Mabel’s Gone Fishing uses top-tier Californian seafood in their Iberian Peninsula small plates at one of North Park’s busiest restaurants. You could pair the Spanish gin and tonic with a platter of baja oysters and a side of chorizo and stop there, but you should keep going and get some grilled fish with thai basil and the mussels escabeche. Mabel’s works for a casual date night or a catch-up, and you’ll keep company with the neighborhood crowd and some mermaid sculpture friends at the bar.

If you’re looking for a low-key neighborhood spot near Downtown, book a reservation at Wolf in the Woods. This tiny restaurant has tons of intimate nooks with Southwestern touches, including dried chiles hanging from the ceiling and Indigenous-printed textiles. Their tight menu offers lighter dishes with a New Mexican twist, like a hatch chili-spiced sweet corn soup and chilled octopus with harissa. It's also got an impressive wine and cocktail list.

This is the restaurant equivalent of the little black dress: timelessly elegant and somehow always in fashion, over two decades into its tenure as one of San Diego’s best restaurants, newly reopened after a hiatus to renovate the kitchen. The rest of the space is just like before: a beautiful deck shaded by majestic Torrey Pines trees outside, and a chic Craftsman dining room inside. Everything is local (and delicious).

You might feel like a character in Midnight Diner entering Yakitori Tsuta’s unmarked door in a Convoy strip mall. Behind the six-seat dining counter, the chef carefully flips and turns round after round of skewers, all chicken, as tendrils of smoke rise up from the binchotan charcoal-fueled grill. Highlights include wings deconstructed to allow every inch of skin to render and crisp, juicy bonjiri (aka chicken butt), and a meatball so tender it’s a wonder that it stays on the stick.

With mismatched paintings and walls scrawled with messages from past diners, this Russian restaurant has the allure of a secret hideaway—if you ignore the crowd waiting patiently on the sidewalk outside. Once you're seated with a Moscow mule in hand, go ahead and order the classics: beef stroganoff, bright pink borscht, and adjaruli, a Georgian bread boat that comes out with a young Russian man who will mix the gooey cheese and egg yolks together in front of you.

As its name implies, Tribute is all about honoring legends in the pizza realm. Celebrated pizzaiolo Chris Bianco’s portrait hangs on the wall of the loft-like dining room, where the wood-fired oven action is visible from every seat, and the menu is stacked with takes on famous pies, including a gourmet version of Costco’s classic combo supreme spruced up with fancy Ezzo pepperoni and housemade fennel sausage.

Kingfisher is one of the buzziest places in town, and you’ll definitely need a reservation to eat here. You’ll find beautifully-plated food incorporating flavors from all over Southeast Asia—go for the wild mushroom congee laced with crispy garlic, crunchy lettuce wraps, smoked dry-aged duck with rice noodles, and nuoc cham chimichurri. The dining room is anchored by an oval-shaped bar and a glowing, golden sculptural light fixture, as if your best design-savvy friend had a blank check.

At first glance the food at Cellar Hand is all-over-the-map, but it’s actually extremely local. There’s a double-digit number of farms and producers—including a ranch in Ramona where they source almost all their meat—on the menu. And even if you’re not in the habit of binge-watching homesteading videos on YouTube, it’s hard not to be impressed by the in-house baker and fermentation specialists at work.

A hotel in tony La Jolla might not be the likeliest place to find some of the best jerk of your life, but stranger things have happened. The restaurant delivers two versions of the Jamaican classic: one is a perfectly aromatic, spicy grilled chicken, and the other is an appetizer with a place in San Diego’s pantheon of iconic dishes. Cubes of pork belly draped in a jerk jelly mingle with plantains and black-eyed peas in a glaze that balances sweetness and heat like a tightrope walk.

This Convoy strip mall joint does one good magic trick: it’s so good that you won’t mind having to order via QR code. If you haven’t had Chinese food from the Northwest of the country, it means plenty of lamb, hand-ripped noodles, and tart aged vinegar. The chewy hand-pulled noodles with (wonderfully fragment) cumin lamb is a must-order, while the eggplant with garlic sauce is deeply savory with a kiss of spice.

After you’ve done the fish taco thing and want a high-end meal, come to Animae for wagyu steaks and reimagined Filipino dishes. Think short-rib kare kare served with bagoong peanut oil and long green beans, or braised beef cheek dinuguan with shishito peppers and a side of coconut rice bread. The restaurant has a playlist that pumps out ‘90s hip-hop and R&B throwbacks, dramatically-draped curtains, and a painting behind the bar of a robot floating in the ocean.

This Pacific Beach restaurant looks like a quintessential tavern—all polished wood, with fish mounted on the walls—where you could get great clam chowder. And you can. But you can also splash out on specials like caviar-topped scallops in a silky butter sauce and be smug in the knowledge that you’re scoring the most prized catch at any given moment, since The Fishery is attached to its own seafood distributor. Look out for local spot prawns or delicate sand dabs.

