CHEF LOOKS TO NEXT SUCCESS
TRAVIS SWIKARD OF CALLIE IS NOW CATERING SPECIAL EVENTS IN PENTHOUSE SUITES
Callie restaurant chefowner Travis Swikard is expanding his restaurant business, both up and out. Last month, Swikard announced the opening of four new special event spaces in the same East Village building where Callie has occupied a ground-floor space since June 2021. Next up will be what he describes as a “bit more swanky” restaurant serving southern French cuisine in the University Town Centre area, set to open around summer 2025.
Since its debut, the 125-seat Mediterranean restaurant Callie has racked up great acclaim, including earning a Michelin Bib Gourmand award in 2021 and being named to Esquire magazine’s list of the 40 best restaurants in the U.S. for 2022. In 2023, Swikard hired Mike Reidy from
The Fishery restaurant in Pacific Beach to serve as Callie’s first chef de cuisine. Having Reidy’s support in the kitchen at Callie has allowed Swikard the time to focus on enhancing his overall
restaurant business, staff training and customer experience.
The second restaurant, which he’s partnering on with his Callie investor David Cohn of Cohn Restaurant Group, was inspired by a Swikard family vacation last summer to Cassis, a small community on France’s Mediterranean Riviera where the geography and climate are very similar to San Diego’s.
Swikard said Côte d’Azur food is lighter and cleaner than the heavy, sauce-laden dishes of northern France. For example, a roasted fish dish in northern France would be served with a beurre blanc sauce, but fish on the French-Italian Riviera would arrive at the table in a vierge sauce, made with white balsamic vinegar, shallots, olive oil, tomato concassé and fines herbes.
Some of the dishes Swikard said he’s planning for the menu at the as-yet unnamed restaurant include roasted sweetbreads and quail, Dover sole meunière and poulet roti, which is chicken roasted over baby potatoes cooked in chicken fat. There will also be a few French-style pastas.
He will likely offer a few prix fixe options, similar in style but not cuisine to the Mediterranean Feast at Callie. He’ll also do a bread course with dips like at Callie, though the dips will be southern French. But one dish that will be brought over from Callie untouched is the popular dry-aged duck. And because the new restaurant will be in the heart of an office park, Swikard said he plans to offer a twocourse, 45-minute lunch service for area workers.
The roughly 140-seat restaurant will be situated in a new building in a business park owned by Ernest Rady’s American Assets Trust, off La Jolla Village Drive at 4747 Executive Drive in San Diego. The restaurant will be designed by the L.A. architecture firm Studio UNLTD, which designed Callie. The modern building will have 24-foot-tall glass walls with 6,000 square feet of interior space and a 1,500square-foot patio, along with a 12- to 14-seat bar and a private dining room. KRBS, a Vermont architect that specializes in building restaurants and bars, will create a French-style kitchen with a real French island stove. As at Callie, the new restaurant will have free parking, plus a valet option.
To take advantage of the green space around the new restaurant building, Swikard said he’s working with his father to plan an on-site chef ’s garden that will include citrus trees and herbs like flowering rosemary, lavender and thyme.
Even before he opened Callie, Swikard has said he planned to expand Callie’s footprint with additional special event spaces in the eight-story Genesis San Diego medical office-lab tower at Island Avenue and Park Boulevard downtown. That 200,000square-foot project is now partially leased, and Callie has begun marketing event spaces for catered special events on the top floor.
On the penthouse level there are rooms on the south, north and west sides of the building that can accommodate receptions for 30 to 75 standing guests. There’s also a new reception lounge next door to Callie on the first floor that can accommodate 50 standing guests. The restaurant is also available for a full buyout of 125 seated or 250 standing guests, plus a private dining room for 18.