OVERTURE
Let’s start with the potato chips. You don’t necessarily expect to see a tangle of chips in the midst of a meal at a restaurant with three Michelin stars, but here they are, arranged like a crunchy Alexander Calder sculpture on top of a glazed white ceramic disk. The chips—Kennebecs that have been brined, fried, and dusted with malt vinegar powder—arrive with a companion plate holding burnt-onion dip and a fine-china sunflower whose center gleams with caviar.
You don’t need to be told what to do. You slip a chip into the dip, crown it with fish eggs, and it’s impossible to resist. “We try to create an experience that you crave,” says William Bradley.
This article appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal.
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But like all fine-dining chefs at his level of recognition, Bradley is also in the storytelling business. The chips and dip are a wink to what’s outside the tall windows of Addison, Bradley’s restaurant at the Fairmont Grand Del Mar, in San Diego County. Seated in a room that feels designed to host debutante balls and fundraisers, where servers attend to your whims with the precision of dancers portraying soldiers in a ballet, you might spy golfers on a putting green on the hotel’s course. Maybe you get the joke, maybe you don’t—the chips and dip work either way. But imagine them as an ultraluxe callback to a country club bar in another era and you’re close to Addison’s source material. Once, Bradley even began meals here with a refined Arnold Palmer, the lemonade-and-iced-tea mash-up that may be golf’s greatest (only?) culinary contribution.
The potato chips help explain how Addison landed three stars—and how it intends to evolve beyond its setting. Because a month or so after you encounter the chips, Bradley gets on the phone to say, “You know what’s funny? We took it off the menu two weeks ago.”
REFRAIN
When Bradley opened Addison on September 6, 2006, he had just turned 31, and he dreamed of creating one of the world’s best restaurants. Some of his ambitions might’ve come across as…unrealistic. The Fairmont Grand was still under construction. There was no foot traffic, no buzz. Conjuring a destination restaurant inside a mock Tuscan villa miles from downtown San Diego seemed laughable, especially for a young chef who’d never attended culinary school.
Bradley grew up in Chula Vista, near the Mexican border. His father was a Point Loma fire chief; his mother fell ill young. Going out to eat wasn’t…realistic. The future chef had no contact with the pageantry and precision of fine dining. He remembers Stouffer’s lasagna and Hamburger Helper on the dinner table. “We were the leftover kings,” Bradley says.
Music provided an entry to creativity. Like many San Diego kids, Bradley was an offspring of 91X, the alternative rock station that fed the region’s restless spirit, in the same manner that KROQ did up in Pasadena. “Dare to be different,” Bradley says matter-of-factly. “Music inspires a lot of the things I do.” At 50, he neither looks nor acts like someone whose synaptic pathways were shaped by the mood-swingy moans, growls, confessionals, and laments of Jane’s Addiction, Alice in Chains, and Radiohead. With his Ray-Bans and a haircut that conveys a military bearing, Bradley comes off like a colonel at Camp Pendleton. In conversation, he’s courteous but controlled, steering things with invisible authority—until you mention 91X. The station, he says, lit up his brain. Those avatars of new wave and grunge and desert rock proved that if you stayed true to your style, you could come out of nowhere and give the world a hard shake.
The music gave him permission to dream big back when Addison was still an empty dining room on a golf course. Yet in his kitchen, there’s no soundtrack. Sharp knives, dishes that depend on precise calibrations—Bradley can’t risk a mishap. “It doesn’t fit our style,” he says. “We like to keep it very quiet.”
CRESCENDO
About a third of the way through dinner, a dish informally called “eggs and rice” arrives—Bradley’s response to Thomas Keller’s Oysters and Pearls at the French Laundry, in Napa Valley. The menu used to list it formally as Regiis Ova Reserve Caviar, Koshihikari Rice, Smoked Sabayon, Sesame (a different caviar has since been swapped in), but insiders use the shorthand. At first glance, it looks like a bowl of pudding for a toothless potentate. A yolk-yellow sabayon, smoky and rich, crowns a mound of warm Japanese rice that’s received a baptismal splash of grilled-mushroom broth. Puffed rice adds crunch; caviar, luxury. Each unctuous spoonful is as primevally satisfying as buttered noodles are to a child. It’s comfort food elevated to something celestial, the kind of dish that merits audible animal sounds—unless, of course, it stuns you into silence.
Guests don’t just admire Bradley’s food; they devour it. Like his father, the fire chief, he sees himself as being of service to others. He aims to deliver “fancy” dishes that guests wolf down with the same relish they bring to tacos or pizza. He wants people to want his food, not merely gaze at it in Instagrammy awe. “This is not an art project,” he says. “Art projects don’t last. This is a profitable business.”
Bradley is, quite literally, built for the job. He’s a supertaster, his palate unusually sensitive, and he believes that that random gift of biology allows him to calibrate the flavors of dishes on the Addison menu so that when diners make contact with them, they hear “Ode to Joy” as performed by a chorus of angels. He guards the gift like an instrument, drinking only water most of the time to keep his palate sharp.
“To have three stars,” Bradley says, “you have to be disciplined in all aspects of your life.” He trains like an athlete, physically and mentally. “Every day, you’re going to the Super Bowl.”
Other chefs describe him as preternaturally centered and uninterested in fame. His friend Matthew Kammerer, of the two-Michelin-starred Harbor House Inn, on the Mendocino coast, says that Bradley’s almost-daily texts sound like goads from a drill sergeant: “What are you doing today to elevate the cuisine?” Josiah Citrin, the chef and owner of the Michelin-starred Los Angeles restaurants Mélisse and Citrin, says, “He’s a Swiss watch.”
