Whenever I drive from Los Angeles to Oceanside, I feel like a time traveler.
One minute, I’m heading south through San Clemente on Interstate 5, and the freeway’s flanked by the familiar homes and shopping centers of Orange County. Then, in an instant, I’m floating through the 125,000 wild acres of Camp Pendleton, which acts as both a base for the United States Marine Corps and, apparently, a cosmic wormhole to a lost California.
In Oceanside, just over 80 miles south of Los Angeles, the main drag is full of military-surplus stores, old-school barbershops, and vintage emporia where all the eight-track tapes and polyester debris of the 1970s seem to have gathered. Fog shrouds the pier, and the Oceanside boardwalk peters out at a place where the Pacific froths so close to front doors that it almost licks its chops, ready to swallow the neighborhood whole. The Bay Area cultural writer and music critic Greil Marcus coined the phrase “the old weird America” to describe a realm of antiquated oddity that predated stuff like air travel and television; Oceanside, upon first glance, has a way of making you wonder about the old weird California.
This article appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
As a kid in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I used to travel with my family from the Pasadena area to visit our uncle Henry, who lived in Oceanside. A military veteran and a gay man at a time when the government did not view those two modes of identity as compatible, Henry—who had a fondness for bolo ties and traces of a Southern accent—would accompany us to brunch in nearby Carlsbad in what I hazily recall as an old Victorian house. There may have been doilies, lace curtains, and Irish coffee. There may have been lemon-ricotta pancakes, spinach-and-goat-cheese omelets, and other culinary wonders of that era.
In those days, Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck were busy changing American food consciousness around Berkeley and Hollywood. No one considered the area south of Camp Pendleton a gastronomic hot spot. San Diego County presented diners with three primary choices if they wanted a great meal: Keep on driving south to San Diego itself, cross the border into Mexico, or turn around and head back to the Crab Cooker in Newport Beach. I can still hear Uncle Henry bemoaning the lack of suitable dining options.
Now, though, northern San Diego County—yes, the sleepy coastal strip that stretches south from Oceanside to Encinitas and Solana Beach—has become an unexpected hub for stellar cooking, with the sorts of wine bars and bakeries and Michelin-starred restaurants that you’d expect to find in San Francisco and Los Angeles. There’s damn good coffee, too, thanks to roadside spots such as Pannikin Coffee & Tea in the beach community of Leucadia and Vigilante Coffee Company in Oceanside.
Uncle Henry would be pleased.
In October, I had two dinners that opened my eyes to how far the Oceanside restaurant scene has come: a tasting menu at Valle, Mexican chef Roberto Alcocer’s Michelin-starred spot adjoining the Mission Pacific Beach Resort, and a kaiseki-inspired feast at Matsu, on Tremont Street, where local chef William Eick collaborated with Dominique Crenn, the chef behind San Francisco’s three-Michelin-starred Atelier Crenn. They were, in fact, among the best meals I had all year.
The shore towns get bougier as you voyage south toward La Jolla, but when it comes to Oceanside itself, the obvious engine behind the food boom is gentrification. In recent years, real estate developers have swooped in to build condominiums and luxury hotels on blocks that used to harbor drug deals and prostitution. (For years, the city tried to shake off a seedy local sobriquet: Oceanslime.) An uptick in tourism has followed. Ahead of the curve, in 2013, Davin and Jessica Waite opened an Oceanside sushi bar with a zero-waste philosophy and a bizarre name: Wrench and Rodent Seabasstropub. It’s still around, which suggests that the Waites were prescient about a need in the regional marketplace.
What’s known as North County sits nearly at the I-5 midpoint between San Diego and Long Beach. Here, talented chefs from points north and south—such as Eric Bost, who left the metropolitan stresses of Los Angeles to build restaurants like Wildland and the Michelin-starred Lilo in Carlsbad—can migrate from the pricier precincts of the urban grid to harvest the coveted ingredient known as cheap rent. Some of the chefs come, too, from a few miles inland—former staffers of William Bradley’s kitchen at Addison, in the Fairmont Grand Del Mar, the first restaurant in Southern California to earn three Michelin stars. Addison veterans Jacob Jordan, Nic Webber, and Kyle South form the creative trio behind 24 Suns, an innovative Chinese restaurant in a far-from-glamorous Oceanside strip mall; Webber also used to cook at the three-Michelin-star Benu, in San Francisco. Now they’re serving wild shrimp Robuchon and Hunan prime beef sirloin as part of a $150-per-person tasting menu a few steps from a kickboxing gym.
The question remains whether there’s enough of an audience in northern San Diego County for fine dining that challenges people, financially and aesthetically. The obvious looming threat to this part of San Diego County is cultural flattening; the currents of the American gentrification cycle suggest that these coastal enclaves are doomed to lose their diversity and their funk. Not immediately, though.
