The perfect order: Chicken liver pate | Summer squash | Berkshire pork
Of course, when starting a business — a company, a family, or a cult — many would prefer a lovingly restored Victorian house among ever-blooming jacaranda trees and a tiny lending library. We want our dream restaurant in a building that makes people say, “I can’t believe this is a restaurant and not the home of a great person (possibly Tom Hanks) who teaches children to read.” It is desirable that the house be as old as possible without it being classified as a “historic building,” which would cause all sorts of permitting problems (your proposal to add a patio requires the approval of all current and past presidents of the preservation society and at least two Jesuses).
Or we want the opposite: a hole in the wall that leads us into a Rudy-inspiring story that has people clapping slowly and holding back tears with each dish we serve (see Little Lion Cafe or Banh Thai). Or an industrial warehouse that has a “once grim, now liver-foamy” quality from years of use as an auto repair shop or meth lab (Juniper and Ivy, Ironside Fish & Oyster).
Cellar Hand is the rare place where you can close your eyes, point to a menu, and still end up happy.
What few of us write on our dream boards is the middle ground – the largely uniform micro-retail areas that are home to America’s essential nail salons and disposable phone entrepreneurs. But as commercial space in San Diego becomes scarce and seedy, strip malls are the future and salvation of our restaurant culture. Fresh from the investor war chest or a strong WhatsApp connection with gods, most of us will find a decent box and give it some pizzazz.
For fans, restaurants in shopping centers have a few advantages over those on stilts overlooking famous surf spots or old barns converted into charcuterie shops. And that is: a few months after opening, a mall gem is ours and ours alone. The hype usually builds slowly. The first people to discover it will be a more desirable type of foodie, immune to the glamour bug. Less shiny streets attract better travelers.
The restaurant is owned by the family behind Pali Wine Co., which specializes in low-intervention Lompoc wines.
Although we associate malls with Quiznos-level culinary might, San Diego has a more optimistic history. Convoy District is the prime example. So is Mira Mesa’s Indian and Middle Eastern food scene. There’s the mighty Sushi Ota in Pacific Beach and now Cellar Hand in Hillcrest.
Next to the DMV and across from the 7-Eleven is Cellar Hand, the new concept from Lompoc-based family-owned Pali Wine Co. and chef Logan Kendall. There’s something poetic about a restaurant next to a chiropractor’s office, because the human back isn’t up to the task of working in a kitchen.
Cellar Hand isn’t unsexy. They’ve knocked down the walls on this corner of University Avenue, added wood and metal, and separated the indoor/outdoor patio experience from the parking lot with planters.
Berkshire pork from local pasture that is a big fan of many chefs: Thompson Heritage Ranch.
As for the food, I haven’t had anything this good since Callie opened. It exceeded my expectations, but I’m not surprised—Kendall has a knack for herb sauces and has been following farmers, local boats, and bakers in San Diego for quite a while. Although people go to Pali’s first tasting room in Little Italy to buy low-intervention wines, his small, simple bites there were always better than necessary.
But Cellar Hand is more. And that more is the ingredients. At this point, the farm-to-table movement has been co-opted, mocked, pantsed, and wet-willed. I often wonder if some of the restaurants that claim to be “farm” think that the back of every commercial food truck is filled with a biodynamic greenhouse run by Wendell Berry.
These tomatoes taste like tomatoes and not like red tasting water.
But I’ve been around this food scene long enough to know that most of Kendall’s friends smell like vines and hot earth. He follows them around, driving around in their ATVs, and they reward his loitering. Sure, he and sous chef Ashley McBrady cook at Cellar Hand. But they mostly take the best ingredients you can find — the apple you ate from a tree that knocked you out, the tomato you grew that tasted like every “tomato” before it was a deception — and build them a top-notch supporting cast.
It’s farm-to-table as an extreme sport or benevolent obsession, possibly a reaction to all the half-heartedness and outright fraud. The high point of this movement was when Alice Waters served a single raw peach for dessert at Chez Panisse. Esoteric, sure. And I’d be a little pissed if I shelled out Panisse money to be offered a piece of fruit. But she was right: If you start with food grown in healthy soil and harvested ripe in the season it was meant to be harvested, its fundamental appeals are pretty incredible. If we think of a great dish as a 100-meter race, using the best ingredients is like starting that race at the 60-meter line.
