The Brief

You may have driven through North County on a scenic detour on the way to San Diego, or even stayed at one of its idyllic coastal communities like Oceanside, Carlsbad, Encinitas, Solana Beach and Del Mar. But you may not have been aware that this sun-soaked corridor has been undergoing a restaurant renaissance in recent years, with both seasoned chefs and newcomers making their mark.

“San Diego was labeled the home of the fish taco for many years,” said William Bradley, the chef of three-Michelin-starred Addison, which opened inside the Fairmont Grand Del Mar resort in 2006. “We didn't have our identity because it was always San Francisco, L.A. and Napa. It was tough for San Diego to show what they can do. ”

Over the past 20 years, Bradley, who grew up in San Diego’s South Bay community of Chula Vista, has witnessed the region’s transformation firsthand. He attributes San Diego’s inclusion in the Michelin Guide California in 2019 as a turning point for the local dining scene.

“They'll find a restaurant that doesn't have all the glitz and glamor, doesn't have the PR machine and a celebrity chef,” he said. “They find these diamonds in the rough.”

In 2022, Addison became the first restaurant in Southern California to earn three Michelin stars, the guide’s highest honor. Neighboring restaurants Jeune et Jolie and Lilo in Carlsbad, along with Oceanside’s Valle, have each earned and maintained a Michelin star in recent years.

“I think we're at a time now that we've got great restaurants, great chefs, and the accolades to support the talent that's here,” Bradley said.

Restaurants will know if they’ve kept, lost, or earned additional stars at the annual Michelin Guide California awards ceremony on June 24.

For road-trippers planning a weekend jaunt down the coast or food obsessives plotting a drive-there-and-back feast on the town, here are seven dining destinations defining North County’s culinary scene right now — listed in alphabetical order.

24 Suns

At 24 Suns, scallop and shrimp siu mai dumplings are paired with pickled blueberries and served in a luscious puddle of buttery fermented habanada.

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At 24 Suns, chefs Nic Webber and Jacob Jordan take an experimental approach to Chinese food, a cuisine with a deep history in California dating back to the Gold Rush.

Ever since the first Chinese immigrants established restaurants in 1849, traditional recipes have adapted to local ingredients and palates, resulting in dishes with a distinctly Chinese American flair, like chop suey and egg foo yong. This nearly 200-year-old culinary tradition continues to evolve inside a squat building in Oceanside that most recently served as a German dive bar (and a strip club before that, according to a server).

Here, the two chefs, who met while working on the line at Addison, serve their take on Chinese food inspired by local micro-seasons. Snow fungus and king oyster mushrooms mimic the slippery texture of a traditional tripe-and-tendon cold appetizer, while plump scallop and shrimp siu mai dumplings are paired with pickled blueberries and served in a luscious puddle of buttery fermented habanada (spiceless habanero pepper). Though the menu at 24 Suns changes often in accordance with ancient Chinese solar terms, Webber and Jordan’s cooking remains dependably earnest with every iteration.

Addison

One of Addison's offerings: garden greens, in the front, paired with chicken liver churros, in the back.

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Arriving at Addison is reminiscent of approaching a stately chateau while navigating through the French countryside. The impeccably manicured 400-acre Fairmont Grand Del Mar — with its Mediterranean Revival architecture full of Corinthian columns, abundant arches, and red clay tile roofs — provides an opulent and tranquil backdrop befitting of the restaurant’s culinary ambition.

Inside a newly renovated dining room overlooking the property’s sprawling golf course, chef Bradley and his team deliver a three-Michelin-starred fine dining experience that attracts a global audience nightly — everyone’s hungry to experience the chef’s expression of French-rooted Southern California cooking.

A bright shot of pineapple tepache lightly sweetened with piloncillo welcomes diners before the parade of 10 courses ($395 per person), punctuated by exquisite Japanese seafood and more quenelles of caviar than one can count, begins. Nods and winks to local foodways, like a chicken-liver churro and a lemony “fish” taco, give the menu a sense of whimsy and place.

