The State approved San Diego County’s proposal to fast track the phase 2 reopening plan. Here is the list of restaurant planning to reopen today, May 21st
I’m sure the list will grow proportionately as the weekend progresses, especially since this is Memorial Day weekend.
I hope they keep this list current. It doesn’t seem that way so far.
I’m likely headed to the Lakehouse Inn in Carlsbad for a long weekend in about 12 days. It seems like many of the restaurants and breweries in the area are opening up. Any suggestions in that area?
I’m ideally looking for places that have outdoor seating.
One of the best restaurats in San Diego. I believe they have or are about to reopen. They have converted a parking lot to an ouside dining area.
Right not it says they aren’t open but maybe they will be open by the time I go down. Thanks.
I read an article last week about their reopening, and now, of course, I can’t find it. But it did say they were going to convert a parking lot into outdoor seating. It did sound like they were planning to reopen before the end of the month. Keep an eye on it.
The news photos of Little Italy on Saturday, with outdoor dining on India expanded on the sidewalks to the curb, makes the scene there look very strange, very makeshift, and not very well attended. Not appealing. I don’t think this is the answer, personally. Maybe on 5th in the Gaslamp, but not LI.
Little Italy has (or had) a charisma, a persona, a character that can’t be reproduced by shutting down the street this way. IMHO.
Which pictures did you see? The ones in Eater SD showed pretty good attendance and quite a few of the restaurants reported doing about 70% of normal sales for a Saturday. From the Eater photos I thought it look TOO crowded with not enough distance between pedestrians and/or diners.
I’ve done “dine in the streets” in other places. It has a certain charm, but ultimately you’re still dining on a street and there isn’t much ambiance in that 
It was Eater SD. I saw the same set of photos that you did, I guess, but we had very different impressions, it seems.
LOL…we did 
Here’s a photo provided by the LI Association that was published in the UT today. The photo tells it all.
“Would you like a table with oil spots on the pavement, or do you prefer to be seated in the no oil spots area? And by the way, how do you like our danger-yellow barrier cords?”
Health issues aside (little details like, oh, distancing when there’s something very nasty going around), I think this might be a good fit for the Gas Lamp Q. Maybe North Park.
But not in LI. Or on streets like Prospect. Just no. Not in those places.
that logic doesn’t even make sense. Street dining ok in North Park but not La Jolla? You comment about oil spots as if North Park has good streets?
that photo looks appealing to me, way more space than we would ever get inside a restaurant!
5th between G & L begins the closure experiement today. Today and Friday the closure will be 5 - 10 pm, I think those are the times I read with Saturday’s closure being Noon to midnight. From what I read there were a lot of issues with non-compliance in the Gaslamp last weekend that hastened this decision.
Comments I heard from friends who were in LI and a few industry folks was that it was nice to be out and about again but there was a lot of non-compliance there as well. As some of the industry folks have observed, “we’re bending over backwards to ensure we’re in compliance with all the new rules and regulations and then these idiots (my word, their were a lot stronger ) show up and put us all in jeopardy”. A few people think the LIA will probably institute some stronger regulations similar to what they’ve done for the LI farmers market with designated entrance points and “bouncers” who are doing crowd control and making sure masks are being worn. The Little Italy Food Hall has had to close again due to positive Covid tests related to it.
I’m not sure what’s so hard about masks. Yeah, they’re annoying but they’re also a fairly effective prevention method.
OK, not in North Park, either, then. Eating in the street is more like a neighborhood block party than dining in a restaurant patio al fresco.
I was talking about aesthetics, apart from the health issues. (Not about social distancing, not about masks.) The pedestrian promenade in LI (one block on Date St.) works because it was built with very good aesthetics. Eating in the street on India, on the other hand, doesn’t work. There may be places where aesthetics are secondary to the people that go there to eat. Gas Lamp comes to mind immediately. I thought maybe also that the crowd in North Park might be less put off by eating in the street on top of oil spots, but maybe not.
Have you ever eaten outside in non tourist places in Italy, France, Croatia etc ? It doesn’t look so different than the picture (beside the yellow barrier/line of course which is a sign if current times). I am not really sure what you are complaining about instead of being happy to be able to eat in restaurants again (which I still wouldn’t do personally)
I’ve eaten outside in a great many restaurants all over the world (not Croatia, but a lot of countries on every continent except Africa), and love eating on the sidewalks where available, and we always seek out the non-tourist areas. But the tables never go all the way to the curb, and I can’t ever recall eating in makeshift areas on the pavement in a city street, anywhere.
And yes, those yellow ropes are part of what I’m complaining about. I can abide the wrought iron sidewalk enclosures that we’ve had for so many years now, but even those are unnecessary in most places, IMO. At least they look nice.
Correction: There in fact was one time I had a meal in a street. It was in Munich during Oktoberfest. Everyone (including me and a business companion) was comping down brats and sauerkraut, and gulping down beer. They had the roads blocked off for the event. It was packed. It was a lot of fun.
Do you fret about the aesthetics while eating at Sab e Lee? almost anywhere on Convoy? Not sure I understand the complaint unless you were going to a Michelin-star restaurant and got seated next to the horse buggy.
Yes I “fret” about the aesthetics of every restaurant that I frequent. If I don’t like that about it, I won’t return.
Aesthetics strongly affect my dining experience. It’s the quality of “looking the way it should”; looking “genuine”; and in that context, appealing. I take into account the type of restaurant and area. For example, I like the rough-hewn ambience at the tiny but special Mien Trung, Thai Papaya, and Pho Hoa LV, for instance. In between there was Troy’s CM. Very dated but very real. Those are “for real” places, which is part of their attraction (to me}. Their genuine (as opposed to, say, franchise mass produced) atmosphere is part of the pleasure of eating at places like that.
And Convoy? Well, Convoy St. itself is pretty gross and disgusting, visually, you’ll have to admit (I think). In terms of the streetside appeal of the district overall, the aesthetics suck. Luckily, the remarkable concentration in a single geographical area of a huge number of all kinds of Asian restaurants makes up for it. And most of the restaurants I’ve been to there (I’m no Convoy Conquest) do have pleasing aesthetics inside.
On the opposite extreme, I pay a lot of attention to the aesthetics of a fine restaurant. Along with the food quality and service, the architecture and furnishings are a draw (or a drag). I’m willing to pay the price for high-end style and class at such places, knowing full well that some of the cost reflected in their menu prices goes towards that well-tended ambience. And that’s fine with me.
Direct answers to your questions: (1) I like the way Sab-E-Lee used to look; and (2) I haven’t eaten anywhere on Convoy since re-openings started.
Last Saturday was the first day of street dining. I suspect as this goes on the restaruants that choose to participate will adapt what they do. From a photos I saw, it looked like Civico 1845 put out astroturf, some potted plants and a white picket fence. It takes labor to set all that up and some restaurants may not have had the available manpower to do a complete set-up and tear down on Saturday. Others may be taking a wait and see attitude before investing in decor and the labor to stage it. I suspect that many restaurant owners and operators are more concerned with reviving their business and income than they are with glamming up the gutter.
As a patron of many, I truly feel for the restaurant owners, DD. I hope for them to regain the “old” normal as a goal, not the so-called “new normal” b.s., which I reject. We can only survive in our private bunkers for so long.
So I get it that they’re willing to prostrate themselves by putting 4-top tables on an adjacent asphalt street, next to oil drippings: They’re desperate. It’s a excruciatingly upsetting and unsettling state of affairs.
