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There's a very widely-read blog called A Hamburger Today, all about - you guessed it - burgers. It's an offshoot of the hugely popular US website Serious Eats and as you might expect largely focusses on that part of the world (with the occasional foray abroad to the usual suspects), but it is nevertheless an interesting and pleasingly unpretentious bulletin of what's new in the burger world. AHT is just as likely to cover the revamp of the Carl's Jr. chicken burger as a gourmet $25 offering from a top restaurant, and clearly makes an effort, geographically speaking and budget-wise, to be as inclusive as possible. But very early on I couldn't help noticing how many top-rated burgers of all shapes and sizes and prices came from one place - San Diego. I took with me on my latest trip a wishlist of over 15, which for a stay lasting only 14 days is, you will appreciate, rather ambitious. And of course I didn't get to try all of them but like the fearless gastro-tourist I am I bloody well did my best.
Perhaps the first thing I should point out is that, contrary to any hugely overinflated expectations I may have had about "San Diego, Burger Mecca", not every last one I ate was worth the effort. It seemed that the more we spent, the fancier the surroundings and the more slick the service, the poorer the sandwich, a fact illustrated most neatly by an evening meal in Avenue 5, Banker's Hill where everyone on our table enjoyed a perfectly pleasant meal apart from those unlucky enough to order the cold, tough, overcooked, tasteless house burger. Which was only me, of course. But I'm not going to dwell on those that didn't make the cut; instead, here are my top 5 burgers of San Diego.
5. Miho Gastro Truck
It shouldn't be a surprise that in a city, or at the very least a state, that has a good case for claiming to be the birthplace of the street food revolution, food trucks are still the first place to go for something lovingly crafted and determinedly unique. Miho Gastro Truck do a range of gourmet sandwiches using premium ingredients popular with their well-heeled and well-fed following, such as the extraordinary buttermilk fried chicken and biscuit sandwich (above) and a lamb burger (more unusual perhaps in the states who don't eat anywhere near as much lamb as we do). But the vaguely Europeanised MGT burger, with its grass-fed beef, black pepper and truffle aioli and caramelized onion, is a thing of rare beauty. The preseasoned beef (I think) created a denser patty than you'd otherwise find but the sweet brioche held together well and I could even ignore the pesky addition of rocket - it made sense in the context of everything else. MGT also do a burger containing candied bacon. Catch 'em while you can.
Various locations in San Diego - check the website for more details
4. Neighborhood Bar
The menu at the Neighborhood Bar is a thing of wonder to an American food junkie like me. It's no word of a lie to say I wanted to order every last thing off it, from the bacon-wrapped mini hot dogs to the braised beef ribs to the grilled cheese salad. Hell, I'd even quite like to try the veggie bean burger with Swiss cheese. But on our visit we managed to whittle down our choices to a heaving pile of pasilla chilli cheese fries, a ridiculous looking thing called the Local Animal (a Polish sausage soaked in pulled pork and gravy with a fried egg on top - every bit as filthy as it sounds) and, of course, the Neighborhood Burger. Simple and satisfying, it contained just three fillings - caramelized onion, gruyere cheese (always a good choice for a gourmet burger cheese I find) and pepper greens for colour and crunch. The bun was a kind of sourdough mix of some kind, robust and full of flavour, but the real star was the beef, confidently medium-rare and boasting that addictive buttery minerality of USDA.
3. Waterfront Bar & Grill
A glorious, unreconstructed dive bar in Little Italy, I fell in love with the Waterfront the moment I walked through the doors. Noisy, dark and full of grimy nooks and crannies, the food is perfectly in character with the surroundings, being unapologetically junky and all the better for it. Starting with a portion of Buffalo Chicken Wings (crunchy, zingy, perfect) I soon got to work on the Waterfront Bacon, a glossy mound of medium rare beef, crispy bacon and neon-yellow American cheese. Excellent pickles, salad on the side and the crunchiest fries in Southern California just sealed the deal. A hoot, and actually the closest thing in style I ate during my trip to the MeatLiquor burger.
