J & Tony's cocktail bar in East Village among Esquire's top bars in America

A cocktail at CH Project's J & Tony's cocktail bar

San Diego Union-Tribune

June 16, 2021 3:26 PM PT

J & Tony’s, a quirky, dinosaur-filled cocktail bar in East Village offering all-day food service, has been named to Esquire Magazine’s list of “The Best Bars in America for 2021.”

The new survey by Esquire writer Kevin Sintumuang includes 27 bars in L.A., Chicago, Brooklyn, Baltimore, Denver, Nashville and more. J & Tony’s — full name: J & Tony’s Discount Cured Meats and Negroni Warehouse — is owned by the San Diego restaurant/bar collective CH Projects.

Sintumuang praised the bar’s “madcap, idiosyncratic space,” which includes giant dinosaur and dragon models and a huge gold disco ball. He also liked the bar’s house negroni cocktail, espresso martinis, cured meats and breakfast sandwiches. “Cocktail-centric zaniness was never this low-key cool and delicious,” he wrote.

J& Tony’s is at 631 Ninth Ave. in San Diego. Visit prosciuttoboys.com.

Kragen writes about restaurants for the San Diego Union-Tribune. Email her at pam.kragen@sduniontribune.com.

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.