San Diego Magazine's Happy Half Hour

San Diego Magazine's Happy Half Hour

The weekly guide to San Diego's food + drink scene, hosted by award-winning food writer and Food Network host Troy Johnson and San Diego Magazine's culture brain, Jackie Bryant. Field notes and perspectives on restaurants, bars, and chefs—including dishes and drinks you gotta try, restaurant openings and closings, events worth your time, and laugh-cry interviews with chefs, restaurant owners, farmers, brewers, and makers who make San Diego's food + drink scene hum.

Episodes

October 15, 2025 68 mins

#403 This week on Happy Half Hour, co-hosts Troy Johnson and Jackie Bryant head to the Marine Room, La Jolla’s oceanfront dining landmark waves slam against windows and the food matches the drama. Chef Derek Dupree introduces new fall dishes, including roasted king trumpet mushrooms with garlic miso emulsion, butternut squash with goat cheese espuma and toasted hazelnuts, and blackened swordfish with crawfish and forbi...

Mark as Played

#402 Happy Half Hour co-hosts Troy Johnson and Jackie Bryant sit down with Sami Ladeki, one of the most influential figures in San Diego dining to trace his long and unlikely career. He shares stories of leaving Lebanon in his twenties, washing dishes in Germany, running food and beverage at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and eventually landing in San Diego to open Sammy’s Woodfired Pizza in 1989. 

Ladeki re...

Mark as Played

#401 After the economic sucker-punch of Covid robbed chef Eric Bost of his LA restaurant Auburn, he entered into a values-first partnership with restaurateur John Resnick. Despite months of permitting and supply snags and personal and operational hits, the two succeeded at last in turning an old Carlsbad boogie-board factory into all-day bakery and cafe Wildland and the smaller, tasting-menu-only Lilo, which nabbed a Michelin star ...

Mark as Played

#400 On this week’s Happy Half Hour with hosts Troy Johnson and Jackie Bryant, we’re joined by siblings Sam Tall and Rebecca Tall-Brown, the second-generation owners of City Farmers Nursery in City Heights. They talk about their family’s 52-year journey turning discarded plants and reclaimed materials into a thriving nursery, the importance of biodiversity and community support, and how Nate’s Garden Grill—operated on site by a fam...

Mark as Played
September 11, 2025 95 mins

#399 This week on Happy Half Hour, Troy and Jackie sit with one of San Diego’s most influential chefs, Carl Schroeder, who rarely interviews. After years at the helm of Market Restaurant + Bar, Schroeder has sold his shares and is stepping back. We talk about the glory days of Market, the early 2000s when “farm to table” actually meant something, his start in storied San Francisco kitchens, and why he’s finally ready to trade the p...

Mark as Played

#398 On this week’s Happy Half Hour, Troy and Jackie camp out on Monarch Ocean Pub’s waterfront deck in Del Mar Plaza where owner-operator Drew Vick runs plates of halibut ceviche, pepperoni-and-broccolini flatbread, and that five-day–brined short-rib pastrami while Bebemos Tequila cofounder Preston Caffrey pours crisp paper planes and talks zero-additive agave and San Diego roots. We hit festival season high notes like, cough coug...

Mark as Played

#397 This week on Happy Half Hour we sit down with Kory Stetina, whose first restaurant Kindred shifted San Diego’s idea of plant-based dining. He’s since teamed with CH Projects on Mothership, and now opened Dreamboat and Vulture in University Heights. Dreamboat is a compact, all-day diner; Vulture is the moody dining room behind it, serving martinis fussed over for a year, lion’s mane “Steak Diane,” mushroom pâté with sourdough, ...

Mark as Played

#396 Herb & Wood changed the city's dining culture when chef Brian Malarkey and Chris Puffer opened it in Little Italy 10 years ago. In restaurant culture, 10 years is 100 years. A feat. But how do you stay relevant in the new-new-new social-media restaurant craze? You hire a "kid" like Aidan Owens, who's one of the fastest-rising young chefs we've seen in the city in a long time. He started cooking at an early age to pay his way t...

Mark as Played
August 14, 2025 85 mins

“He was wearing two dog tags. The bullet went through the first dog tag, but the second deflected it down into his ankle. The bullet’s still in his ankle.” As Ky Phan shares on this week’s Happy Half Hour podcast, her father’s dog tag with the terrifying hole not only saved his life, but eventually became the ticket to a new life for his young family.

The Phans are from a small village in South Vietnam, near a river where they woul...

Mark as Played

#394 This week, Happy Half Hour details Del Mar’s legendary past with longtime restaurateurs John and Sara Wingate of En Fuego Cantina & Grill. Co-hosts Troy Johnson and Jackie Bryant retrace the beach town’s transformation from Victorian bathhouses and racehorse legends to its current food scene, anchored by icons like En Fuego, which is now celebrating 30 years in business.

