San Diego’s Top Ten Restaurants of 2011

SOLACE
Urban Solace chef-owner Matt Gordon always had the cooking chops. Now he’s got the food ethics to go with ’em. And that veggie faro at his new joint in Encinitas (Solace & The Moonlight Lounge)? Ancient-grain awesomeness.

About two years ago local food writers were given a heads-up via a nice dinner at the original North Park Solace that an Encinitas version of Solace was on the way. At the time, Encinitas was just coming into its own as a dining destination and this was big news.

Since then, Encinitas has exploded with dining options and Solace & the Moonlight Lounge is now another solid option to that lineup.

They did great things with the space with a downstairs dining room and the Moonlight Lounge upstairs which features a bar, communal table, and outdoor deck. It also serves a lounge menu as well as the full dining room menu. On two visits, I found myself drawn to the upstairs lounge. It just seemed to have more character and energy and I love the idea of the communal table to meet new folks over drinks and dinner.

The staff was very friendly and attentive but our server, at least, did not seem to have the menu knowledge one would expect from a chef driven establishment. We did not get silver until we asked for it. We ordered a cheese plate that never showed up, our oysters were called clams upon delivery, and our requested extra tomato jam never made it for the cheddar biscuits.

This was on a fairly slow Monday evening. Again, there was no attitude problem as everyone was very nice and we seemed to have multiple servers, which made it even more odd, but better than the alternative of being ignored.

I’d just really like to see a server in a cool place like Solace (among others in Encinitas) who can wow me with their menu knowledge, romance the dishes a bit, and suggest a beautiful wine or beer pairing with what I’m considering. Not too much to ask right?

So back to the Moonlight Lounge, it really is a great place to hang out and with a big painting of Jeff Bridges as “The Dude” from the Big Lebowski dominating the space, I felt right at home. The lounge has all the cool of Union without the obnoxious loudness.

I should add that I saw the proprietors of Fish 101 here on their night off, that’s a very good sign. I’ve yet to try any of their fancy designer cocktails but they sure look good. They hand make all of their flavored syrups for their cocktails and have a large selection of either sustainable or organic West Coast produced wines on their list.

All of their bar and menu items are prepared without the use of high fructose corn syrup and they feature Boylan Bottling Company’s all natural soda on tap.

You have to love Boylan soda, and not just because it’s a great name.

We started with a dozen oysters and the much-hyped warm cheddar and chive biscuits with warm honey butter with very good smoked tomato jam.

A solid cup of tomato fennel soup also rounded out the starters. Our cheese plate finally made it, though awkwardly placed in the middle of the meal. Starters range from $5.75 for the biscuits to $13.50 and there is a nice variety to choose from.

We heard the watermelon, tomato and cucumber salad was a must-have and that did not disappoint.

The whole salad section looked very good and they average around $10.

My entrée was the mustard crusted local halibut with farro stew and a toasted black pepper sauce. Farro was new to me but it worked well and added a nice rustic texture to the dish. Think al dente barley, and look farro up as it is an interesting grain.

We also tried the leg of duck confit, duck fat fried creamers, cress-apple-fennel slaw, and a red wine sauce.

All good stuff and I’ll be back to try all the entrees which range from $9.50 for the burgers to $32.50 for the ribeye.

The peanut butter and chocolate crème brulee for dessert is now on my top 5 list. Their entire dessert list looked delicious and they all run $7.

Classic and Modern American

Urban Solace, located in the heart of North Park’s “Restaurant Row,” near Hillcrest, South Park and University Heights, in San Diego, CA, features classic and modern American cuisine, by Executive Chef Matt Gordon. Urban Solace opened it’s doors in September of 2007. Shortly after in August of 2011, it’s sister restaurant, Solace and the Moonlight lounge opened in the North County coastal city of Encinitas. “We opened Solace because … we felt that the Encinitas market had a demographic that was receptive to our natural and sustainable concept of food and cocktails, and we loved the location.”

Solace and the Moonlight Lounge and Urban Solace both offer a menu of gourmet casual foods including a sample of Chef Matt’s signature dishes. Both menus and bars are completely free of artificial ingredients and are comprised of mostly organic and sustainable products.

Each restaurant reflects the city it resides in. Solace in Encinitas is more seafood-focused, with the raw bar and variety of fish dishes. Urban Solace in North Park reflects the youthful, hip vibe with modern twists on American classics.

At Urban Solace, entrees include the fan-favorite Duckaroni, “Not Your Momma’s Meatloaf”, pulled chicken and buttermilk dumplings, braised Paso Prime grass fed beef cheeks, and BBQ glazed Duroc pork belly. Saturday Blunch and Sunday Bluegrass Brunch boast signature Urban Solace items like a warm buttermilk cinnamon roll with cream cheese frosting, kitchen sink biscuits ‘n gravy and a simple bowl o’ grits. Starters, salads and sandwiches are also available.