Over the summer, I wandered into the California Surf Museum in Oceanside. At the front desk, a woman took my $7 and advised me not to miss “our Mona Lisa.” This legendary work of art turned out to be a red, white, and blue surfboard with a massive curved chunk missing from the middle. Yes, it was the same surfboard that a tiger shark had bitten into in 2003 when it attacked Bethany Hamilton and severed her left arm.
Someday, Oceanside may no longer be weird. Thankfully, we haven’t reached that point yet.•
Six Great Restaurants
Matsu
626 S. Tremont St., Oceanside
On a quiet, semiresidential lane in Oceanside, in a stark space that feels as though it might’ve once housed a pharmacy, chef William Eick and his team offer a menu that flirts with the progressions of kaiseki, the centuries-old Japanese tradition that honors the passage of the seasons. Eick considers himself a perpetual student of Japanese techniques and traditions, and so his ever-changing menu is a meticulous (but never pretentious) meditation on California and the good stuff that grows and swims and crawls here. I still dream about a Matsu chowder that had slabs of tender spiny lobster meat fanning out over a creamy, briny broth—so delicious that I wanted to pick up the chipped black ceramic bowl and pour the elixir down my throat.
Valle
222 N. Pacific St., Oceanside
Valle offers something exciting and rare: the opportunity to experience stateside the sort of high-wire artistry found at restaurants in Mexico City (such as Pujol and Quintonil) that have changed the way the world views Mexican cuisine. Chef Roberto Alcocer, known for his trailblazing work in Baja California, enthralls diners with a seasonal tasting menu that brings together delicate flourishes (his spin on ajo blanco, the cold soup from Andalusia, is made with pistachios instead of almonds) and street-cart carnality (barbacoa tacos, tongue tacos, Wagyu steak with black beans). For those who don’t like the precious vibe of tasting menus in general: This is a tasting menu with guts.
Wildland
2598 State St., Carlsbad
Food writers do not observe the usual laws of mealtime logic. More than once, I have driven the 100 miles from L.A. simply to wolf down the breakfast sandwich at Wildland. The all-day destination as large as a school auditorium is owned by restaurateur John Resnick, the man who built Carlsbad’s culinary reputation with places like Campfire and Jeune et Jolie. Chef Eric Bost and his crew cut no corners when it comes to baking, curing, plating, and sourcing. Their Wildland breakfast sandwich, with fennel sausage, sharp cheddar, and a schmear of gribiche aioli that merges perfectly with the bright orange yolk of a fried egg, trumps its morning competition to the north and south.
Atelier Manna
1076 N. Coast Hwy. 101, Encinitas
At this open-air, open-your-chakras oasis, chef Andrew Bachelier and his wife and business partner, Larah, have created one of the most innovative and—just say it—Californian restaurants in California. It’s partly a West Coast juice bar with drinks that have neo-hippie names like Moonstone and Goldenrod and ingredients like ginseng, reishi, cat’s claw, and Blue Majik. But there’s also food unlike anything you’ll usually come across in Spirulinaville: an ancient-grains porridge made with Job’s tears and chicken-skin togarashi; Turkish eggs with thick yogurt and torn herbs. The result is a bonkers-good morning haunt that locates the elusive sweet spot between deliciousness and wellness.
Herb & Sea
131 W. D St., Encinitas
It’s a party every night at Herb & Sea, where the room can feel as raucous as a sports bar. But the dashing young Australian chef at the helm, Aidan Owens, has a lot more on his mind than happy hour. A glance at his seafood-centric menu reveals a palate that leans toward hot sauce and herbs and citrus: There’s tangerine, black lime, and charred-green-onion oil in his ceviche, and the steelhead trout crudo comes with stone fruits, lime-leaf oil, and a calamansi vinaigrette. Owens is cooking in a style that calls to mind the emergent Bobby Flay, and it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the country takes notice.
Merenda
1931 S. Coast Hwy., Oceanside
Every town needs a place to drink wine and eat snacks and loosen up. Recent years have ushered in a national trend toward the type of unfussy wine bars that serve as neighborhood hubs in cities like Paris and Copenhagen, and now—in keeping with the shift across northern San Diego County—there’s one at the edge of the Coast Highway in Oceanside. The beverage menu offers all the indicators of taste—lambrusco, pétillant naturel, orange wine, and a vigorous international selection of vermouths—as do the elegant tilework and French posters. Owners Aaron Crossland (who spent his childhood in Oceanside and Camp Pendleton) and Lauren Crossland-Marr know exactly what you want to eat with those drinks: marinated olives, rosemary walnuts, roasted potatoes with aioli, and a delightful nosh called champagne nachos, which are a heap of potato chips topped with crème fraîche and trout roe. This is North County, baby, and there’s no need to pretend you’re anywhere else.
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.
