Breaking Into the Big Time ...

October 19, 2009

ANGELL’S ASCENSION: University of San Diego graduate Mike Angell delivered his first sermon as a seminarian this month at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. Challenge enough. But when he stepped off the Metro train and spotted Secret Service agents out front of the church, he knew this was the big time. President Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama and their daughters were waiting in President’s Pew 54. Angell says he was “a little nervous anyway,” but “it was wild having the President listen to me talk for 15 minutes.” When it appeared the President was making eye contact with him, Angell says, he had to make a concerted effort not to stare back. “I was afraid my train of thought would get derailed.”

THOUGHT FOR FOOD: The recession continues to take its toll on some of San Diego’s once most-successful restaurants. The more prominent among dozens of closures in the past year: Parallel 33, Laurel, 150 Grand, Jack’s, Modus, La Vache, California Cuisine, Café Del Mar, Molly’s, Gemelli and Blue Coral. The latest casualties: the Gaslamp Quarter’s Dakota Grill, soon to be a Melting Pot franchise (fondue), and Cane’s Bar & Grill, closing after 13 years in South Mission Beach ... Meanwhile, with restaurants closing to the left and right of him, Chris Shaw is about to open his third Hillcrest restaurant/bar catering to a mostly gay clientele. Shaw, whose Urban Mo’s and Baja Betty’s have been huge moneymakers, debuts Gossip Grill, at University and Normal Street, on Halloween weekend. This time, he’s targeting lesbians.

DRINK TO THIS: Sorry, Milwaukee; tough luck, Pittsburgh. San Diego is America’s new beer capital. The current issue of Men’s Journal, ranking the “Top Five Beer Towns in the U.S.,” rates our city number one. “San Diego isn’t just surfing and LaDainian Tomlinson anymore,” the Journal says. “The variety of beers across the city is the most eclectic in the country.” And “30th Street in North and South Parks is easily the nation’s best beer boulevard.” The magazine’s favorite brews: Alpine Ale and Lost Abbey’s Duck-Duck-Gooze.

NAME’S SAKES: Veteran Old Globe director Jack O’Brien may be bound for his fourth Tony award. He’s been tapped to direct Love Never Dies, the long-awaited sequel to the hugely successful Phantom of the Opera. Love opens in London in March and goes to New York in November 2010 ... Maureen Sullivan, the San Diego Magazine president and publisher, has been chosen as the face of the San Diego Food Bank’s annual Holiday Drive — an honor she shares this year with a guy named Tony Gwynn ... CNN talk-show host Larry King, still riding the crest after a half-century in radio, comes in November 8 as the author-lecturer for the annual San Diego Jewish Book Fair.

BOOM & BUST: If retail sales are starting to make a comeback, customers still aren’t exactly beating down the doors. At Carlsbad’s Plaza Camino Real shopping center on recent Thursday and Friday mid-mornings, business was sufficiently slow for police to rope off two of the parking lots for practicing chases and street busts.

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