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I’m sitting in a slab of concrete under a freeway, eating a ceviche black as eyeliner.

There might be seven seats in this restaurant. Or maybe it’s 12 minus five. That area under the stairs might also be a couple seats, or it might just be a very inviting storage area with a flower vase. The restaurant is so small your core instinct is to count seats and tabulate if Alchemy – Choose Thy Poison is a real place with a sane business plan or if it’s a social art project designed to question the reality of restaurants and business plans.

There’s a large, floor-to-human-height window near our table. Through it, I notice someone didn’t make their bed this morning. It’s a decision I deeply empathize with. It’s moments like this that make you acutely aware that Alchemy is also technically the courtyard of a six-room micro-hotel called Narcissus. Not the kind of massagey boutique hotel you’re thinking of with soft woods, obscene amounts of linen, and opinions on bonsai therapy. It’s a near-Brutalist cube of base industrial materials—concrete and acrylics bent and molded into a series of alcoves, with pods to sleep in. Sculptures lie behind glass like Tilda Swinton circa 2013.

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The window to the unmade bed forcibly crams light voyeurism into the dining experience. The hotel and Alchemy feel like the parts of Mexico I love the most. Although Mexico has its multimillion-dollar restaurants, a vast majority of the best street-level places feel like you’re temporarily recreating in a very lovely construction project.

Alchemy’s location is what most people comment on (“I can’t believe a place like this exists on a block like this.”)—jammed at the bottom of the freeway embankment on the northeast side of Barrio Logan. But that makes it distinctly Barrio, the historic cradle of San Diego’s Hispanic and Chicano culture. The I-5 freeway was built through Barrio in 1963—a fairly traumatic gashing of the neighborhood—and residents responded by painting epic murals on the ugly concrete belly of eminent domain. Where some would’ve just accepted the industrial blight, locals saw shade for a park. There is a deep history here of turning concrete into art, and Alchemy carries that on.

The vision for the property came from owner Benjamin Longwell, whose company—The Society of Master Craftsmen—sounds like it wears a monocle. Longwell is part of the new guard of developers who focus on urban infill. Instead of adding to the city sprawl, they find unused or underutilized parcels of land in established neighborhoods, then build creative mixed-use spaces that, in perfect scenarios, add something of value for locals.

I’m not making a case for architectural sainthood, but there isn’t a huge list of developers who would look at the line of cars exiting the freeway in front of Alchemy and think, “We must build here.” So in that sense, Narcissus and Alchemy feel additive to the community, not extractive.

I stare back at Alchemy’s ceviche negro, a glossy mound of halibut that looks inspired by the La Brea Tar Pits or melted vinyl records. Chef-owner and Mexico City–native Eddy Cortes saves all the trimmings of his dishes (garlic and onion skins, vegetable shavings), then chars them into an ash to create a recado negro—a Yucatán specialty that usually involves toasted chiles, achiote paste, vinegar, and a ton of warm spices. He tosses local halibut with squid ink, tamari, charred pineapple, and citrus. The usual charm of ceviche is that it’s light, bright, full of color. Not here.

It is fantastic—acidic but with a whole world of toasted, warm flavors, like ceviche that’s seen some things.

The menu from Cortes—a home cook his whole life, only having taken it professional a few years ago with his popular pop-up, Barracruda—is really a tour of specialties from various states in Mexico.

A crema de poblano has the blended ghost of rajas at its core: an emulsion of roasted poblanos with butter-sautéed onions and garlic, plus a touch of milk that’s topped with queso fresco, chile ancho, and morita oil. Morita—a smoky Mexican condiment made from dried and smoked red jalapeños for a less intense, fruitier cousin of chipotle—is the key here. It specializes in spiking fats (guacamole, fried eggs, burritos). Sop up the crema with house-baked garlic-rosemary sourdough, blackened from the ash of a corn husk.

Smoked tuna is a Baja gift that’s become an anchor for most San Diego taco shops, and Alchemy combines mesquite-smoked yellowtail with caramelized onions, sweet peppers, and Chihuahua cheese (the OG quesadilla filling), then stuffs it in a perfectly baked masa empanada. The result is somewhere between a TJ Oyster Bar taco, a calzone, and a tamale—but with extra flavor and more black hue from cuttlefish ink.

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Alchemy’s huaraches de res is Cortes’ ode to where he’s from. Huaraches are the New Haven–style pizza of Mexican food—thick, oblong masa flatbread layered with refried beans and a payload inspired by the Mexico City markets the chef grew up roaming with his dad: braised beef (braseado), avocado salsa, pickled vegetables, salsa macha, and jocoque (Mexico’s fermented dairy product, like a cross between crema and labneh).

