Petco Park is known for having some of the best food in baseball. They were even one of the first stadiums in the nation to bring in iconic and emerging local restaurants, craft beers, wine, and cocktails for a more upscale experience (we still love a good, classic hot dog). On this episode of Happy Half Hour, co-hosts Troy and David get the inside scoop on the ballpark’s food and drink scene at Alesmith’s 394 bar inside of Petco. With a stadium that holds nearly 50,000 visitors, vice president ...
Jun 27, 2023•45 min
Fair food is legendary—the logical extreme of American cuisine. The food court is Pinocchio’s island for people whose favorite invention is a deep fryer. We train for this. And this year we partnered with the San Diego County Fair to bring you the ultimate “Fairtastic Food Competition.” All told, three judges—myself, Chris Stone of @sdfoodies, and Nirit Wigdor of @sandiegoeats—tasted 36 dishes across six categories and named six of the best things to eat at the fair. One of my favorite humans, R...
Jun 13, 2023•55 min
This week on Happy Half Hour, our food and drink podcast that won a national award and we’ll never shut up about that fact… I try somewhat awkwardly to establish nostalgic bonds with David Kennedy, co-owner of James Coffee Co. James is the younger brother of a longtime friend (Lisa Kennedy, who owns The Corner Mercantile & Eatery in La Jolla). I vaguely remember going over to their house when we were in high school, and I’m fairly certain I falsified a memory of him learning guitar while we ...
Apr 28, 2023•1 hr 27 min
Long before “pivot” became a silver-lining buzzword, Tracy Borkum made a career out of it. For instance, the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla recently spent $105 million and tapped one of the top architects in the country to recast its iconic building into an ocean-facing art compound. And Borkum—a San Diego restaurateur who years ago got her BA in art history from UC Berkeley—became a big part of it. It was a dream, really: a merger of what she loved and studied (art) and what she made he...
Mar 24, 2023•1 hr 11 min
During the first terrifying shutdowns of the pandemic, Pulitzer-nominated photographer Jeffrey Brown and his partner started lowering bread out the window of his third-story studio in downtown San Diego. They used a basket and rock-climbing rope (Brown is serious about rocks and ropes, and once climbed El Capitan). People—very few people, at first—would pay for the bread Brown and his partner Jenny Chen were making upstairs. They’d always enjoyed food, pored over cooking mags, and made elaborate...
Mar 17, 2023•1 hr 22 min
I may not still be on TV if it weren’t for Catherine McCord. Nowadays, she’s one of the foremost cookbook authors in the US, with recipe bibles issued under her brand name Weelicious. She helps parents manage cooking without losing their minds and angrily writing off food as a concept, or just loading a Super Soaker with Goldfish crackers and shooting them at their kids as they head to work with stains on their shirts. She’s the CEO of her own nationwide meal delivery service for families, calle...
Mar 10, 2023•1 hr 13 min
Look, there are enough excellent brunch restaurants in San Diego that waiting hours for a seat at Morning Glory—Little Italy’s rose-hued bastion of breakfast pork belly and morning booze—feels, admittedly, a little silly. Our out-of-town friends gaze forlornly at happy, well-fed-looking strangers while we assure them that the forthcoming pancakes will be worth the delay. “There’s a Champagne vending machine,” we promise. Maybe it’s the pink tile ceiling. Or the trippy mirrored bathroom. But that...
Mar 03, 2023•1 hr 12 min
During the pandemic, actor Matthew Arkin got a call from his dad, Alan Arkin. “My dad says, ‘Hey, you know you can make aquavit at home?’” Matthew explains, sipping a damn delicious aquavit tonic in the SDM conference room. Matthew’s response was, essentially, “Uh, thanks, dad.” In Scandinavia, aquavit (the word means water of life) is everything. There are over 200 songs dedicated to it. In the U.S., it’s mostly known as the stuff they drink in Scandinavia—a bracing blast of northern booze that...
Feb 24, 2023•1 hr 17 min
Jennifer Carruthers is one hell of a sharp brain on wine. Not surprising. She had a successful career as an engineer before deciding she was far more interested in the structure and story of a good wine. So she spent a decade studying wine as a broker and distributor—eventually making it to the Advanced Sommelier level (an incredibly byzantine, difficult and rare knowledge of wine). Finally, she launched her own company, JC Select Wines, which specializes in hand-picking wines for special events...
Feb 17, 2023•1 hr 20 min
In the spirit of spirit month, we’re starting out with a well-deserved bang. Let’s talk about the liquor that comes in hot, and leaves us even hotter – sizzling with a well-paletted spice on the tip of our tongue and a soothing warmth in our bellies. I’m talking about tequila, baby. The tip of the iceberg in the Mexican spirits world. Some of the best are distributed right from San Diego. In fact, Happy Half Hour brings on an old friend who’s expanded his company’s rotation since his last featur...
