San Diego Magazine's Happy Half Hour

Sometimes the best restaurant is the one everyone tells you not to open. This week on Happy Half Hour , Troy Johnson and Jackie Bryant sit down with chef Mario Cassineri, who left Michelin-starred kitchens behind to make handmade pasta in Barrio Logan. Raised in Milan, he trained under Italy's first three-Michelin-star chef before trading fine dining for a burned-out building everyone else overloo...

Fresh fruit, pillowy mochi, and a philosophy rooted in slowing down. This week on Happy Half Hour, Troy Johnson and Jackie Bryant sit down with Gemma Matsuyama Yamada, the pastry chef behind Kimochi, whose seasonal fruit mochi has quietly become one of San Diego's most sought-after pop-ups. After honing her craft at some of the country's most celebrated restaurants—including Blue Hill at Stone Bar...

Encinitas just got its first-ever speakeasy — or rather, its first hidden cocktail den — and the Happy Half Hour crew couldn't even find the front door. In this week's episode, hosts Troy Johnson and Jackie Bryant broadcast live from inside Anigma, the stunning new bar tucked behind the legendary Roxy on First Street, joined by Bebemos tequila CEO Preston Caffrey to sip on some of San Diego's best...

We tried 18 dishes across savory and sweet categories, these are our favorite dishes Every year, the San Diego County Fair becomes the city's biggest pop-up restaurant with 150+ vendors, a million visitors, and one very serious food fight. In this episode of Happy Half Hour, Troy Johnson and Jackie Bryant go behind the scenes of the Fair-tastic Food Competition, now in its fourth year. Troy and Ja...

It's Switchfoot Bro-Am week. The epic, annual, San Diego-est thing—one of the best free beach parties in the country that does good for kids who need a community to rally around them. Doesn't just raise money, but makes the kids part of it. For this episode of Happy Half Hour, we asked Switchfoot lead singer Jon Foreman and drummer Chad Butler to take us to one of their favorite local spots—and th...

The chef and owner of Luigi's shares his journey from opening a small bar above Lake Como to lines forming around the block in Golden Hill for his pies. At 23, Luigi Agostini left his hometown of Varese, Italy for America, finding his way to San Francisco in search of adventure and new beginnings. Living with 17 other strangers, he soon began working in restaurant kitchens across the city and even...

The border is a huge part of why San Diego's food culture took off. The kitchen exchange of chefs and ideas and burning wood and seafood acid parties across San Ysidro built a Mexican-American style that's unlike anywhere else in the US.  That bordertown verve is the topic of conversation for the dinner party this week on Happy Half Hour . Hosts Troy Johnson and Jackie Bryant welcome back Claudett...

Leucadia's charm is in no small part because someone planted eucalyptus trees for railroad ties, but that wood turned out to be useless. So they just let those peely giants grow and grow, which is why the Leucadia stretch of PCH is now a majestic leafy canopy into what Troy calls "the mood"—not a city, but a state of mind. Spiritually Spanish, no sidewalks, dirt under your toenails, more than its...

On this episode of Happy Half Hour , Relic Bakery owners Samantha Bird and Derek Hadden pulled up with a selection of their best fare including Crunchwrap Supreme croissants, paté en croûte, an XO sausage wrapped in laminated dough, and a tahini strawberry cookie. Derek and Samantha share their Midwestern pandemic love story and discuss their culinary training in Copenhagen which includes a bike c...

The Blink-182 muse who grew up feeding Kelly Slater and Rob Machado at his mom's North Shore Hawaii house debuts Breakers Cafe, Bar & Grill Benji Weatherley walked into San Diego Magazine and immediately made everyone in the room feel like they'd known him their whole lives—which, if you grew up surfing in San Diego, you basically did.  The Momentum Generation kid; the guy whose mom essentially ra...

Happy Half Hour co-hosts Troy Johnson and Jackie Bryant pull up to Moe's by the Beach for a live episode with two guests who, between them, have thrown some of the most legendary parties Mission Beach has ever seen.  Eric Lightstein—who gave San Diego Cane's, the city's scrappiest and most beloved rock club—now runs this steakhouse out of the old Saska's space, and he's grinding his prime steak tr...

Some festivals happen because a city needs them. Others because one guy walked into a bar in Louisiana, saw someone playing accordion with their whole body, and never recovered. And thankfully, the latter is how Gator by the Bay became San Diego's largest Louisiana-themed festival. It returns to Spanish Landing park May 8 through 11. On this week's Happy Half Hour, co-founder Peter Oliver explains...

