Category Archives: San Diego eats + drinks

around san diego - San Diego eats + drinks

cardamom cafe & bakery, home of the world’s best almond croissant

September 30, 2013

Eaman and I have started a new Sunday tradition: Each week we pick a different breakfast breakfast or coffee spot and practice Farsi. (If you’re late to the party, Eaman is Persian and fluent in Farsi.) Back in New York I had a Farsi tutor and was pretty dang proficient, but then we went traveling and and Spanish, Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese, Malay and Hindi vocabulary pushed all the Farsi knowledge out of my brain.

I’m getting back on track, and for yesterday’s class, we went to Cardamom Cafe & Bakery, a simple spot in North Park. Our French toast was solid but way too huge, and the huevos were certainly nothing to write home about. So why bother talking about this place at all?

Two words: almond croissant, probably the best you will ever have and the cafe’s most popular pastry. It goes well with the house coffee, which is usually so tasteless in restaurants that I almost always go for a latte. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that Cardamom’s coffee is actually really wonderful. Beyond the baked goods, the outdoor patio is super pleasant and always filled with dogs. Yesterday we met Teddy’s brother from another mother (not really), an Anatolian shepherd. Fun fact of the day: Anatolian shepherds have six toes!

Come for the croissants, stay for the pups.

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around san diego - San Diego eats + drinks

the cutest little mexican spot: ranchos cocina in ocean beach

September 11, 2013

If your restaurant has a cute outdoor patio, I’m probably going to like it. If your restaurant has quality rolled tacos, I’m going to love it. Those two criteria came together for me recently at Ranchos Cocina, a Mexican spot in Ocean Beach with the most darling outdoor space. (Oddly enough, the other diners sat inside! What the what?) The space is more like a home backyard with tons of hanging plants and casual seating. There were even little birdies chirping by our table side. It was basically the enchanted forest from Sleeping Beauty — with margaritas.

The menu is, in a word, large. But they also seem to have the most vegetarian options I’ve ever seen at a Mexican restaurant in San Diego. My cousin found the veg fajitas pretty bland, but I’m curious how the tofu options taste. On my end, I loved my beef rolled tacos and Eaman’s enchilada-taco plate was happily devoured. That said, this place wins more in the ambiance department than in the food department, but it’s certainly a solid choice, especially if you have vegetarian diners.

Oh, and the margarita glasses are all sorts of kitschy wonderful. Check it out:

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around san diego - San Diego eats + drinks

donut bar: san diego’s first artisinal donut shop

August 21, 2013

Beyond San Diego’s plentiful Mexican food, I’m always whining about all the foods in New York that I can’t find here. Well, I can check artisinal donuts off the list now because San Diego recently opened Donut Bar, a gourmet donut shop with a long list of flavors that rotate each day, everything from nutella, creme brulee and red velvet to birthday cake, chai and chocolate Heath.

I met my friend, Gloria, for breakfast — I use the term breakfast lightly — just one hour after the place opened. They make about 1,000 donuts every day and if you go too late, especially on weekends, you run the risk of fewer flavors to choose from. (The hours of operation read “Mon-Fri 7am — Sold Out.”)

Gloria ordered the glazed and I got the coconut drizzled with chocolate. The donuts, about the size of my face (no, really), are soft, spongy and totally on par with Dough, my favorite spot in New York. They also sell coffee and tea, and host a quaint upstairs cafe with regular seating as well as leather loungers with built-in electrical sockets. It’s one of the few places I’ve come across in San Diego that actually deserves the hype.

Check it out…

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around san diego - San Diego eats + drinks

dishcrawl carlsbad

June 17, 2013

Seeing as how I’m not a big drinker, I’m not one to get excited about a pub crawl. But a food crawl — where you hop from restaurant to restaurant with a group of strangers-turned-friends — that’s something I could get excited about. So when Dishcrawl invited me to participate in one of their events, which takes diners to four different restaurants in one night, I said, “Yes, please!”

The restaurants are kept secret until the first location is revealed 48 hours before the event; the rest of the food spots are revealed as the night goes on. In the meantime, meals are eaten, connections are made and friendships are formed. I believe wholeheartedly that food is what brings people together best and during Dishcrawl, Eaman and I made some great connections and new friends. Seeing as how we’re still new to the city, it was a wonderful way to meet locals.

Oh, and how was the food, you ask?