Feb 09, 2023•1 hr 42 min
Most of you know Troy as our fearless leader and a frequent flier—or as the guy you wish you could text for recommendations on where to take your finicky mother-in-law to dinner in San Diego. (I just asked him for you; he suggests Fort Oak in Mission Hills). His college classmates, on the other hand, knew him as the guy who couldn’t cook. “I knew how to turn the knob on the microwave to the right,” he admits on this week’s podcast. The two women across from him on the mic are working to make sur...
Feb 02, 2023•1 hr 5 min
Over the last few decades we’ve really started to ask questions about what we’re eating. Does the green label really mean organic—or was it grown on an organic “section” of a farm, gobbling up pesticides in the wind? If I’m buying this tomato in January, and it was grown in Florida sand, picked unripe, and gassed on the train on the way to California—what, exactly, am I getting out of this? Why do some eggs look like mandarins and some look like a vague notion of the color yellow? Farmers market...
Jan 27, 2023•1 hr 12 min
Listen, I know it can seem like some of us at San Diego Magazine basically eat tacos and taste beer for a living. But it’s in pursuit of the story. Whatever it takes to get to the grist of it all. For you. You deserve this. And if that raises our BAC a tad, we’re there for you. For Stone Brewing’s Laura Ulrich, on the other hand, sampling IPAs is a major part of a hard day’s work. Officially one of Stone’s “small batch brewers,” it’s Laura’s job to research and develop new suds, tweaking recipes...
Jan 17, 2023•58 min
This cafe is one of the better places in San Diego to eat clean, sure. It’s also parents’ love for their daughter. This damn good salad—loaded with all kinds of greens and seeds and micronutrients in various natural forms—was all for her. Every parent knows the feeling. When your kid is sick or hurt, you will do the wildest things you never thought you’d do, uproot your life, quit jobs, take four extra jobs, do whatever it takes to help them regain their health. Parakeet Cafe is what Carol Roize...
Jan 10, 2023•1 hr 5 min
Oh man. Dear god. Thanks, you all. This year, you downloaded episodes of our podcast 276,977 times. As a San Diego media company just trying to create things of value where you’ll learn something, think about something in a different way—that’s a huge number. I’m sure Joe Rogan sneezes that number, but for us it’s pretty great. A lot of sneezes. When we launched “Happy Half Hour” in 2016, we had zero or near-zero idea what we were doing. Flailing at mics. Loghorrea-ing our way into the digital v...
Dec 24, 2022•1 hr 33 min
The future of seafood might be in San Diego. Not in Point Loma or Oceanside, but in a bioengineering facility in Sorrento Valley. From a single cell, BlueNalu is growing toro—bluefin tuna belly, the prize delicacy of most high-end sushi—in a perfectly hygienic bioreactor that looks like the giant stainless steel structures in the city’s top breweries. Their goal is creating world-class seafood without the need for fish. In turn, transforming a limited and unpredictable resource (seafood) into an...
Dec 16, 2022•1 hr 1 min
They don’t have a trash can in their kitchen. A fully operational, busy restaurant kitchen without a trash can. OK, that’s hyperbole. They do have a small one that is rarely ever used. The Plot in Oceanside keeps 99% of what they do out of the landfill. That is not normal. December is our “Environment Issue” of San Diego Magazine. As I wrote in my note at the beginning of the issue, it’s not about being perfect and it’s not an evangelical radical screed against any and all industry. The issue is...
Dec 09, 2022•1 hr 27 min
Mashed potatoes are the bedrock of Thanksgiving. If you do not have a creamy pile of spuds, you are exhibiting a flagrant disregard for the rules of the feast. Mashless people seem more like thanks takers. And Josh Mouzakes—the executive chef of Arlo at Town & Country, who trained for four months at French Laundry (lived in a garage nearby, eating peanut butter sandwiches for the honor), then at Joel Robuchon in Vegas, a couple years at Hotel Del, and two recent appearances on Food Network—s...
Nov 23, 2022•1 hr 20 min
As a kid growing up in La Jolla, Annemarie Brown-Lorenz had swordfish bills sticking up out of the ground in her backyard. Her dad was a fifth generation local fisherman who believed in using every part of the fish. If you take a life from the sea, have the respect to use every part of that life. And Annemarie’s grandmother (a first-generation American from Slovenia) grew all her own food; believed if you stuck swordfish bills in the garden it would lend its nutrients to the soil. So forget the ...
Nov 17, 2022•54 min
There is a house in La Jolla that is almost entirely food. It overlooks Black’s Beach. It is a very, very nice house. Walk its grounds, and you come across blueberries and strawberries and cabbage and habañeros and herbs and goats and bees and chickens and greenhouses. What was once a tennis court on the grounds has been filled in with more food growing. It is a house-farm, an Eden on the sea cliff, and it’s become an epicenter of San Diego’s food scene. It’s owned by Michelle Lerach and her hus...