Set a calendar reminder to book Soichi’s sushi omakase—reservations disappear within minutes of their monthly release at noon on the first day of each month. With a warm wabi-sabi aesthetic, this Adams Avenue restaurant offers takeout and a la carte options, but its main attraction is a $169 omakase with a dozen rounds of nigiri (and often, rarer cuts). Think silky gizzard shad marinated in a homemade vinegar sauce, or engawa, a prized portion of muscle from the fin of a flatfish.

Lamb is king at Aqui Es Texcoco, and if you leave without the meat sweats, you didn’t do it right. The cafeteria-like Chula Vista restaurant does brisk business in barbacoa, served with mugs of piping hot lamb broth and chickpea soup that make great hangover helpers, especially at breakfast time. Cuts of slow-roasted lamb, both fatty and lean, come with fresh corn tortillas and all the fixings to fashion your own tacos.

This easy-to-miss North Park spot basically forces you to invade the personal space (and eavesdrop on) your fellow diners. But what it lacks in square footage it makes up for in sheer flavor, with a French-y approach to classic Southern California fine dining. The menu changes every few months, but recent highlights included flakey cod with tartar sauce and ultra-crispy potato slices—like fish and chips’ wealthy cousin who studied abroad in Paris—and a rich, tender plate of braised short ribs.

At Cesarina, you choose your shape and sauce, and they churn out the al dente pasta right before your eyes in the open air pastificio. We suggest any shape with creamy funghi sauce, where cremini, shiitake, and porcini mushrooms almost outshine the pasta. Or the paccheri vodka and scampi, delicate and smooth with an entire langoustine on top. (It’s locally revered enough that the menu warns “BEWARE OF IMITATIONS!”)

Kettner Exchange might be the only clubstaurant in San Diego with legitimately good food. If you don’t want to party in a cabana on the raucous patio, grab a quieter booth and grab a Pig Mac that swaps pork belly for beef and folds the lot into a steamed Asian bun with a cartoon pig face made out of dough on the side. Or dig into assertively numbing and spicy Szechuan frog legs, and a giant duck meatball that outshines most Italian restaurants.

The Oaxacan steak and eggs at Atelier Manna might be one of the best meals up in North County: tender meat served with excellent mole made from smoked tomatillo and charred chocolate. Some days it comes on a sope, other days on an english muffin. For a less meaty option, consider the porridge with Hokkaido scallops or perfectly poached turkish eggs with crusty bread to mop up the yolk and herby yogurt sauce.

Quixote looks like a haunted cathedral, and it’s the perfect dimly-lit spot for hanging out with gothic gargoyles, gossiping, and drinking horchata. Sure, you can get better tacos at nearby taquerías, but the Oaxacan-leaning dishes like smoky tlayudas and beet salads in creamy requesón cheese are delicious and much more interesting. The main event here should be the braised lamb belly, a juicy slab of meat with a mole sauce you’ll remember.

Getting a Callie reservation might be harder than avoiding traffic on the 5 during rush hour. That’s because people move quick to secure dishes like lemon saffron linguini with bits of local uni, and juicy Aleppo-spiced chicken that gets a little sweetness from coriander honey. If it’s your first time, the Mediterranean feast for $75 a person is a great way to try a variety of their food, and the wine pairing is worth the extra $40.

Don’t be fooled by the cowhide chairs or the steer skull hanging on the wall—you have not wandered into a Cormac McCarthy novel. Welcome to Cowboy Star, a steakhouse bringing the Wild West to the East Village, right down to the giant spur-shaped door handle. If you’re looking to indulge your cowboy fantasy and tear into a tender, juicy hunk of ribeye, you’ll leave happy, but even the parker house rolls, bronzed from the oven, are amazing.

This three-level North Park hub has the backing of Padres ace pitcher Joe Musgrove, who signed on after eating at one of the sister restaurants in Baja. Have an aperitif at the rooftop oyster bar before heading downstairs, where you can choose between a seven-course tasting menu at the chef’s counter that bellies up to the kitchen, or a lower-key prix fixe in the dining room.

The fine-dining-factory atmosphere at Trust is familiar—concrete floors, exposed ventilation—but the menu throws a curveball. American staples like honey-butter hush puppies rub elbows with Asian-leaning dishes like lemongrass and thai chili-infused crab fried rice, though this isn’t a jack of all trades, master of none situation. The char siu glazed brisket is like elite Hong Kong BBQ, slow-cooked for 36 hours (and disappearing from your table within five minutes).

This omakase spot is a whole lot fancier than the rastafarian sushi roll joint it replaced, but it still has an all-are-welcome feel. And although its itamae sushi chefs are more smiley than serious, they also give diners what might be the closest to a Tokyo-style sushi experience as you can get in San Diego without flying across the Pacific. The $160 omakase menu is available at the 10-seat sushi counter or the enclosed patio, and it nimbly shifts with the seasons.

Addison is the Mount Everest of fancy San Diego restaurants. All of the dishes on the $355-per-person seasonal tasting menu are expertly executed, whether that’s chicken liver churros, a crispy potato cube layered with black truffle and Iberico ham, or sashimi with kiwi and melon. Beyond the food, Addison has an extensive, excellent wine and cocktail list, plus bottles of rare champagne.