Taste of Little Italy: Your passport to San Diego’s center of deliciousness

San Diego Union-Tribune

June 7, 2018 5 AM PT

If you’ve ever walked through Little Italy and said, “Wow, another new place to try,” or, “I’ve been meaning to eat there, and there — and there!” then grab your passport to take a tour through San Diego’s undisputed center of deliciousness. Wednesday’s 10th annual Taste of Little Italy offers dozens of samples from some of the best restaurants, sweet shops and watering holes in town.

A stamp-able passport allows you to eat and drink along two designated routes — north or south — with each featuring marquee fine-dining restaurants (Born & Raised, Juniper & Ivy, Herb & Wood), hipster hangouts (Craft & Commerce, The Crack Shack), Italian standouts (Barbusa, Civico 1845, Mona Lisa Italian Foods), pie shops (Filippi’s Pizza Grotto, Isola Pizza Bar, Napizza), dessert emporiums (Devil’s Dozen Donut Shop, Frost Me Café and Bakery) and beverage spots (Ballast Point, Bird Rock Coffee Roasters, Caffe Italia, Pali Wine Co.).

You can start planning your route by finding out what each place is serving here. For my $40, I’d travel north just to have The Crack Shack’s tender buttermilk biscuits with miso maple butter, Puerto La Boca’s skirt steak and Argentine malbec, Ironside Fish & Oyster’s briny bivalves, and whatever heavenly morsel Devil’s Dozen decides to tempt people with.

Buon viaggio e buon appetito.

5 to 9 p.m. Wednesday. Various locations along two routes, Little Italy. $40 per tasting route. (619) 615-1092. littleitalysd.com/events/taste-of-little-italy

michele.parente@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @sdeditgirl

Eat | Drink

Michele Parente

Michele Parente is the Dining, Wine + Lifestyle reporter for The San Diego Union-Tribune. Her areas of expertise include the Valle de Guadalupe wine region, fashion, television, women’s issues and coverage of aging, such as the impact of Alzheimer’s and dementia and family caregiving. Michele is the former Sunday and features editor, where she oversaw profiles, special projects, such as the Legacy of WWII and in-depth reports on a variety of topics. She joined the U-T in 2003, supervising coverage areas that have included features, fashion, TV, Food, Consumer Health and Arts & Entertainment. Previously, Michele was the assistant features editor at The Oregonian, in Portland, as well as the Portland City Hall reporter. She spent 10 years at New York Newsday as a reporter on the crime, education, state legislature and New York City Hall beats. She was part of a team that won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Reporting. A native New Yorker, Michele received her B.A. in political science and Italian Literature at UC Berkeley. In 1980, she studied at L’Università di Urbino, in Italy. One of her life’s goals is to make her way through each of the world’s great wine regions.

Taste of Little Italy: Your passport to San Diego’s center of deliciousness

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