The Gärten Opens in Morena District
Plus: Tamale Café at LV Farmers Market, By Means of Smoke Cooking Classes, LV News Briefs and the Morena Specific Corridor Plan.
What’s better than sitting inside a festive San Diego establishment and drinking a cool craft beer while also eating a delicious pizza? That’s easy. The answer is…sitting OUTSIDE on a beautiful San Diego sunny afternoon or a mild evening. That’s the ideal setting for enjoying a German style brew and a pizza or sandwich, or maybe a tasty mead beverage in place of a beer, or maybe even a glass of wine.
If eating in an outdoor European kind of wine and beer garden environment sounds appealing to you—The Gärten—which this past weekend celebrated its grand opening in the Morena District (5322 Banks Street), is the place for you. The Gärten is a 2,500 square foot open-air venue which is shared by three (and soon to be four) establishments offering food and beverages located there on the site. The Gärten offers a number of tables and benches for guests to partake of a wide variety of beverages offered by Deft Brewing and Lost Cause Meadery. The food is provided by Pizza Cassette, which features wood-fire pizza and Italian-themed sandwiches. This collaborative effort complex will soon be joined by Oddish Wine, which will open sometime this fall.
The Gärten is located in what might be considered off the beaten path, in an unusual area for a high quality drinking/eating establishment as it is surrounded by a number of businesses more in keeping with the industrial area reputation long enjoyed by this part of the Morena District. But the businesses collaborating at this site are expected to serve as catalysts that will help drive the ambitions reflected in the City’s Morena Corridor Specific Plan (published in 2019), which foresees many more new entities moving to this area, eventually transforming it into a cool commercial and office space environment.
Both Deft Brewing and Lost Cause Meadery have been featured in previous issues of the Linda Vista Update. Both tasting rooms offer delicious and interesting concoctions. You can go back and read our article on Deft Brewing and all it’s great tasting beers on tap, and read the one here on Lost Cause Meadery to learn a little bit about drinking the unique honey-based beverage of mead.
While visiting the Gärten this past Sunday for the grand opening celebration, we tried out two Deft Brewing beers, a Bruxelles Trip (a Belgian tripel) and a Day of the Deft (Irish Stout). Both beers were excellent. We also enjoyed a white sauce Mushroom and Sausage wood fired pizza (without the sausage, of course) from Pizza Cassette. You can check out Pizza Cassette’s food menu here. Warning: The aroma from their outdoor wood fire stove is irresistible.
The place was packed with hungry and thirsty customers during our visit, which added to the festive atmosphere.
On a previous pre-Grand Opening weeknight visit to the Gärten we enjoyed the musicians and the stand-up comic who entertained the audience. There was a nice combination of families and young people in attendance.
There is no parking lot devoted to the Gärten complex, but there is plenty of parking available on the nearby streets.
We recommend you take a trip west across Morena Boulevard and pay a visit to the Gärten. While there, have your pick of beer or mead, and eventually wine. And don’t bother fighting the aroma of the pizza. Just go ahead and indulge in a few slices! After all, what difference does a few calories make?
TAMALE CAFÉ: New Vendor at Farmers Market
As I mentioned in last week’s LV Update, we were lucky enough to recently bring on a couple more vendors to help further make the Love, Linda Vista Farmers Market a Thursday go-to destination for great food.
Today, I am going to tell you about one of those new vendors—the Tamale Café. The Tamale Café is the home of Award winning Me Gusta Gourmet Tamales. These delicious tamales come in beef, pork, chicken, veggie, chile and cheese, pineapple, sweet corn and strawberry. You can purchase the tamales hot to eat right away, or cold so you can steam or microwave them later.
I spoke with Dora Ortega who told me their business started in Pacoima in L.A. County by the Ortega family in 1999 and has grown considerably. She said the main location is on Van Nuys Blvd, and that they do about 100 farmers markets in L.A. County. They are now spreading into San Diego County, to include markets in Chula Vista.
According to Dora, the recipe is an old family recipe and the secret is in the masa. The tamales are hand-made daily and individually wrapped in fresh corn husks. According to their website, they do not use lard and the margarine is 0 trans fat. The cheese is 100% Monterey Jack and the meat is the finest, trimmest cuts.
Well, the proof is in the pudding as they say, so I bought a bunch to try at home. The tamales are $4.00 each or you can buy a dozen and get one free. Since we do not eat meat, I purchased the chile and cheese, sweet corn, and pineapple ones. So far, we have tried the chile cheese which is my favorite kind of tamale.
I can attest that the masa is delicious. There was a good amount of cheese and just the right amount of chile for me. Dora will give you some different sauces also, and the milder sauce was to my liking. We were looking forward to trying the dessert tamales but since the chile cheese was so filling, we could not eat any more. We will save them for later. A friend at the market had purchased a sweet corn tamale and I tried a bit of that and liked it very much as did everyone else who tried it. Another friend purchased a pork tamale and said it was stuffed with meat and very delicious.
We heard the Tamale Cafe did a brisk business at last week’s Farmers Market—almost selling out—and Dora promises to bring more tamales this week.
So come to the Love, Linda Vista Farmers Market today. Stop by the Tamale Café and buy a few to take home or have one there. Don’t forget to mention you read about them in the Linda Vista Update.