2. In'n'Out
Well, it had to feature somewhere. There's always the worry when you try and revisit a great lunch that it will fail to live up to the time-gilded memories, but it's testament to the extraordinary quality and consistency of In'n'Out that a Double Double with fries and a root beer was just as brilliant in 2012 as 2010. In many ways In'n'Out is a kind of objective ideal of a cheese burger - enjoyable, familiar and reassuring while also superbly fresh (you can easily watch the whole process whilst you wait for your food - I bet you don't know many fast food joints in the UK that peel and chip their own potatoes) and, of course, delicious. The real revelation this time though was rediscovering the fries - golden brown, crunchy outside and soft within, they had the most incredibly potatoey flavour. I have simply never had better potato chips anywhere else.
1. Carnitas Snack Shack
Picking a winner amongst competition like this was never likely to be straightforward, but the monumental Shack burger has posed a completely unexpected problem - namely, I know in my heart it's my favourite, I know it's better than any other burger I ate in San Diego, but I have no idea why. On first glance it is nothing extraordinary; a heavily poppyseeded bun, lettuce, cheddar, tomato, beef. But strange and wonderful things happen when you bite into it. Firstly, you will notice that the beef is powerfully flavoured (grass fed I believe, an increasingly common specification in the "gourmet" end of San Diego burgers) and cooked cleverly to a juicy pink despite being quite wide and not too thick (anyone can cook a burger the size and shape of a baseball to pink). Then you will notice the addition of a thin slick of bacon jam just underneath the top bun, which much like the candied bacon in the Miho burger adds a sweet and savoury seasoning and an extra tranche of flavour. And then - and I can hardly believe I'm saying this - the tomato. The juiciest, tastiest, most tomato-ey tomato I've ever tried in a burger, traffic-light red and oozing heavenly umami, it was as unexpected as it was brilliant. It's possible the bacon jam enhanced the tomato in some strange way, or maybe it was some kind of rare breed heirloom vegetable ripened under the bright California sun and picked during a full moon. I just don't know. And anyway it's not just the tomato that made this special - although I've done my best to try and figure it out, I still don't really know why the Carnitas burger was so good. It just was. Perhaps that's all that matters.
I'm tempted to end on a somewhat controversial note. I ate incredibly well in San Diego for not very much money, the sun shone, the fresh IPAs flowed freely and every minute was a blast. But if - only if - I am to focus my attention for a second purely on the burgers, I reach the inescapable conclusion that actually, ignoring the higher prices and the weather and the Piccadilly Line, the best of London really can hold its own nowadays with the best of Southern California. There are many more worse meals to be had generally in the UK than in the easygoing service culture of the USA but when passionate, talented people hunker down and make good food, be it in WC1 or 92104, geography becomes irrelevant. So I'm going to just come out and say it, and of course I'm hopelessly biased, but the best I've ever eaten is still the MeatLiquor Bacon Cheeseburger. But perhaps a return trip to San Diego and a 2nd trip to Hodad's is in order. Just to be 100% sure, you understand.
"I can't believe you didn't get to try any fish tacos!" was my sister's first thought on my return from San Diego all the way back in 2010. If this area of Southern California is famous for anything food wise, it's burgers (more - much more - on which later) and, thanks to its close proximity to the international border, Mexican cuisine, and yet thanks to little more than personal prejudice fuelled by a succession of mediocre Mexican meals in London, on my first trip to this part of the world I didn't go out of my way to eat any. "How good can a fish taco be?" I told myself. "Deep fried fish in a tortilla. Squeeze of lime. Boring. Mexican food is just the same 3 ingredients arranged in different ways, isn't it? I know what I'm talking about, I've been to Chiquito."
What a fool I was.
Of all the wonderful food we enjoyed over the course of the last few weeks in San Diego, it was Mexican that was consistently the most bold, exciting and - most importantly - good value. I was stunned not just by the quality of each individual thing we ate but also the sheer variety, making an embarrassing lie of any prejudice I may have previously held about Mexican cuisine. This is not an exhaustive list of the best San Diego/Tijuana has to offer (I was only there 14 days and had to squeeze some burgers in) but hopefully enough to demonstrate to any deprived Briton that there really is more out there than burritos.