Solace and the Moonlight Lounge features a deluxe artisan meat and cheese board in addition to a variety of entrees. Fan favorites include braised Paso prime grass fed beef cheek, and sumac rubbed wild salmon, leg of duck confit, and the urban burger. Solace also features vegetarian menus, with a 3-course tasting menu offered every Wednesday.

In each space, Executive Chef Matt Gordon treats restaurant guests just like guests in his own home, offering healthy, sustainable and delicious meals. Many items such as condiments and syrups for drinks are made on site to ensure quality and eliminate corn syrup.

Solace and the Moonlight Lounge and Urban Solace are built on the foundations of simplicity, honest food and exemplary service. Beyond plates of classic and modern American cuisine, lies Chef Matt Gordon’s commitment to smart sourcing, sustainability and total elimination of all artificial ingredients.

Needing solace from my own kitchen, I paid a visit to the new spot while it was still within the first few weeks of the soft opening. Normally, I’d give a place much longer to work out the kinks, but it was there and I was hungry, so let’s everybody stop arguing. (Dramatic foreshadowing: Had the evening not gone well, I’d be reviewing someplace else.)

Props to the Solace crew for accommodating my, shall we say, demanding dining friend. She’s sweet and has a twinkle in her eye, but she has inflexible food likes and dislikes. “Apparently, I’m picky?” she guilelessly said to me, before politely asking the server if it would be too much trouble to substitute two-thirds of her choice for something else. She wanted the Jidori chicken, but instead of sweet potatoes, she wanted french fries, and instead of chard, how about asparagus? (I considered quietly moving to a different table to avoid being tainted.)

Now, I realize chefs out there are probably shaking their fists in outrage because they work so hard at creating their menus and developing flavor combos; they’re not wrong to find this particular trait of their patrons to be, at minimum, irritating. But the kind folks at Solace could not have been more easy-going about giving my persnickety pal a delicious dining experience and a plate filled with tasty menu items pieced together all custom-like.

Like what you’d find at the North Park locale, the Jidori chicken is excellent. This version is lemon-and-salt crusted, and although, to me, the skin wasn’t too outrageously flavorful when nibbled on, that hardly matters when you’re eating chicken as tasty as this. She may avoid sweet potatoes, but my friend left hardly a shred of meat on that bird’s bones.

They’re doing some great things with seafood, which makes sense considering you could easily throw a picky patron and hit the ocean just a few blocks away. The mustard-crusted local halibut is quite tasty, as halibut usually is and as anything crusted in mustard should be. But be sure to check out the black bass glazed with smoked salt and sugar. I expected a very strong flavor but instead tasted something subtle and layered. The fish was pillowy-soft and tender, and the salty-sweet glaze didn’t beat me over the head with a kettle-corn-contrast of flavors but instead gently permeated the fish like a light and tenderizing brine.

Save room for dessert. Though you’ll be tempted by the novelty and Girl Scoutiness of the “Les S’mores” offering, I say go for the goat-cheese cheesecake, plated on a pool of spiced honey and a this-shouldn’t-work-but-shut-the-front-door-it-does drizzle of basil syrup.

There’s no question that Chef Gordon and his crew know how to create good food in a nice atmosphere. Both Solace spots offer a hard-to-quantify feeling of being welcomed, embraced and well fed. Sitting down to share a meal there is the best way to understand the restaurant’s name.

The sister restaurant to North Park’s Urban Solace, a local favorite, Solace sits on the north end of Pacific Station in Encinitas, serving plenty of modern comfort food and seafood.

Chef/owner Matt Gordon said Solace has been busy since its opening, with great feedback from diners in the opening nights.

“We plan on being here a long time, so a few months late is no big deal,” Gordon said.

While a handful of Urban Solace staples —- such as the Warm Cheddar & Chive Biscuits, Watermelon/Tomato/Cucumber Salad, BBQ Glazed Duroc Pork Belly, and Grilled Four Cheese Sandwich With Fresh Basil And Tomato And Creamy Tomato-Fennel Soup —- have migrated north, a few customer favorites remain on the North Park menu only, including the Duckaroni and Pulled Chicken And Buttermilk Dumplings.

But what Solace lacks in standbys, it more than makes up for in seafood dishes, which Gordon said pays tribute to the new location’s proximity to the ocean.

Seafood dishes include Mustard Crusted Local Halibut With Farro Stew And Toasted Black Pepper Sauce; Sumac Rubbed Wild Salmon With Toasted Quinoa, Spiced Butter Sauce And Roasted Lemon; Smoked Sea Salt & Sugar Glazed Black Bass With Fennel Braised Root Vegetable Hash; and more.

“We want to have fun and do some new stuff,” Gordon said. “It (the menu) flows together.”

The North Park restaurant’s menu is also a reflection of its location. Urban Solace took over a building that had a French Quarter feel; Southern-style comfort food fit the mold. With Solace, Gordon and his team were able to decide the design and feel themselves.

The new Solace space has a downstairs dining room and an upstairs lounge with a “raw bar” that serves oysters, steak tartare and more. There are also cheese plates and salumi available upstairs.

