Blog

Dine in or Take-out this year….Let Chef Jeff do all the work.
Make reservations soon or download the order form if you need a little help this year.
(more…)

Whatcha doing for restaurant week?  Sunday, September 18th-Friday September 23rd…  $30 three course dining experience.  Ever wanted to try us out?  This is a great time to have a three course dining experience and pamper yourself.
(more…)

Met with Anchi from IRC and the New Roots Community Garden yesterday and they brought over some really awesome heirloom tomatoes.  We had just received our daily delivery from  Suzie’s Farm and I had researched and ordered the night before, some Turkish eggplant.  Little round devils that look beautiful and have a peppery flavor tot hem.  Loren, my Sous Chef, and I were talking about what to do and we decided to on the salad to the left.  Sauteed Suzie’s Farm Turkish Eggplant Salad with New Roots Farm Heirloom tomatoes and Armenian cucumber ribbons, Terra grown oregano and Thai basil.  Wow!!!  This was amazing and we sold a ton.  We have it on special again tonight and hopefully we can showcase some really cool produce that’s growing in our city.  We’re also featuring tonight lash fried Suzie’s Farm Red Okra with a housemade chicken chorizo aioli.

In addition to the great produce, we’re featuring local halibut and yellowtail.  Terra is definitely a farm to table pioneer in the East County of San Diego.

Hop on in to Terra for Easter brunch with the family. Enjoy our regular menu with some great specials on April 24th from 10am-2pm. (more…)

Pamper your moms and grand moms at Terra’s special Mother’s Day brunch. Join us from 9am-2pm May 13th for a special menu. (more…)

Thank you Hillcrest for 13 awesome years. The rent just got a little too high to handle. We’ve closed our Hillcrest location and we’re in the process of moving to our new home; 7091 El Cajon Boulevard. We’re planning on opening April 6th, so stay tuned. Same great food, catering still available, great new space.

I had a ball doing the first photo shoot @ Terra of the food for the book.  It took me two entire days to get all of this ready for photography.  I’ve done food shots one or two at a time over the years for magazines and websites, but nothing like this.  To make it worthwhile to do, we had to shoot 26 dishes over two days. Whew!!! We had to have everything ready and then “fluff” it up when we were actually ready to shoot. Very interesting and cumbersome process.  The dishes here are avocado shrimp cocktail with wasabi sorbet, pumpkin creme brulee with diced persimmon, tomato and cucumber salad with mint and lemon and the last dish is the grilled hanger steak with oven roasted rosemary potatoes and chimichurri sauce.

Stay tuned for more farm and garden visits and another photo shoot coming up February 4th.  We’ll keep you posted so you can follow the entire process.

Happy Eating! Good Food makes the world go round.

I continued working through the rest of high school and upon graduation, a friend that I had made at the hotel was moving up to La Jolla to manage the front office for a newly acquired hotel owned by the same company that owned the Circle 8.  This hotel company was operated by family friends of ours; my mom’s best friend to be exact.  My friend, Wayne, asked me if I wanted to be a bellman and make tips for the first time in my life while going to UCSD.  I was a 4.2 student and only applied to SDSU, UCSD and UCLA.  I was young, dumb and stupid just like most graduates not knowing what to study or what I really wanted to do.  I knew I didn’t want to go too far and when Wayne asked me to work for him, I nearly had a heart attack thinking of leaving my dad after 5 ½ years of working together.  While attending UCSD I joined a fraternity and it was at this point that I knew I could cook.  My good friend, Danny and I would go to the Asian markets in Kearny Mesa for some sushi grade Ahi and by the time we were back at our apartment, there were 10-15 guys waiting for dinner. Every time I cooked dinner it was like having a banquet because so many guys would just show up.

One thing led to another and by the time I graduated in 1991, I still had no idea what to do with an economics degree with an emphasis on math and art history.  I did the only thing I knew how, which was work in a restaurant. I went back to Pam Pam and worked for my dad for about 6 months and then, ironically, my dad’s friend that got us into the deli business was now in the mortgage business: Uncle Steve.  Uncle Steve told my dad and I that his company was making money hand over fist with refinances and that if we got our real estate licenses we could go work with him.  We were suckers and went for it and we made a ton of money for about 2 years until the interest rates took a jump up.  It was at that time that I was living in Encinitas spending a ton of money on fine wine and food, travelling up to Temecula on the weekends and talking with Joe & Bill Hart.  I really had an appreciation for food and wine, but still didn’t know much about cooking.  My friend Jonathan and I, same friend from high school, would putz around in the kitchen, but certainly nothing professionally yet.