Mariscos Germán Taco Truck, South Park
Of the Mexican food trucks that serve San Diego, a large number seem to specialise in seafood. I didn't really ever find out why this should be the case - perhaps their mobile nature makes it easier - or cheaper - to stock up daily on fresh fish than bricks-and-mortar outlets, or perhaps it's something to do with the cooking process that makes seafood easier to deal with than anything else. Either way, each neighbourhood in the city seems to be served by at least one of these large white trucks with a tiny serving hatch cut in the side, and I have it on good authority that most of them are pretty damn decent. Mariscos Germán certainly is.
We ate delicate, crisply-fried chunks of fresh fish in soft masa-flour tortillas doused in hot sauce, chunky fresh vegetables and coriander. We ate crispy fried tortillas topped with the most perfect, zingy, herby (thyme at least, amongst other things) fish and shrimp ceviche and vast slabs of buttery avocado. We also ate something called Aguachile, ordered blind but which turned out to be a chilli-spiked ceviche containing a bewildering variety of seafood ingredients. It was all unbelievably good and unbelievably good value - a vast meal for two with enough Aguachile left over for lunch the next day came to about $12.
Super Cocina, Normal Heights
With not a taco in sight, Super Cocina specialises in a different style of Mexican cuisine - hearty, chilli-spiked soups, stews and the all-important mole. We queued up, canteen-style, with plastic trays and ordered by pointing at various of the bubbling vats of brightly coloured liquid, and again paid a pittance (about $6.50 I think) for a rich, gently chocolatey chicken mole, a soft quesadilla soaked in some kind of Mexican cottage cheese, rice and beans. I can't pretend we had an exhaustive range of the menu but judging by the queues and online reviews for this functional little cantina, their food has a loyal and enthusiastic fan base. And they can count me in, too.
Misión 19, Tijuana, Mexico
A couple of paragraphs as part of a Mexican food roundup is probably doing this very serious (and very expensive) haute cuisine joint in Tijuana a great disservice, but I include it if only to show that Mexican food can do high-end as well as the best of them. Highlights of the multi-course tasting menu included a pretty glass of deconstructed shrimp salad containing wonderfully powerful guacamole puree; a crisp-fried octopus tentacle with garlic jam, pistachios and green chickpea; a silky risotto spiked with Mexican truffle (who knew?) and fantastic "heirloom" beans and wild mushrooms; and a meltingly tender portion of stunning Mexican beef (a first for me), cooked sous vide and served with crispy, flavoursome chayote squash and vanilla-infused olive oil.
You could probably get away from Misión 19 for less than the $200 a head we spent if you went a little easier on the wine, but I hadn't risked life and limb crossing the border into one of the world's kidnapping and murder hotspots to take it easy. In all honesty though, the border crossing was completely painless, there were plenty of smart yellow cabs waiting to whisk us to and from the restaurant and the evening was a lot of fun. If you go yourself, don't miss the interesting bar upstairs (Bar 20) where they do all sorts of fancy things involving molecular mixology (cringe, but that's what they say themselves).
Tacos el Gordo, Chula Vista
I save the best until last. We wouldn't have even found this place if it wasn't a clandestine tip from my sister's Mexican hairdresser, someone very much tuned into the San Diego food goings-on and who claimed this unassuming drive-thru in the border town of Chula Vista served the best tacos in the area. She was right, of course, but just how good they were is difficult to convey without dissolving into a heap of breathless superlatives. Beef mulas were like beef taco sandwiches, moist chunks of shredded beef inside two discs of soft, thick tortilla, accompanied by a slab of salty rubbery cheese of some kind and topped with fresh salad. Other tacos came in the form of asada, beef steak strips covered in smooth guacamole and chilli sauce, and the rather more challenging Tacos de Sesos - brain (el Gordo specialise in offal and serve tacos made with tripe, tongue and the disconcertingly vague "head") with tomatillo sauce which I tried for the sheer bragging rights but can't say I'd rush to order again.