Alchemy’s seared tuna crudo gets a tad abused by the riot of big flavors: charred hibiscus salsa, avocado salsa, pickled grapes, pomegranate salsa macha, and chipotle aioli. It’s a fate that also tempers the joy of the zarandeado, with the adobo marinade on the shrimp fighting a bit with recado negro and chipotle crema. Sticking with curmudgeonly food critic notes, flies are a part of the Alchemy experience, at least during our visit. They’re fairly hard to evict from the outside world, but more measures could be taken to discourage their participation.

The oxtail tetelas—like a Mexican pupusa—are a diary note from Cortes’ travels to Tlaquepaque, where they famously superboost their salsa with a touch of instant coffee. First, Cortes braises the oxtail with beer and Mexican spices. Then he blends that braising liquid into a salsa with beef tallow, guajillo, charred onions, tomatoes, and black garlic. Keeping with the goth food theme, the oxtail goes into masa negra infused with squid ink.

Desserts are where you realize just how deeply Alchemy is committed to the art bit. Rarely do you see a neighborhood bistro trying to pull off trompe l’œil—the French specialty of making pastries and other desserts look like fruit or other everyday objects. (The phrase means “to deceive the eye” and is the historical precedent for the Is It Cake? phenomenon.) Pastry chef Catherinne Avila does, though. A “Naranja” comes out in the form of a mandarin, but inside is orange blossom mousse, apricot jelly, and sablée (a delicate, crumbly shortcrust). A “Philosopher’s Stone” comes in the form of a brick of gold with a serpent on top; inside are mango mousse, mango-Tajín jelly, and a coconut dacquoise.

As Barrio Logan enters an apprehensive phase—its creative culture and restaurant scene growing rapidly, bringing economic promise face-to-face with the need to protect the Chicano way of life—this concrete tuckaway from a Mexico City kid feels like a good step. The Barrio has a long history of making art in unexpected places, and Alchemy carries that a little further.

Photos Credit: Dee Sandoval

The Perfect Order: Vulture Martini | Potato Pavé | Crab Cake

Kory Stetina is a long way from learning what vegan food was through a pamphlet at punk-rock shows in his teens. He stands in his dream restaurant, Vulture, wearing a non-sportsy sports coat. He’s married with a child. There’s a very non-punk potato pavé on the monogrammed plate, the servers are in tux-adjacent attire, and this whole building in University Heights has been turned into a plant-based funhouse with formidable, obsessive style.

Despite the earmarks of midcentury continental formalism, five out of 10 people in here wear arcane t-shirts. Word got out early on that Vulture was a fine-dining experience, and while there’s a tableside Caesar and velvet curtains and soft, artful furniture, that was never the intent. Stetina had to do some PR legwork to pop the “special occasion” balloon that floated over the project—another collaboration between himself and Arsalun Tafazoli of CH Projects—and it seems to be working.

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One of the t-shirt people I recognize: Justin Pearson of The Locust and Three One G Records. A thoughtful and progressive punk force in SD, he’s seated at a corner table with individuals who look like they’ve at least dabbled in if not dedicated their lives to graphic design and can casually play a theremin near a rare fern. Vulture captures that same dinner-party-for-creative-people mood that the Middletown bar Starlite first brought to the city.

It’s a place for grown-up punks, for ideas and ideals.

(Obtrusive but important note about punk rock and plant eaters: The rather genuine punk music of the 1970s and ’80s that eventually birthed Green Day and Nirvana and even, I guess, My Chemical Romance emerged from a philosophical and creative instinct to challenge status quos, which often meant expressing unpopular and political opinions in an excessively loud and urgent manner—pretty much exactly what Simon & Garfunkel were doing but far more invigorating and annoying. There were plenty of bands who got big because they had great hair and a good producer; there were other bands who got cult-famous based on the holy-wow way they expressed uncomfortable ideas, making people question the way they lived. Eating only plants was a part of this live-different worldview, and, like any good movement, it got co-opted by the tad too righteous, moral, and shame-mongery. It should be said that Stetina made his name in San Diego by being a philosophical vegan who’s un-mongery.)

To get to Vulture, you enter through Dreamboat, a well-lit, bright, Mr. Clean-ish, ’60s-era, plant-based, romantically American diner that’s all white and chrome and charm—poodle-skirt notions and connoisseur coffee and smoked potato latkes and Impossible burgers and baked goods and milkshakes and cocktails. Seating occupancy: one-and-a-half people on Ozempic (fine, it’s 10).

