San Diego: The Prado (July 2018)



My spouse and I dined at The Prado for lunch on a Thursday afternoon in early July 2018. The restaurant is open for lunch daily (approximately 11:30 am to 3:00 pm) and dinner on Tuesdays through Sundays (after 5:00 pm); between those times, the lounge offers light snacks and drinks. You can make a reservation using the online Open Table system. If you arrive without a booking, the host will add your name to a waiting list and provide you with a buzzer sounds when your spot is ready.

The Prado is located in Balboa Park’s House of Hospitality, just off the Plaza de Panama. The House of Hospitality was originally built as the Foreign Arts Building for the Panama-California Exposition of 1915. Intended to be temporary, its name was changed to the House of Hospitality for the California Pacific International Exposition of 1935. In the late 1990s, the historic building was demolished for structural reasons, but architects reconstructed it using the original building as a model, including an interior (but al fresco) patio courtyard with a fountain. 

The restaurant offers both indoor and outdoor seating. You can choose to sit in the bar room/lounge, which offers seating at a tiny bar, at a few high-top tables, at regular-height tables (a few of which share a padded banquette), and a few on the front “porch” surrounded by foliage. (Seating in the un-air-conditioned bar room is unreserved and is therefore first-come, first-serve.) You can also choose to dine al fresco on the multi-tiered rear terrace with views of the Cafe del Rey Moro gardens, the adjacent canyon, and the downtown skyline beyond. But the choicest seating is in the more formal main dining room, which is divided into two parts: a courtyard room (with views of the piazza and its fountain) and the solarium (with skylights and views of the terrace). The Hospitality House Building and the Prado restaurant also offer private event rooms and banquet facilities that can accommodate between 60 and 500 guests at a time, depending on the room chosen. Varied décor showcases painted beams reclaimed from the original building, stenciled ceilings, antique mirrors, wrought-iron candles and lanterns, and blown-glass sculptures. We were surprised to learn that the main rooms of the restaurant have no dedicated restrooms; we had to leave the restaurant in order to use the public restrooms across the piazza.

The Prado offers American cuisine with both California and Spanish elements; the dining room features a more formal menu, and the bar room offers lighter fare. Because we did not have a reservation and the wait was lengthy, we dined in the bar room on its casual small plates menu. We shared a flatbread pizza and some mini tacos, followed by the coconut flan for dessert. Despite our server’s promises to deliver hummus and crackers, each time we asked him for them, he said they were on the way, then finally admitted that the restaurant had no more hummus available! (We would have settled for just the crackers, but he wouldn’t bring just those.)

Our light meal in the lounge at The Prado was acceptable; however, we wish that we could have tried the more formal menu in one of their more elegant dining rooms.











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