San Diego Magazine's Happy Half Hour

Christophe Rull walked away from a six-figure pastry chef job to spend two years training for one of the biggest chocolate competitions in the world. The gamble paid off: In 2021, the French-born chef was named U.S. Chocolate Master and went on to place fifth internationally, presenting an ocean-inspired chocolate sculpture built around the idea of protecting marine life. These days, his ambitions are a little closer to home. Rull and his wife, Wilma, have traded the luxury-hotel kitchens where he built his career for a 1,200-square-foot patisserie in San Marcos, where French butter, carefully laminated croissants, and neighborhood hospitality are the main attractions.

On this episode of Happy Half Hour, Rull talks with Troy Johnson about the leap from leading pastry teams at some of the country's most prestigious properties to running his own place: Christophe Rull Patisserie. He traces his approach to hospitality back to the south of France, where welcoming people is second nature, and explains how that philosophy carries into the shop, where he and Wilma know regulars by name—even the four-legged ones. He also shares what makes a truly great croissant, why the ingredients matter as much as the technique, and how the discipline of a hotel kitchen translates to a much smaller operation. The conversation also gets into the science behind chocolate—and the painstaking process that gives a well-tempered bar its signature snap.

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Fifteen years ago, Oceanside's food scene looked pretty different. Then Flying Pig Pub & Kitchen opened in a not-exactly-prime location in South Oceanside and started serving Southern-influenced food with pork chops, red beans and rice, pork belly, and the kind of cooking that made people wonder why they'd driven past the place so many times.

On this week's Happy Half Hour, host Troy Johnson talks with Flying Pig owners Aaron and Roddy Browning about the restaurant's unlikely beginnings and the evolution of Oceanside's food scene around it. The couple opened the restaurant in 2011 with limited resources and, as they tell it, maxed-out credit cards and a space that happened to have the restaurant essentials they needed: a hood system, grease interceptor, and room for some seats. They also built the restaurant's distinctive look from the kinds of Craigslist, flea-market, and salvage-yard finds that eventually gave the Pig its eclectic, lived-in personality.

The conversation gets into what has kept the Flying Pig going all these years: Southern cooking rooted in memory and tradition, but filtered through California's produce and coastal sensibility. They talk about the restaurant's signature pork chop—which is still made from the same recipe—as well as pork belly, house-made pastas, fried chicken, red beans and rice, and banana pudding. Troy also makes the case that the Pig helped kick off a new generation of food in Oceanside, a city whose restaurant scene has changed dramatically since the Brownings first opened their doors. And after revisiting the restaurant himself, he says it's still as good as he remembered.

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San Diego has beaches, sunshine, biotech, and enough stucco to wallpaper a small country. But what actually gives a city its personality? The artists, musicians, designers, dancers, galleries, theaters, museums, and all the other creative people making things that give a place its identity. That's the question at the center of this special edition of the podcast, recorded as part of San Diego Magazine's September arts and culture issue, created in collaboration with the Art + Design District and San Diego FC Playmakers.

Host Troy Johnson sits down with Jonathon Glus, former director of the City of San Diego's Department of Cultural Affairs; and Grant Oliphant, president and CEO of the Prebys Foundation. Glus now serves as the Prebys Foundation's senior art & design fellow in residence at the Downtown San Diego Partnership, where he's helping develop the emerging Art + Design District around the Civic Center. Together, Glus and Oliphant bring two sides of the conversation to the table: what it takes to build the physical and cultural infrastructure for a creative city, and what role philanthropy, government, businesses, and artists themselves play in making that happen.

The conversation gets into San Diego's recent fight over arts funding, the city's cultural ecosystem, and why supporting artists means more than simply writing checks. They talk about the Art + Design District's roots in city planning work dating back to 2016, the cultural institutions already clustered around the Civic Center, and examples from cities like Miami and Austin that used major cultural initiatives to help shape their identities.

And, naturally, Troy gets nostalgic about San Diego's old jazz scene, including his best friend's dad's club, The Crossroads, and the unfortunate fate of a very valuable vinyl collection.

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What does a soccer team have to do with San Diego's arts scene? Quite a lot, as it turns out. When San Diego FC launched, the club could have spent its marketing budget on billboards, bus wraps, and digital ads. Instead, it went into neighborhoods, found local artists and creatives, and started building the club's identity with them. Through its Playmakers initiative, artists have designed limited-edition merchandise, had their work featured on the stadium's jumbotron, and found themselves in front of thousands of fans—and, in some cases, a national TV audience.

