When prolific restaurateur Brad Wise first inspected the long-empty North Park building where he hoped to create his dream brasserie, it was raining so hard that buckets of water were leaking onto the floor where he stood.
“I’ll never forget that day. It was when San Diego had all that flooding, and there were holes in the roof, and it was just pouring in water,” recalled Wise, who owns and operates more than a dozen restaurants, from steakhouses to a craft ice cream shop. “I should have run then.”
On Wednesday, Wise’s Trust Restaurant Group will open its most ambitious project yet — À L’ouest, a Parisian-inspired restaurant that is the largest of all his venues and nearly the most costly, at $4.5 million. With its imported Italian marble tile, elegant chandeliers, high ceilings bedecked with hanging greenery, a glass-enclosed kitchen and electronically controlled windows that open onto 30th Street, there’s no hint of the once boarded-up building where the homeless would seek refuge.
À L’ouest features a glass-enclosed kitchen. (Kristian Carreon / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Many of the group’s dining spots —Trust, Fort Oak, Cardellino, Rare Society — are located in urban locations like Mission Hills and Hillcrest, so a new venture in North Park, already a dense dining destination, made sense for Wise. The 4,800-square-foot space at 3002 University Ave., Wise’s largest restaurant to date, has a combination of green upholstered banquettes and bistro-style seating indoors, as well as 44 patio and bar seats outside. In all, the restaurant — his 13th — will seat more than 200.
“I didn’t open a French restaurant to get a (Michelin) star, that’s not what this is,” Wise stressed. “As soon as you call it a brasserie, you know what this is, because on the weekends, we’ll be open from morning until night, serving essentially brunch, apéro hour (a quasi pre-dinner happy hour), dinner and then into a little bit of a nightlife — just because of where we are on this corner.”
Initially, the restaurant will be open Wednesday through Sunday, but in several weeks, it will transition to a new schedule that will include brunch on the weekends, when the restaurant will remain open until 1 a.m. Eventually, it will move to daily dinner service. À L’ouest will also feature a spiral staircase leading to an upper-level space, but the restaurant group declined to disclose at this time what will occupy that area.
Chef and owner Brad Wise at his new À L’ouest brasserie in North Park. (Kristian Carreon / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
A well-regarded chef known for high-quality consistency at his various restaurant concepts, Wise traveled to Europe and New York City to draw inspiration for his menu of French classic dishes with a contemporary twist. An ample raw bar with mussels, tuna crudo, and smoked mussels; French onion soup; steak frites (that comes with a choice of three cuts of beef), and a baguette served with a thick Bordier butter cultivated in Brittany are reminiscent of the bistro fare found in Paris.
“On the one hand, we’re doing things, technically-wise, that are typically done in the United States or Southern California, so it’s a little like the best of both worlds,” said Wise, a New Jersey native. “It’s about simple, simple ingredients, but if you can prepare them the right way and make a classic like steak frites the exact way it’s supposed to be made, doing the right stocks, doing the demi-glace the right way, reducing the cognac the right way, it becomes very special.
“So I had 15 steak frites in New York in three days, and I was grossed out by them. None of them really stood out to me, and I decided we need to make this memorable. So being able to select your type of steak — that’s kind of unheard of. We just had some time to work on it.”
While Wise’s desire to bring a classic French restaurant to San Diego germinated early on in his career, active planning for it began about 2-1/2 years ago. He had hoped to open it last summer. The major cause of the delayed opening, he said, was the protracted process for securing city approvals.
“I paid for expediting, and it took me 8 1/2 months to get my plans fully done with two rounds of corrections,” Wise said. “So it wasn’t like it was back and forth. They just don’t move fast.”
À L’ouest is located near the intersection of University Avenue and 30th Street in North Park (Kristian Carreon / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
As centrally situated as the new restaurant is, the building at 30th and University Avenue was not initially a big draw for Wise, given the extent of rehab it would need, he said. Circumstances, though, changed when a now disbanded restaurant group, which had scrapped plans for reimagining the space, approached Wise. And so began the journey to what is now À L’ouest.
One appealing perk that came with the leased location, says Wise, is a rare type of liquor license that allows for the consumption of alcohol into the very early morning hours, which gave him some additional options to work with.
“It means I could serve dinner later on the patio at a popular corner, or maybe I can do industry nights on the weekends where people get done working late and they come and eat here on our patio,” Wise said. “So there’s so many different things that go into these places once you talk through the deal.”
To finance his latest venture, Wise used the same model he has employed for the restaurant group’s other ventures: relying on one of his partners, whom he described as an angel investor, and also a second, smaller investor.
“I’ve been lucky enough to figure out a model that works well for me, so we don’t do any loans, nothing like that,” Wise said. “It’s all self-generating, and we raise money through my two investors.”
San Diego restaurant broker Pasquale Ioele said he believes that A L’ouest will be a win not only for the Trust Restaurant Group but also for North Park, a community that has seen its ups and downs as dining trends continue to evolve.
“Brad and Trust have an amazing track record of going into certain areas and uplifting those neighborhoods,” said Ioele, a principal at the Urban Property Group. “He sees these emerging neighborhoods and what can work there. North Park is looking to redefine itself. There have been a lot of bar-centric restaurant concepts and now they’re more food-driven.
“I think you’ll see a lot of that trend happening in other areas throughout the region. If you look at bar and alcohol consumption, that’s down across the country. The younger generation is drinking less.”
Dining and Cooking