Atelier Manna

Manna's torrija, or Spanish french toast.

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Veteran restaurant-goers (and Anthony Bourdain stans) tend to roll their eyes at brunch, with its tired Benedicts prepared by hungover cooks for tipsy crowds. But chef Andrew Bachelier’s Atelier Manna in Encinitas makes a compelling case for the daytime meal.

After cutting his teeth for over two decades in fine-dining kitchens, including six years at Addison and leading the charge at Jeune et Jolie and Campfire in Carlsbad, Bachelier opened the breezy 25-seat restaurant seeking the ever-elusive work-life balance — and brunch time will never be the same again.

Bachelier’s standout French toast starts with an entire third of a sourdough loaf locally sourced from Prager Brothers that’s steamed until pliable, saturated with sweetened custard, soaked overnight, and baked to order. Ordinary poached eggs get the Turkish treatment under the chef’s care: cradled in herbed yogurt, bathed in chile-garlic butter, strewn with parsley, dill, and mint, and served with toast.

To wash everything down, there are non-alcoholic “vitality tonics” from bar manager Nick Sinutko, including a refreshing carbonated cold brew spiked with red ginseng, cinnamon, and holy basil, and bubbly dragonfruit juice laced with juniper and ginger.

Jeune et Jolie

Jeune et Jolie's interior.

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Lily Glass

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An inspired four-course pre-fixe menu ($120 per person) unfolds with elegance and ease at Jeune et Jolie , stationed on a quieter stretch of State Street in downtown Carlsbad, in one of the prettiest dining rooms in North County. The Michelin-starred restaurant’s menu is grounded in French tradition and seasonal sourcing, while Paris’s bistronomy tradition informs its sensibility.

Chef Eric Bost, who decamped from Los Angeles to North County when his critically acclaimed restaurant, Auburn, shuttered in 2020, is picking up where opening chef Bachelier left off.

Jeune et Jolie’s choose-your-own-adventure menu allows diners to curate meals to taste, selecting individual dishes from a handful of choices that change often to reflect peak seasonality. In the midst of springtime’s splendor, supple sea urchin tongues topped a crisp English pea tartlette, and caviar, dill, and wasabi accompanied chubby stalks of verdant asparagus.

“This is French cooking through a Southern California lens,” servers tell diners as they settle in for a spirited evening.

Lilo

Lilo's lobster with black mission fig, charred onion and bronze fennel with a sauce of dried chilies.

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There are no bad seats in the house at Lilo in Carlsbad, where 22 diners are seated along a U-shaped counter overlooking hushed, hunched-over, and hyper-focused cooks collectively assembling and delivering the night’s many courses.

Opened by chef Bost in a former boogie board factory after the success of Jeune and Jolie, Lilo serves an intricate tasting menu ($300 per person) featuring a dozen courses that are as beguiling to behold as they are to consume.

Locally caught spiny lobsters, prettied with charred cucumber and blackberry, arrive on an icy vessel surrounded by native plants. A savory-sweet quenelle of orgeat ice cream heaped with kaluga caviar has appeared on the menu since day one. Lilo’s seasonally-driven, technically precise cooking, coupled with warm yet expert hospitality, earned the restaurant a Michelin star just 10 weeks after opening.

Valentina

Valentina's raw local bluefin tuna, steelhead trout, and scallop, served with olive oil, paper-thin red onions, and fried capers.

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While many of North County’s most notable restaurants are chef-and-seasonally driven, Valentina Restaurant in Encinitas bucks the trend and leans into tradition instead.

Named after the daughter of owners Mario and Morgan Guerra, Valentina has garnered a passionate local following for its modern Spanish cooking since opening in 2019. The restaurant’s black and white interior — featuring white-washed booths, subway tile walls, and honeycomb floors — provides a duotone backdrop for a dazzling parade of tapas.