Nov 04, 2022•1 hr 9 min
Mariana Cardenas went home that day, gathered her five kids, told them the news. Then she called all the government assistance programs and informed them the Cardenas family no longer needed their help. “My oldest son is autistic,” she explains. “Two weeks earlier he’d told me he wanted to go to art school and I had to tell him we couldn’t afford it. So I got to tell him he was going.” The this that happened is one of my favorite stories of good I’ve come across in the San Diego food and drink s...
Oct 28, 2022•1 hr 24 min
About a week ago, I sat down for splashes of mezcal with Amar Harrag, who’s now successfully launched a few different drinks-and-dinner concepts on both sides of the border. His first, Tahona, created an unparalleled mezcal tasting bar to Old Town. He then opened Wormwood, the French-Baja cuisine and absinthe bar in North Park, which preserves the soul spot that was Jayne’s Gastropub. Finally, Tahona Baja in Ensenada—transforming two dry-docked, ark-looking wooden boats into mezcal tasting rooms...
Oct 21, 2022•1 hr 7 min
On this new podcast, we get a lesson on natural wines from Chelsea Coleman—co-founder of the Rose Wine Bar in South Park who just opened Mabel’s Gone Fishing, a gintoneria and oyster bar that also has natural wines. Seems like just a few years ago, natural wines were what your kooky friend with the urban chickens and the Wendell Berry tattoo drank. The nat-wine ethos was always noble: wines made from grapes grown on sustainable and ideally organic methods, inoculated only with naturally occurrin...
Oct 14, 2022•1 hr 24 min
The story of Skrewball deserves its own biopic, if not a 30-part Netflix series. On the surface, you see a good-time peanut butter whiskey from San Diego—one that defied all naysayers and became one of the top-selling spirits in the country. And then you talk to co-owner Steve Yeng and every twist of his life story makes your eyes bulge and your heart alternately sink and soar. His family fled the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, living in Thai refugee camps. In the San Diego Magazine offices for t...
Sep 23, 2022•2 hr 53 min
Restaurant openings, restaurant closings, and Manny Machado becomes a nail tech. Just kidding, but only about the restaurant closings. Gotcha again. There will be no Manny-pedis in the near future. On this episode of Happy Half Hour, David and Troy talk to vice president of ticket sales and membership services for the Padres, Curt Waugh. Waugh joined the franchise in June 2014 after being with Spurs Sports and Entertainment where he managed ticket sales for the San Antonio Rampage ice hockey tea...
Sep 16, 2022•35 min
So much history in this place. It’s where brewers came up with one of the beers that put San Diego on the national map. It’s where a person signed a deal for a billion dollars and sold to a multinational corporation. And it’s where an indie brewer bought it back, and took it into the new age. The place is the palace of beer that is Ballast Point in Miramar. The beer is Sculpin IPA. For this podcast, we sat down with five evolutions of Sculpin in front of us—from grapefruit Sculpin to a Aloha Scu...
Sep 12, 2022•1 hr 3 min
Lake San Marcos is such a mystery to me. Like if you took the water feature from a miniature golf course and expanded that over a couple miles—that’s what it would be. A human-made oasis. Fake? You bet. Kinda magical? Also that. And that’s the kind of hokey water hocus pocus I live for. I’m the kind of guy who thinks sequins is the height of American culture. This podcast we recorded live from the Mister A’s of Lake San Marcos—Amalfi Cucina Italiana. Chef Marcello Avitabile is a six-time World P...
Sep 01, 2022•34 min
When I went to Padres games as a kid, a man stood 30 feet away from you and hurled a hot dog at your face. Maybe you got some popcorn whose best attribute was that it looked yellow and had enough salt to turn your insides into prosciutto. Oh, and you got some flat Coke. If you only drank sodas at baseball games in the 80s, you wouldn’t know the product came with bubbles. To be honest, I kinda miss that hot dog throwing man. But I don’t miss the food. Modern baseball food is worlds better. You go...
Aug 26, 2022•37 min
Not sure how many San Diego restaurants have a real, bonafide Shepard Fairey art piece—sanctioned by the artist, famous for his propaganda art like the Obey (Andre the Giant) and Hope (Obama) series—but Shank & Bone in North Park is one of them. So technically the Vietnamese restaurant is a pretty notable art gallery. Their pho sure is some art. So are their fish sauce chicken wings, salty and sweet. In our June “Best Restaurants” issue, Shank was named readers’ choice for Best Vietnamese an...
Jul 08, 2022•1 hr 18 min
This meat looks geological. Like lovely, delicious geodes. In the refrigerated case, huge racks of Brandt Beef just lay there at Ranch45—have been laying for a while (40 days, says one tag). When meat is dry-aged like this, it begins to look prehistoric and unlocks a whole new universe of flavors. Excess moisture is drawn out of the meat over time, breaking down the protein, tenderizing it and concentrating its steakness. It works the same way as when you “reduce” a stock or a soup to crank up t...
Jun 15, 2022•45 min
