What do you think of when you think of a French fine-dining restaurant? Hushed service? White tablecloths? Unpronounceable dishes made with heavy sauces and imported ingredients?
That’s not Fleurette, the 120-seat French Mediterannean restaurant that native San Diego chef/owner Travis Swikard opened with his wife, Mia, and business partner David Cohn, on Dec. 10 in the UTC area of San Diego.
Although he spent nearly a dozen years rising to the top of French master chef Daniel Boulud’s Dinex restaurant group in New York City, Swikard wants his Fleurette to be a French restaurant with a decidedly San Diego flavor.
Travis Swikard, a Michelin recognized chef, stands by his Athanor stove from France in the kitchen of his new restaurant Fleurette on Thursday, Nov. 7 in the UTC area of San Diego. (Sandy Huffaker for The San Diego Union-Tribune)
The bar and lobby area of Fleurette restaurant in San Diego. (Zack Benson)
“Oeufs & Eggs,” a dish made from local farm eggs, San Diego uni, sherry sabayon and black truffles at Fleurette restaurant in San Diego’s UTC area. (Eric Wolfinger)
Sourdough rosemary fouglasse, a bread dish served with olive oil and tapenade at Fleurette restaurant in San Diego’s UTC area. (Eric Wolfinger)
Hope Ranch Mussels “Vol-au-Vent” at Fleurette restaurant in San Diego’s UTC area. (Eric Wolfinger)
San Diego “Bouillabaisse,” a bourride-style fish dish on the dinner menu dishes at Fleurette restaurant in San Diego’s UTC area. (Eric Wolfinger)
Provençal Lamb Duo on the dinner menu at Fleurette restaurant in San Diego’s UTC area. (Eric Wolfinger)
Risotto al Pistou, a pasta dish at Fleurette restaurant in San Diego’s UTC area. (Eric Wolfinger)
Leeks Vinaigrette with local duck egg at Fleurette restaurant in San Diego’s UTC area. (Eric Wolfinger)
Duck Liver & Bone Marrow Pâté at Fleurette restaurant in San Diego’s UTC area. (Eric Wolfinger)
Kanpachi & Carrot “Cru,” a seafood dish on the dinner menu dishes at Fleurette restaurant in San Diego’s UTC area. (Eric Wolfinger)
Beef Tartare à la “Niçoise” at Fleurette restaurant in San Diego’s UTC area. (Eric Wolfinger)
“Lavender & Honey,” a semifreddo and pistachio cake dessert at Fleurette restaurant in San Diego’s UTC area. (Eric Wolfinger)
The exterior of Travis Swikard’s new Fleurette restaurant in the UTC area of San Diego. It opens Dec. 10. (Sandy Huffaker for The San Diego Union-Tribune)
The private dining room at Fleurette restaurant in San Diego. (Zack Benson)
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Travis Swikard, a Michelin recognized chef, stands by his Athanor stove from France in the kitchen of his new restaurant Fleurette on Thursday, Nov. 7 in the UTC area of San Diego. (Sandy Huffaker for The San Diego Union-Tribune)
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That’s evident from the moment you arrive at the stunning glass wedge-shaped 6,000-square-foot restaurant off Executive Drive.
Oversize ochre-hued doors imported from France bear large brass plates decorated with the restaurant’s name (fleurette means “little flower”) and a stylized drawing of a spiky San Diego sea urchin. Inside on the lobby wall, there are playful portraits of Swikard’s mentors, Boulud and Gavin Kaysen, the former San Diego chef who is Team USA president for the biennial global Bocuse d’Or cooking competion in Lyon, France.
Fleurette’s friendly wait staff are trained to knowledgably explain the French origins of each dish and how local ingredients are used. And Fleurette’s menu is written in English and decorated with whimsical drawings of a duck in a jaunty beret and a sardine in a sailor’s cap.
But it’s the beautifully plated food and imaginative drinks that best tell the Fleurette story.
French techniques are used to prepare twists on classic French Côte d’Azur-inspired dishes made with mostly San Diego and Southern California ingredients. And bar director James Roe’s 10-drink cocktail menu includes six named for cities in Southern France and the other four named La Jolla, Del Mar, Encinitas and Coronado.
Swikard used the same formula at his 5-year-old Michelin Bib Gourmand restaurant Callie in San Diego’s East Village. It serves Mediterranean food made with mostly local ingredients.
“I very much want to make French cuisine faithful and approachable,” Swikard said in an interview about Fleurette last week. “I understand where I’m at. Most people here don’t speak French, and French restaurants are intimidating to people. My goal has always been to just cook delicious, well-executed food with amazing ingredients.”
I dined at Fleurette in late December, ordering eight items, including dessert, a glass of French wine and two cocktails. Dinner for two before tip was over $300, but the three-hour dining experience, from the delicious food to the warm service and free parking, made it well worth the cost.
Long in the planning stages and long anticipated by local diners, Fleurette lives up to the hype. Callie has been my favorite restaurant in San Diego since it opened in 2021, thanks to its great food, service and convivial atmosphere. But for fine dining, Fleurette is now my No. 1.
