California Kebab & Beer Garden

Now that California Kebab and Beer Garden has been open for a year, I guess it is time we let the secret out.

Great beer selection, beers brewed in house (under the name "Amplified Ales"), good food and a comfy outdoor patio with an ocean view - what's not to like? Ever since they opened in our neighborhood of Pacific Beach, they've been our go-to spot.

Their house beers have been consistently good - particularly the Electrocution IPA.



The food is really tasty as well, and different from what you typically get in other craft-beer-centric spots. As you might suspect from their name, the menu is kebab-centric. Our favorite is the lamb doner. It is really good as a sandwich on pita, but we especially like it made into a salad:



Our favorite sides are their falafel and zucchini:



If you are looking for something over the top, look no further than the doner fries:



In addition to local craft beers, they also usually have a few lower-alcohol German beers on tap. On Wednesday nights they serve them in liter steins for five bucks - a nice way to enjoy a relaxed evening.



The sunset view from the patio does not suck:



California Kebab is located at the South end of the second level of the Promenade - in the spot that once was Da Kine's Plate Lunches.

California Kebab & Beer Garden
4150 Mission Blvd #208
San Diego, CA
858-270-5222

Collaboration Kitchen with Chef Amy DiBiase

This past Sunday we attended the latest Collaboration Kitchen dinner - a monthly event at Catalina Offshore Products. The "collaboration" is between Catalina (who provide the fish), Specialty Produce (who provide - you guessed it - the produce) and a guest chef who does the cooking. This month the chef was Amy DiBiase, who is now the executive chef at the Cosmopolitan Restaurant in Old Town.

The first dish she and her sous chef prepared was a shrimp ceviche. Unlike many shrimp ceviches which pre-cook the shrimp, this dish was only marinated - but for a longer period of time than is typical. This gave the shrimp a softer, but very pleasant texture. Persian cucumber added crunch, and orange juice and pureed melon rounded out the flavor.



The event was part Catalina Offshore infomercial - but not in a bad way. This is Dan from Catalina talking about the Mano de Leon ("Lion's Paw") sea scallops they sell:



And here is Tommy from Catalina slicing some up for sashimi:



We've gotten these scallops before (see our Dishes with Fishes post from a few weeks back) and they are fantastic. We've done a nice ceviche with them, but had never had them raw before. It was fantastic - even without any seasoning.

Chef DiBiase's second dish featured the Mano de Leon scallops. Here she is searing them up with two pans going at full bore:



And the final dish - served with a salad of zebra potatoes with sugar plums and lovely sprigs of tarragon:



Perfect cook on the scallop, and the potato salad was very good as well.

The next dish was halibut poached in olive oil:



It was served with asparagus, and plated on a brandade and topped with a cream sauce and toasted panko crumbs.



Meanwhile, Tommy was slicing up some raw yellowtail:



The yellowtail was good, but he also cut up some sushi-grade halibut which, drizzled with some soy, might have been my favorite single bite of the evening (sorry, I didn't get a picture).

The final dish was grouper. It had been marinated in citrus:



and was cooked on a flat top grill:



They served the grouper with caponata (which was light on the capers, thankfully).



This last dish was probably our favorite. The grouper was cooked perfectly and the caponata went with it very well.

Overall it was a very fun experience and a fantastic meal. The Catalina team were great hosts and Chef DiBiase and her sous chef did an impressive job of putting out four stellar dishes for about 60 people in just two hours time. Her restaurant may well be worth braving Old Town for.

Avocado Varieties

When I first moved to San Diego, avocado was synonymous for Hass - I wasn't really even aware that there were other kinds. San Diego is avocado central, though, and I've since broadened my exposure to different varieties of the tasty fruit.

Pictured above is this weeks haul from our farmers market. The one on the left is a Nabal. We hadn't heard of the variety before, but we had some for breakfast this morning (with tomato on toast) and it was really, really good - great flavor and super-creamy. The one in the middle is a Fuerte - we've been getting nice versions of these for several months, but they're more of a spring crop and this is the last of them. The big guy on the right is a Reed - I bet we can make a good-sized batch of guacamole with that one alone!

Pizza Port Ocean Beach is Open!

