THE FOODIST / A RESTAURANT RENAISSANCE IS BLOOMING IN CORONADO

Hotel Del Coronado's SunLife Organics right on the world's best beach

Coronado eateries have never lacked an elegant and delicious role model. Since 1888, the Hotel del Coronado has shown the rest of the island how memorable restaurants become part of a community’s personality. 

Generations have gathered beneath the Del’s red turrets for birthdays, anniversaries, romances, business lunches and long afternoons when nobody was in a hurry to leave the table. 

 Restaurant names and menus have changed over the decades, but the Del’s basic recipe has endured: graceful surroundings, professional service, good food and the Pacific Ocean waiting just outside. 

 Now the village beyond the hotel gates is following the old master’s example. Coronado has all the ingredients of a first-rate restaurant town. The Pacific anchors one end of Orange Avenue. San Diego Bay sparkles at the other. In between are residents, sailors, hotel guests, beachgoers and day-trippers carrying healthy appetites and credit cards. Something especially tasty is happening in 2026. 

Coronado is enjoying a restaurant renaissance. New dining rooms are opening in storefronts that needed fresh life. Hotel restaurants are creating small worlds of their own. Burgers, tacos, Mediterranean cooking, Champagne, oysters, ice cream and healthy beach fare are elbowing one another for room on the island menu. 

BY THE SEA

 The latest entry is By The Sea, the long-awaited restaurant at 1300 Orange Avenue. Coronado residents Doug and Lara Hamm have spent three years developing the project, drawing inspiration from the Amalfi Coast, the French Riviera and the Greek Isles. 

The menu is expected to offer elevated coastal fare with Mediterranean and Italian influences. By The Sea occupies the former Boardwalk Beach Club space, a short walk from the Hotel del Coronado and close enough to the Pacific to remind diners why seafood tastes better near salt water. 

 By the Sea: 1300 Orange Avenue Mediterranean-influenced coastal cooking, Italian flavors, seafood and cocktails. Website: bytheseacoronado.com  

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NIGHT HAWK 

 The new Baby Grand hotel has given Coronado a restaurant with a flair for theater. Night Hawk is an open-air dining room where the kitchen works with live fire and the menu leans toward Greece and the Mediterranean. Expect citrus, herbs, olive oil, sea salt, smoke and a thoughtful selection of Greek wines. The setting includes palms, statues, stonework and rock-formed booths. 

Night Hawk does not look as though somebody merely opened a restaurant. It looks as though somebody discovered one during an archaeological dig and added a bar. 

 Night Hawk at The Baby Grand: 1315 Orange Avenue Open-fire Greek and Mediterranean dishes, cocktails and Greek wines. Website: thebabygrandcoronado.com 

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FALLEN EMPIRE

Fallen Empire: Some restaurants place a hostess near the front door. Fallen Empire makes customers find the door. Hidden behind a statue inside the Baby Grand, Fallen Empire is a reservation-only Champagne and oyster bar with brass booths, red mohair, an undersea mosaic and enough atmosphere to make James Bond check his tie. 

The combination cocktail and raw bar gives the room the feeling of a private European hideaway. This is not a place for a hurried cup of coffee before running errands. It is built for lingering. 

Fallen Empire at The Baby Grand: 1315 Orange Avenue Oysters, raw-bar selections, Champagne and cocktails. Website: thebabygrandcoronado.com 

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DOUBLE STANDARD

Double Standard: Restaurateur David Spatafore and Blue Bridge Hospitality opened Double Standard beside Village Pizzeria in March. Its appeal is wonderfully uncomplicated: American Wagyu burgers, large chicken sandwiches, hand-breaded tenders, fries, onion rings, milkshakes and root-beer floats. The revived Leroy Burger comes with Muenster cheese, bacon jam, pickles and garlic aioli. 

Nobody enters Double Standard fearing dinner will arrive as three peas, a flower petal and a mysterious streak of sauce across an oversized white plate. This is food designed to require two hands and several napkins. 

Double Standard: 1202 Orange Avenue Wagyu burgers, chicken sandwiches, tenders, fries, onion rings and shakes. Website: doublestandard-sd.com 

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Kim and Tyler Malek are cousins and creators of Salt & Straw empire

SALT & STRAW

Salt & Straw: Coronado’s new Salt & Straw has brought a measure of Portland imagination to the traditional ice-cream cone. The shop supplements 13 regular flavors with monthly limited editions. Sea Salt with Caramel Ribbons remains a dependable favorite, but the adventurous can encounter combinations involving goat cheese, berries, chocolate, flowers and occasionally enough habanero to make the tongue sit up and take notice. 

