Dish Spotlight: Carne Cruda Asada at Juniper & Ivy

Little Italy's Juniper & Ivy is one of my favorite restaurants in the city. It ticks a lot of boxes for me: A wide array of unique small plates, a great cocktail list, an inventive menu that changes throughout the year—and most importantly, a few permanent menu items that are among my favorite dishes, period. One of those is the carne cruda asada.

Not-so-quick aside: Leading up to our recent visit, I'd planned to profile a different one of their mainstays, the incredible yodel cake. Its wild combination of textures (crunch! powder! ice cream!) and flavors (coffee! chocolate! strawberry!) mingle and combine in wonderful ways. It's a perfect dessert... but on our visit they'd ruined it, tampering with the flavor profile to create a far-inferior apple and matcha version. When we told the waiter as much, he confided: "You're preaching to the choir." Turns out much of the staff is lobbying to get the original back. Fingers crossed!

Now, back to the topic at hand.

The carne cruda asada has no right be as good as it is—not with ingredients that are so seemingly simple. It's just toast stacked with steak tartare, jalapeño, cotija cheese, quail egg and scallion, sliced into four pieces for sharing. And yet...

Flashback: The year is 2014. We're visiting J&I for the first time, soon after its grand opening, and I spot an odd and intriguing tartare toast on the menu. We order. I grab a slice. The toast is thick-cut, hardy enough to support a huge helping of tartare, so tender it's creamy, infused with jalapeño heat. The adorably tiny sunny-side-up quail eggs amplify that luscious texture. It's like the perfect savory breakfast, but I'm having it for dinner. A smattering of scallions and hint of lime and provide the springiness needed to lighten the heavy steak-and-eggs combo. And finally, the cotija supplies the critical salt element that unites the rest into a Mexican-influenced masterpiece. Months after this first encounter, I continue to think back on it longingly.

Here in 2018, the cruda asada is still one of the best dishes in San Diego. No outrageous flavors, just subtle, hearty and satisfying. It's the first dish to make me really love steak tartare, the kind of dish where every ingredient has an essential role to play. A true instant classic—let's just hope they don't go adding apples and matcha powder.

Review: Single Fin Kitchen (& Little Italy Food Hall)

The hamachi bowl comes everything,
including the kitchen sink.

Poké is over.

Food halls are the hot new culinary trend. They're popping up across San Diego County, and while they're similar in format to your classic mall-rat, Hot-Dog-On-A-Stick food courts, they're generally more sophisticated and thoughtful about the cuisine on offer.

The newly opened Little Italy Food Hall, where Amy and I went for date night, is a great example. Its six gourmet food (and drink) options include killer Milanese pizzas from Ambrogio15 and Sam the Cooking Guy's decidedly non-traditional Not Not Tacos.

We first grabbed a couple of drinks from the Food Hall Bar. Amy got the Piazza Spritz, a bright, fresh blend of prosecco, aperol, grapefruit liqueur and blackberry. I got the daiquiri italiano, which was nice and sweet with a prominent nutty amaretto flavor.

For dinner we opted for Single Fin Kitchen, which specializes in Japanese-style seafood. We started off with some shishito peppers. Usually about one in ten of these are actually hot, but in this batch I'd say at least half of them brought some serious pain. The ponzu and topping of smoky bonito flakes were pleasant additions (when I wasn't dying of spice!).

Single Fin's main attraction is its elaborate donburi rice bowls—and I do mean elaborate. As we watched their creation, it was almost comical how many sprinklings of extra ingredients they got, even after they looked finished. To give you an idea: Amy's bowl contained rice, hamachi sashimi, hamachi tartare with green onion, shiso leaf, cucumber, chile threads, avocado, radish, pickled veggies, smoked bonito flakes, microgreens, seaweed and furikake. Whew!

Was all that complexity really worth it? Well... actually yes, for the most part. It could easily have been overwrought, but instead it was like a whole ecosystem of harmonious flavors. You could create a forkful of hamachi tartare with a bit of minty herb fragrance from the shiso and some hearty bonito... or maybe a delicate bite of sashimi that balances chile threads with cooling cucumber.

My bowl, the Salmon 360, included three types of salmon—sashimi, tartare and torched belly—as well as sake-marinated salmon roe, microgreens and a thin slice of fried egg. The salmon belly was delicious and tender. The egg, too, was almost melt-in-your-mouth. I really liked the ocean flavors of the seaweed and spices. If there's one problem with these bowls, it's all too easy for the taste of the fish to get lost in the jungle of ingredients.

The staff was friendly and funny—and apparently in a good mood too, because they also gave us a free scoop of black sesame ice cream. Let me tell you, they weren't messing around; it was so rich with sesame seeds that it tasted almost like a peanut or almond butter. The trade-off, though, was in the texture: Since it was so packed with ground seeds, it really wasn't all that creamy. Still, we finished every bite just to savor the uniqueness of that sweet sesame flavor.

The creativity on display at Single Fin was positively kaleidoscopic. Sure, maybe not every element in the bowls really needed to be there. And by the time we finished, I actually felt slightly exhausted from the variety (and maybe those peppers had something to do with it too). But there also something exciting about having such a host of ingredients lovingly assembled by folks who obviously care about their craft. I want to try the other stations in Little Italy Food Hall, but it'll be hard when Single Fin is right there tempting me.

Score: 8.5 out of 10 (Excellent)