Holiday Recipes

Our Chefs’ Holiday Gifts to SDTW Readers

“Shop ‘til you drop” is just an expression, not a dictum. Smart shoppers look forward
to renewing sagging energies and resting fatigued feet with a special lunch or brunch at
one of San Diego’s enjoyable eateries. Food during the holidays just tastes better. 

We knew you’ll want to share some of your culinary experiences with folks at home, so we asked a few of our favorite restauranteurs for one of their special recipes.  The recipes are on the next page. Below, two San Diego restauranteurs talk about their restaurants.

We hope you and your families enjoy these holiday gifts from SDTW and our local chefs as much as we did.

Click HERE for recipes !!!

A Healthy Addiction: Sushi Fix

Andrew Berlin, 35, is not your typical restaurant owner or sushi chef. A former product development director with an MBA from UC Irvine, he had never even worked in a restaurant when he decided to open Sushi Fix.

He has eaten sushi all his life, though. “My mom took me when I was 12,” he recalls, and it immediately became his favorite cuisine. “In college, I didn’t have the money to buy it, so I learned how to make it myself,” he says. Back in those days, he treated his friends to an annual party, the “Summer Solstice Sushi Soire.”

His job in the hospitality industry revealed that fast casual food was becoming a hot trend, but fast casual sushi outlets were non-existent. Andrew saw a niche and decided to fill it.

“I wanted high quality, but less expensive sushi than you find in a restaurant,” he recalls. “So I went to the sushi chef institute in LA to get really good at (making) it.”

And then, in late 2004, he opened Sushi Fix.  Customers can eat in or take out, with only a 10-15 minute wait for walk-in orders. A sauce bar encourages sampling of all five different condiments. 

Andrew’s favorites include spicy albacore rolls and deep fried “monkey rolls” with spicy tuna and crab filling. Sides of seaweed salad (“really different, but very good”) or green salad make tasty additions. Chicken, steak and tempura dishes please non-sushi eaters.

Andrew is living proof that his cuisine is healthy.  “Before I opened this restaurant, I had high cholesterol,” he says. “Nine months ago, it had dropped to less than one-half of what it was. The change in my diet was the only variable.” 

He has become one of his own best customers. “Seventy-five percent of what I eat, I eat here,” he says.  His could be good advice for a healthy addiction.

Big Jim Wade’s Comfort Food: Authentic Southern Barbecue

When Jim Wade moved to San Diego from his native Alabama to go into business with a friend in the late 1990s, he really missed authentic Southern barbecue.  So, when the original business idea fell through, his friend persuaded him to open a restaurant. Having no experience in that business, he decided to keep it simple.

“Ribs, white bread, and cold beer was all I wanted to do,” he says. “I wanted to find a hole-in-the-wall location, like back home.” Undaunted by the lack of such authentic facilities, he ended up in his Encinitas location. “I thought it was really too big,” he says.

“So, my friend said I needed to do ‘sides’ to expand the menu.”  That is what he did, adding turnip greens, peach cobbler and other Southern comfort food staples.

His entire menu was printed on the back of the servers’ t-shirts when he opened Big Jim’s Old South Bar-B-Q in February, 2000. 

Being relatively new to California, he didn’t anticipate our food tastes. “I didn’t know I was opening a rib restaurant in a nest of vegetarians,” he says. When a group of business women came to lunch and asked for veggie burgers, he was stymied for a moment. Then, he served them samples of his turnip greens. “They loved them and ordered two more plates of them,” he recalls.  Little did they know they were cooked with ham hocks.

“This is comfort food,” Jim says. “It’s not health food, but it’s not unhealthy, either.  We use hickory and cook out all the fat.”  All his sauces are original and authentic. That means not sweet. “Nobody from South really likes sweet sauce,” Jim says.

Chargers quarterback Philip Rivers understands that. An Alabama boy himself, Rivers and his teammates are regulars. When Jim told Rivers his team was headed for the Superbowl, “(Rivers) said that would be alright, except ‘There’s no Big Jim’s down there.’” Sounds like Big Jim better plan for an enormous take-out order.