A Sad Weirdo's Guide to San Diego
Introducing a new travel series full of food, drink and sex (and sun and sadness)
Welcome to A Sad Weirdo’s Guide To, a new travel series I’m somewhat overambitiously launching on the JDS Newsletter. Will it be regular? Well, is anything regular? But when it happens it’ll be worth it. As anyone who has tried to make plans or have a meaningful relationship with me knows, I travel a lot. Makes sense. I’m a travel writer. But something that has always irked me is that, with precious few exceptions, travel writing — categorized as service journalism — has always been devoid of voice. Well, a certain type of travel writing has been rendered voiceless. There are still some, through precious few, outlets publishing first-person travel essays with voice but none that combine the bitsy-usefulness of a good travel piece with actual good writing. So that’s what I’m trying to do here. You’ll learn a lot about me (useless) but also a lot about San Diego (useful). First up, San Diego, where I traveled for Best New Restaurant research for Esquire, a librarian conference and a rave.
My father loved sun and as soon as he could he split from Philadelphia for San Diego. I was thirteen and was remanded to his custody for the summers. My memory of the city at the time was a bright but lonely town. I didn’t surf. I didn’t skate. I didn’t go to school and I had no friends. My stepmother drove me around La Jolla and Del Mar in the passenger side of her convertible, taking me to all the places my father had been unfaithful to her. “What’s an Oriental Garden?” I asked, “Why do they have massages there?” So I would say my feelings about the country’s eighth largest city are complicated.
I was back in San Diego recently to appear on a panel for the American Library Association’s Annual Conference. I had long wanted to go to the ALA because I heard librarians like to party hard, removing their marmish demeanor like a pair of reading glasses and getting freaky after hours. In this regard I was disappointed but maybe I didn’t hang out with the right librarians. Instead, I was busy exploring the city. Certainly in the last five or so years, the San Diego restaurant scene has evolved from glorified spa cuisine to include formidable and ambitious restaurants by deeply talented chefs. I am not sure if it is residual trauma, East Coast snobbery, the truth or – more likely – a combination of all three but I do think it’s safe to say, as many San Diegans have told me, that San Diego is not cool, at least not in the way Los Angeles or New York is cool. And that’s part, to me, of the charm. It’s like a trade show of a city. There’s no pretense among San Diegans nor, for that matter, a Bostonian’s provincialism nor a Philadelphian’s sense of inferiority. There are no chips on shoulders here, just tribal tattoos.
The Hotel: Esquire named Lafayette Hotel, its Best Hotel of 2024, so of course I was going to stay there. And so did every one else. When I walked in around midnight, the lobby of the historic hotel was jam packed. I hadn’t seen so many halter tops since college. To me, nothing is more luxurious than staying at a cool hotel and just going to sleep. It’s like Night at the Museum. Through the lobby is a beautiful bar and through that is a pool, designed by Johnny Weismuller (Tarzan!) in 1943. During the day this pool is filled with locals (day passes are $46 on the weekend; $30 during the week.) One woman in a very small bikini was reading – and athletically highlighting – bell hook’s All About Love, which I kinda thought was a thirst trap but then quickly realized that might be the definition of patriarchal narcissism to think this person is reading bell hooks for my delectation. Some guy asked me whether I had a picture of myself tattooed on my back. (I don’t. It’s Serge Gainsbourg.) And I made friends with another guy named Clay, who had declared bankruptcy earlier in the afternoon and was celebrating. My room had a bathtub in it and the television was hidden behind curtains. There was a canopy bed which, to be honest, would have been best slept in with company. Somewhere down by the pool there was perhaps someone for me but the distance between the ground floor and the fourth, between loneliness and intimacy was insurmountable.