In the back corner of this tiny diner is an antique host stand. The host takes you through a velvet curtain, down the short hall, and through a door, until you enter into, what?

Some will call it a speakeasy, but it’s really just a fun surprise restaurant (“speakeasies” do still exist, but they’re not on OpenTable, and almost everyone with a project they call a “speakeasy” will, on their most honest days, admit it’s not a speakeasy).

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You’ll step into cavernous, amber-glow, lava-lamp darkness. So, the first experience Vulture offers all of us is temporary blindness, followed by the opportunity to behold the shockingly slow ability of human eyes to adjust to radical shifts in light. The music is on point, a mix of obscure indie tracks and guilty-pleasure soft-rock bangers. Thanks to listening bars, restaurants have become the stereo-system showrooms of America. Remember that guy in high school who one day showed up with box speakers in his trunk and a $6,000 head unit, an amp, subwoofers, and EQs, and his car sounded like Dr. Dre’s and Rick Rubin’s place of business? That guy is restaurants.

It had been open six weeks when it got the Michelin star. At six weeks, a restaurant is a newborn. Newborns wail and struggle to breathe. They’re cracking open their first panic attack. Nine months in the flotation tank of the mom spa, then—blammo—the landlord shuts off the water and fairly traumatically evicts them into a drafty world that has no clue about mood lighting.

It’s old food critic wisdom that restaurants need six months to get running and ready for real analysis. Crew members will have lied on their resumes, narcissists will find themselves bored, the strangely emotional demands of diners will break newbies. It’s a fresh organism dedicated to executing nightly public theater, and it takes time for all the parts to learn how to operate as a fluid whole—develop mutually beneficial roles, nail the timing, speak the unspoken language.

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Granted, the team at Lilo in Carlsbad aren’t newcomers, and they’ve had way more time than they ever wanted to plan this out. Plus, the partners—restaurateur John Resnick and chef Eric Bost—helped earn their restaurant across the street, Jeune et Jolie, a Michelin star (and they run its raved-about sister restaurant, Campfire, down the block).

“We’re lucky,” Resnick says. “About 80 percent of the people on our team, we either worked with immediately or they came back because they were excited about this project.”

The project is a 22-seat, tasting menu–only restaurant featuring Bost, longtime chef de cuisine Dusan Todic, wine director Savannah Riedler (formerly of Post Ranch Inn and two-Michelin-starred Saison), and beverage director Andrew Cordero (Jeune et Jolie and Campfire). It’s four years in the making. When a 10,000-square-foot building became available on State Street in 2021—the last of its kind on one of Carlsbad’s most up-and-coming drags—they jumped at it. The plan was to build a massive all-day restaurant (Wildland, now open) and, behind it, tiny Lilo, where they could showcase what their vision of the ultimate San Diego dinner experience could be. It’s the kind of James Beard Award and Michelin bait that ambitious restaurateurs dream of and makes basic sense when they have a chef-partner like Bost.

“Campfire and Jeune—from the time leases were signed to opening doors—took about 12 months,” Resnick says. “So I kind of felt like, alright, 18 months should be doable.” He pauses. “It was not.”

At that time, the pandemic was still slowly releasing its chokehold. Supply chains had been shot with a billion tranquilizer darts. Building two restaurants at a time while exhibiting a noble American amount of ambition was no picnic. The week after the project finally broke ground, the construction lead on the project—“the only person more essential to the buildout than us as owners,” Resnick says—departed. A fun idiosyncrasy of construction in North County is that most contractors live 40 minutes away and prefer freelance gigs closer to home. So, finding help was hard. Plus, a new ordinance had been passed in Carlsbad since Resnick opened his first two restaurants.

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“I was down in Baja having lunch when I got an email about needing a ‘minor site development plan,’” Resnick remembers. “I was like, ‘Well, it’s got the word minor in it; it’s probably not a big deal.’ That one thing added nine months to the project.”

Project costs ballooned. Hems were hawed. The buzz on this project had been loud, and now the scene wondered and whispered. I ask Bost and Resnick if there was a time they considered giving up or drastically reducing the vision.

“It came up, yeah,” Resnick says. “At the end of the day, it was a ‘the only way out is through’ type of thing.”

They thought they’d launch in July 2023. The doors opened in April 2025.

