Travel plan idea blog

Where to eat in San Diego

I'm still working on the web hosting, but the blog must go on. I have a friend going to San Diego for a few days on business and he's looking for good restaurants out there. He's staying at the Marriott in La Jolla. I've collected some advice – feel free to leave your own by making a comment.

1) Anyplace in the Gaslamp is gonna be good for dinner. But... for lunch one day you gotta try Kansas City Barbeque. It's this little hole in the wall dumpy looking place, but its where they filmed the "You've lost that lovin feeling" scene from Top Gun. (You'd NEVER be able to tell, its pretty trippy) But there's top gun and KC football memorabilia all throughout the joint. I was in SD for 3 days and I had to go there twice. The food is amazing too. It's within walking distance of Petco Park. Take a walk in the park they have. They open the outfield gates up and you can walk all around right up to the outfield fence, through the bleachers etc.

2) I live in San Diego. There are a bunch of good places in downtown. If you like Italian the best place in the whole city is Buon Appetito in Little Italy. For Breakfast you absolutely have to go to Hash House a GO GO in Hillcrest. In La Jolla go to George's at the Cove and sit near the balcony for an amazing view. Also in Lajolla is the Marine Room, but it is more pricey. You have got to try a Carne Asada burrito from one of the Roberto's Taco stands. They are all over the place in SD.

3) If you want steaks, go to Donovans. It's probably the best in SD, and it is right there in La Jolla. I know they are all over the country but Flemings is an amazing place for a good cut of beef. It's at the end of K Street in the Gaslamp. Across from the Hilton. There are some really cool Irish Pubs in the Gas Lamp. If you can' have fun there, I don't know what to tell you!

4) Buon Appetito in Lttle Italy is a great Italian restaurant. And they have a great wine bar right next door. Georges is nice too, but for the view. Top of the Market in Seaport Village has good seafood and great views. It's walking distance from the Midway. And there are a ton of good restaurants in the Gaslamp. Just walk up and down 5th and check out the menus. You're guaranteed to find something you like.
My favorite restaurant is a place called Island Prime in Point Loma.
Great food, and a great view of the city.
KC BBQ is OK for a beer I guess, but I wouldn't go there to eat, especially if I were only here for a week.

5) If you are in La Jolla and willing to pay a heavy check, go to George's, great view of the cove, pretty nice food. I'd recommend the less formal top floor, best view, easiest atmosphere. Will you have a car? Pizza Port is a really cool place a few beaches up if you like Pizza, they brew their own beers too.
In Ocean Beach (where I've lived) there is a small bar/restaurant called South Beach with some of the best fish taco's you'll find. A couple other places here depending on your mood, Pepe's, a small Italian place run by a couple from NYC, and Rancho's, a small Mexican place with an organic theme.

Best sushi in San Diego is Sushi Ota, hands down, it's in Pacific Beach, not far from La Jolla. Make reservations if you go there.

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I live in SD as well and i must say the ABSOLUTE BEST place for dessert is "extrordinary desserts" on 5th ave in hillcrest. the owner trained in france and heaven i think!!! and if your in SD for a long time and want a taste of some great new york style pizza try "bronx pizza" also in hillcrest.

Posted by: diane at January 20, 2007 08:02 PM
This is wonderful! I'm planning a trip for myself and my husband in September to SD and Cabo. Thanks for the information!

Posted by: Beth at January 20, 2007 11:07 PM
I can't recommend Market in Del Mar enough.
http://www.marketdelmar.com/index.html

Posted by: John at January 20, 2007 11:25 PM
The absolutely best fish tacos are at Chuey's just off Imperial Ave. underneath the Coronado Bridge. When I first heard of fish tacos I said "yew!" but they're awesome.

Posted by: Marta at January 21, 2007 01:45 AM
The absolutely best fish tacos are at Chuey's just off Imperial Ave. underneath the Coronado Bridge. When I first heard of fish tacos I said "yew!" but they're awesome.

Posted by: Marta at January 21, 2007 01:45 AM
You cannot miss the Sunday brunch at the Hotel del Coronado! It's in an amazing room, the food is great, and you can eat yourself into a coma. The cost of bloody marys and/or bellinis is included. The service is great. They have king crab legs galore, and they've been halved so you just scoop out the meat.
Also on Coronado is Peohe's. It's Hawaiian food. Great view of the harbor, and great food. Enjoy SD! I love it!

