Misadventure distillery opens new bar and outdoor dining operation

Misadventure Vodka is packaged in wine bottles.

Sept. 18, 2020 6 AM PT

Last spring, the Vista-based vodka distillery Misadventure & Co., was getting ready to open its new onsite bar when the pandemic struck. Then its wholesale business vaporized when bars and restaurants suddenly closed.

So owners Samuel Chereskin, an agricultural economist, and bartender Whit Rigali quickly retrofitted the 5-year-old distillery to make bottled spray-on hand sanitizer, which has been a success.

Misadventure plans to keep making hand sanitizer for the foreseeable future, but this month it got back into the vodka business. On Sept. 3, it opened its new bar and outdoor dining operation, serving vodka cocktails and a rotating menu of food items provided by different purveyors.

The food and beverage operation is open from 5 to 10 p.m. Thursdays-Sundays. Some indoor seating is available up to 25 percent of capacity. Misadventure is at 2420 Grand Ave. in Vista.

Misadventure makes sustainable vodka from surplus baked goods. It takes about 2,000 pounds of baked items to produce 600 bottles of vodka. Visit misadventure.co.

Pam 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.