Traditional patatas bravas are reimagined as French potato pavé, daintily dolloped with spicy tomato sauce and chive aioli. A pristine plate of raw local bluefin tuna, steelhead trout, and scallop is served with olive oil, paper-thin red onions, and fried capers, riffing on San Francisco’s Swan Oyster Depot’s winning formula. Artichokes, trimmed of all their fibrous bits, are smashed and seared to golden perfection and served with a rich aioli for contrast. Valentina’s small plates deliver big, bold flavors.

Valle

Valle's patio next to the beach.

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Valle

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For anyone who’s ever dined in and around Valle de Guadalupe, Mexico’s wine country, the magic of the experience rests as much in the surroundings — undulating vineyards and hilly vistas — as what’s on the plate.

The dynamic spirit, characteristic of Baja dining, is brilliantly captured inside chef Roberto Alcocer's Michelin-starred restaurant Valle, located steps away from the Oceanside pier on the ground floor of the Mission Pacific Beach Resort. Polished service is delivered with ease, while the dining room pulsates with the kind of vibrant energy often missing from fine dining temples.

Valle’s 12-course, $220 menu is a celebration of modern Mexican cooking, full of visual twists (see: charred onion meets glossy caviar in a pitch-black tart), nods to tradition (see: nixtamalized local vegetables served with white mole), and utterly delicious mashups (see: miniature blue corn huaraches embellished with A5 Japanese wagyu). The culinary conversation between San Diego and Baja California is continually evolving with Alcocer as a trusty translator.

That ocean breeze is just not cutting it in schools in Torrance and Long Beach as Southern California reels from a heat wave.

Parents have taken to social media, created petitions and are proposing a bond measure in order to address the sweltering classrooms as temperatures hit triple digits in some areas.

Only 25% of Torrance Unified classrooms have air conditioning, according to a district spokesperson. And while 90% of Long Beach Unified schools have air conditioning, the schools without air conditioning have to bear this heat spell until the end of 2027 when new air conditioning will be in all classrooms.

What are schools doing to beat the heat?

In Long Beach, the district says there are portable fans in classrooms without AC and the district has installed heat-blocking window covers.

"The things that we do immediately and have been doing for several years, hydration stations,” Keith Butler, the deputy superintendent at TUSD, told the school board early this week. “So our nutrition services freezes blocks of ice, puts them into containers with water, and students are — and staff are able to rotate through and at least get ice water.”

There is also a classroom rotation system so everyone gets a turn in cooling zones, he said.

Can schools close on extreme heat days?

Eric Mitchell, a spokesperson for LBUSD, told LAist, “The District will not close schools because of extreme weather unless the City of Long Beach Public Health Department or a state-authorized emergency response agency directs it.”

Baillie echoed his words adding that a state-declared emergency allows schools to close temporarily without needing to make up teaching time. School funding is dependent on attendance and instructional time.

If a local emergency is declared, school districts, she said, must consult with labor unions to adjust the school schedule to either extend the school year or move to a student-free professional development day.

“Our district is actively discussing creating union-approved ‘weather days’ that would provide a mechanism to adjust the schedule,” Baillie said. “Thresholds would be part of that discussion and might focus on when national weather alerts elevate a heat advisory to an extreme heat event, as they did this week.”

So how can Torrance get ACs in the classroom?

School districts like Torrance pay for facility upgrades like new ACs through district issued bond measures. A school district takes a loan and the people in that city pay back that loan through an increase in their property taxes. That is because there is no specific state allocation of funding for major upgrades or construction. Most of the money schools get from the state is spent on instruction and other student services. There have been some occasional grant programs, like CalShape, but no ongoing source of funding.

This week, a petition to get TUSD to place a bond measure on the ballot to fund ACs has already garnered over 1500 signatures.

