Whole Beast, Blackhorse Road and The Friendly, San Diego

Earlier this month I was lucky enough to eat probably the best burger I've ever had in my life. It was a smash burger, cooked quickly on a flat-top to a good crust, placed inside a toasted sweet bun and dressed with little more than deli cheese. And before I get accused of being deliberately misleading I'll say now - it wasn't at Whole Beast.

The Friendly in San Diego is a slightly bizarre little operation serving just two things - decent, if unspectacular, pizza by the slice in the New York style, and probably the greatest burger on the West Coast. It's a simple concept but then the greatest things often are - good, coarse, high fat content ground beef, smashed onto a searing hot flat top and aggressively seasoned. Deli cheese is melted on top, and then the single patty goes into a wide, flat bun. So far, so 2025.

But the Friendly have a couple more additions to their $8 (yes, really) 'Dirty Flat Top Cheeseburger' - firstly a dollop of soft butter-braised onions - no crunch from these, thank you, it's all about the caramelised flavour - and a layer of homemade aioli just under the top bun. The combination is extraordinary - you get the crunch from the toasted buns and the beef, and the single square of cheese is just enough to provide that gooey dairy classic cheeseburger feel in the mouth. But the combination of the onions and the ethereally light aioli above all that provides this incredible floaty flavour bomb, like the beef and the cheese are being draped in a velvety, garlic-onion mousse. That, and the fact that its low, flat profile is perfect for holding in your hands, makes it one of the great burger experiences. There's nothing else even close to it in San Diego, probably the world.

So this is a tale of two burgers. Or to be more accurate, three burgers across two burger joints. It's not Whole Beast's fault that I had a life-changing sandwich made to a very similar spec in California four days before I found myself heading up Blackhorse Road towards their residency at Exhale taproom, but then I'm afraid life isn't fair. Just ask Dick and Mac McDonald. Whole Beast are clearly burger-lovers, and burger aficionados, as they are doing pretty much everything right in the construction of their offerings. Both have a generous amount of good beef, smashed out flat and wide, spilling attractively outside of the soft toasted buns. The cheeseburger (£13) is a thing of wonderful simplicity made with care and heart - the toasted bread and crisp beef crackle deliciously as you bite down into it, and the melted cheese eases the whole thing along. It really is a superb burger.

I like the green chilli cheeseburger slightly less, perhaps because the chilli element comes in the form of a kind of smooth, cold chutney, and there's quite a lot of it, which throws the delicate balance of textures in the smash burger off slightly. I did appreciate the hit of chilli though - they didn't hold back on that - and this was, all said, still a very well constructed burger, with the same crunchy, almost honeycombed beef patty and squishy soft/toasted buns.

Their crinkle-cut chips are also excellent, every bit as good as those served by Shake Shack (the only smash burger chain worth bothering with), and holding a nice, greaseless crunch right to the very bottom of the bowl.

Smoked chicken wings had a fantastic hearty, bouncy texture that spoke of very good chicken, and a lovely note of smoke accompanied every bite. I will forgive them for leaving the wing tips on (why serve something you can't eat? You might just as well leave the feathers on) because they were so fun to get stuck into, and the "wild leek ranch" they were coated in was a refreshing counterpoint to the smoked meat.

The only slight disappointment of the lunch were these cucumbers, which despite the addition of "whipped tofu dressing, chilli crisp, furikake" and something else obliquely referred to as "GGG" (your guess is as good as mine) mainly tasted of, well, what they were - plain, unpickled, chopped cucumbers in a vaguely Japanese salad dressing. And I don't know about you, but I can prepare raw cucumbers fairly easily myself at home. And they don't cost £7.

Overall though, Whole Beast is worth the journey to this corner of NE London, even for those of us who live at the other end of the Victoria line. Where it matters, the food is knowledgeably crafted and intelligently cooked, with a genuine enthusiast-level of attention to smash burger detail, and a pleasingly liberal attitude to inspiration to fill out the rest of the menu. I should also mention the sauces, my favourite of which was the treacly, rich pork fat BBQ, an excellent foil for the crinkle-cut chips. There really is something of note across the board.

