipping the craft-building and going straight to wild fusion-concept cuisine.

“Stuff that I feel is pretty classic hasn’t been done in San Diego—this generation of dining hasn’t seen it,” Swikard says.

He points to French master chef Jean-Michel Diot of La Jolla’s Bistro Du Marché as the role model. “Doing classic at a high level consistently—there’s no better level of cuisine than that,” he adds. “I wanna build a foundation for cooks in San Diego and train them how to cook in this style.”

The current cast: Mia Swikard runs marketing for both restaurants. Ann Sim is director of opps for both concepts. His chef de cuisine is Roman Garcia, who was also CDC at Selby’s in Atherton, CA when it won a Michelin star. The GM is Steve Dreifuss, formerly of Little Italy’s now-shuttered Camino Riviera. Callie’s beverage team—wine director Tracy Latimer and head bartender James Roe—have made moves as well, leaving heirs to oversee Callie.

“Callie was what I felt was right for San Diego at the time, and I feel like this is what’s right for San Diego now,” Swikard says. “I couldn’t have done this without doing Callie.”

Despite some preemptive eulogizing, the latest Brewers Association statistics estimate that though craft beer’s national volume is down 5 percent, it’s still a $72.5 billion industry. It ain’t going anywhere; just normalizing. 

In San Diego, it seems like the ones who are chugging mightily along are the ones who offer more than just beer. Craft Coast, for instance. The brewery and taco stand opened its first brewpub in Oceanside in August 2020 and its second in San Marcos in April 2024. Both locations feature their own beer and Baja-style tacos, mulitas, and bowls. 

Blake Masoner, one of the three co-founders with Lars Erickson and Brian Gillen, says he and his partners built a business plan on the premise of caring equally about the quality of the beer as the tacos. Food is no longer an option for a fledgling brewery’s survival. It’s essential.

“The days of business park breweries are limited, I think,” he says, noting they intentionally keep it simple.“In-N-Out doesn’t give everything to everybody for a reason, because they’re good at what they’re good at.”

His time at Pizza Port’s brewery was inspiration—a business model that survived on craft beer and pizza since the ’80s. 

Craft Coast has had a successful five years in North County, where all three founders are lifelong locals. After one failed attempt to snag a spot in Encinitas in 2021 (followed by a successful bid in late 2023), they’ll open its first spot in the neighborhood this summer at 476 S. Coast Highway 101 in the former Filiberto’s space where the owners spent many late nights filling up on tacos.  

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The roughly 3,000-square-foot indoor and outdoor space (located directly underneath the Encinitas arch) will open seven days a week for lunch and dinner, with possible late-night hours on weekends. The dozen or so taps will include Craft Coast’s five core beers (Agua Baja Mexican lager, Shootz Mahalo hazy IPA, Old West American IPA, XPA extra pale ale, and Sunset Market prickly pear sour with a rotating fruit) along with other collaborations and seasonals, plus canned and bottled non-alcoholic options and a selection of recently released to-go cans. 

Expect the same food menu as the first two locations, plus a fully built-in salsa bar (my literal dream) designed by Ralitsa Kombakis of Studio Rallou. If the name sounds familiar, she also designed the soon-to-open À L’ouest French brasserie by chef Brad Wise (Trust Restaurant Group) in North Park. 

Masoner says while the team likes to grow slowly, they’re committed to prioritizing their home zone of North County. If (and when) they open another brewpub, this is where they hope to stay.

“We’ve spent a lot of time living in Encinitas,” he says. “We always said if this building ever comes up, we should get it and do something. Then we established Craft Coast and here we are, five-and-a-half years later.”

Craft Coast opens this summer at 476 S. Coast Highway 101 in Encinitas.

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San Diego Restaurant News & Food Events

Something Bedda is Coming to South Park

When Matteo (somewhat suddenly) closed in South Park in December, it already had a succession plan in place. Angela Catania, who owns nearby Carbon Angela’s Kitchen, took the keys and announced Bedda in January. Bedda, which means “beautiful” in Sicilian, will not be an Italian restaurant—so don’t expect pizza or pasta, but do expect all-day dining, plus a deli and market and nighttime bar with cocktails and wine. Personally, I’m always glad when an uber-visible corner restaurant doesn’t stay empty for too long. I’m already counting down to its opening in mid-February.  

Beth’s Bites