The Classic: My friend, the photographer Eric Wolfinger is a life long San Diegan. He says that when you bite into a rolled taco with pork under a ticker tape of lettuce and dust of cotija cheese at Las Cuarto Milpas, you know you’re in San Diego. “That taste doesn’t exist anywhere else.” Las Cuarto Milpas in Barrio Logan has been around since 1933. Today it’s still run by the Estudillo family. The line forms early. It’s cash only. There’s no fucking about. Inside the spartan room, a pot of chorizo with beans bubbles; a vast pot of oil into which rolled tacos are fried shimmers like a lake of fire; tamales steam, each station tended by a no nonsense emissary of the Estudillo clan. In the back room, you can glimpse the tortillas being made, laden with lard and, and in the adjoining dining room, a core sample of all San Diegans -- from construction works to judges to shipwrights from the nearby naval yard -- gather in near silence, save for the crunch of the tacos.
A Good Hang:: When my friend, an East Coast surfer, heard I was going to San Diego he said I had to look up Joel Tudor. Tudor is a legendary long boarder from south San Diego who, well before logging – as longboarding is called – became cool again, was riding 8 footers up in Cardiff and environs. He’s been called the “the pencil-thin Raphael of the longboard renaissance.” Tudor won his first ASP World Championship in 1998 and his second in 2004 and his third in 2021, at the age of 45 He also happens to be a highly ranked Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt who owns a school in Del Mar. Because I’m a better fighter than I am a surfer, we arranged to meet at the school. Surfight is by far the chillest BJJ academy I’ve been to. It’s a small space, lined with tatami mats, with walls and ceilings covered in surfboards. There’s a turntable and a vinyl collection. By the time I walked in at 1:05pm for the open mat, the space was packed with clumps of guys rolling. Joel co-owns the school with Magid “Gorilla Hands” Hage IV. When you think of surfer judoka, it’s Magid of whom you’re thinking. Built like a statue with golden curls, Magid grew up surfing and fighting. Eventually Joel gestured to me to roll with him. I must have 30 pounds and close to a decade on him but the man destroyed me. My neck cracked in places I didn’t know it could. His style is very patient and methodical. When he gives you something -- a limb, a back -- know that he’s setting you up.
Best Unexpected Pre-Beach Lunch: After class, we walked across the street to a hidden farmer’s market, tucked behind a municipal building, which operates every Saturday. There in the back corner, under a banner that says East African Cuisine, past the decorative soaps and tomato-laden tables, a Somali immigrant named Hasno Ali makes some of the best sambusas you’ll have in San Diego, crisp outside, steamy and moist within. (The potato are my favorite.) She also serves a delicious spicy lentil soup (shurbat cadas), sauteed onions and rice.. After a roll -- and before the beach -- it’s like mana.
The Dinner: I don’t know how you call a steakhouse Le Coq with a straight face. It all seems like a gambit to get uptight rich La Jollans to say things like, “I love le Coq,” “I’m hungry for Coq” or some derivation thereof. But the newest and best restaurant in La Jolla is Le Coq so everyone’s pretty coq-hungry. The chef at the sprawling restaurant is Tara Mansod, the James Beard semifinalist who also runs Animae, who deftly weaves slight Filipino touches into a classic steakhouse menu. (I wish she would do more of that, to be honest.) A fresh baked baguette with crispy chicken skin butter; a refreshing yellowtail crudo with tomato and wasabula; a well made steak with anchovy herb oil, crisp bricks of pommes darphin (goyische latkes). It was good, by golly. Many of the staff are Filipino too and proud of Mansod, including our waiter Kathleen Evangelista, a 28-year-old who emigrated in 2012.. She’s the eldest daughter of her family and the first one to go to college. “My whole family is depending on me,” she said, and it was hard to tell if she was joking because her affect is so cheery and her sense of humor, we discovered over the course of dinner, subversive and wry. I was very into that
Drinks: San Diego is not not a serious cocktail city. New bars like Part Time Lover and older ones like Realm of the 52 Remedies have been focused on technique-driven cocktails.. I also spent, I would say, 85% of my time in San Diego drunk. Some of that was probably for work; some because I guess I was pretty lonely. At some point though – after a particularly good mezcal Manhattan at Quixote, a decommissioned Mexican church, dissassembled and reconstituted with candles and stained glass – I fell asleep by the pool and then looked in the mirror and I was sunburned and my hair was crazy and I just thought fuck, JDS, get it together. Instead I went back to Quixote and ordered another mezcal.