The long, painful wait is over - the Pizza Port Ocean Beach location finally opened its doors to the public last Friday. We weren't going to brave opening weekend crowds (I heard it was crazy), but Sherry had yesterday off and the weather turned unexpected beautiful, so we hopped on our beach cruisers and headed down to OB.

The place was pretty active for a Tuesday afternoon, but not at all crowded. The deal here is just like the other Port locations - one line for beer, and another for pizza. They have a good number of taps (not sure exactly how many) with beers brewed on premises, other Port beers and a selection of guest beers.



They have a tiny bar seating area:



And of course the expected rows of picnic tables:



The prime seating on a warm spring afternoon, however, is their outdoor patio, which is where we made a B line for after grabbing a couple pints of their house IPA - the Jetty IPA.



I liked the Jetty - it is a good west coast IPA. Maybe a bit heavy on the bittering hop versus aromatic for my taste, but still very nice.



Sherry tried their New Break Pale Ale, which is a slightly hoppy pale - a fine beer if that's what you are looking for. Their other current house offerings didn't grab me (Chronic Amber, a honey blonde, a brown and a hefe), so I opted for a Bizon Belgian IPA from Port San Clemente. I found it to be more IPA and less Belgian than is typical of the style, but I enjoyed it.

We didn't get any food, but I expect it is exactly like the other locations. I'm no pizza snob, and I will happily eat Port's, but their beer is the real draw for me. Instead, after lazily enjoying our beers, we walked the block distance to the Ocean Beach Mariscos German truck and split a shrimp quesadilla (basically the same filling as a gobernador taco, but easier to eat). Yum.

All in all, the new OB Port location is a great addition to the beach beer scene. We plan to visit often.

A Visit to Suzie's Farm

Who knew that there was an operating farm in San Diego County west of I-5? We certainly didn't, but we do now. This past Saturday, Slow Food Urban organized a visit Suzie's Farm, an organic farm located just south of Imperial Beach in the Tijuana River Valley.

Pimping some freshly uprooted carrots in the picture above is not Suzie (although she gets asked that a lot). It is Lucila De Alejandro, who operates the farm with her husband Robin Taylor. Suzie was their dog. Well, kind of. Suzie was a Norwegian Elkhound that lived wild in the valley, and later with them.

And the property we visited wasn't strictly Suzie's Farm. It is "Kiki Town" - a 40 acre parcel of land right nearby their original farm location that they have been farming since last July. Why "Kiki Town"? Named after one of their current Norwegian Elkhounds, of course.

Right now the farm is harvesting the tail end of their winter and spring planting and are getting geared up for summer. Below you can some of the of thousands and thousands of tomato plants in numerous varieties that they've started:



Or are they nettles :-) By touring the fields and observing, it became immediately apparent that one of the challenges of growing organic crops near the sea in San Diego is that nettles will grow almost better than anything you intentionally plant.



The fields start nice and clean. Below you can see lovely young bean plants shooting up from beneath a soil-warming layer of black plastic (and right along side, the tender young nettle plants growing between the rows!).



They had a very nice variety of gorgeous lettuces growing, like these green and purple leaf lettuces.



Between the newly planted fields and the older, winter crops was a beautiful, edible "wall." One of the participants likened it to a stone fence, building up in layers. It is composed of carrots in the front (light green tops just visible here), followed by rows of black kale, swiss chard, purple mustard lettuce and finally arugula going to seed in a tall bright yellow swath. We tasted it all - the mustard leaf tasting very much like spicy mustard and the arugula intense and peppery even in its waning state.



So many plants looked picture perfect, like this late season cabbage. Where are the worms and pests?! (Unlike my home patio garden...)



The tour we attended included some opportunity to take home the ultimately fresh goods. We harvested rainbow chard (below), broccoli, cauliflower (had some roasted Sunday night - lovely), sugar snap peas, and a little of this and that as desired.



All in all, it was a very pleasant couple of hours.



Suzie's Farm has a CSA (if we weren't already very happy with our own farmers market we'd be very tempted to join), and they supply a bunch of restaurants in town.

Real people growing real food for real people. Just 20 miles down I-5 from our very urban home!

Mariscos German Truck in Ocean Beach

I'd heard that a new Mariscos German truck recently starting operating in Ocean Beach, so we went to check it out today for lunch. It is parked in the lot of the Apple Tree market off Cable Street between Newport and Santa Monica.