But the spicy pork and spicy beef tacos - Tacos de Adobada, shaved to order off two revolving columns of marinaded meat and doused in a yoghurt-chilli sauce - would have been worth the trip alone. I can imagine, based on my shonky pictures and without being there to taste them yourselves, that it's hard to see quite what could be so special about them; they are, after all, "just" fresh soft tortillas topped with moist and crunchy spiced meat, fresh vegetables and coriander. But there's something about the combination of all the different textures, the spices, the earthy tortilla and the fresh dressing, that makes something that, like all great cuisine, is much more than the sum of its parts. Instantly smitten on our first visit, we made a special effort to go back on the last day to have them again. And even now, writing this up back in cold, drizzly London just thinking about them is enough to get me booking the next available flight to Lindbergh Field airport.
I will be back of course - having family there is only one of a number of reasons to visit this consistently charming and likeable part of the world. If you're not the kind of person who enjoys knocking back some of the freshest, tastiest craft beers in the world in the early evening Californian sun whilst snacking on ceviche tostadas and chilli sauce well, on the one hand I feel sorry for you but on the other, there's always the beaches, the mountains, the wildlife (Black Widow spiders aside though; I had quite enough of those), and many other kinds of food if you need any more reasons to visit. Oh, and burgers. They have a few of those. Watch this space.
Mariscos Germán 9/10
Super Cocina 7/10
Misión 19 8/10
Tacos el Gordo 9/10
Before I begin a rundown of the food highlights of my recent trip to San Diego, it's probably worth reminding myself to not get too carried away. Yes, I ate very well, in a number of places, most of which were on the "dirt" side of "cheap" and one or two meals (usually involving fried meat patties) rank up there with some of the best food I've ever eaten anywhere. But with the benefit of a glorious climate, some of the friendliest people on the planet and an attitude to service that was never anything less than bend-over-backwards perfect, you tend to come away with a warm happy glow from even the most modest snack. I'm sure after a few weeks of blazing sunshine smiles and fresh seafood sandwiches I'd be craving the London drizzle and a Tayyabs, so take much of the following gushing enthusiasm with a pinch of salt....
The first night, and heavily jetlagged, I found myself in Hodad's, a burger joint in an area of town called Ocean Beach. Nestled amongst the crumbling hippie hostels, cavernous strip-lit surf shops and dive bars, Hodad's has been serving what it modestly calls the best burgers in the world since the late 60s, appropriate as the area itself seems also to have changed very little during the last 40 odd years. Sat in a boisterous, eccentric room with walls plastered in car number plates and with locals queuing patiently outside serenaded by bearded buskers, we tucked into onion rings and bacon cheeseburgers, the former crispy and fresh and towered so high they blocked out the light, the latter, well, just about perfect. The bacon at Hodad's is stripped, boiled then pressed and fried into thin crispy patties which taste almost like ham confit - not just a fantastic concentrated flavour but a lovely range of textures, which sit very well with the soft beef soaked in slimy cheap Kraft cheese. This may seem like a criticism of the cheese - it isn't, as anyone who has ever had a Roquefort or mature cheddar monstrosity from any number of misguided "gourmet" burger joints in the UK will hopefully tell you. Burgers like this, flamboyantly unhealthy, planet-sized, groaning with cheese and salt and grease and beef, could not exist anywhere else in the world. And if they did, they certainly would not cost $6. I was in love.
At the Little Italy Farmer's Market I ate freshly scooped-out uni, bought some of the nicest (and most expensive) tomatoes I've ever known, and gorged on a beef brisket sandwich. It was a good day.
Since trying the USDA steaks at Goodman back in August, I had been understandably eager to try the famous grain-fed beef at what would hopefully be at slightly less of a premium than the examples flown over to Mayfair. However, it seems that good beef is expensive even this close to the source, and these two fine-looking dry-aged rib-eyes, from Iowa Meat Farms, cost nearly $60 - that's almost comparable (thanks to that bloody exchange rate) with that charged at places like Jack O'Shea's in London for their Black Angus. I wish I could tell you that they were worth the money, but I can't - not because they weren't, but because I completely cocked up the cooking procedure and managed to bake them to a uniform grey before I'd had a chance to sear. Blame an oven that falsely reported its own temperature, a steak-cooking method nicked from the Food Channel which was far too fiddly, and me. Mainly blame me. But all was not lost, because in this Land of the Free, Home of the Beef, you don't have to travel miles across town to an artisan butcher, nor pay a small fortune, for some excellent cow. Costco, the wholesalers (sort of a US equivalent of Macro but a thousand times better), sell a huge range of extremely fairly priced steaks and ribs, and not just the cheap cuts either - I bought two USDA prime New York Strips (what I think we would call sirloin) for little more than $20. And this time, ladies and gentlemen, I did those dry-aged beauties proud - cooked perfectly (even if I do say so myself) on a white-hot skillet and a brief spell in a warm oven to rest. They were amongst the very best that steak can be - beefy, metallic, gorgeously shot through with rich fat and with a satisfying thick crust.
