Editor’s Note, June 2025: Gathering San Diego’s Food Icons
This is, by far, the most ambitious thing we’ve ever done.
Eighty-eight obscenely talented people in one room, surrounded by some of the best damn photographers and filmmakers and storytellers in the city. I watched an 83-year-old uni diver—the backbone of our fishing culture—talking to North Park’s champion of natural wine. A member of the family who built The Kebab Shop geeked out over celebrity chef and fantastic-hair guy Richard Blais.
A Michelin-starred chef reconnected with the chefs who trained him years ago. There was a baby in the room, born a decade after her parents started their own dream at a local farmers market. And we had the woman who runs that farmers market show up with her mom. The farmers whose families grow the incredible food that goes into those markets were there, too.
Usually, for this issue—Best Restaurants, our annual ode to the people who make the city’s food and drink culture hum—we feature one restaurant or chef who had a hell of a year. This time, we thought, What if, instead, we gathered “them all?” The Michelins and the James Beards, the moms and the pops, the farmers and fishers, the ranchers and community builders?
The cover of this issue is that.
The Harlem jazz scene of the 1950s inspired the idea. In 1958, Esquire magazine invited 57 musicians who’d had a key role in building Jazz culture onto a stoop in the iconic New York neighborhood. Photographer Art Kane captured the people who’d created a special moment in American culture—so much talent in one frame, all in their Sunday best.
The act of photographing and filming this cover is exactly why our CEO Claire and I took over this classic media company three years ago. We wanted to use what we’d learned in media to help build the culture of San Diego. To find the inspiring dreamers and workers and entrepreneurs of our city and help tell their stories in ways that are epic and visual and compelling enough that people remember those stories. Ideally, we hoped to not go broke in the process.
Culture is built through remarkable work—and through remarkable stories of that work.
And being able to get a large amount of our food and drink culture in the same room with some of the city’s most talented storytellers is exactly the point. To meet each other, reconnect, just take an hour and shoot the shit. That’s how a culture grows. In the days following the shoot, I was flooded with emails and texts saying how folks had met someone new, exchanged numbers, started sketching collaborations.
There were many people in that room who deserved a magazine cover of their own. And they didn’t even mention it. They wanted to stand with the group.
When I initially texted CH Projects founder Arsalun Tafazoli about this idea, not only did he not flinch—he called me, almost more excited about the idea than I was. He asked his team to open Leila—one of our Best New Restaurants, this year’s runaway hit—and cook for everyone, pour drinks. It’s something Arsalun and I have always held in common: a pretty core desire to bring people together. Because loneliness is common, and it sucks. Culture and the future of us come together eye-to-eye. We have the opportunity— through media and restaurants and bars and farmers markets—to get humans in the same place. To foster real connections that ideally will push the culture of San Diego forward.
Thanks to the people who showed up. Thanks to the CH team. And to our SDM team for their creativity and for agreeing to ambition.
(Important note: This cover isn’t “everyone.” There are thousands of people who’ve transformed San Diego from a work-in-progress into a food culture that’s entered the national conversation. We just made a list of some of the people whose work has inspired us and invited as many as fire codes would permit. Hopefully, it’s the start of a new annual tradition.)
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