Blais, Rosen plan casual chicken joint

March 27, 2015 2:45 PM PT

The next dining project from the restaurant team of “Top Chef” Richard Blais and owner Mike Rosen will be a bit lower in the pecking order than their debut project, the 1-year-old fine-dining hotspot Juniper & Ivy.

The Crack Shack, an outdoor cafe serving gourmet chicken and egg dishes, will open in early fall at a former construction shed that has sat empty for 20 years on the same block as their top-rated Juniper & Ivy.

The shed will serve as the kitchen for a 3,000-square-foot outdoor dining area. The menu will serve free-range chicken and non-GMO eggs from local boutique farms, as well as organic produce and custom-baked breads.

The restaurant’s menu will be developed by chefs Blais and Jon Sloan, and the restaurant’s executive chef is Bradley Austin. Dan Pena will serve as the Crack Shack general manager.

Read the full story on utsandiego.com

Source: DiscoverSD

Restaurants

Pam Kragen

Pam Kragen is the arts and entertainment editor, as well as the chief theater, dining and opera critic, for the San Diego Union-Tribune. She joined the Union-Tribune staff in October 2012 after 27 years at the North County Times, where she served as the Arts & Features Editor, as well as the paper’s longtime arts writer and theater and opera critic. She is the co-founder of the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle. She holds a bachelor of arts degree in journalism from San Diego State University and completed fellowships in theater criticism at the University of Southern California and opera-classical music criticism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. And in 2022, she was chosen as one of the fellows in the prestigious National Critics Institute, run by the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterf, Conn.