San Diego Magazine's Happy Half Hour San Diego Magazine

Did you know one of the country’s most celebrated sommeliers lives and works in San Diego? It’s true! This week, we welcomed Coco Randolph of Black Radish and San Francisco’s Californios to the Happy Half Hour podcast.

Randolph is new-ish to town, having moved here about a year and a half ago from San Francisco, where she helped her family run two Michelin-starred Californios. Her sister is married to its decorated chef, Val Cantu, and the whole Randolph clan (plus Cantu) started the restaurant in 2013. Since then, Californios has been granted many awards and accolades from various organizations (like Michelin), including for its wine program, which is under Randolph's direction.

When her Texas-born-and-raised family first embarked upon opening a restaurant, the clan tasked Randolph with being its sommelier as well as the general manager. No idle hands in this crew. The only problem was that Randolph knew little about wine, though she knew she loved Mexican food after having lived there for years following homeschooling and graduating from Texas Tech. No problem. She’s an autodidact, sharp as a whip, and incredibly ambitious. She picked up a copy of The Wine Bible, studying obsessively every second she wasn’t working Californios’ front-of-house.

In 2015, just two years after opening, Michelin awarded Californios its first star. By 2017, the restaurant had the distinction of being the world’s only two-star Michelin spot focused on Mexican cuisine. And Randolph’s wine program, which started as a list with a dozen producers and had expanded to a cellar boasting hundreds of the world’s finest vintages and rarest allocations in less than a decade, was awarded the Best of Award of Excellence from Wine Spectator and the Best Wine Restaurants nod from Wine Enthusiast. In 2021, Randolph was awarded Michelin’s first-ever Sommelier of the Year designation; she was just one of two somms to receive the nod.

While she’s still involved with Californios and the family from afar, her heart and body are very much in San Diego. She’s growing Black Radish’s wine program exponentially by regularly bringing top producers to town for special wine dinners and other events.

And there’s more good news. “I moved here for my lover boy!” Coco excitedly exclaims any time anyone gives her the chance. She didn’t come here for food or wine, but for love, which to me signals she’s planting deep roots. “It’s true, we are fully staying here, building a life,” Randolph confirms. Expect to hear a lot more from Coco wherever anyone’s pouring grape juice in town.

In addition to trying some of Coco’s wine selections, of which you can hear more about in the episode, we also talk about the news. Crack Shack is opening its fifth location in Pacific Beach; even more Korean Fried Chicken called Season Ave is arriving to Clairemont Mesa; Eleven Madison Park and Herb & Wood alum Sebastian Becerra is opening Peruvian spot Pepino in La Jolla to much fanfare; Gator by the Bay is in town once again beginning May 9, and Oddish Wine turns 1 on May 11.

Sometimes, it’s the most fun to chop it up with friends. And when your friends include legendary sushi chefs and top DJs, all the better. This week we brought to Happy Half Hour Chris Cantore, a former voice across San Diego’s radio airwaves, and his long-time buddy, North County sushi chef Tyler Mars. Troy goes way back with the duo, having been both a music and food journalist during his career.

The pair just launched Needlefish, an omakase and record-spinning pop-up that they plan to take around San Diego, and hope to one day make a brick-and-mortar location. In fact, they held their first event for SDM staff just a few weeks ago to rave reviews.

The idea is simple: fresh fish and good tunes, vinyl-only. Cantore says he likes to bring back the classics, like 90’s hip-hop, punk, and stoner rock like Queens of the Stone Age. Tyler pairs that with his own sliced fish creations, served on warm vinegared rice and usually in combination with other condiments and ingredients you haven’t experienced eating sushi before (think thin-sliced prime rib eye and chimichurri, for a non-fish example).

Though Needlefish is new, the duo’s idea is not. They both wanted to open up a spot together 25 years ago. But they were scared, and life happened. So did kids, and marriages, and careers, and the transitions of said careers, and Mars’ eventual cancer diagnosis. The latter came in 2021 but Mars is now in remission.

“It’s really because of what happened to Tyler that we finally had the courage to pull the trigger on this,” Cantore says. “We realized that life is short, and you don’t know how much time you have left. You have to do what you love to do, and this is what we love to do.”

Stay tuned to our pages to find out more about where these guys will be popping up and when. Follow them on @needlefishco on Instagram for the latest updates.

We also chat other food news around town including our Best Restaurants issue! Mission Hills’ jewel Wolf in the Woods took home the top prize of Best Restaurant, while North County brunch temple Atelier Manna won Best New Restaurant. Check out all the other critics’ and readers’ picks here. Basic Pizza is also closing its doors, which opened in 2006, when Petco Park was just two years old. It’s moving to the other side of the park, though, so fret not (and, also, it’s the same owner as all the URBN restaurants with similar menus). And, finally, beloved LA Japanese chain Katsuya is coming to UTC with Katsuya Ko, which offers more of an izakaya-style menu geared towards younger consumers.