By Means of Smoke Project Taking Place this Saturday
People of Linda Vista, are you interested in learning new and interesting recipes? Are you curious about different food dishes associated with our diverse ethnic/racial community? If so, you might want to attend this Saturday’s The Olfactory Present: By Means of Smoke free cooking school, offered at the Linda Vista Community Park (located at 7064 Levant Street). The class session will be held at the park’s Melinda Appling Memorial Pavilion.
The first cooking school session will begin at 10:00 am with subsequent sessions going till 6:00 pm. During this free cooking school, participants can learn recipes and foodways from members of the diverse communities that make up the neighborhood of Linda Vista.
This By Means of Smoke free cooking school is part of the City’s Park Social Program, which is sponsored by San Diego’s Arts and Culture Commission. As indicated on the City web site, “Park Social is a citywide initiative introducing social-specific public art into San Diego's vast and varied park system. Held for six months in 2022, Park Social engages with a broad and constantly shifting audience of park goers, intervening and interacting in the social spheres of public parks and exploring topics ranging from environmental justice to belonging and social cohesion through responsive artistic projects.”
The By Means of Smoke project was conceived by San Diego artist Brian Goeltzenleuchter ( a SDSU professor) and coordinated by New York City chef Tessa Liebman. It is meant to be “a sensory-based socially engaged artwork that attempts to raise awareness and stimulate dialogue around cultural differences using olfactory traditions. The cooking school curriculum “fuses many of the culinary traditions we see and smell at park cookouts.” As part of this interesting project, Goeltzenleuchter recruited a number of resident cooks from Linda Vista willing to share their recipes.”
According to Goeltzenleuchter, visiting is open to all, but class space is limited. (This is the City's way of saying that if you want to eat anything you need to sign up at bgprojects.com/school )
Check out the below poster for more details about Saturday’s cooking session times.
LV News Briefs
Farmers Market: The Love Linda Vista Farmers Market will be held today (Thursday) at the Linda Vista Plaza Shopping Center from 2:00 pm to 7:00 pm. Stop by and stock up on fruits and vegetables, check out what all the other vendors are selling, and take advantage of this great opportunity to meet your fellow Linda Vista residents in a friendly community-oriented setting.
Kearny High Football: The 4-3 Kearny Komets play a non-league home game against Army-Navy (Carlsbad) this Friday October 14 at 7:00 pm.
University of San Diego Football: The Toreros play a home game against Presbyterian College (South Carolina) this Saturday October 15 at 2:00 pm.
Linda Vista Town Council: The Linda Vista Town Council (LVTC) will hold its monthly general meeting on Wednesday October 19 at the Baha’i Center (6545 Alcala Knolls Drive). Social time begins at 6:00 pm. The meeting’s official program begins at 6:30 pm. The owners of Linda Vista’s popular Sushi Yurimichi will be the featured speakers. The public is invited; you don’t have to be an LVTC member to attend. This meeting is a chance to network with other LV residents and learn about what is going on in the community.
Civita Development Wins Honor: Civita in Mission Valley was recently recognized as the Best Master-Planned Community of the Year by the Building Association of San Diego. You can read a Times of San Diego article about this honor by licking here.
Councilmember Campillo Budget Priorities Submission: Councilmember Raul Campillo (District 7) has submitted his budget priorities for the upcoming Fiscal Year to the Independent Budget Analyst. His submission includes a couple items related to Linda Vista. You can read about those items, and all his other submissions, here.
More on the Morena Corridor Specific Plan
This issue’s feature article on the Gärten, an outdoor eating and drinking venue, makes mention of the City of San Diego’s Morena Corridor Specific Plan. In case you are not aware of this plan (published in 2019), it is the City’s attempt to address the future development of an area that extends north from Linda Vista’s Morena Trolley station, through the Tecolote Trolley station, and up to the Clairemont Trolley station. The plan reflects recommendations regarding land use and urban design recommendations, and mobility improvements, as well as recreation and conservation concerns.
If you want to know what the City of San Diego has in store for this part of Linda Vista, Bay Park and Clairemont, you can read a digital copy of the Plan by clicking here.
As indicated in the Plan, it “envisions the transformation of an auto-oriented commercial corridor into a pedestrian-oriented village with employment areas, retail, and residential uses linked by pedestrian and bicycle facilities adjacent to the Tecolote and Morena/Linda Vista trolley stations in the Linda Vista community.” While promising to do such things as “protect and enhance the Morena Corridor’s unique neighborhood character” and “preserve public views of Mission Bay”, the plan aims to “enhance the Morena Corridor as a mixed-use village that has a vibrant community core with strong restaurant/retail/design district components and gathering places, balanced residential density that includes affordable housing, quality urban design, safe and accessible travel for all modes, employment opportunities, supporting infrastructure, and public amenities.”
The below map details the different land use plans for each part of the Morena Corridor.
The Gärten, along with its collaborative business partners Lost Cause Meadery, Deft Brewing, Pizza Cassette, and soon Oddish Wine is located in the “Employment” section of the Morena Corridor Specific Plan and is expected to include “a range of urban-oriented light industrial, creative office/flex space business, and commercial uses that provide a sub-regional job center for small- and medium-size businesses.”
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