When the rates went back up, my income dropped by over 50% and I was forced, along with my dad, to go back to Pam Pam and cut our losses.  For the first year back at the restaurant, Jonathan and I were dreaming up some great ideas of restaurants.  There were two concepts he and I were thinking about. One was centered around skewers and everything being served on skewers with cool dipping sauces and the other was a wrap restaurant.  This was in 1994 or so and there was a place called World Wrapps that was started up in Berkley by two San Diego kids.  My dad and I took a flight up there to check it out and decided that there wasn’t a great location in San Diego for that type of concept.  But, wraps were a great idea for a menu addition.  I would go into the restaurant around 9am and work on specials for the day in the kitchen and then at night I would turn around and run the front as the manager.  The lead cook we had at the time was Dennis and he and I would come up with killer specials.  We were using chimchurri sauce years before it was popular in San Diego.  We ended up transforming the menu at Pam Pam into a full service restaurant and we added some wraps, skewers and pastas and nearly doubled the sales that year.  This was the point that I really began to think about this as a career.  It was at this same time that I went to Boston for a week and trained under Chef Michael Schlow, who was voted one of Food and Wine’s Best Chef’s 1996.  It was with him that I really got schooled on the finer details of food and wine.  I came back with an unbelievable appreciation for the culinary arts.

My dad and I actually thought that if we could do this at this dinky little restaurant in a hotel, that we could take this out into a community in town and really make something for ourselves.  We looked and looked for about a year or so all over San Diego for a space. and there was this space in Hillcrest that was vacant.  But, my parents thought that it would be too high profile of a location for me to run the kitchen with my extremely limited experience.  So, we put the word out for a Chef and we found someone that we thought was perfect. I told him my concept for a restaurant, which was a casual fine dining restaurant that was unpretentious and had a commitment to great wine and that was going to serve a contemporary American cuisine with emphasis from South, Central & North America.  We opened Terra Restaurant on May 7, 1998 and I was the General Manager.  Our Chef that we thought was so great, sabotaged and sank us from the get go.  Kitchen staff weren’t trained properly, didn’t know the menu correctly and therefore the consistency was awful.  We parted ways after about 3 months and then we hired another Chef and another and another.  We went through 6 Chefs in the first two years.

more to come…….

Tonight I hosted the SDGNO(San Diego Girl’s Night Out) twitter group.  Most of the women are moms both single and married and most have their own blogs and businesses. SanDiegoBargainMama, LaJollaMom, Meladramaticmommy, iizliz.posterous and stephaniethompson to name a few.

I had a great time showing them what Terra is all about and what I’m doing with local farms and sustainable seafood.  I told them about my history with school gardens and my work with the Childhood Obesity Initiative and how I’m incorporating all of that into my cookbook.  I think they all, not only enjoyed my talk about what I’m all about, but also loved the 4 course spread I layed out for them.

1st Course Salad

We had Organic Baby Green Salad with Japanese Tomato, Persian cucumber and miso-honey vinaigrette garnished with basil seeds.  Next I showered them with some local black sea bass with wilted greens(beet, collard, escarole & baby red spinach) topped off with a lobster beurre blanc.

Black Bass with lobster beurre blanc

Then they got a flat iron grilled pork flat iron atop roasted fingerling potatoes with roasted Temecula honey onion from Crows Pass Farm and roasted gala apple.

Pork Flat Iron With fingerling potatoes, Temecula honey onions & Gala Apples

The last course was a dessert trifecta. Maple Cheesecake with candied yam cream, Chocolate Tart and Apple persimmon cobbler with butternut squash ice cream.  Not a bad dinner if I do say so myself.

I think I’ve definitely made some new friends that will remember me and Terra Restaurant in Hillcrest.  For my first twe-eat up, I think it was a success.  We’re talking about another in February which would be a Karl Strauss beer dinner.  More details coming soon….

Happy Eating.