The Redemption

For Bost, the unveiling of that restaurant was especially redeeming. In 2020, he’d lost what felt like everything. He’d spent 20 years working his way through some of the world’s best kitchens: Le Cirque, The Ritz-Carlton in St. Thomas, Alain Ducasse, and both The Lodge at Torrey Pines and The Inn at Rancho Santa Fe in San Diego. He hit the top when he was named executive chef for Guy Savoy, launching the famed French chef’s elaborate Vegas restaurant and then overseeing his places in Singapore. In 2017, ready to do his own thing, he returned to SoCal and spent two years developing the idea for his dream restaurant. He finally opened his unpretentious tasting-menu place, Auburn, in LA in 2019.

If you don’t know the name Christophe Rull yet, you will soon. Born and raised in Marseille in southern France, Rull started his apprenticeship at age 15 before five years of culinary school where he studied cooking and pastry. He bounced from Michelin-starred kitchens to luxury hotels to the École Nationale Supérieure de Pâtisserie (ENSP), the prestigious pastry school that Alain Ducasse (record holder for most awarded Michelin stars on the planet) founded in 1999.

After France, Rull opened Aria Resort & Casino in Las Vegas and worked at MGM Grand. He won season 7 of the Food Network’s Halloween Wars, followed by another win on Holiday Wars. He appeared on Bake Squad and then topped it all off with the title of U.S. Chocolate Master in 2021 and a fifth-place finish in the 2022 World Chocolate Masters.

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So, all of this is to say, the guy can bake. And he’s about to open his first shop of his own. Christophe Rull Patisserie opens later this month in San Marcos. 

Rull can bake, sure. But he’s smart, too—he knows San Diego is the place to be for the best food and quality of life. After six years in Las Vegas, he accepted the role of executive pastry chef at the AAA Five Diamond Park Hyatt Aviara Resort, Golf Club & Spa in Carlsbad from 2016 to 2021. “I fell in love with this area,” he says. But after he quit to pursue his dream of competing at the world championship, he came back to the US jobless and unsure of what to do next.

“It’s the same high as athletes—you go to the Olympic Games, and you’re sacrificing two years of your life to prepare for that big event, and once the event is done, then you’re done,” he laughs. So he asked himself “What am I doing now?” He ended up at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles as the executive pastry chef for a new concept, which allowed him hands-on decision making from development all the way to opening. Basically, it was a dress rehearsal for launching his own place. 

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Rull decided on San Marcos for his first patisserie for a few reasons. One, he loves North County’s chill vibe. Two, he sees all the development potential over the next few years. Getting in now will pay off later, he’s betting. The North City suite is on the small side—around 1,200-square-feet total, with around one-third as kitchen space and the remainder front of house. But he doesn’t need a ton of space to realize his ethos of “simplicity well done.”

“I like to stay really fundamental, and to the classics, such as a good butter croissant or almond croissant,” he explains. His menu will include his famous cinnamon roll and sourdough bread, plus around a half dozen different breakfast pastries, croissants, French macarons, danishes, eclairs, chia seed pudding, cookies, and some sandwiches like a classic French ham and cheese and chicken pesto, all made with imported French butter and flour. 

He’ll offer around 10 eclairs at a time, ranging from classic vanilla and lemon meringue to passion fruit mango, salted caramel, tiramisu, and more. Coffee service will be simple, featuring Lavazza drip coffee and traditional espresso. 

It’s a family-run business, with his wife Wilma working side-by-side with him. They both decided to leave the luxury hotel world to take a chance on the dream, something that Rull says takes risk and sacrifice. “[This] is where I wanted to be,” he says. 

Christophe Rull Patisserie opens late August or early September at 251 North City Drive, Suite 121 in San Marcos. 

San Diego Restaurant News & Food Events

The (Brief) Return of Small Bar! 

For one-night only, everyone who has yearned for the return of University Heights’ Small Bar will get their wish. Better still, the pop-up is going to feature its famous fried chicken as orders of either half or full birds, and it’s all going down at Grand Ole BBQ in North Park on Monday, August 25 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. I strongly suggest arriving beforehand, because my inner psychic is predicting a ridiculously fast sellout. 