 Vegan and gluten-free choices are available. Salt & Straw proves that ice cream no longer has to choose between chocolate and vanilla and then call it a day. 

Salt & Straw: 1303 Orange Avenue Small-batch ice cream, rotating specialty flavors and vegan selections. Website: saltandstraw.com 

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CRACK TACO SHOP

--This place has carried its Cardiff-famous burgundy-pepper tri-tip south to Coronado. Corn tortillas are pressed to order, ingredients are prepared fresh and the kitchen uses olive oil and beef tallow instead of seed oils. Its signature Crack Taco combines marinated tri-tip with onion, cilantro and guacamole. 

 The place is casual, substantial and open late. Orange Avenue can always use another kitchen willing to feed people after respectable dining hours have gone to bed. Crack Taco Shop 1009 Orange Avenue Tri-tip tacos, burritos, quesadillas and freshly prepared Mexican favorites. Website: cracktacoshop.com 

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SUNLIFE ORGANICS

The Hotel del Coronado added SunLife Organics to its beachfront offerings in June. Its menu concentrates on smoothies, açai bowls, juices and lighter food aimed at customers who have just exercised—or hope their clothing creates that impression. After a burger, onion rings, Champagne and a double scoop of Sea Salt with Caramel Ribbons, an açai bowl may qualify as responsible behavior. 

SunLife Organics at Hotel del Coronado: 1500 Orange Avenue Smoothies, juices, açai bowls and health-conscious beach fare. Website: sunlifeorganics.com 

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 CROWN CITY'S FOOD SCENE GROWS LARGER 

 What makes Coronado’s restaurant revival worth celebrating is the variety. 

-- By The Sea is reaching for Mediterranean coastal elegance. 

--Night Hawk cooks over flame. 

--Fallen Empire pours Champagne beside an oyster bar. 

--Double Standard understands the continuing importance of a well-made hamburger. 

--Crack Taco Shop keeps the avenue fed late into the evening. 

--Salt & Straw handles dessert. 

--SunLife Organics offers absolution the next morning. 

 And watching over them all is the Hotel del Coronado, which has been teaching the island about hospitality since Grover Cleveland occupied the White House. 

 Credit here belongs to the publications and reporters who have been on the ground documenting this dining boom. 

-- Lori Weisberg San Diego Union-Tribune brought renewed attention to the long-awaited opening of By The Sea. 

-- Megan Kitt of The Coronado Times provided an excellent firsthand look at the imaginative Baby Grand hotel and its Night Hawk and Fallen Empire restaurants. 

-- Jennifer Velez of The Coronado Times reported in appetizing detail on the openings of Double Standard and Salt & Straw. 

-- Kate Murphy of Axios San Diego placed the Baby Grand restaurants within the larger wave of new dining rooms appearing around San Diego County. 

--Discover Coronado also deserves a tip of the coffee cup for keeping close watch on the changing Orange Avenue restaurant scene and supplying useful details on By The Sea and Crack Taco Shop. 

 Good local food reporting does not happen from a distant desk. Somebody has to walk through the door, meet the owners, study the menu, ask questions and occasionally sample the merchandise. These reporters and publications did the legwork. We happily followed the aroma. 

 Coronado remains a small island village, but its restaurant ambitions are becoming anything but small. In 2026, Orange Avenue is developing into one of the most interesting and delicious promenades in San Diego County.

DESIGN / SAN DIEGO’S VICTORIAN SURVIVOR

 

Sherman Heights (above, looking West)

occupies a small rise immediately east of downtown San Diego, close enough to see the modern skyline yet old enough to remember when there was very little skyline to see. It is one of the city’s earliest residential neighborhoods and remains among its most architecturally distinctive. 

Victorian towers, ornamental gables, Craftsman porches and modest wooden cottages stand along streets that have absorbed nearly every major turn in San Diego’s civic history: prosperity, immigration, freeway construction, disinvestment, neighborhood activism and, now, renewed interest from preservationists and homebuyers. 

Sherman Heights was named for Matthew Sherman, a Civil War veteran, businessman and future San Diego mayor who purchased approximately 160 acres east of Alonzo Horton’s developing New Town in 1867. The elevated land looked west across the flats toward the harbor, giving the subdivision both its name and its original selling point: air, views and distance from the activity below. 

Sherman built first a farmhouse and later a larger residence in the district. As San Diego expanded during the building booms of the late 19th century, Sherman Heights became a desirable address for merchants, professionals and civic leaders. Homes built from the 1880s through the early 20th century reflected the fashions of their day—Queen Anne exuberance, Folk Victorian practicality, Craftsman restraint and later Spanish and Colonial Revival influences. 

