Sam 'The Cooking Guy' heads to Seaport Village

Sam ‘The Cooking Guy’ heads to Seaport Village

Grain & Grit Collective’s Eats By Sam, along with Spill the Beans and Mr. Moto Pizza, will soon open in the San Diego shopping complex

Oct. 11, 2020 6 AM PT

The newly remodeled Seaport Village shopping complex in San Diego’s Marina district has announced three new restaurant tenants that will open this fall.

This month, Grain & Grit Collective will open Eats By Sam, a temporary ghost kitchen concept offering takeout/delivery meals developed by San Diego’s TV chef Sam “The Cooking Guy” Zien.

The two concepts are called Samburgers and Samwiches. The items will be prepared in the kitchen of the former Buster’s Beach House at Seaport Village, which in the spring will become home to a full-service Zien restaurant concept that has not been named.

The idea is to focus for now on delivery food until the pandemic wanes and restaurant dining rooms can fully reopen. Zien and Grain & Grit’s past collaborations include Not Not Tacos and Graze by Sam.

Also set to open in October in the Village’s lighthouse building is a Spill the Beans coffeehouse. Like the original Spill the Beans in the Gaslamp Quarter, the location will serve a wide range of coffee drinks along with scratch-made bagels and housemade cream cheese spreads.

In November or December, a location of the fast-expanding Pacific Beach-born Mr. Moto Pizza chain will open in the Village, serving pizza by the slice and bottled beers.

Visit seaportvillage.com.

Restaurants Eat | Drink

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 New London, Conn.