Jordan Howlett just needs a minute. Give him that, and he’s liable to have you hooked. Thanks to his highly recognizable, signature mirror-selfie videos, Howlett (San Diego Magazine’s cover star for our 2024 Best Restaurants issue) has amassed upwards of 30 million followers across his social channels by sharing fast food hacks and wisdom with deadpan delivery and a genuine love of food. Some 70 million people see his videos every month on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. He's a one-minute, one-man daily Netflix special.

But it hasn’t been easy. Growing up financially strapped meant that Howlett’s opportunities were often limited. Stress has been a theme. He’s been belittled and bullied. He slept in his car while chasing a dream. It took a maniacal work ethic and healthy amount of delusion to propel him to the social media stratosphere.

“I didn’t realize how creative my parents were until I realized just how much we were really struggling,” Howlett tells us in this episode of Happy Half Hour.

Born in LA County, Howlett moved to Oceanside in the fourth grade after spending his early life in the desert town of Victorville. Howlett began attending Oceanside High as a sophomore, where he joined the baseball team.

“Originally, I was thinking maybe football,” Howlett says. “I’m on my way to the football field and the baseball coach sees me, and he points me right at the baseball field and says, ‘Why don’t you go over there?’”

That interception changed the course of Howlett’s life.

At 16, with no sports experience, Howlett became hooked on baseball. Before long, he started dreaming of playing Division 1 ball. He wanted to go pro. But his teammates had been playing since preschool. Howlett had some catching up to do and 100 people—teammates, coaches, everyone—telling him he had no chance. But Howlett didn’t care. He just got to work, training every spare minute, working three times harder than everyone else.

It paid off. Howlett found himself on fields he was never supposed to see… at least until Covid killed his baseball career. Then it was back to low-wage fast food jobs—until that work ethic came in handy for growing a social media audience.

In this episode of HHH, Howlett joins us in the studio to recount his childhood in Oceanside, his path from awkward high school baseball wannabe to Division 1 athlete, and his road to internet superstardom. Along the way he recalls how his Fast Food Secrets Club came to be, recoils from pickle pizza, and tells us about one of his absolute favorite local spots to eat.

Want to see his videos? Follow him at @jordan_the_stallion8.

This week’s Happy Half Hour extra special guest is a longtime friend of San Diego Magazine, Feeding San Diego. If you tune into our channels, this fantastic organization probably doesn’t need much of an introduction. And if you’re lucky, you would have caught Troy emceeing their gala last month (in a sequin jacket, of course).

But for the uninitiated, Feeding San Diego is easily one of the most impressive non-profits in town. We’ve covered ‌food insecurity before in the magazine’s pages. Through our other partnerships with the organization on social media and online, and in this episode, we continue to shed light on one of our region’s most dire problems. In partnership with a network of nearly 350 local community organizations, including local charities, schools, faith communities, healthcare providers, and meal sites, Feeding San Diego collects food and financial donations, moves and distributes food to communities who need it, and advocates to end hunger.

Feeding America says nearly 300,000 people in San Diego County, including almost 80,000 children, are hungry. Feeding San Diego is Feeding America’s only local partner food bank, established in 2007, and beyond just banking and distributing food, it rescues 1.2 million pounds of high-quality, edible surplus food monthly from local grocery stores alone. It also manages around 875 pickups of food donations a week from local retailers and provides food assistance to kids, families, seniors, college students, military families, veterans, and the unhoused via about 300 food distribution sites around San Diego County.

“There are many faces of hunger,” says Kate Garrett, Feeding San Diego’s Director of Supply Chain, who represented the organization on this episode. “It can be your neighbor, a coworker, a kid your child goes to school with, seniors on fixed incomes living in rural towns, military families, and veterans. Hunger can affect anyone.”

Garrett, who in a past life was once a zookeeper at a zoo in Greece and is an accomplished horseback rider, has been with the organization for over six years and was a shortlisted nominee of the Food Chain Global Youth Champion Award in 2022. She’s responsible for figuring out the logistics of all the aforementioned, which is no small task considering the numbers involved.