But, Baillie said, “Third-party polling completed earlier this year showed a willingness to vote for additional future bonds; however, when specifically asked about the costs of specific bonds to fund the $520 million needed to upgrade the electrical systems and install AC at all 34 campuses, polling showed there would not be enough support (bonds require 55% +1 of voters in an election) to pass a bond for AC.”

And so the bond measure was not placed on the upcoming ballot.

Butler, the deputy superintendent, explained during this week’s school board meeting that parents cannot simply donate an AC unit.

“ One [reason] is it's not super effective to have a typical window unit from a home that would be trying to cool a 960 sq. ft. classroom with 27 students and a teacher, maybe an instructional aide,” he said. “But the bigger issue is the ones that are large enough to really do that, the room has to have a large electrical load, and our electrical system within our buildings where most of them were built in the 1960s, it's just not meant to handle what it does.”

LAist reporter Mariana Dale contributed to this article. 

The Orange County District Attorney’s Office is hosting a buyback event Sunday where people can exchange their e-bikes and e-motorcycles for up to $1,000 in gift cards. The goal is to reduce the number of illegal bikes on the road, and give parents an incentive to get dangerous vehicles out of kids’ hands.

“These vehicles are not child’s play, and the consequences are incredibly dangerous and increasingly deadly,” DA Todd Spitzer said in a news release announcing the event.

Communities in Orange County have been grappling with a surge in e-bikes and e-motos on the road, including among young kids, and an accompanying increase in serious crashes.

“Our area has pretty much the highest concentration of e-bike injuries and e-bike accidents in the country,” said Dr. Tetsuya Takeuchi, the trauma medical director at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo.

Takeuchi said  just over 70% of the children treated at the hospital for e-bike injuries had some level of head injury, “from a simple concussion to devastating brain damage, brain bleed and skull fracture."

A lot of those injuries are among teenagers not wearing helmets, he said. Plus, many e-bikes on the market are too heavy and fast for children to control, Takeuchi said.

Besides safety concerns, tensions have flared with other drivers, pedestrians, and neighbors in areas with heavy concentrations of e-bikes.

Newport-Mesa Unified School District became one of the first districts in the country this year to restrict e-bikes to high school campuses only. District leaders say the policy is working to disincentivize young students from riding e-bikes to school. But at one middle school, students with e-bikes have opted to ride them anyway, parking in the surrounding neighborhood and raising the ire of homeowners.

The DA’s approach

The DA’s office has started to target parents who allow their children to ride e-bikes and e-motorcycles that have been illegally modified for high speeds, sometimes with deadly consequences. In April, the district attorney filed child endangerment charges against a mother from Aliso Viejo after her 14-year-old son struck and killed an 81-year-old man while doing wheelies in the street in Lake Forest. The boy was riding an e-motorcycle souped up to reach 60 mph.

Details of the buyback program

The e-bike and e-motorcycle buyback program is part of the DA’s plan to address safety concerns with e-bikes. Local police departments, hospitals and the California Office of Traffic Safety will also be onsite with information booths.

People can bring in functioning or non-functioning e-bikes, e-motorcycles, e-scooters and pocket bikes and exchange them for gift cards worth up to $1,000 — while supplies last.

The event takes place from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., Sunday, Sept. 13, at Angel Stadium in Anaheim.

An appeals court issued a ruling Friday that strikes down a federal government effort to block a lower court’s order requiring the construction of 2,550 new housing units on the Veterans Affairs campus in West Los Angeles.

The long-running case, brought forward by disabled veterans struggling with homelessness in the L.A. area, has centered on the use of the sprawling 400-acre VA campus.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter had previously scrutinized leases for the private Brentwood School’s athletic facilities, a parking lot company, an oil drilling enterprise and UCLA’s baseball stadium.

Ruling that the campus was meant to aid veterans, Carter ordered the VA to not renew the leases and quickly build 750 units of temporary housing and 1,800 units of permanent housing.

But Carter’s September 2024 order has been on hold ever since the defendants asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to review his decision.