The menu will be familiar to anyone who has patronized one of the other Mariscos German trucks:

And the prices are (at least to my recollection) the same as well:

They have a nice little seating area behind the truck. Emphasis on "little", though - it is just a single table with a few chairs so you need to be lucky to get a seat. We weren't lucky, so we enjoyed our lunch curbside.



As is the case with the other trucks, when you order they give you a cup of fish soup with a shrimp in it. Unlike the soup I've had at the University & 35th truck, this shrimp came sans head. Maybe trying not to freak out the beach folk?

The University truck (which I've heard has been sold, although it currently maintains the same name) currently charges $.75 for the soup, but I saw no mention of a price at the OB truck. Regardless of price, it makes for a perfect snack while you are waiting for the rest of your food.



We ordered a tostada mixta, which is a huge mound of octopus, shrimp and fish ceviche topped with large slices of avocado:



I found it a wee bit salty (and I'm a salt fiend), but the texture was fantastic - particularly the octopus. It was definitely the best thing we had.

We also got a couple of tacos, which were pretty much exact replicas of the ones we've had from the University truck. The gobernador is a daunting mound of shrimp, onions, peppers and cheese:



The smoked marlin taco also has peppers, onions and cheese but adds cooked tomato. And, of course, the smoked marlin, which is pretty tasty stuff:



It ended up being a bit more food than we could eat. The tostada was huge, and their tacos are also very big. Personally, I would prefer it if they made them a bit smaller. They would be easier to eat, and I could have more variety without stuffing myself to the gills. As complaints go, however, that's a pretty minor one.

All in all, the Ocean Beach truck is the same Mariscos German experience in a more convenient (for us, at least) location. It's going to be a great place to get a bite to eat before or after a few beers at either Newport Pizza or the new Ocean Beach Pizza Port.

Pizza Port in Ocean Beach

Update: Pizza Port Ocean Beach is now open!

Why am I posting a picture of a partially constructed building? Because Port Brewing, one of our favorite local brewers, is opening a location in Ocean Beach - just down the coast from us.

I first heard rumors about the new location (on Bacon Street - where an old Boll Weevil used to be) about a year ago. Construction was stalled for quite some time (issues with their liquor license, I think), but they now appear to be moving full speed ahead. We took a bike ride down to OB yesterday to have lunch at Newport Pizza, and snapped the above photo.

To say that we're looking forward to the opening would be an understatement.

Update (3/15/2010): We went by today and they are looking pretty much done with the exterior. More importantly, you can see that they've got their brewing equipment installed!

La Playa Taco Shop - Mexican Breakfast in Pacific Beach

We absolutely love a good Mexican breakfast. Where we live in San Diego, there are a plenty of taco shops where you can grab a bite to eat in the morning, but it generally means getting a breakfast burrito. Now, don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of a good breakfast burrito. But I also like a more traditional, sit-down plate of food, and that can be harder to find.

Fortunately, we have La Playa Taco Shop serving up great renditions of the standards. On real plates. With silverware. Pictured above is their Huevos Rancheros - always a good way to go. I'm more likely to order Huevos Divorciados, though:



Why have one sauce when you can have two? We really like both their red and green salsas. The green is the spicier of the two. Huevos Divorciados isn't on their menu, but they've been happy to oblige when I've asked for it.

Also not on the menu is Sherry's current favorite - a combo of a chile relleno and one egg ranchero style:



Chile rellenos are one of those food items that are great when done well, and terrible when done poorly. In my experience, they are much more often done poorly. La Playa, however, does them perfectly - an intensely flavorful poblano chile (lots of places use Anaheim chiles, which work nowhere near as well), a thin, nicely-seasoned batter, and a molten cheese center.



If scrambled eggs are more your thing, you can get Huevos al Albañil (brick-layer's eggs). Their version has bacon in it:



Or Huevos con Chorizo:



And, of course, they also do a breakfast burrito. With all of the other great options, however, we've yet to try it.

La Playa's non-breakfast offerings are very good as well. I'm particularly partial to their al pastor and carnitas tacos (check out this post on What We're Eating for pictures of the carnitas), but we've enjoyed everything we've tried.

La Playa Taco Shop
3973 Mission Blvd.
San Diego, CA
(858) 488-7405