So again, it's hardly a disaster that Whole Beast's version of the smash burger isn't quite on a par with what is regularly spoken about as one of North America's greatest (just ask Reddit) - it's just sheer coincidence I managed to try both in the space of a week, and there was only ever going to be one winner in that battle. The fact is, the E17 variety is still, by any measure, a smashing (pun intended) achievement and a lovely way to spend your lunch money. And London's burger scene is all the better for its existence.

Whole Beast 8/10
The Friendly, San Diego 10/10

I forgot to take a photo of the bill but the damage per person came to about £33 with a pint of Exale beer each. And yes, that is a terrible photo of the Friendly Dirty Flat Top Cheeseburger, sorry - you'll have to take my word for it that it looked a lot better in person.

Tuétano Taqueria, San Diego

On the shortest day of the year, in the middle of the gloomiest and wettest of England's gloom and wet, I thought it might be fun to review a taco shop in southern California, because it's days like this you need to remind yourself that there are places in the world where the sun always shines.

Tuétano is Spanish for 'bone marrow', and so if you call yourself 'Tuétano Taqueria' this brings with itself a certain set of expectations. I remember being very disappointed as a child when it turned out central Liverpool chippie The Lobster Pot didn't serve lobster (yes, I was that kind of kid) but, fortunately for all concerned, expectations are more than met in this cheerful little spot in Chula Vista, where the birria tacos come with an "optional" chunk of roast bone marrow.

I put "optional" in inverted commas because quite honestly, anyone making the journey here and NOT ordering the bone marrow needs their head examined as it's the loveliest bit of offal you can order in this part of the world. And I'm including the brain and tongue tacos at El Gordo in that assessment.

Anyway I'm getting slightly ahead of myself. The menu at Tuétano is short and no-nonsense, essentially the same ingredient - birria - served in two types of taco casing and also available as a sandwich (torte). Short menus are almost always a good sign, indicating a kitchen focussed and confident in their abilities where it matters, and not trying to be all things to all people.

The first thing we ordered was the standard quesabirria taco - so their own birria mixture topped with lovely gooey cheese, either some kind of pizza mozzarella or a very close Mexican equivalent, in a standard taco casing. For $4 it was a fine example of its kind, the slow-cooked beef and cheese creating that magical combination of flavours and textures that are such an integral part of the Southern California experience, and yet so weirdly difficult to find elsewhere.

Better, as you might hope and expect, was the same filling inside with the bog standard tortilla swapped out for their own hand-pressed on-site version, fluffy little things as light as buttermilk pancakes but holding firm to the last bite - well worth the extra $1 and more than enough reason to visit by itself.

But as I mentioned, Tuetano have a little extra trick up their greasy sleeves, and it's a quite wonderful chunk of roasted bone marrow which for an extra $7 comes slapped on top of your taco speared through with a little wooden stick, like a beefy lollipop (sorry, popsickle). Push the perfectly cooked marrow through the bone onto the top of your taco and you are rewarded with a storm of beefy, offaly wonderfulness, a spritz of fresh lime and chopped coriander (sorry, cilantro) just enough to stop the whole thing tipping over into fatty excess.

They also do a lovely "consommé", not a clear broth in the French style but a heady beef soup made from their own stock, finished with chunks of fresh onion and soft, buttery frijola beans. Typing this back in Blighty with 70mph winds and horizontal rain battering the windowpane makes me think such a powerfully flavoured winter-y soup is wasted on a part of the world where the temperature rarely dips below 'shorts weather', but then life is nothing if not contradictory.

Even the drinks offering has had some love and attention directed towards it. The counter has 3 barrels of Agua Fresca, one of which on the day I visited was a homemade mint and lemonade, the plastic cup it came in dipped in chamoy - a sticky, sweet and sour paste (usually) made from tamarind, tajin and sugar. They also sell Mexican coke and a rather nice non-alcoholic sangria soda, again not a fast array of options but all making sense.