For this special edition of the podcast, created alongside San Diego Magazine's September arts and culture issue, host Troy Johnson talks with Sebastián Morúa, SDFC's Senior Vice President of Brand & Innovation, and longtime San Diego native and creative Tony Martinez of Barrio Junto. The conversation gets into why a professional soccer club would make local art part of its business, how Martinez's decades in San Diego's creative community helped shape Playmakers, and the club's early efforts to connect with artists across the county through its Chrome Ball Tour and neighborhood events. The goal, they explain, isn't simply to put a local artist on a T-shirt. It's to let the people who already understand San Diego help define what the new club looks and feels like.

The conversation also gets into the less glamorous—but important—side of supporting artists: money. They talk about how Playmakers pays local creatives, the value of the platform SDFC provides, and what it means to build an ongoing relationship between a professional sports club and the artists who help shape its identity. They also discuss the club's growing music initiative, which will bring local musicians into the fold, and the many ways artists have already contributed to SDFC through merchandise, murals, Parks & Pitches projects, and more. Ultimately, it's a conversation about soccer, art, community, and what can happen when a major sports franchise gives the people already making culture in San Diego a bigger platform.

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The wellness world has gotten a lot more complicated since the Golden Door opened its doors in 1958. Today there are powders, potions, trackers, supplements, and approximately 9,000 ways to turn a chia seed into a personality. But the San Marcos retreat, guided by Deborah Szekely's vision, was already taking a whole-body approach—bringing movement, food, and wellness together—long before wellness became an industry.

On this week's Happy Half Hour, host Troy Johnson talks with Golden Door executive chef Greg Frey, who's been at the legendary retreat for more than 12 years. They get into its history, the famous guests who've passed through its doors, and the truly impressive number of people who keep coming back (one guest has been 150 times).

Frey shares his experience learning how to make food that's genuinely satisfying without leaning on the usual culinary crutches, and walks Troy through some of the recipes in The Golden Door Table, the new cookbook featuring 100 recipes from the resort, including feta-whipped avocado toast and the iconic potassium broth. They also discuss the Golden Door's four-acre vegetable garden, which supplies about 80 percent of the vegetables on guests' tables at this time of year, and the Country Store that grew out of that garden during the pandemic. What started as a way to keep all that produce from going to waste became a way for Golden Door to share its food with the surrounding community.

There's plenty of history here, but ultimately this is a conversation about making healthy food taste good and about the philosophy behind a place that has been doing that for nearly seven decades. There's also a cookbook, a garden, a little bit of Golden Door lore, and one extremely persistent problem: Troy can't seem to stop calling Greg Frey "Glenn Frey."

Some wellness habits die harder than others.

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If you think a cookbook about pregnancy sounds like a collection of sad smoothies and recipes involving seven different kinds of seeds, Eric Wolfinger and Torie Borrelli Hall have some news for you. Their new book, Eating for Life: A Holistic Cookbook for Pregnancy and a Thriving Family, has carbonara, lasagna, steak, chocolate mousse, and plenty of other delicious food to keep you both satisfied and nourished.

This week on Happy Half Hour, Eric—a James Beard Award-winning food photographer and San Diego native—and Torie, a local holistic nutritionist, join host Troy Johnson to talk about the book, how it came together, and why feeding a family well doesn't have to mean making food boring.

The partnership started years ago, when Torie suggested Eric change what he was eating for breakfast after noticing his blood sugar was all over the place. He says the tweak didn't exactly "change his life," but it did change his energy and temperament enough that, as he puts it, everyone in his orbit thanked her. From there, the two longtime collaborators started building a cookbook around the nutrients Torie wanted people to get from real food: protein, egg yolks, fish, shellfish, organ meats, collagen, and plenty of other ingredients that don't always make it into modern family cooking. After years of recipe development, photography, testing, and one very optimistic Kickstarter, they landed on 120 recipes, each photographed and tested by home cooks.

And while the book is designed with pregnancy and postpartum nutrition in mind, the philosophy is considerably broader: cook food that tastes good, get enough protein and nutrients, and make meals that work for actual families with actual schedules. The conversation gets into everything from getting kids to try unfamiliar foods (apparently eight to 15 exposures can make a difference) to the role dads can play in cooking during pregnancy, plus Troy's ongoing battle with his children over the existence of dino nuggets. In other words, Eating for Life is less about eating "perfectly" and more about making good food a part of everyday life.