The neighborhood’s architectural celebrity is Villa Montezuma [above], the fanciful 1887 mansion built for Jesse Shepard, an internationally known pianist, writer and spiritualist. Designed by the architectural firm Comstock and Trotsche, the house is a Victorian performance in wood, glass, towers and richly decorated rooms. It remains one of San Diego’s most memorable historic buildings. 

 Yet Sherman Heights is important for reasons extending beyond ornate houses. Unlike some early San Diego subdivisions, the neighborhood developed without the same level of racial exclusion found elsewhere. Over succeeding decades it became home to German, Italian and Jewish residents; Japanese and Chinese families; African Americans; and, beginning especially in the latter 20th century, a predominantly Mexican-American population. 

Its history is therefore not a neat succession of architectural styles but a continuing account of newcomers building lives near the center of the city. That continuity was badly disrupted during the middle decades of the 20th century. Highway construction carved new boundaries around Sherman Heights and separated it physically and psychologically from downtown and neighboring communities. Suburban expansion drew away some established households. 

Large homes were divided into apartments, additional dwellings were placed on rear lots, and absentee ownership contributed to deterioration on some blocks. By the 1970s and 1980s, the neighborhood was struggling with neglected infrastructure, declining homeownership and the familiar consequences of official inattention. 

 Residents did not wait indefinitely for rescue. 

In 1984, neighborhood activists organized what became the Sherman Heights Community Center. They first gathered in a Victorian house remembered as the casita amarilla—the little yellow house—and later helped design a 12,500-square-foot community facility with architect Rob Quigley (designer of the San Diego Downtown library]. The building was created through workshops in which schoolchildren, older residents and other neighbors contributed ideas. It remains a persuasive example of architecture produced with a community rather than simply placed within one. 

 The city designated the Sherman Heights Historic District in 1987, protecting a substantial collection of houses and helping establish preservation as part of the neighborhood’s recovery. 

 Its Modern Appeal Sherman Heights today offers something increasingly rare in San Diego: a genuine urban neighborhood whose identity was formed before automobiles, shopping centers and master-planned subdivisions dictated the city’s shape. Its first appeal is visual. A walk through its residential streets reveals houses with asymmetrical rooflines, narrow windows, turned porch posts, stained glass and decorative shingles. 

Some have been restored carefully; others bear the evidence of adaptation, divided households and several generations of repair. The resulting streetscape is not museum-perfect, but it is alive. Its second appeal is location. Downtown, East Village, Golden Hill, Barrio Logan and major transportation routes are close by. From parts of the neighborhood, the downtown towers and Coronado Bridge appear almost as extensions of the local scenery. 

Sherman Heights retains the scale of an older residential district while sitting beside the working center of a large city. Its strongest appeal, however, may be cultural. The Sherman Heights Community Center continues to offer youth activities, senior programs, digital-literacy instruction, citizenship and English classes, food assistance, neighborhood beautification and cultural events. 

Sherman Cocina, launched in 2024, provides training and support for small culinary businesses and food entrepreneurs. These are not decorative neighborhood amenities. They are the working machinery of community stability. The center’s annual Día de los Muertos observance has grown from a modest local gathering begun in 1994 into several weeks of programming with community altars and thousands of visitors. The event demonstrates how Sherman Heights has converted cultural memory into a public tradition without surrendering its neighborhood origins. 

 

Sherman Heights should not be romanticized. Traffic, freeway edges, uneven property maintenance, housing pressure and the threat of displacement remain part of its reality. 

Renewed interest in historic homes can fund restoration, but it can also attract speculation and short-term investment that weakens the very community responsible for preserving the neighborhood through its difficult decades. 

That tension is central to the modern Sherman Heights story. Preservation cannot mean saving façades while pricing out the families, elders, artists and merchants who gave the district its cultural life. Nor should the neighborhood be treated as an inexpensive annex to downtown awaiting discovery by outsiders. Sherman Heights has already been discovered—repeatedly—by generations of San Diegans who arrived, established households, opened churches and businesses, raised children and defended the neighborhood when public attention turned elsewhere. 

Address 2709 Imperial

Its modern appeal lies precisely there. Sherman Heights is beautiful, central and historically significant, but it is not merely a collection of Victorian houses. It is a community that has survived prosperity, division, neglect and reinvention while retaining a recognizable sense of itself. From its hills, old San Diego and new San Diego remain visible at the same time. Few neighborhoods provide a better view of either.

Address 20 Twenty-Fifth Street