Posted by: Heidi at January 21, 2007 09:38 AM
The area around seaport is great, as is the food at The Fish Market nearby. Also a good restaurant is The Red Sails, great little rest. by the boat docks.

Posted by: Richard at January 21, 2007 10:26 AM
San Diego is my home and as a local (not very many people can honestly call themselves that) I am proud to say that San Diego is full of wonderful "sections" where the dining, scenery, and night life are dependant on what mood you're in. There's La Jolla (fancy, a bit pricey, but the scenery impeccable), Pacific Beach and Ocean Beach (PB and OB referred to by locals) is fun for a more mellow time. The Gaslamp (Downtown) is great for excellent dining and vibrant night life. Hillcrest (just about 15 minutes north from the GAslamp) also has wonderful restaurants. But what hasn't been mentioned in the prior reviews is Old Town. State historic parks, historic sights, museums, history afficionados, quaint shops and wonderful Mexican dining (all the restaurants on the main strip are pretty good) defines Old Town. Passing through San Diego and not doing Old Town would be a mistake.

Posted by: Yazmin at January 22, 2007 12:50 AM
In Old Town 1 blk. east, on Juan St.is La Pinata Mexican food, Great prices and Great food. North of the 8 freeway and east of the 5 freeway is Tio Leo's Mexican food also Great! I've gone to both for 20 years. Fast food, In-Out Hamburger.
Anthony's on the Harbor, by the India Sailboat and to the south is the Navel ship, you can also tour. From Anthony's to the Navel ship are all walking distance, if you get tired, you can hop on a bicycle taxi. If Adults only go to the Hyatt they have happy hour go to the elevators and puch bar floor. Talking about a spectaculer view of the Bay, the drinks are good too! Have fun.

Posted by: Elisa at January 22, 2007 03:35 PM
I graduated from UCSD, but now I live in Boston. There are so many great places to eat in SD.
The Cottage on Fay Street in La Jolla is a wonderful place to eat a late breakfast. The patio is beautiful and the corned beef hash is heavenly. World Curry on Garnet in Pacific Beach is another great place to eat. It's fun and funky. Pannikin on Gerard in La Jolla has wonderful baked treats and Mexican hot chocolate to warm up with after a full day of wintry tourism.

Posted by: Karen at January 23, 2007 05:57 AM
The Cheese Shop Deli in La Jolla is the best deli I've been to. The Roast Pork Loin sandwich is to die for! The Cheese Shop is at 2165 Avenida De La Playa, La Jolla.

Posted by: Tracey at January 23, 2007 06:38 AM
I recommend West in Carlsbad http://www.opentable.com/rest_profile.aspx?rid=5871 probably the only 5 star in North County San Diego, and difficult to get into. MAKE a reservation at least a week in advance.

Posted by: Mark Fidelman at January 23, 2007 12:46 PM
We enjoyed the Mandarin House, 2604 Fifth Ave.
San Diego, 619-232-1101

Apparently this place has been a fixture in San Diego for many years. The food is nothing unusual for a Chinese restaurant, it's just very good stuff. Reviews say that their Cantonese dishes like cashew chicken or sweet-and-sour pork are really good. I don't recall what we ordered, but we would eat there again if we didn't live 3000 miles away.

Posted by: Roi at January 25, 2007 05:27 AM

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We'll be back to normal soon, I promise

First, I apologize. I will have this blog back to normal as soon as possible. Give me a week but I hope to do it sooner. If you want to know what's going on, read on - some exciting and scary stuff is happening to my travel blog.

Things are crazy here. This blog started getting so much traffic that my web hosting company crashed. That's why you see the old version of my site. To move forward I need to buy a dedicated server, which poses two problems.

The first problem is money. I'm used to paying $10/month for hosting. Now I'll be lucky to spend less than $200/month and we might be looking at $400/month or more. I saw one that was $1800/month but hopefully I don't need that! Anyway, this problem can be overcome. I might have to do a donation campaign like Public television or something if we go over $400/month but this part will work itself out.