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around san diego - San Diego eats + drinks

buona forchetta in south park

June 5, 2013

For me, Buona Forchetta was love at first Instagram. I had seen the new Neapolitan pizzeria shared on Instagram by some San Diego locals, and I think it was the combination of twinkling string lights and location that got me. The restaurant is located on a quiet stretch of South Park and boasts a minimal, but authentic menu and a fresh-off-the-Italian-boat staff. In fact, the night we were there last week, the owner’s mother was in town from Italy, serving up her own dessert menu. That was our first hint at the deliciousness to come.

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around san diego - San Diego eats + drinks

brunch at fig tree cafe

April 8, 2013

The plan was to go to Snooze, one of the most popular brunch spots in San Diego that happens to be in our neighborhood. The week before Teddy arrived, we decided to take advantage of our fleeting freedom and work-at-home status (definitely can’t step away for too long now given the pup’s hourly bathroom needs) and walked into Snooze only to find out the wait was 40 minutes on a Wednesday at 10 a.m. Sorry, but I gave up waiting for restaurants towards the end of my New York tenure.

Screw it, we said, and walked around the corner to the small, cute and less crowded Fig Tree Cafe. The menu has all the sweets and savories you’d want at reasonable prices. Eaman and I shared the veggie scramble ($9.25 for eggs with goat cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, spinach, toast and the most perfect roasted potatoes) as well as French toast with whipped cream and strawberries ($10.45). Make sure to try the orange zest-flavored syrup, too. It’s got zing.

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around san diego - San Diego eats + drinks

balboa international market

March 27, 2013

Given his Persian roots, naturally one of the first questions Eaman asked upon arriving in San Diego was, “Where can we get a decent kabob around here?” It’s a tough one to answer because despite a fairly large Iranian population, San Diego can’t lay claim to as many great Persian food options as you’d think. Iranians give most of the restaurants lukewarm reviews, and the food is regarded as average at best. (One that gets a lot of recognition is Bandar. We haven’t been yet, but if we asked where to find the most expensive kabob, Bandar would surely be the answer.)

That said, if you don’t have a Persian mother who serves up some of the best asheh reshteh and fesenjoon you’ve ever tasted, I’m sure you’ll be as happy as I was at Balboa International Market. Last week for Persian New Year, we checked out the part-Middle Eastern/Indian grocery store, part-fast-food joint, where we ordered the lamb koobideh (a ground lamb kabob) and boneless chicken kabob plates, both of which came with a roasted tomato, mound of rice, lavash bread and side salad. (The salad is a nod to Western customers because it’s definitely not traditional.) The quality of meat was great — tender, juicy and well-marinated — and I definitely went to town on the sumac, a spice gingerly sprinkled on the rice. In my case, it was shoveled on top. I really can’t get enough.

Despite what my lace top might imply, it’s certainly not a fancy place, but for the price, taste and quality, Balboa Market is your best bet for Persian food, even according to an native son like Eaman. (Oh, and they make fresh noon barbari, a traditional oven-baked flatbread, too!)

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around san diego - San Diego eats + drinks

phuong trang: authentic vietnamese in san diego

March 11, 2013

Convoy is one smorgasbord of delicious Asian food. It’s a street in the neighborhood of Kearny Mesa that’s filled with eats from Thailand, China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam and The Philippines. Food is usually cheap and almost always authentic, but the problem is picking a place. How do you know what’s best when there are so many options?

Well, you blindly pick one.

OK, maybe you shouldn’t do that, but that method worked well for me on Saturday night. If my recent hunger pangs for pho meant anything, we started knowing that we wanted Vietnamese food. Since Yelp and its too-many opinions can be overwhelming, I flipped through San Diego Magazine‘s Asian Food Guide issue instead and took a shot in the dark.

The place? Phuong Trang. The prices? Crazy good. (Like $6.25-for-a-large-noodle-entree good.) The food? Also crazy good — Vietnamese with everything from pho and noodle bowls to hot pots and rice paper wraps (a DIY dish Eaman loved in Vietnam). Apparently my blind pick was pretty on-target because the next morning a friend told me that Phuong Trang comes highly recommended from her Vietnamese friends.

Between the six of us, there were shrimp noodle bowls, vegetarian noodle bowls, pho and garlic chicken wings. The bun xao bo hoac ga — a beef noodle dish and our favorite street eat in Hanoi — was a faithful rendition and the garlic wings had a nice kick and tender meat. Oh and as for the pho, after all those dreams about hot, tangy soup, I wasn’t even paying attention when I ordered and asked for the vegetarian noodle bowl by accident. (It comes with its own non-fish, vegetarian sauce!) Fortunately this place is so good that even when you order just as absent-mindedly as your process was to pick the place, you still get something worth writing home about. (See: this blog post.) And I don’t totally mind that I messed up my own order; it’s a good excuse for going back sooner rather than later.

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