Here’s a taste.
Food from the sunny south coast of France is much lighter than the heavy cuisine in the northern city of Paris. Provençal cooking has a greater focus on fresh-caught seafood, humble ingredients like seasonal vegetables and farm eggs, and light sauces, lemony vinaigrettes, tapenades and vibrant herb mixes that accentuate the freshness of the ingredients rather than cover them up.
We started our dinner with a wonderful bread course of fougasse, the traditional bread of Provence, which is cut and shaped to resemble an ear of wheat. Instead of the traditional flatbread dough, Fleurette’s fougasse dough is a delightfully crunchy rosemary sourdough, served with a flavor-bomb dish of Ligurian olive oil and tapenade.
The dish Swikard calls his “biggest flex on the menu” for its daring simplicity is the Aix-en-Provence-inspired Winter Vegetable Aioli, a pristine and perfectly prepared plate of delicately poached fresh vegetables served with a light aioli sauce. When I ordered it in December, it came with a chilled lobster tail, but it’s now a fully vegetarian dish.
Also from the “bites and snacks” section of the menu, we enjoyed the savory Crispy Barbajuans, a traditional snack from Monaco, which Swikard makes with an old recipe from French master chef Alain Ducasse’s grandma. Bittersweet Swiss chard filling is wrapped in dumpling-style pastry and fried, then liberally sprinkled with aged Parmesan and fresh-ground pepper.
Perhaps Fleurette’s most photographed dish, and my favorite to eat, is the “Oeufs & Eggs” appetizer.
Yes, it is listed on the menu with quote marks, like several dishes at Fleurette that play with classic French traditions. In Provence, brouillade aux truffles is a simple dish of soft scrambled eggs with black truffle shavings. Swikard’s version ups the ante with San Diego uni (the briny orange reproductive organs of sea urchin), a sabayon made with Spain’s Pedro Ximénez sherry (a little bit figgy, a little bit licorice-y) and a splash of maple syrup. It’s a warm, sweet, savory, salty, umami dish served beautifuly inside a purple urchin shell on a bed of local kelp. Warm, buttery sourdough toast comes on the side for schmearing. I could eat this haertwarming dish as an entire meal and be content.
We also tried two other dishes identified on the menu with quote marks, the “Vol-Au-Vent” and “Bouillabaisse.”
The vol-au-vent is a baked puff pastry cup usually filled with creamy chicken or seafood with vegetables. Think of it as a fancy pot pie. Swikard created this delicious dish with mussels as an alternative to the staple French appetizer of escargot (Burgundy snails). Offshore farm-raised mussels from Santa Barbara’s Hope Ranch are stirred with confit potatoes and tomatoes and served with a garlic-persillade (parsley) butter and sun-dried tomato.
Traditional bouillabaisse is a fish stew from Marseilles made with fish, shellfish and a slow-steeped fish bone broth. Swikard’s rich and elegant version features local sheepshead fish and spiny lobster with melted leeks and saffron. They’re serve with a tableside pour-over of bourride-style seafood broth that’s been emulsified to give it a bisque-like consistency.
Swikard’s Callie is known for its housemade pasta. Fleurette also serves a lineup of lighter Provence-Mediterranean pasta options, including a light egg yolk fettucine with Meyer lemon butter and caviar, ricotta gnocchi and a winter pumpkin and chestnut agnolotti. We especially enjoyed the zingy, party-in-your-mouth Risotto al Pistou, a vivid green pesto pasta dish made with fresh basil, pine nuts, confit tomatoes and Parmesan.
A few dishes we didn’t try but plan to on our next visit are the Winter Leeks Vinaigrette with caviar and duck egg from Ramona’s Connelly Farm, and the Kanpachi & Carrot “Cru,” a gorgeous dish of raw amberjack with a sauce of carrot juice, almond milk, citrus and herbs.
Fleurette offers a quartet of desserts. Swikard’s favorite — in part because Daniel Boulud always includes this on his own menus — is the gluten-free Warm Dark Chocolate Fondant. It’s a decadent, intense, melt-in-your-mouth chocolate cake with a side ofchocolate tuille and coffee caramel gelato.
Next time, I’ll try one of the other desserts. There’s the Lavender & Honey, a floral semifreddo made with raw honey from San Diego’s Mikolich Honey farm, pistachio financier cake and lavender mousse. The Winter Citrus Vacherin is a frozen dessert made with layers of tangerine-yogurt sherbet, Madagascar vanilla gelato and whipped cream, topped with a “fleurette” flower meringue candy. And the Chocolate and Hazelnut Mille-Feuille is a cylindrical layered dessert made with brown butter feuille de brick pastry, chocolate and hazelnut mousses and chocolate chip gelato.
Fleurette
Hours: 5-10 p.m. (bar stays open until 11 p.m.) Tuesdays-Sundays
Where: 4727 Executive Drive, Suite 100, San Diego
Parking: Three hours of free parking with validation. Optional valet service available.
Phone: 858-332-2655
Online: .fleurettesd.com, instagram.com/fleurettes
Dining and Cooking