The second problem is that I don't know what to do with the dedicated server once I get it. I have no idea how to administer the server or get my site over there. I think I can hire someone to do this but not being in control scares me. I've spent hundreds, probably thousands of hours on this blog and I'm used to doing it all myself. Maybe I can learn to take care of a server, but this might take a while or I might fail. I'm not really technically gifted...

Anyway, those are the two problems. The good news is that the site should load very fast once we're back up and running, and we should see more lively discussions since we'll have more traffic. Unless I lose all my readers while the site is in limbo. Then I could just go back to my cheap web hosting....

Comments transferred from the old server:

Have missed your Blog, but understand the problems you presented. Hope everything works out without too much expense on your part. Thanks for the update and look forward to your Blog again!
Dian

Posted by: Dian at January 18, 2007 02:14 AM
James--

A piece of friendly advice: Don't get a dedicated server that you have to manage yourself. There are hosting companies that can offer you hosting that will scale as you need it to, without you having to manage the server yourself.

Talk to MediaTemple.Net about the MediaTemplte Grid Server plan. It will feel like one of these managed, shared environments, but they will behind the scenes scale your environment to run on one or even several servers if need be. They handle some high profile sites-- for example, I think they recently handled a product launch for Nike, and they are handling kiva.org, a nonprofit that has gotten a lot of media attention lately (showing up in PBS news broadcasts with ~1M people watching e.g.) and had their site overwhelmed several times before they found MediaTemple.

The plan starts at $20 a month, and scales upwards as your traffic rises, with some corresponding rise in price.

Another option would be a managed dedicated server. Typical is 1and1.com's Managed Server plan, though many companies can offer you this. You get exactly the same kind of fully managed, locked down environment you get in a typical shared hosting plan, but your site is the only one running on the server. In terms of flexibility it's no better or worse than what you've been doing, but in terms of scalability you get the performance of a dedicated server without the responsibility for figuring out how to operate it.

Those would be the two avenues I'd investigate if I were in your position. If you're not deep into this stuff already, you don't want to burn your time on this. Focus on blogging and making money.

Hope this helped you. In the interest of full disclosure, I do know the technical people behind Kiva.org and was featured briefly in a program about them on PBS, and I am a reasonably satisfied customer at 1and1 for both dedicated Windows servers and shared Linux/Unix servers.

Good luck... -Antonio Romero, Menlo Park, CA

Posted by: Europe Arts Travel Calendar at January 20, 2007 03:18 AM
Thanks - I'll check Media Temple out!

Posted by: James Trotta at January 20, 2007 06:14 PM
James--

I sent you the reference for MediaTemple.

Can you contact me off list? I would like to ask you something but not on the public comments feed.

Thanks,

-Antonio Romero

Posted by: antonio romero at January 27, 2007 01:32 AM

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Getting back to normal

You may have noticed some strange things happening to this blog recently. It seems that we had some sort of Yahoo special and began receiving 15 requests/second. This is an insane amount of traffic which quickly shut down my web hosting. It also happened right at the end of my vacation in America, the part where I was playing NERO in Ohio and flying from New York to Tokyo to Busan.

Anyway, now that I'm getting back to normal I've had time to (I think) take care of my problems and get this blog back to normal. If I'm wrong we'll be offline again soon and I'll try something new. One way or another, this blog will persevere.

I also want to get back into the swing of things by linking to a travel article. This one is advice on how to handle certain emergency situations that could come up while you're on vacation. Mostly this advice has been covered here before. Buy travel insurance. Have a photocopy of your passport. I don't think I mentioned not to do illegal drugs but you already know better.

One was about what to do when your traveling companion goes missing. The advice here seems somewhat lacking: Talk to your tour operator (not that I'm ever on a tour) and your hotel.

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Travel trends: Asia, Europe, river cruises, volunteering, & the environment

Those of you not too caught up in holiday madness have noticed that I'm not blogging as regularly as I normally do. That will continue for the next week or so although I do have something for you today.

Here's an article on travel trends that says more Americans are visiting China and India although as you'd expect, Europe is still very popular. In both China and Europe, river cruises are becoming more popular. Volunteer and environmentally friendly vacations are also gaining popularity.

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