San Diego: Lionfish (July 2018)



My spouse and I dined at Lionfish for dinner on a Thursday evening in early July 2018. Lionfish is open daily for dinner only. You can make a reservation using the online Open Table system. The restaurant was busy on the night that we visited, but oddly, three young ladies were stationed on various nearby street corners with copies of the menu and the task of enticing visitors to stop by for an impromptu drink, snack, or meal.

Lionfish opened in the Pendry Hotel (owned by Montage Hotels and operated by Clique Hospitality) in February 2017. The hotel and restaurant occupy a prime mid-block spot on bustling Fifth Avenue in the Gaslamp District. Although the main dining area of Lionfish is situated on the street level, a more casual outdoor lounge is located on the rooftop. The main dining room is visually impressive, with soaring ceilings in the bar, lounge, and front of the dining room, and large windows that allow a view of the sidewalk patio. The more formal part of the dining room has lower ceilings but offers views of the glassed-walled kitchen. A second floor mezzanine overlooking the bar and lounge area offers overflow and private dining. The color scheme is neutral, with dark woods, attractive furniture, and interesting lighting and wall décor.

Lionfish serves contemporary coastal cuisine featuring seasonal ingredients and local seafood. (Select meats are also served.) To start, we shared the mushroom gnocchi, which was a beautifully presented dish; however, we thought the portion undersized because our server billed all the small plates as shareable. For our entrees, we both ordered sea bass, but of different origins and with different preparations: the Baja striped sea bass [served with squash, fennel, and olives] and the local bass [served with mussels, legumes, and chorizo]); the local bass dish was our clear winner of the two entrees. At our server’s gushing suggestion, we ordered a side dish of Brussel sprouts with squash, but we found that the other ingredients of malt vinaigrette and goat cheese made it taste rather unpleasant. As our dessert, we shared the yummy peanut caramel tart garnished with peanut brittle, kettle corn, meringue (although it was more marshmallow fluff than egg white), and vanilla ice cream. When we finished our dessert, our server inquired as to whether we liked it, and tongue-in-cheek, we presented her with our clean plate and told her that it was terrible and that she should remove the charge from our bill. (As we were paying our bill, we noticed that she had, in fact, deleted the dessert from our charges! We were stunned; we often make a similar joke to our servers after “licking our plate clean”, but this was the first time that one really didn’t understand that we weren’t serious! However, she was nowhere to be found to fix the error when we signed our check.)

Parts of our service were good (the bartenders were particularly nice and helpful), and other parts were non-existent. Some of our food was tasty, and others were not. But we enjoyed the busy atmosphere of the interior space as well as sitting on the sidewalk patio to people-watch.



















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