One of the biggest misconceptions about food rescue and re-distribution, Garrett says, is that people assume the food collected is expired or somehow lesser quality. “Our goal is to make food as accessible as possible,” she says. “And not just any food, but edible and nutritious food. Want to make sure that what we're providing is really high-quality and good for people to eat.” She adds that the food they collect is merely surplus, meaning it is still perfectly edible and within sell and use-by dates. A good example she gives is supermarket bread: it’s baked fresh every day, but not every loaf will sell, and they are required to throw it out at the end of the day. It’s still in perfect, fresh condition, of course. But now it’s become surplus. That’s where Feeding San Diego comes in, to give just one example of what they do and the types of logistics Garret manages.

In addition to solving local hunger issues (one can dream), we also talked about local food news. Donut Bar opened its augmented reality donut experience on Columbia Street near the waterfront (and SDM HQ), Anime’s Tara Monsod is a finalist for the James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef, California award (the first from San Diego to get this far, ever!), and Shorebird Restaurant, which has outposts in Newport Beach, Palm Desert, and Sedona under the WildThyme Restaurant Group umbrella, will open in Seaport Village some time in 2024.

Our Happy Half Hour guest today is the local chapter CEO of probably one of the most beloved and recognizable charities in the world: The Make-A-Wish Foundation, San Diego chapter.

We invited Suzanne Husby, who garnered her title in 2021, to talk all things Make-a-Wish at Matsu in Oceanside. Husby has been with the foundation for 17 years, moving up the ranks from intern to wish coordinator, a few more big titles, and finally ending up as chapter CEO most recently.

Her specialty was overseeing wish-granting operations, volunteer management, and medical outreach, and she was key in granting a whopping more than 3,200 wishes for local children.

Recently, the Foundation decided to partner with executive chef/owner William Eick of Matsu to host their upcoming gala and collaborate on special appearances to benefit Make-A-Wish. When gala chair Dai Logan first approached chef Eick, it was instant kismet. Logan had been a superfan of the chef while chef Eick has always had big heart for the organization. The pair formed a new friendship and partnership shortly after.

In the episode, Husby chats wish fulfillment and details several wish-making missions that have taken place in San Diego during her decades-long tenure at the organization.
As we chat, Logan opens up about her Happy Half Hour fandom as well as her recent trip to Japan, during which she existed solely on chef Eick’s recommendations, and shares a special bottle of sake with us that she brought back to the states. Finally, we get the scoop on the foundation’s Make-a-Wish gala which takes place on October 12 at the Park Hyatt Aviara with chef Eick.

Closing out the show, Troy discovers radishes at Marisi; Jackie finally finds NY-style pizza that she likes; 24 Suns pop-up is teaming up with IRS Cocktails to open Swan & Fox in Oceanside; the Puesto group is opening a CDMX-style restaurant at The Headquarters; and The Del is opening beer spot The Laundry Pub as part of its new sprawling reno.

“Close my eyes, she's somehow closer now / Softly smile, I know she must be kind / When I look in her eyes / She goes with me to a blossom world”

The lyrics to the iconic Beach Boys song “Good Vibrations,” penned in part by Mike Love, are likely about a woman from long ago. But they could just as easily be about the flavors and sensations from his brand new rum, Club Kokomo Spirits.

We had Love in-house along with his children who work for the spirits company to chat all things San Diego, award-winning rum, and good vibes on this week’s Happy Half Hour.

Also joining us was Geoff Longenecker of Seven Caves, the brand's distiller, who was shaking up mojitos for us in real-time. In case you aren't already aware, he’s one of the preeminent spirits distillers in San Diego. “It’s pretty damn good, isn’t it?” Love whispered loudly to me, leaning in as he sipped. Indeed.

Both Love and The Beach Boys have a storied history in San Diego. They shot the Pet Sounds album cover at the San Diego Zoo. They played countless concerts at the Rady’s Shell, Del Mar Fairgrounds, and what was formerly Jack Murphy Stadium; Mike Love used to live in Rancho Santa Fe (where his daughter went to Cathedral Catholic); and, of course, the fact that it’s distilled right here.

Love’s aspirations started years ago when he was enjoying a “perfect” mojito in New York with his wife, Jacquelyne, while humming the chorus of his co-authored hit song, “Kokomo.” His penchant for wordplay took over as he uttered the word “Kokomojito,” and ever since, Mike’s dream has been to share the spirit of Kokomo with the world, he says.

Currently, Club Kokomo Spirits makes award-winning rum and gin-based canned cocktails and a line of bottled rums. The company prides itself on using high-quality ingredients, including natural sugars and flavors, like a unique blend of demerara cane sugar rum and traditional Jamaican pot still rum.

“Aruba, Jamaica, ooh, I wanna take ya / Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty mama / Key Largo, Montego / Baby, why don't we go? / Jamaica…”

Again, the song is about something else, right? Or…? Love says, “Kokomo is a state of mind.” He smiles and takes a sip, and grins once again.