Beth’s Bites

• Despite some premature reports in other outlets, Elizabeth Ruiz says her restaurant Todo Pa’ La Cruda is not opening a third location in Pacific Beach. The existing two locations on Imperial Avenue and Logan Avenue are still up and running, and while she’s not currently looking hard for a third location, you never know when the perfect spot will present itself. (It’s just not in PB, for now.)
• It always tickles me just a bit when a company with a specific location in its name moves outside of that location. (See: North Park Beer Company in Bankers Hill, for one.) Coronado Coffee Company is expanding off the island (that’s not technically an island) and opening a second location in Point Loma, bringing its specialty coffees, matchas, teas, steamers, and other goodies across the water. 
• If pop-ups defined the first half of 2025, visiting chef collaborations might be what’s happening the second half. Next up is chef Omar Hernandez from Ensenada’s Celida Cafe heading to Wildflour in Liberty Station, where he’ll work with Phillip Esteban on their first brunch takeover on Sunday, August 10. Expect some Baja-inspired brunch plates like crispy lamb with sunny side eggs, passion fruit French toast, and Mexican eggs benedict with habanero hollandaise. Light on calories, it will not be.

Listen Now: The Latest in San Diego’s Food and Drink Scene

Have breaking news, exciting scoops, or great stories about new San Diego restaurants or the city’s food scene? Send your pitches to [email protected].

Every year for the Best of San Diego issue, we ask readers to nominate and vote for a San Diego classic restaurant they want food critic Troy Johnson to review. Whichever they vote for, he goes. Last year, they sent him to Rocky’s Crown Pub. This year… Mexican classic, El Indio.

The Perfect Order: Taquitos with Everything | Chicken Tamale | Mordiditas

When you’re credited with inventing the entire concept of the taquito, pretty much every other dish you create is going to pout in that cigar-shaped shadow. Unless you sous vide a couple narwhals, the taquito is gonna dominate your story.

San Diego’s El Indio is widely cited as the global birthplace of the taquito. (Note from our nonexistent legal team: Like any food origin story, it’s contentious—many will tell you a small, rolled taco had been a staple in Mexico for generations; others claim an LA taco stand beat SD to it. But by and large, El Indio has been granted paternity for the word “taquito” and cited as the first in the US to both sell and widely popularize the iconic thing—which happens to fit our narrative nicely, so we’re leaning in.)

So, El Indio’s mordiditas are that almost-famous entourage dish that deserves more applause. Sliced segments of taquito, about the size of pigs in a blanket, are assembled in a heap on a plate and absolutely waterboarded with nacho cheese and pickled jalapeños. They’re essentially loaded taquito nachos, an idea whose glory, in a just world, will outlive us all and echo in Valhalla. They solve a longstanding problem with every single batch of nachos that has been made in humankind—that each and every chip is denied an equitable amount of cheese or load.

Most nachos are built as an altar to American capitalism: The top couple of chips accumulate a vast majority of the cheese and the rest of the chips just keep hearing rumors of a trickle-down until they protest. If our species ever gets cut from the roster of the universe, the fact that we put a man on the moon but could never equally dress our nachos should be examined by our successor species as a possible cause.

El Indio’s taquito rubble comes in a biblical flood of nacho cheese. It’s a snack-bar treat for people whose therapists have listened to their fantasy of placing their open, eagerly receptive mouths beneath the queso pump—albeit with far better taquitos made from scratch.

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The dish isn’t gonna knock your socks off, but it’s satisfying in a calorie-gargling way, a celebration of the fact that merely entering a taco shop releases us from acknowledging the physical limits of human arteries. Would El Indio’s mordiditas be better if the cheese was scaled back and partnered with a crema, or if the cheese was lovingly dirtied with chipotle in adobo, or if they came topped with a lawn-sized pile of cilantro and onions and activated charcoal ash from the sacred cenotes of Chichén Itzá? Shut up and eat your naquitos.

It feels simultaneously excessive and absolutely correct to say El Indio is a San Diego legend and global food icon. In 1940, Ralph Pesqueira Sr. was working in one of the many aerospace headquarters that surrounded Lindbergh Field (the SD International Airport’s original name), building planes and war machines. As a side dream, he started making and selling fresh corn tortillas by hand on the corner of Grape and India Streets.

As with most food success stories, there was a key moment of technological innovation (consider In-N-Out’s invention of the two-way speaker or Pizza Hut introducing online ordering to the pie masses). Around 1945, Pesqueira—who we might call the Thomas Edison of Mexican food—invented San Diego’s first tortilla-making machine. By hand, he could whip up 30 dozen a day; with the machine, he cranked out 30 dozen an hour. A full-fledged tortilla factory was born, the effect of which was massive for putting training wheels on the local Mexican food culture that would boom decades later.

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When aero coworkers asked him if he could make a handheld, good-travelin’ food for lunch pails, he thought of flautas (a Mexican staple with global roots—a flour tortilla usually wrapped around meat and rolled into the shape of a flute, then fried).

He did a smaller version with fresh masa corn tortillas. The taquito entered the world. He sold each for 18 cents.