If you've added up the prices I've mentioned above in your head you may have reached the conclusion that Tuetano is a bit of a bargain, and indeed it's not far off, but this being America in 2024 every seemingly reasonable order is at the final stage slapped with sales tax and (increasingly common) a minimum 20% tip, so costs can easily head north of expectations. However, $33pp for probably the best birria taco meal in town is still more than acceptable. You can certainly pay more for less.

It's more than possible I only obsess so much about quesabirria tacos (and believe me, I do obsess about them) because it's the one thing hasn't quite been tackled successfully by any UK Mexican joint. Madre in Liverpool had a decent bash at one point but last time I tried was a shadow of its former self, and most spots in London, even the ones that are so-called taco specialists, don't even bother with birria. But then maybe, like that bottle of holiday wine that tastes so flat and dead when you've gone to the effort of bringing it all the way home, quesabirria aren't meant to travel, and I'll just have to wait for my next trip to California for my next hit. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

9/10

Tadokoro, San Diego

Some of the best food in California is to be found in strip malls. This isn't just my opinion, but the opinion of chef Ludo Lefebvre, who in his Mind of a Chef episode was referring to his own locale of Los Angeles but which applies just as well to its southern cousin. Yes, in San Diego there are plenty of decent ways to spend your dinner dollar downtown, the insanely flashy Born and Raised being the latest and greatest of them (and somewhere I would have positively reviewed already were it not for the fact it's pitch black in there after sunset and none of my photos came out). But if it's not a New York-style steakhouse (above), or boisterously over-designed late-night date venue you're after (e.g. Juniper & Ivy, Kettner Exchange, Craft & Commerce), then you'll need to start looking towards suburbs like Lemon Grove or Kearney Mesa, where the real magic happens.

Over the years I've had charming hand-made dumplings from Tasty Noodle House in Kearney Mesa, table-sized bowls of fragrant Pho from Convoy Noodle House in Chula Vista (there's also, unsurprisingly, one on Convoy), and blindingly fresh fish tacos from TJ's Oyster bar in Bonita, all right at the very top of their respective games when it comes to the cuisines in which they specialise and all installed in unassuming strip malls where the prices are reasonable, service is friendly, and parking dreadful. These unassuming, ugly even, at least from the outside, slices of functional Americana are where frills and flourishes are (excuse the pun) stripped away, leaving the food to do the talking.

At Tadokoro, then, the food very much is the focus, but once you leave the rather workaday environs of this Old Town strip mall behind you and step inside the restaurant, it's clear just as much energy has been expended on the remarkably authentic Japanese interior and warmth of the service as anything that may end up gutted, fileted and served on a plate. It's a tiny place by San Diego standards, with only about 20 seats at tables and a further 9 at the bar. Needless to say, for the true 'omakase' experience it's critical you sit at the latter, where you can watch the bits and pieces of your dinner being assembled right in front of you, not to mention gawp at those destined for fellow diners as well.

One thing I took home from my trip to Japan back in 2012, along with a suitcase full of crazy flavoured noodles, was the sobering realisation that, despite my previous certitude, I was not the fearless food adventurer I thought I was. A salad bowl topped with cod sperm was the first shock to the system, and raw whole baby squid (giblets in situ) a few days later dealt my culinary confidence the mortal blow. Generalising hugely, whilst Japanese food is often intelligent and beautiful, it's not always very accessible, and their fondness both for fish semen as well as bland savoury jellies and bony freshwater fish fried whole along with their soily guts didn't always sit well on a Western palate. On this one, at least.

I had a flashback to the CSI (Cod Sperm Incident) watching our itamae open the biggest oyster I've ever seen in my life (from British Columbia), heave out the contents onto the counter, and slice it up into five pieces for my starter. It sat in front of me, dressed lightly in ginger and ponzu, looking like a bleached placenta, and for a moment I wondered whether I was up to the task. Fortunately - thank God - it tasted sweet and lean, with no hint of the horrid creaminess that can affect these bivalves in certain seasons. If you ever get a chance to try a giant Pacific oyster from British Columbia, take it, is my advice.