The Wingates reveal how the once-humble house-turned-res...

Mark as Played

#393 This week on Happy Half Hour, co-hosts Troy and Jackie sit down with Emily Brubaker, executive chef of Omni La Costa Resort & Spa, to talk about her recent win on the premiere season of Yes, Chef!, a national cooking competition judged by Martha Stewart and Spanish-American chef and restaurateur José Andrés. 

Brubaker shares what it was like to step away from her kitchen and her family for six weeks to compete, and how she app...

Mark as Played

#392 On this episode of Happy Half Hour, Troy Johnson and Jackie Bryant take the show to Waverly in Cardiff for a tequila-soaked taste test with San Diego-based brand Bebemos. The mission continues to find the ultimate dish to pair with their joven-style tequila. Along the way, they’re joined by Camino Riviera and Waverly bar manager Stephen O’Halloran and SDCM executive chef Brian Redzikowski to explore the nuances of agave, mezca...

Mark as Played

#391 This week on Happy Half Hour, Troy Johnson and Jackie Bryant sit down with Jason Mraz and Vallie Gilley to talk about the new life of Jitters Coffee Pub, the first coffee shop to open in Oceanside back in the ’90s. After 24 years, Vallie and her husband were ready to let it go until Mraz, a longtime regular, stepped in as a partner. What followed is a full-circle revamp complete with vegan comfort food from chef Felix Alcaide,...

Mark as Played

#390 This week's HHH is posted at Veranda, the breezy new restaurant inside the freshly renovated $550 million Hotel Del Coronado, and features a feast of scallop risotto, charred artichokes, and massive secret-menu tomahawks. Executive Chef Brian Archibald joined Troy and Jackie to talk about rebirthing one of America’s most iconic resorts (and why he left Florida for San Diego). Also at the table is Michael Feuerstein of Nature’s...

Mark as Played

#389 Happy Half Hour heads to the oceanfront deck at Nobu Del Coronado, one of the newest openings as part of the Hotel Del’s recently completed $550 million renovation. Chefs CJ and Victor walk us through dishes like yellowtail crudo with jalapeño, crispy rice with spicy tuna, three-day miso cod, and real wasabi grated on sharkskin, as well as the philosophical underpinnings that make Nobu, well, Nobu. To follow Nobu at the Hotel ...

Mark as Played

#388 On this episode of Happy Half Hour, Troy Johnson sits down with Ron and Isabel Oliver, the duo behind Somos Maíz. Isabel grew up in Michoacán learning how to make masa the traditional way. Ron spent 20 years as chef de cuisine at the Marine Room. Now they’re sourcing heirloom corn from farmers in Mexico and turning it into fresh masa that’s showing up on plates at Valle, Tohono, and beyond. They chat about how most tortilla ma...

Mark as Played

#387 Happy Half Hour goes full fried as Troy and Jackie broadcast from the San Diego County Fair, tasting their way through 18 brain-and-taste bud-bending entries in the 2025 Fairtastic Food Competition. Spam wonton tacos. Cajun honey dogs. Furikake fries with runny eggs and edible flowers. But one stood above them all: a tres leches cinnamon roll from Country Fair Cinnamon Rolls, dreamed up by a third-generation baker, Willie Matt...

Mark as Played
June 12, 2025 47 mins

#386 This week’s Happy Half Hour comes to you straight from the bar at Fort Oak, where we posted up with Jess Stewart, Trust Restaurant Group’s beverage director and the mind behind some of San Diego’s most quietly brilliant cocktails. She breaks down her kitchen-driven approach to drink-making (yes, there’s salt in that watermelon margarita), why bartenders hate mojitos, and how she turned “Oyster Mondays with Friends” into a must...

Mark as Played

#385 This week on Happy Half Hour, hosts Troy Johnson and Jackie Bryant welcome Mike and Jenny Eastwood of Smallgoods American Cheeses & Provisions—a La Jolla gem born out of NYC’s Murray’s Cheese and years in San Diego’s farmers market trenches. The couple shares how a career in commercial production, a cheese cave internship, and a well-timed move from Byron Bay to San Diego turned into a sandwich-slinging, American cheese–champi...

Mark as Played

#384 This week’s Happy Half Hour is equal parts hot sauce origin story and full-blown love fest for San Diego’s indie food scene. Troy Johnson confesses he’s a BBQ purist—until one burger from Rosemary’s shatters his sauce snobbery with a tangy, tamarind-laced revelation. Enter Larz Watts, the founder of Oak Steak BBQ, who built his now-beloved sauce business during the pandemic with nothing but backyard smokers, a Co-Packer crash ...

Mark as Played

Popular Podcasts

    It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.

    Crime Junkie

    Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.

    Stuff You Should Know

    If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.

    The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show

    The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.

    The Joe Rogan Experience

    The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.

Advertise With Us
Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

© 2025 iHeartMedia, Inc.