As space becomes increasingly scarce in San Diego, next-generation restaurants in malls are the future.
Start your meal at Cellar Hand with the Bluefin Nduja Toast. Instead of cured pork, there are cubes of raw bluefin caught in San Diego, tossed in nduja spices (usually sweet smoked paprika and Calabrian chiles), white soy sauce and Meyer lemon. A small mound of this is served on toasted house-made toast with dill aioli and local chives.
From the dips section of the menu, choose baba ganoush, eggplant from Chino and D’Acquisto Farms that’s oven-roasted in the pita and then mixed with tahini and seasoned with Meyer lemon. It’s the lemon balm harissa — pulverized with arugula and cilantro (Hukama Produce), then garnished with pomegranate seeds and dukkah (toasted sesame, cumin and smoked coriander) — that puts the finishing touches on it all. The whipped tahini is fine, but the high acidity overpowers the pithy, nutty depth — though the warm, airy, house-fermented and wood-fired pita makes everything taste better.
Chicken liver pate with orange wine Jell-O shots on brown butter toast.
The chicken liver pate looks like a student trick: an airy, creamy pile of mousse topped with Jell-O shots. Hillcrest has an impressive and enduring Jell-O shot tradition, so this feels like a sign of respect—except these ’80s-era wobbly party cubes are made with Pali’s orange wine (a tannic white wine that gets its Cointreau-bottle color from storing the wine with the skins). Served on sesame bread baked in brown butter and topped with sumac and local grapefruit oil, it’s a pretty incredible, Gatsbian bite.
Kendall and McBrady’s favorite dish seems to be Simon & Garfunkel’s local sweets, Farm Duets. The tomato dish features D’Acquisto tomatoes and stone fruit (white peaches and plums) from R&L Farms.
They’re dressed with a simple, heady sauce of arugula and fermented red wine and garnished with radish greens and Chino Farm salt.
There are a few Hondas to the left of these hedges, but you would never know it.
For the phenomenal melon dish, they use Rocky Sweet melons from Weiser Family Farms, watermelons from JR Organics, and cucumbers from Chino Farm (pressed with lemon juice and cinnamon basil). It’s tossed in Urfa Biber (a complex, moody Turkish chile variety with a hint of dark raisins that gives the dish a rare flavor profile). They ferment cantaloupe in salt and chiles from Beylik Family Farms, blend it into a gelatinous kosho and drizzle it over the whole thing, then add Bulgarian feta and melon seeds, which they dehydrate and puff up. The star is the cool, sweetened lemon-basil broth at the bottom (left over from pressing the cucumbers).
Chino Farm’s squash is a meal in itself: trimmed and vacuum-packed with dill, then roasted with balsamic harissa and infused with herbed ricotta made from Thompson Heritage Ranch milk. The team makes its own za’atar (thyme, sesame, Urfa biber, Aleppo, sumac) and then douses it with hot oil to create a variation on salsa macha.
For dessert, an ice cream sandwich with brown butter toast and a scoop of Chino Farm’s new Aisu dairy.
I try two mains, one a hit, the other a bust. The bust is the whole local red snapper, drowned in a too-tart homemade labneh. The bust is the Berkshire pork—from the fast-chef-famous Thompson Heritage Ranch in Ramona—which is simply seared in its own fat, basted with brown butter and pineapple sage, deglazed with Palis Tower 15 “swell” wine (a blend of Bordeaux reds), and garnished with R&L Farms candied grapes, toasted almonds, and jus. This pork redefines the genre.
It’s understandable that winemakers are so obsessed with top-quality farming—especially in San Diego, with its incredibly fertile soils (Waters sourced her produce from Chino Farm in Rancho Santa Fe), nearly year-round growing climate, and the most small farms per capita of any U.S. county. Our produce is country caviar. Not all restaurant operators can afford to use it on such a large scale, and there’s no shame in that. But Kendall and McBrady manage it, and they do it with just the right balance of sensitivity and restraint.
You don’t paint on Picassos with your fingers.