With the oyster came monkfish liver, as dense and rich as paté de foie gras, on top of an addictive layer of pickled mushrooms. And next to that, some pieces of conch mollusc, which to be perfectly honest didn't have much of a taste or a particularly pleasant texture (they were rather tough) but hey, at least I can now say I've eaten conch.

So clearly Tadokoro weren't afraid of pushing the timid Western palate, and good for them because over the next 14 or 15 "courses" (most just bite size) I got to try not only some world-class sushi, but a great deal of fish and shellfish I've never even seen on a menu before never mind actually sampled. Such as this local San Diego Bay spotted prawn, which was presented first as part of a sashimi set (antennae and legs still waggling away) alongside otoro (fatty tuna, as good as ever), a scallop from Japan (fine but not spectacular) and curls of "Bigeye" tuna and amberjack (apparently some relative of the sashimi-staple yellowtail).

At the relatively modest price point (for omakase anyway) of $85, it's perhaps unsurprising that some of the courses used cheaper fish, but I still would have much rather the usual black cod miso (of Nobu fame) than the presumably farmed and rather ordinary Chilean seabass used here. Still, it was nice enough, particularly the pickled ginger stem which was as colourful as it was tasty.

I got to try a bit of this tempura roll, which was my dinner companion's main course (I couldn't persuade her to go full omakase, and after the arrival of the giant oyster she was glad she hadn't) and it was packed full of good stuff, including a lovely fresh crab mixture and some of that gorgeous buttery California avocado.

The head and legs of the spotted prawn from the sashimi course now reappeared having been deep fried (you can also ask for it in soup form). Incredibly, aside from the thick carapace the whole of the rest of the animal was now entirely edible; the head had an incredibly complex, ever-so-slightly bitter concentrated seafood flavour, and the legs were like eating tubular prawn crackers. Hugely enjoyable.

Next began a run of the highlight of any omakase experience (at least I think so), the nigiri. I'll save you the exhaustive detail (and not only because I didn't take notes honestly guv) but amongst those pictured above are halibut cured in kelp, a remarkably spicy tuna relative cured in chili (the red one), a fantastic blowtorched mackerel, a sea urchin from Hokkaido (which wasn't actually as nice as the local San Diego ones but I wasn't about to start an argument) and finally a lovely fatty bit of smoked eel.

Towards the end of the meal, while we polished off our sesame ice creams, a whole, bright-red golden eye snapper appeared from the back and was carefully gutted and fileted in the front kitchen. The skill going into the separation of the light pink flesh from the bone was mesmerising to watch, a lovely bit of food theatre in of itself, but also neatly encapsulated just how much skill and effort goes into the food at Tadokoro. For a bill of around $140/head with a decent gutful of sake, this is almost certainly one of the most accomplished sushi restaurants in the city, and has become my new benchmark for the West Coast "omakase" experience.

In fact, it was so good I not only pledged to go back as soon as possible but it also gave me renewed vigor to venture forth on my next trip to the States and see if anywhere else can top it. I've heard good things from the usually reliable Eater (I would say that, as they occasionally pay me for work) about a little place called Sushi Ota in Pacific Beach, which despite a worrying habit of serving cod's sperm is many people's favourite for this kind of thing. They also operate out of a strip mall. I'll keep you posted.

8/10

Cowboy Star, San Diego

Surely one of the most glorious incarnations of the restaurant, if you are a normal functioning human and enjoy the consumption of red meat and powerful cocktails, is the US Steakhouse. The first place to go looking for these of course has always been, and remains, New York; in a city that knows how to eat better than almost anywhere else, and with a long and happy history of all the ancillary things that make a good steakhouse (slick, old-timey service, plush leather banquettes and the reasonable assumption that steaks should only be served in sizes of "half a cow" upwards), the examples there are the best in the world, and are rightly world famous - Luger's, Keens, the Old Homestead; names steeped in tradition and romance, bastions of civility and luxury in a fast-changing world.