More Drinks: Anyway, after the conference, a bunch of us on the panel -- Dan Saks, Jessica Ralli, Rekha Rajan, Gabrielle Balkan and our publisher Cecily -- went to get dinner and cocktails at Paradisaea in La Jolla. The dinner was good. (Highlight, probably, a brussels sprout hummus). But the cocktails were superb. Each of the sixteen cocktails are named after a bird. Flightless Birds are non-alcoholic. (Get it?) The Dodo, for instance, featured Ritual’s non-alcoholic bourbon. All are very well balanced, imaginative and expertly made. My favorite, the Hoopoe, is a slightly sweet and smoky cocktail of mezcal, blistered kumquat, vanilla and lime. I had a few of those. This was the best joke told at dinner and perhaps in all of San Diego on that particular night: What’s the difference between jelly and jam? I can’t jelly my dick in your ass.
Late Night Drinks: Roma Norte
The newly opened Roma Norte is in basically a shopping center called The Headquarters by the marina. It’s by the same people behind Puesto, Mexican restaurants which caused a splash last year by announcing that they would no longer use any tequilas with additives. (They are one of California’s largest tequila purchasers.) The man behind Roma Norte is Beau de Bois. He’s a handsome dude. Conceived as an industry hang, Roma Norte stays open late and caters to bartenders coming off their shift. It’s dark and cavernous and the drinks are fancy but the vibe isn’t. My rum and coke, for example, was made with house made cola, clarified lime cordial and a combination of milk-washed Bacardi Ocho & Banks 7 Rum. It shimmered. It glimmered. It went down easy.
Eat the Bar Alone: Mabels Gone Fishing
I eat alone all the time. Sometimes I eat alone at home and I don’t even put on pants. Sometimes I eat alone at restaurants. I also sometimes don’t put on pants. In San Diego, during a heat wave, I’m wearing these shorts. Do I love eating alone while I’m traveling? No. Would I prefer there to be a frisson of sexual energy? Yes. But the apps aren’t working. (No one is looking to have dinner in fifteen minutes with a pleasure dom on Pure.) So I take my copy of All Fours, Miranda July’s new book, and head to Mabel’s Gone Fishing. One of Esquire’s Best New Restaurants, the Iberian spot is perfect grabbing a seat at the bar in solitutde. Do I enjoy the jamon iberico, which arrive like little lacquered fabric swatches, and the very good Spanish G&T? Yes. Sadly I’m surrounded by couples, none of whom seem to be looking for a unicorn, so instead I content myself reading July’s truly filthy prose -- I love it -- hoping my hard-on doesn’t show through my jorts.
Late Night Party: Pirate Panda Undergound Rave
After a few nights with xvideos.com in my room, taking nude selfies (for whom!??!) and reenacting the Death of Marat for Instagram in my in-room tub. I have to go out. Clubs are not my thing, really. I always think of that line from Stephen Malkmus’s song JoJo’s Jacket: “The house music will blare. And turn your ears into. A medicinal jelly.” But, it does occur to me the older we get the more things are not your thing which is, I think, why we get tetchy and sclerotic. The underground party scene in San Diego is vibrant and goes hard. Most of these parties are thrown by Pirate Panda in the warehouses that dot the city. I find one, celebrating the birthday of DJ Longjawns, and head into the night. First of all, there are a LOT of people here. Weirdly many are dressed as clowns. Don’t know if that is an SD thing but I’m into it. The warehouse is shot through with lasers and the music is truly diaphragm vibrating. Something that’s nice about being alone at a loud club is that even if you wanted to talk to someone, you couldn’t. I’ve heard some of the Pirate Panda parties are play parties but this one isn’t. So I just dance. And dance. And dance. And soon it’s three a.m. and I’m in a Lyft home, sweaty and a little exuberant. A line of Tom Waits’ “San Diego Serenade” popped into my mind:
I never saw the morning 'til I stayed up all night
I never saw the sunshine 'til you turned out the light
I never saw my hometown until I stayed away too long
I never heard the melody until I needed a song.
And this I hummed as I rode in my Lyft through the darkened streets of San Diego back to my hotel, with its lush carpet and empty bed.
Headed to San Diego this week for the first time — impeccable timing.