You'll have to wait longer for star chef Rob Ruiz's Liberty Public Market debut

A photo of Rob Ruiz, owner of The Land & Water Company restaurant

San Diego Union-Tribune

Aug. 28, 2019 12 PM PT

Liberty Public Market, the ever-dynamic food hall at Liberty Station, has a revamped roster of vendors — and a hold-up of a high-profile project from Carlsbad sushi chef Rob Ruiz.

Ruiz, the sustainable seafood star and executive chef/owner of Carlsbad’s The Land & Water Company, is in a holding pattern for his hand-roll project Hold Fast. A market spokeswoman attributed the delay in the much-anticipated booth’s debut to construction issues. A peek behind plastic sheets recently revealed a near-empty space. It replaces Fishbone Kitchen, which sold fresh seafood and had a raw bar counter. Ruiz, The San Diego Union-Tribune’s 2016 Chef of the Year, is the most celebrated San Diego County chef to be associated with Liberty Public Market. No opening date for Hold Fast has been announced. “In the interim, the space will host an artisan day cart and provide additional seating for market visitors,” a spokeswoman said. (More seating will also be made available elsewhere in the market, she added, as will private event space.)

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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.