Bradley did not seek out a restaurant job because he had a daydreamy tendency to get lost in cookbooks or had his face melted by raw oysters on the coast of Gironde, à la Anthony Bourdain. That stuff would come later. He did not spend a few years as a stagiaire at El Bulli in Spain or Noma in Denmark, as many of his contemporaries would, marinating in modernist cuisine or the New Nordic movement. That stuff wouldn’t happen at all.
“For me, it was more about a job,” he says. “I didn’t want to keep asking for money to support my skateboard habit.” He wasn’t going to college, so he had to do something. Working under chef James Boyce at the Loews Coronado Bay Resort, he learned that Boyce had cooked at Le Cirque with Daniel Boulud. He began to read up on the elite chefs—Boulud, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Gray Kunz—who’d come to dominate the realm of American dining in the luxe-French mode. Viewers of The Bear might cringe, wince, and shield their eyes when exposed to the stress of a high-end restaurant kitchen; Bradley was hooked. “The rhythm. The noise. The cadence,” he says. “The beauty and the violence of a restaurant.”
But when Addison opened, public apathy appeared to have the upper hand. One evening, the spacious, stately dining room sat empty. Servers hovered. There was nothing to do. Then a taxi pulled up. A man ambled in and asked, “Is this a restaurant?”—a reasonable question, given the circumstances. Told yes, he sat down, realized that he, like a Twilight Zone character, was the only guest, and left. Then he returned, with the cab driver as his dining companion. “Thank God,” Bradley says.
This is not the part where we reveal that the man was a critic for the New York Times who, overnight, transformed the twinned fates of Addison and chef William Bradley. The story of Addison is even odder, because it involves a restaurant that the national press has barely acknowledged, and that has never won a James Beard Award, and a San Diego native who didn’t feel discouraged, even when feeling discouraged (if not doomed) would’ve been a sensible reaction. “It didn’t cross my mind—ever,” Bradley says. “If you’re cooking with soul and purpose, they’ll come.”
Somehow, they did. Now diners fly from Tokyo and London to hover outside in anticipation near the brass plaque that reads, “William Bradley: Grand Chef.” When Addison earned its third star, in 2022—the first restaurant to do so in Southern California—hundreds of reservations poured in overnight. (As Alta Journal went to press, there were 13 restaurants in the United States with three stars; 8 of them were in California.) “Now you’ve opened up your restaurant to the curiosity of the world,” Bradley says. “People book the restaurant—and then they book their travel around that.”
CODA
After you’ve polished off the Cantonese quail—a savory high point of dinner, in a rich, sticky, coppery jus infused with the Chinese signature known as five spice—dessert begins. The 18th hole is dark, the sun has gone, diners sink into their big armchairs as if drugged, and you inhale deeply as you prepare for the arrival of a yuzu custard dusted with ceremonial-grade matcha; a fancy twist on a tres leches cake; and a closing hot shot of champurrado—Mexican hot chocolate topped with bitter orange and candied coriander. You can feel San Diego asserting itself in those flavors: Mexico to the south, the Pacific to the west, and the layers of Latino, Japanese, and Chinese influence that have long defined the region.
Those elements now dominate Addison’s menu. There’s a churro filled with chicken liver; a shellfish chawanmushi; an egg drop soup with silken tofu and shiitakes. When Addison earned its first Michelin star, in 2019, Bradley congratulated his team and then said, “In order for us to really make a difference, we’ve got to change and evolve.” Until then, he’d viewed Addison as a West Coast descendant of centuries-old Gallic gastronomy. Was that enough? He thought, If I were a traveler from Europe or Asia, would I stop in San Diego County for a one-star expression of contemporary French cuisine?
“Guess what?” he recalls realizing. “I don’t know if I would.”
So the menu began to shift. In came yuzu, seaweed, miso, black bean paste. “It gives us so much more freedom to explore,” Bradley says. “Now you have bites that you cannot find anywhere else.” Addison began to tell a story about San Diego itself—a city shaped by many cultures but defined by none. “We really don’t have a cuisine,” he says. “Why not be inspired by all of them? Addison doesn’t remind you of anywhere else. And that goes back to Queens of the Stone Age and Depeche Mode—they don’t sound like anyone else.”
Bradley often walks a stretch of Torrey Pines State Beach between the waves and the sandstone cliffs. “That’s where I got engaged,” he says, pointing to a spot along the shore. “The next day, we flew off to Paris. I had it all planned.” He comes here often—sometimes with his wife and two kids, sometimes alone, to meditate. “It almost feels like an extra hour of sleep,” he says. “When you’re here, you don’t have to answer to anybody.” (This being San Diego County, his sentence is punctuated by the screech and boom of a Top Gun–style aircraft roaring by.)
He’s lately been seeking those pockets of silence. In March 2026, Addison will close for a full renovation ahead of its 20th anniversary. “This place, when it opened in 2006, it was wow,” he says. The Versailles-by-way-of-Vegas grandeur will give way to something softer, earthier. “You can only go so long with that juxtaposition,” Bradley says.
Still, his ambitions reach beyond decor. Back in the kitchen after his walk, he starts listing chefs: Björn Frantzén. Yannick Alléno. Joël Robuchon. Thomas Keller. Is this a quiz? What do they have in common? They’ve all had three stars at more than one restaurant. “I want two three-stars,” Bradley says. “That’s my goal in life.”
But wait, you want to tell him. That’s…unrealistic. Only one American—Keller—has ever done that.
“You know why?” Bradley says. “Because he dared to do it.”•
Over the years, Jeff Gordinier has contributed to publications such as Esquire, Food & Wine, and the New York Times. He recently won the James Beard Foundation’s M.F.K. Fisher Award for Distinguished Writing.
