On Jan. 14, 2022, Kingfisher Cocktail Bar & Eatery opened its doors in San Diego’s Golden Hill.
Within weeks, reservations at the modern Vietnamese restaurant were booked six weeks out. But that was just the beginning of its fast rise to success.
Within its first year, Kingfisher would earn both a Michelin Guide recommendation and a spot in Bon Appetit’s 50 Best New Restaurants of 2022, and its opening executive chef, Jonathan Bautista, would be named a semifinalist for the James Beard Foundation’s 2023 award for Best Chef: California.
Then, within a couple of months, Bautista would move on from Kingfisher and so would the restaurant’s founding general manager David Tye.
Change like that can be hard on a young restaurant, but Kingfisher transitioned smoothly to new leadership.
In the kitchen, two existing Kingfisher cooks stepped up. Former sous chef David Sim was promoted to executive chef and Sydney Imlay moved into the sous chef position. And before he left to start his own restaurant consulting business, Tye extensively trained the staff to carry on in his absence. Later, industry veteran Garrett Thor would be hired as general manager.
Kim Phan, who co-owns Kingfisher with her husband, Quan Le, and her sister, Ky Phan, said the new leadership team at Kingfisher has maintained all the quality standards that put the restaurant on the map in 2022. But they’re also a tight and harmonious group who have improved on the owners’ mission to celebrate the flavors of Southeast Asia with food and cocktails designed to complement one another.
“The new Kingfisher under David (Sim) has taken our food in a more Asian-inspired direction, which has always been our vision, and the French culinary background of chef Sydney has given them each their own territory. They complement each other well,” Phan said. “And Garrett, like David and Stephen (Mallory, the longtime bar manager), really takes care of the team. It’s always a team-first environment.”
Sim was 4 years old when his Cambodian-Chinese family moved to San Diego from his birthplace of Seattle. He remembers from a young age gravitating to the kitchen at family gatherings to watch his mom and the other women preparing meals. Eventually he was invited to join the food-prep process. “Cooking was a big social thing that made people happy. I just wanted to make people feel good and happy and warm.”
His first paid cooking job was a 10-year stint at In-N-Out Burger, where he said he learned invaluable skills in systems management, organization, cleanliness, teamwork and humility. Later he worked for Whisknladle and at Trust Restaurant. A longtime fan of the Crab Hut restaurants (that the Phan sisters and Quan Le also own), Sim heard about the plans for Kingfisher and applied. He was one the restaurant’s first pre-opening hires in fall 2021.
Sim said that since Kingfisher opened, its menu has always been the result of a collaborative effort by the entire culinary staff.
“It wasn’t well known that everyone had a big hand in everything,” he said. “It’s very important that people have creative freedom and take pride in what they do. If they make it, I don’t take credit for it.”
A few of the most popular dishes on the current menu were directly inspired by Sim’s mother’s recipes: the Baja striped seabass with caramelized fish sauce, and the whole fried rockfish. Other popular menu additions are the house-made egg noodles with black truffles, garlic and soft-boiled egg; the new Da Nang-style hamachi crudo with Vietnamese fish sauce, garlic and pickled daikon; and the tart and peppery stone fruit salad.
“Asian food is known for being a little sweet or spicy, but I look for a lot of sugar, acid, salt and spice. It’s about a balance of those ingredients,” he said.
In his ongoing quest to find more “jungly” ingredients for the menu, Sim shops each morning at the Vien Dong Market in City Heights. His future goal is to expand Kingfisher diners’ palates with less-familiar ingredients that are staples of Southeast Asian cuisine, like bamboo shoots and durian. Earlier this month, Kingfisher debuted a house-made fish sauce caramel ice cream.
“Our food has been comforting and familiar but I want to take it a level further,” he said.
Bar manager Stephen Mallory also joined the Kingfisher pre-opening team as a bartender in October 2021. He was promoted to bar manager in June 2022. Tye designed the opening cocktail menu, including the signature Saigon Moped, which remains on the menu today. Mallory said that drink, with Roku gin and debittered bitter melon, is popular with guest and he wanted to keep it on the menu to pay homage to Tye and the restaurant’s roots.
In keeping with the owners’ desire to have drinks that complement the food, Mallory said he and his bar team have worked closely with the chefs to infuse into the drinks some of the menu’s unique herbs and spices like rau ram, galangal root, palm sugar, black sugar and black vinegar syrup.
“We let the creative process dictate the direction we go,” Mallory said. “Sometimes we’ll consider a dish that doesn’t have a (matching) cocktail and we figure the challenge out.”
And because the food menu is seasonal, Mallory has encouraged his bartender team to create cocktails that also change with the seasons.
One of his favorite cocktails on the menu is the Sesame Soirée, a gin cocktail which was created to complement one of Sim’s desserts, a glutenous rice ball with ginger, sesame and coconut. “It was so lights out, we had to make it in liquid form,” Mallory said.
Another of Mallory’s seasonal favorites is the Endless Prosperity, made with Baja gin, a kumquat and Szechuan peppercorn syrup, Champagne, rice vinegars and a few drops of chili oil. He also loves the new Starry Eyes, a fruity cocktail made with starfruit cordial, bitters and LoFi gin, and the Kit Fox cocktail, which features tequila infused with the tips of spruce tree branches.
Mallory said that when Kingfisher opened, some of the cocktails on the menu were inspired by classic drinks that could be found at any bar. His goal has been to create drinks that can’t be found anywhere else.
He’s now in the early stages of brainstorming fall cocktails, is expanding bartender and server education and is continuing to grow the cocktail program.
“We keep sharpening our knives,” he said. “I think we’re on such a great course and trajectory. I want to take it as far as possible.”
Kingfisher Cocktail Bar & Eatery
Hours: 5-11 p.m. Wednesdays-Mondays
Where: 2469 Broadway, San Diego
Phone: (619) 432-1014
Online: kingfishersd.com
Originally Published: