Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Drinking soda at a bottle shop
New North Park eatery serving great food, not beer, inside Bottlecraft
Crispy duck on a bed of lentils and greens, topped by pickled mustard seeds.
Juan Miron and Kevin Ho seem intent on feeding beer drinkers. Their MiHo Gastrotruck established a following by parking outside breweries and bars, serving street food to happy hour denizens and craft beer fans.
Now they've built on their food truck success to start a restaurant with a fixed address. However, while their new venture has moved inside, it hasn't left beer culture behind. Instead, they've set up shop inside North Park's Bottlecraft bottle shop.
Gotta pass a lot of beer to get to that counter.
Now, Bottlecraft didn't really need to install a restaurant to be a great place to buy beer. The University Avenue location offers the great selection of its Little Italy shop, with three times the cooler space. Its greatness is built around the opportunity to try out hard-to-find craft and imported brews, including individual 12-ounce cans and bottles. This means you can skip the six-pack and walk out of there with however many bottles you'd like, and hopefully trying something new.
However, you do have to walk out of there, because unlike the Little Italy shop, they don't have a license to serve beer on site.
This is where installing JUKE could help. While they still can't serve alcohol on premises, the city may now let them. Because beer should go very well with the locally-sourced menu the MiHo crew has put together, including tofu bibimbap, brisket and braised octopus.
I would have tried the octopus, except I've recently read they're incredibly intelligent animals, so I can't in good conscience eat them anymore. Which isn't to say I was ready to go vegan with JUKE's roasted beets or cauliflower steak. I settled on the crispy duck, because ducks ain't bright, but they are delicious, and I enjoyed my breaded duck confit topped by pickled mustard seeds more than anything I've ordered from the Gastrotruck.
Buying only four bottles actually shows restraint.
Now, moving indoors doesn't mean JUKE offers table service. You order at the counter in the back of the shop, then take your receipt up to the Bottlecraft register to pay. Most likely you've picked up a few bottles of beer on the way. I happened to find a couple of bottles of Pliny the Elder on hand, which is rare enough that this and most liquor stores enforce a two-bottle limit in a futile effort to keep the excellent IPA in stock. I also grabbed a single can of local favorite Modern Times' Fortunate Islands, and a Weihenstephaner "kristall weissbier" I'd never tried before, wishing I could drink any of them with my meal.
Take it outside.
I'm really not sure I could have, even if they did have that license, since most of the seating is out on the sidewalk. And I mean, right on the sidewalk, with nothing to separate you from the busy intersection of 30th and University. The Bottlecraft folks say they'll make room for some indoor tables, but until drinking outdoors becomes legal in North Park, eating in at JUKE may mean sticking to the house-made nonalcoholic brews like lemon ginger beer, or strawberry blood orange soda. Not a bad trade-off, but ultimately it looks like JUKE is going to be beer-lovers' take-out.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Drinking soda at a bottle shop
New North Park eatery serving great food, not beer, inside Bottlecraft
Drinking soda at a bottle shop
New North Park eatery serving great food, not beer, inside Bottlecraft
Crispy duck on a bed of lentils and greens, topped by pickled mustard seeds.
Juan Miron and Kevin Ho seem intent on feeding beer drinkers. Their MiHo Gastrotruck established a following by parking outside breweries and bars, serving street food to happy hour denizens and craft beer fans.
Now they've built on their food truck success to start a restaurant with a fixed address. However, while their new venture has moved inside, it hasn't left beer culture behind. Instead, they've set up shop inside North Park's Bottlecraft bottle shop.
Gotta pass a lot of beer to get to that counter.
Now, Bottlecraft didn't really need to install a restaurant to be a great place to buy beer. The University Avenue location offers the great selection of its Little Italy shop, with three times the cooler space. Its greatness is built around the opportunity to try out hard-to-find craft and imported brews, including individual 12-ounce cans and bottles. This means you can skip the six-pack and walk out of there with however many bottles you'd like, and hopefully trying something new.
However, you do have to walk out of there, because unlike the Little Italy shop, they don't have a license to serve beer on site.
This is where installing JUKE could help. While they still can't serve alcohol on premises, the city may now let them. Because beer should go very well with the locally-sourced menu the MiHo crew has put together, including tofu bibimbap, brisket and braised octopus.
I would have tried the octopus, except I've recently read they're incredibly intelligent animals, so I can't in good conscience eat them anymore. Which isn't to say I was ready to go vegan with JUKE's roasted beets or cauliflower steak. I settled on the crispy duck, because ducks ain't bright, but they are delicious, and I enjoyed my breaded duck confit topped by pickled mustard seeds more than anything I've ordered from the Gastrotruck.
Buying only four bottles actually shows restraint.
Now, moving indoors doesn't mean JUKE offers table service. You order at the counter in the back of the shop, then take your receipt up to the Bottlecraft register to pay. Most likely you've picked up a few bottles of beer on the way. I happened to find a couple of bottles of Pliny the Elder on hand, which is rare enough that this and most liquor stores enforce a two-bottle limit in a futile effort to keep the excellent IPA in stock. I also grabbed a single can of local favorite Modern Times' Fortunate Islands, and a Weihenstephaner "kristall weissbier" I'd never tried before, wishing I could drink any of them with my meal.
Take it outside.
I'm really not sure I could have, even if they did have that license, since most of the seating is out on the sidewalk. And I mean, right on the sidewalk, with nothing to separate you from the busy intersection of 30th and University. The Bottlecraft folks say they'll make room for some indoor tables, but until drinking outdoors becomes legal in North Park, eating in at JUKE may mean sticking to the house-made nonalcoholic brews like lemon ginger beer, or strawberry blood orange soda. Not a bad trade-off, but ultimately it looks like JUKE is going to be beer-lovers' take-out.
Comments