"I've wanted to be a chef since I was 4 years old. I'm a humble dude with a skateboard in the back of my truck. I'll stand behind the ingredients and let them shine before I do." This is why Travis Swikard has brought a plate of lightly poached local veggies to the  Happy Half Hour studio this week. It's both not what you expect from a chef who's trained under some of the biggest global names in F...

Brad Wise of Trust, Fort Oak, and Rare Society talks restaurant wins and terrors and names the best sandwiches in San Diego.   "We were scraping by, praying that we were going to have a busy weekend to make rent and—not only that, but payroll," recalls chef Brad Wise. Thank god his food was good and his wife had a job. It's been 10 years since his first existential terrors as a restaurateur. A dec...

A few years back, Accursio Lota—2017 World Pasta Champion and chef-owner of Cori Pastificio and the new Dora Ristorante which was named for his nonna—told us he raised snails under his family's staircase as a child in Sicily. Fattened them up on raw spaghetti and fresh herbs, eventually ending their journey on this planet with some butter and garlic. Turns out this was an entire neighborhood kid t...

It is now time, when hot dogs become communion wafers once again. The weather is Joe Musgrove's elbow. The Fernando Tatis baseball dance-swagger reenters. He is the most exciting right fielder in the history of the game, almost appearing on every play as if he has no idea to execute the task in front of him—until he defies gravity and pulls a baseball out of the the beginning of space, then throws...

All due respect to their highly sustainable role in the ecosystem and feeding the world, but sardines served as a dish on their own can be a significant challenge to your ability to enjoy eating as a concept. They are the seafoodiest seafood—as if the ocean itself was poured into a pot, reduced into a deeply intense stock, and served in tiny-fish form. But at The Fishery in Pacific Beach , chef-pa...

As the food writer for SDM since 2011, Troy has been compiling the " Best Restaurants " list in San Diego Magazine for the past 15 years. All year long, he eats throughout the city and keeps a running Notes document filled with the best restaurants and dishes and drinks he finds. It operates like his personal leaderboard. He shares that list in the issue every year alongside the readers' picks. He...

The industry built this one. Had it been half-ass, it never would've worked. Lion's Share opened up 14 years ago, a sliver of a dark den of a craft cocktail bar and semi-restaurant near Seaport Village. But on the wrong side of the street. Not a destination. Foot traffic, zilch.   And yet, the bartenders were some of the best in the city, experimenting with the fringes of what was possible. Back t...

San Diego's next-gen Filipino American chefs are bringing their adobo roots to the top kitchens     Multiple-time James Beard nominee Tara Monsod comes in to talk about kitchen life and the rise of Filipino food—the fare she grew up with—in San Diego. She and host Troy Johnson run through their list of the best date spots in the city, including oysters on the only rooftop hideout in North Park (De...

Terra chef Jeff Rossman spills secrets of the catering world and we name our favorite farm-to-table restaurants One of the absolute best deals in San Diego recently? A $12 ribeye from one of the better chefs in the city. A $10 pasta dish he made for a wedding. Jeff Rossman was one of the first local chefs to cook modern farm to table with his restaurant, Terra. Opened it in 1998 with his dad, who...

At Coco Maya, try chef Phil Humphrey's skirt steak with chimichurri, his big-knuckle lobster tacos, and a damn phenomenal coconut shrimp (the '80s classic will be slandered no more). What's your favorite soup in San Diego? The one that rearranges your DNA into a dumb, smiley emoji?  On this episode of  Happy Half Hour we do a fantasy soup draft of our 12 favorites in the city—from the corn piñon s...

#419 You've barely touched your fries. Why do you look hungry and not hungry at the same time? The big discussion on this week's episode:  Ozempic is the wobbly, wet-gremlin  Yelp commenter who wants to rain on America's happy restaurant parade. We re-air the interview you probably skipped the first time we had it a year ago because it sounded like tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory stuff. But now, the...

Broadcasting from The Shanty in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, Happy Half Hour looks at the week's biggest restaurant news, including the upcoming closures of Dreamboat and Vulture and the shuttering of Cucina Enoteca—plus an examination of why unpretentious neighborhood bars continue to anchor San Diego communities.  Host Troy Johnson also checks in on what's opening, welcomes back  Bebemos tequila founder...

One of Little Italy's top chefs is back. Hard to overestimate how much Ironside Fish & Oyster changed the game when it opened in Little Italy in 2014. It was the dream concept for Jason McLeod, a chef who'd earned two Michelin stars in Chicago (for Ria). Little Italy was the unloading dock of San Diego's legendary fishing fleets, had that rich seafood history but no epic seafood joint. McLeod and...