Without going into too much detail, other eateries in San Diego and environs worth a mention are:
- Donovan's Steakhouse, which although not up to the standard of Luger's (or even Hawksmoor/Goodman in terms of the steak itself) was nevertheless a hugely enjoyable way to spend my birthday evening, and they can mix a fine martini.
- El Pescador Fish Market in La Jolla, where you point at the bit of fresh fish you like the look of and they stick it in a sandwich for you. Kind of like London's Fishworks, only not crap.
- Mariscos Godoy, in Chula Vista, a completely bonkers Mexican restaurant which served seafood dishes soaked in cheese and cream (what's not to like) while an enthusiastically voluble mariachi band bashed away in the background. In the interests of keeping this post to a vaguely readable length I can't go into everything we ate, but one of the dishes was called a 'crater', and was a kind of thick fish soup served inside a hollowed-out lump of volcanic rock so white-hot that the soup reduced itself over the course of the meal and was still too hot to touch after we'd paid the bill and left. It still wasn't the craziest thing on the menu.
- Encinitas Café (in Encinitas) which for sheer old-world Americana and character is hard to beat. I had bacon and pancakes and poached eggs, washed down with something called a 'malt', which tasted like Horlicks ice-cream.
Amazingly, it took until my final few hours before the flight back from LAX to make it to a branch of the legendary In 'N' Out burger. Not so much a fast food restaurant as a widely established cult, In 'N' Out are famous for two things - being the first drive-thru restaurant to make use of two-way speaker systems for ordering, and for having a 'secret' menu which isn't advertised in store. The 'secret' menu (not so secret really, as it's clearly listed on their official website) has probably helped create an extra frisson of exclusivity around the chain, but really there is no mystery to the overwhelming popularity of In 'N' Out - they are simply very, very good. From a refreshingly tiny 'non-secret' menu I ordered a Double Double (that's two patties, two slices of that lovely slimy Kraft cheese) and fries, while my sister ordered an 'animal style' (some sort of onion and cheese sauce) hamburger. Very much in the (correct) Hodad's style, this was a supremely accomplished burger, generous in portion and flavour. Crunch was provided, rather than the bacon slice at Hodad's, by a slightly extra toasted brioche bun lid, but what this burger did have going for it over Hodad's was the price - a paltry $2.99 for what must be up there with the best burgers in the world. And this from a chain! Quite a large chain too. Is it too much to hope that one day we'll see one of these in London? Of course it is - by the time the In 'N' Out Kings Road opened they'd be forced to add rocket salad and ciabatta buns and low-fat mayonnaise. You're more likely to see a Tayyabs on Manhattan Beach.
Which brings me nicely back to my first paragraph. Yes, San Diego was lovely, and it's hard not to be charmed by such a beautiful county and people as consistently pleasant as their weather, but on my second night back in London, my circadian rhythms still slightly off-kilter, I was invited to the christening of Tayyabs' new basement room. After piles of lamb chops and seekh kebabs, bowlfuls of dry meat and gorgeous chunks of spicy slow-roasted lamb, I was reminded that for the benefit of a better climate or a decent burger there will always be something else I'd have to give up. Cold, wet, noisy and dirty London may be, but there's no place like home. It's good to be back.
Hodad's 9/10
Donovan's Steakhouse 7/10
El Pescador Fish Market 7/10
Mariscos Godoy 8/10
Encinitas Café 7/10
In'N'Out 9/10