As far as the design, the downstairs dining area is split into two areas, with stairs and a servers’ station acting as the divider in the middle. The north side offers more natural light with large windows facing E Street, with benches lining the walls and wood decorating much of the space.

The south side shares space with the kitchen, offering a noisier, more bustling atmosphere. There’s also a patio outside, though Gordon sees that more as a lunch space.

Upstairs, plenty of bar-height tables take up the floor space not occupied by the large wood-paneled bar. There’s another outdoor seating area upstairs, and Gordon said the whole place can seat up to 190 guests. Upstairs patrons can order off the full menu as well as from a bar and raw bar menu. Reservations can be made for the downstairs area, while upstairs is open seating (but as witnessed on a recent weeknight, it fills up fast).

The goal in both restaurants is not supposed to be about design, Gordon said. “We want people to remember, first and foremost, who they ate with, the company they had. Then, great service, and we hope in all of that, the food filled the last little hole.”

Drink-wise, Solace partnered with Blind Tiger Cocktail Co. to create the cocktails for the new location. Gordon said his wife concocted the drinks at Urban Solace, but found she didn’t have time to also take up the task at Solace, so she worked alongside Blind Tiger to fine-tune the new creations.

Solace also offers several craft beers on tap, including Airdale and Green Flash; it’s also one of the first restaurants in the area to offer draft wine.

The wines, mostly from Paso Robles and the northern California wine country, come in casks that hold 25 bottles and are offered by the glass.

Now that the doors have been open for dinner for almost two weeks, Solace plans to begin offering lunch next week, with brunch hopefully coming along in early September.

Gordon said he was already looking for a second location when the developer for Pacific Station contacted him about the project a few years ago. Gordon said he came up to check out the location and felt in his gut that Encinitas was the right choice.

“When we opened Urban Solace, it was an old building, but you could feel change in the air,” he said. “That’s exactly what I felt standing in a dirt strip over there.”

Gordon said Encinitas has become a downtown hub for North County residents, with many restaurants filling by 6 p.m. And when he started getting more diners from the area down at Urban Solace, he knew there was a need for something similar up north.

“We want to be that restaurant … that chef-driven restaurant, on that corner,” like other neighborhoods have, Gordon said.

Read more: http://www.nctimes.com/lifestyles/food-and-cooking/article_f28c4bb3-a926-5c2a-bcdc-5e285a4c2ae7.html#ixzz1W6fwLSjK

There’s another meaning, for sure. But this week’s soft launch of Solace and the Moonlight Lounge in laidback Encinitas – I’d call this a quiet, cozy, non-ballistic approach to opening a restaurant.

(For explosive restaurant launches, please see Del Mar’s Burlap. It had lion dancers…who were probably overshadowed by Burlap’s mega-personality chef, Brian Malarkey.)

For more than a year food journalists have been doing a drum-roll for Moonlight. (See mention of it in this story I wrote last August.) Finally, 18 hours ago, came this low-pitched tweet from chef-owner Matt Gordon. “oh.. and by the way.. WE’RE OPEN!!!! #solace&themoonlightlounge.”

You may recognize the chef at the heart of Moonlight’s mission control center. Gordon has put a warm cheese biscuit lathered with honey-butter into the hand of every North Park visitor, courtesy of his comfort-food-but-cosmopolitan Urban Solace restaurant.

And the under-$20 menu at Moonlight looks comparable to Urban. There’s Braised Brandt Farms Beef Cheeks and BBQ Glazed Duroc Pork Belly at both, a peek at their menus reveal. But North County should riot if there really isn’t any duckaroni (mac ‘n cheese with duck confit, bleu cheese).

Because North Park is so hip it’s barely even hip anymore, the good folks behind Urban Solace have popped open a new bi-level Enc spot in place of the old Redsand warehouse/ bowl, with a ground floor full of reclaimed wood booths, and a lofty lounge boasting a massive communal table, plus an s-shaped drinks station with an attached raw bar lorded over by a wooden stencil of a Ralph’s-card-carrying Jeff Bridges, who hasn’t been near that many clams since Tron Iron Man…ok, whatever, he’s rich. Vittles range from shareable bits like a dungeness-crab-filled Brik served with spiced aioli & fried lemon, to man-fortifiers including an all grass-fed rib eye with crème fraiche dill mashers/ grilled asparagus, and a creamed corn/ herb puree-paired, BBQ-glazed Duroc pork belly, though with all this grassy herb, one would expect it’d be the rib eyes that’d be glazed. The bar’s 12 taps spew the likes of Avery Salvation and Coronado Brewing’s Mermaid’s Red, while house ‘tails (developed with Blind Tiger Cocktail Co.) weigh in at a staggering 23, from the Lebowski-inspired Dude Abides (white whiskey, Kona coffee liqueur, chilled coffee, half ‘n half), to the classically twisted cucumber vodka/ ginger syrup/ ginger beer Cuke Mule — leaving you to wonder “where did that smuggler hide that cucumber?”

Because wine sometimes does the trick, the bar’s rocking 12 rotating taps, all pouring elevated varietals, with no “jug wines” — so, feel free to drink them with No Fear.