New immersive art gallery and restaurant-bar opens in Oceanside

Ratatouille Bouquet vegan dish at KNVS restaurant, bar and gallery in Oceanside.

KNVS (pronounced “canvas”) is both an immersive art gallery and a restaurant-bar.

San Diego Union-Tribune

July 28, 2022 11:48 AM PT

Kevin Shin, the entrepreneur behind three food-and-drink outlets at the Fin Hotel in Oceanside, will open his fourth concept there on Saturday. KNVS (pronounced “canvas”) is both an immersive art gallery and a restaurant-bar.

KNVS will feature quarterly art exhibitions with a rotating seasonal menu inspired by the art on the walls. The debut exhibition is “The Floral Guild,” a show of whimsical, colorful and feminine paintings by Oceanside artist Margaret Alexis Chiaro. It runs through October.

The coordinating menu, co-created by chefs Michael Mitchem and Matthew Monko, includes a vegan ratatouille “bouquet” and a berry-cured salmon. KNVS beverage director Wyatt DeMars is also creating cocktails themed to Chiaro’s art, including the Love Bush, made with Jamaican rum, bell pepper and Chartreuse liqueur, and the Iris, made with rye, cognac and charcoal.

Shin, a Marine veteran and Culver City fire captain, also runs the Switchboard Restaurant, North Coast Roastery coffeehouse and Haetae, a Korean street food lounge at the Fin Hotel. KNVS hours are 4 p.m. to midnight Fridays-Tuesdays at 1333 S. Coast Highway, Oceanside. Visit knvs.bar.

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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.