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Brunch is a meal that exists because we decided breakfast needed a later start time and a liquor license. This week on Happy Half Hour, hosts Troy Johnson and Jackie Bryant are in Oceanside at Toasted Gastrobrunch with chef Alfie Szeprethy and Preston Caffrey of Bebemos Tequila. They talk about the strange and winding history of brunch, from its British origins to its inevitable American evolution into a social event involving eggs, enormous plates of food, and drinking before noon.

On the menu: lobster toast with Maine lobster, avocado, bacon, corn, and truffle; pumpkin pancakes; chilaquiles; a smoked turkey Monte Cristo French toast; and a short rib Benedict that ultimately takes the crown. The Benedict, Alfie argues, is basically the perfect food architecture: a vehicle, a meat, an egg, and a sauce. Add some crispy potatoes and a tequila cocktail, and you've pretty much solved brunch.

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If you've been to a big San Diego food event and there's a whole tuna getting broken down in front of a crowd, there's a good chance Jeff Roberto is somewhere nearby. Roberto has been making sushi in San Diego for 38 years, back when there were only seven sushi restaurants in the county. Now, through Sushi on a Roll, he and his nephew Austin have become one of the city's go-to teams for high-end traditional sushi catering—and tuna breakdowns big enough to stop a party in its tracks.

On this week's Happy Half Hour, Jeff and Austin join Troy and Jackie to talk about the evolution of sushi in San Diego, from the arrival of the California roll and the rise of oversized American sushi to the city's growing appreciation for traditional cuts and whole-fish preparation. They also bring along some seriously unusual bites from their winning Omakase Open entry, including tuna spinal-cord "bone marrow" topped with smoked yuzu ponzu, rare kama toro, and an old-school pressed sushi that traces back to one of sushi's earliest forms.

The conversation is part sushi history lesson, part tuna master class, and part family handoff. Roberto talks about cutting hundreds of pounds of tuna for massive events, while Austin explains how learning alongside his uncle has shaped his approach to traditional sushi, and why the competition dish was designed around Roberto's strengths.

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Glass Box isn't your typical sushi restaurant. Tucked inside the Sky Deck in Del Mar, chef and owner Ethan Yang serves omakase from inside a literal glass box—a transparent kitchen built around the idea that what you see is what you get.

It's a fitting philosophy for a third-generation restaurateur whose food is rooted as much in family as technique. On this week's Happy Half Hour, Yang joins host Troy Johnson to talk about growing up in his family's Rancho Bernardo restaurants, learning to make dumplings and sushi rice alongside his dad and grandmother, and why one bowl of Taiwanese beef noodle soup still anchors everything he cooks.

The conversation is equal parts family history and sushi master class. Troy breaks down why the best sushi isn't necessarily the freshest, the surprising journey of bluefin tuna from cat food to luxury ingredient, and why aging fish can actually improve its flavor. Yang shares the techniques behind his omakase, the dishes that have earned Glass Box back-to-back competition wins, and the philosophy that has made the Del Mar restaurant one of San Diego's most underrated sushi destinations.

Naturally, the conversation turns into a friendly debate over the sushi rolls that introduced so many Americans to raw fish. Troy and Ethan draft their gateway favorites—from crunchy rolls and California rolls to spicy tuna and eel avocado—proving that even the chef behind one of the city's best omakase counters still has plenty of love for the classics.

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The Remy occupies a building that's been serving San Diegan's steaks for more than 50 years. Longtime locals remember it as Hungry Hunter. Today, it's been reimagined as a modern American steakhouse—one that still nods to its past while carving out a new identity of its own.

This week on Happy Half Hour, Troy Johnson, Jackie Bryant, and Bebemos co-founder Preston Caffrey head to a western-grit-meets-contemporary steakhouse for Golden Hour with chef José Ruigomez and Beverage Director Ken Fordan. Over Bebemos cocktails, they talk about the challenge of following a local institution, building a steakhouse for a new generation, and the dishes earning a spot on the menu—from Australian Wagyu and octopus with mint labneh to a burger and fries that's nearly gone by the time the cameras start rolling.

Of course, no episode would be complete without a fantasy draft. This time, the crew picks the San Diego restaurants and bars they'd bring back from the dead, sparking a healthy debate over the city's most-missed dining institutions.

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