But while New York set the template on how to serve steak, they don't have the monopoly on steak itself, and so it stands to reason that wherever people care about dry-aged, premium cow, and wherever the supply of such will allow it, you will find restaurants taking the cue from the big apple. Some areas take longer than others to catch up - London took its sweet time but now we have Goodman and Hawksmoor and Gillray's and so things are a lot better than they used to be - but with Southern California not being the first place that comes to mind when you think of steak, San Diego's steakhouse culture only really kicked into first gear with the opening in 2008 of Cowboy Star. Fortunately for San Diegans, Cowboy Star is pretty much the only steakhouse you'd ever need anyway.

Décor is a clever fusion of New York tradition - leather booths, open kitchen, nice white tablecloths - and California style (plenty of woodwork and nice high "warehouse-y" ceilings). It feels as serious as it should do for a place charging $50 a main, but with an easy atmosphere thanks to inordinately friendly and capable service (not nearly as much as a given as it once was in the US) matched with that ever-present bright Californian sun.

Everything we had was great. This may not make for a particularly inspiring read, but it is undoubtedly true, especially regarding the gin martini which was served ice cold in a frozen glass and met every single criteria of the perfect martini. There's absolutely no better way of beginning a steak dinner than with a dry martini, but there's always the danger that a lesser example (warm or watery or containing shards of ice) can spoil things. Nothing to worry about on that front at Cowboy Star though.

The Steakhouse Burger is often an institution in itself; think of the Luger's stripped-back version with its huge ball of funky aged mince, or the Hawksmoor (UK) take which was the first time most Londoners (this one included) had any clue how good a burger could be. This isn't the "Ultimate", Cowboy Star's signature burger (which would have been my own choice), but in fact the lunch special "Bison burger" - leaner, gamier and served with roasted chillies. The meat had an incredible depth of flavour and was as loose and juicy as only the very most expertly built burgers can be, the white "cheddar" (I use the word loosely) binding it all together well and the bun having a great taste as well as holding together well. Nice fries too - fluffy inside and with a gentle crunch, rather like In'N'Out's.

I was that close to ordering a $65 bone-in 45-day aged ribeye for my own main but in the end common sense prevailed and I settled (!) for a $50 T-bone. This was a beautiful bit of meat and had been cooked incredibly well, with a nice defined "crust" with no burning or bitterness and a nice smooth pink interior. It was also nice to see such a varied list of steaks on offer - sourced mainly from the US from various ranches in California, Wyoming or Washington state, but also some luxurious Hokkaido Wagyu for a whacking $100 for 8oz. Which I'm sure is quite the thing - they let us gawp at it even if we didn't quite have the pockets for it (that's it on the left):

Steakhouse desserts are notoriously variable, and usually variations on the theme of cheesecake and ice cream, but at Cowboy Star were well worth the effort. Bread and butter pudding was a vast slab of a thing, golden-browned with a sugar crust and topped with rich chocolate ice cream, unsophisticated perhaps but undeniably enjoyable...

...while this strawberry chiffon cake was a far more "cheffy" affair, involving powerfully-flavoured strawberries teased into all kinds of interesting shapes and textures, topped off with a particularly lovely sour cream sorbet.

Understandably - and quite rightly - the T-bone formed the largest part of the bill, but was still pretty good value considering the quality of the offering, and didn't feel like a liberty. And actually $138.36 (once you've added on the practically more-or-less-compulsory 20% service charge) is a pretty reasonable figure to pay for a meal like this, especially as I say given the brilliant service (full disclosure: they comped me a martini, which may have been something to do with seeing me take photos, but may just be because they're like that) and whole silver-service steakhouse vibe.

So despite not being in New York, or even anywhere particularly notable for its beef production, Cowboy Star succeeds on every measurable criteria of a steakhouse and then some by just following the New York template as closely as makes sense in Southern California. I'm worried that this post is going to come across as too relentlessly gushy, as puffy as that strawberry meringue, but sometimes there is such a thing as a restaurant doing almost everything right, and it's probably better I just admit as much rather than inventing fault where there is none. I loved Cowboy Star, and if you are one of those fully-functioning humans I mentioned earlier, you will too.

9/10