Case returns to lower court

On Friday, more than two-thirds of the court’s 29 judges ruled against the VA’s petition for a rehearing.

“It's a historic day for veterans,” said Mark Rosenbaum, an attorney with Public Counsel representing the plaintiffs.

“The government has been fighting their veterans, who went to fight on behalf of the nation,” he added. “They've been fighting them like they are the enemy. They went to the district court to fight. They lost.”

Rosenbaum said he’s pleased to see the case return to Carter’s courtroom after a long appeals process. Carter, himself a Marine Corps veteran who served in the Vietnam War, took an active role in pushing the VA to address a homelessness crisis that has thousands of former service members experiencing homelessness on any given night in L.A. County.

Could the VA pursue further appeals? 

Carter has also ordered the VA to stop using veterans' disability payment benefits as a reason to make them ineligible for supportive housing programs due to income restrictions.

But Rob Reynolds, an Iraq War veteran who advocates for L.A.’s veteran community, said the federal government’s attempts to win an appeal could continue.

“The government can still appeal this to the U.S. Supreme Court,” Reynolds said.

When veterans involved in the case first heard today’s news on the 9th Circuit ruling, he said they immediately asked about the potential for further appeals.

“All of us are really hoping that the government stops this fight, and that we can get housing built for our veterans and end this madness once and for all,” Reynolds said.

A spokesperson for the VA declined to comment on the ruling, saying the department does not discuss pending litigation.

Jenny Yang, a comedian from L.A., has been traveling across the country turning immigrant grocery stores into comedy hubs. Now she’s back in L.A. getting ready to start a mini-residency in Highland Park, tape her first one-hour special and share moments from the tour.

Yang kicked off her Good Egg Immigrant Grocery Store Standup Comedy Tour in June in L.A., then took it to 15 cities across the country. She told LAist the decision came as a way to cope with the grief from her dad’s death, 10 failed in vitro fertilization treatments between 2020 and 2025 and seeing the news of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids spread across the country.

She said the idea to tour grocery stores was a way to reclaim those spaces, after immigration enforcement left many afraid to go out and do simple tasks like buying groceries.

“If we cannot laugh in front of a wall of instant ramen around our bok choy," Yang said, "then what is the American dream for?"

Her routine wove in stories about her fertility struggles and the challenges of having to be a “good egg” growing up as the child of immigrant parents from Taiwan. Her hope for the tour was to connect with people, to make jokes and help people feel lighter after.

The tour proceeds went to local nonprofits serving immigrant communities, and Yang said those organizations helped recruit the grocery stores. She said some stores said no at first — they felt overwhelmed by ICE activity in their city, had lost staff or worried about drawing attention.

“That's part of the story of the tour is it's one thing to want to imagine this beautiful world where you can tell jokes inside of immigrant grocery stores," Yang said. "It's another thing to know what those obstacles are, and I think that's still very telling for where we are as a country.”

One moment stood out to Yang: performing at Shuang Hur Supermarket in Minneapolis. It’s near the memorial for Alex Pretti, the nurse that a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot and killed in January as federal agents carried out immigration enforcement in the city.

“I was able to talk to Henry, the owner who’s a Chinese American uncle. [He] was so proud of being able to help his regular patrons, who for the most part even though it was an Asian centered grocery store, were majority Latino,” Yang said. “I was able to bear witness to their resilience as a community, what they did to take care of each other.”

Now she’s back in L.A. and is doing a mini-residency at the Outside In Theater at 5317 York Blvd. in Highland Park. Her first show is 6 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 12, followed by shows on Sept. 19 and 26 at the same time. Tickets are pay-what-you-can, and you can find them at Outside In's website.

In February 2027, Yang will be taping her first one-hour special at Rancho Meat Market #1 in Lincoln Heights. She describes it as a love letter to Los Angeles that’s endured so much, from the ICE raids to the January fires.

You can follow Jenny Yang’s work here.