{"id":427233,"date":"2025-12-05T20:28:34","date_gmt":"2025-12-05T20:28:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/427233\/"},"modified":"2025-12-05T20:28:34","modified_gmt":"2025-12-05T20:28:34","slug":"review-vulture-university-heights-new-vegan-restaurant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/427233\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Vulture, University Heights\u2019 New Vegan Restaurant"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Perfect Order:<\/strong> Vulture Martini | Potato Pav\u00e9 | Crab Cake<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kory Stetina<\/a> is a long way from learning what vegan food<\/a> was through a pamphlet at punk-rock shows in his teens. He stands in his dream restaurant, Vulture<\/a>, wearing a non-sportsy sports coat. He\u2019s married with a child. There\u2019s a very non-punk potato pav\u00e9 on the monogrammed plate, the servers are in tux-adjacent attire, and this whole building in University Heights has been turned into a plant-based funhouse with formidable, obsessive style.<\/p>\n

\"InteriorPhoto Credit: James Tran
Visitors stroll through the white-and-bright diner Dreamboat before stepping into Vulture\u2019s moody bar.<\/p>\n

Despite the earmarks of midcentury continental formalism, five out of 10 people in here wear arcane t-shirts. Word got out early on that Vulture was a fine-dining experience<\/a>, and while there\u2019s a tableside Caesar and velvet curtains and soft, artful furniture, that was never the intent. Stetina had to do some PR legwork to pop the \u201cspecial occasion\u201d balloon that floated over the project\u2014another collaboration between himself and Arsalun Tafazoli<\/a> of CH Projects<\/a>\u2014and it seems to be working.<\/p>\n

One of the t-shirt people I recognize: Justin Pearson of The Locust and Three One G Records. A thoughtful and progressive punk force in SD<\/a>, he\u2019s seated at a corner table with individuals who look like they\u2019ve at least dabbled in if not dedicated their lives to graphic design and can casually play a theremin near a rare fern. Vulture captures that same dinner-party-for-creative-people mood that the Middletown bar Starlite<\/a> first brought to the city.<\/p>\n

\"InteriorPhoto Credit: James Tran
Every upholstery in Vulture is tufted, every bust underlit for drama, every detail obsessively detailed.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a place for grown-up punks, for ideas and ideals.<\/p>\n

(Obtrusive but important note about punk rock and plant eaters: The rather genuine punk music of the 1970s and \u201980s that eventually birthed Green Day and Nirvana and even, I guess, My Chemical Romance emerged from a philosophical and creative instinct to challenge status quos, which often meant expressing unpopular and political opinions in an excessively loud and urgent manner\u2014pretty much exactly what Simon & Garfunkel were doing but far more invigorating and annoying. There were plenty of bands who got big because they had great hair and a good producer; there were other bands who got cult-famous based on the holy-wow way they expressed uncomfortable ideas, making people question the way they lived. Eating only plants was a part of this live-different worldview, and, like any good movement, it got co-opted by the tad too righteous, moral, and shame-mongery. It should be said that Stetina made his name in San Diego by being a philosophical vegan who\u2019s un-mongery.)<\/p>\n

\"FoodPhoto Credit: James Tran
The Vulture martini, the result of a year of tinkering\u2014a near-frozen booze concerto of three different gins and four vermouths.<\/p>\n

To get to Vulture, you enter through Dreamboat<\/a>, a well-lit, bright, Mr. Clean-ish, \u201960s-era, plant-based, romantically American diner that\u2019s all white and chrome and charm\u2014poodle-skirt notions and connoisseur coffee and smoked potato latkes and Impossible burgers and baked goods and milkshakes and cocktails. Seating occupancy: one-and-a-half people on Ozempic<\/a> (fine, it\u2019s 10).<\/p>\n

In the back corner of this tiny diner is an antique host stand. The host takes you through a velvet curtain, down the short hall, and through a door, until you enter into, what?<\/p>\n

\"InteriorPhoto Credit: James Tran
Bedecked in red velvet, Vulture was five years in the making.<\/p>\n

Some will call it a speakeasy<\/a>, but it\u2019s really just a fun surprise restaurant (\u201cspeakeasies\u201d do still exist, but they\u2019re not on OpenTable, and almost everyone with a project they call a \u201cspeakeasy\u201d will, on their most honest days, admit it\u2019s not a speakeasy).<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll step into cavernous, amber-glow, lava-lamp darkness. So, the first experience Vulture offers all of us is temporary blindness, followed by the opportunity to behold the shockingly slow ability of human eyes to adjust to radical shifts in light. The music is on point, a mix of obscure indie tracks and guilty-pleasure soft-rock bangers. Thanks to listening bars<\/a>, restaurants have become the stereo-system showrooms of America. Remember that guy in high school who one day showed up with box speakers in his trunk and a $6,000 head unit, an amp, subwoofers, and EQs, and his car sounded like Dr. Dre\u2019s and Rick Rubin\u2019s place of business? That guy is restaurants.<\/p>\n

\"FoodPhoto Credit: Arlene Ibarra
The \u201ccrab\u201d cake, made with hearts of palm.<\/p>\n

No windows in here. It\u2019s essentially a long room with lights exactly the temp and hue of orange burning coals\u2014the color of hypnotism and Matthew McConaughey\u2019s opium den. Under giant, tall ceilings, the walls are lined with plus-sized, underlit, white-plaster busts. It\u2019s regal and cheeky, a cross between Greek philosopher fetishism and Clash of the Titans lunchbox culture. Plush carpet underfoot. A series of half-shell, velveteen booths and marble tables with brass edges. It\u2019s lovely, and it feels both half-asleep and energized, like that 3 a.m. in-between state of existence when your dreams are viscerally wacky and feel so real you start to fear your own mind. The upper half is wallpaper-core\u2014a print of various nontraditional flowers in a sea of black (like if Georgia O\u2019Keeffe had weirder taste in blooms and was a bit goth).<\/p>\n

\"FoodPhoto Credit: James Tran
The pav\u00e9, made with potatoes smoked overnight in the embers of Vulture\u2019s wood-fired oven.<\/p>\n

Vulture took Stetina and CH five brutal years to bring to fruition. After two incredibly successful food and drink concepts in South Park<\/a>\u2014Kindred (true punk-rock vegan) and Mothership<\/a>, an alien space bar that made Esquire\u2019s \u201cBest Bars in America<\/a>\u201d\u2014he and CH took a stab at building their big plant-based idea and retrofitted the whole building. They signed the papers and started paying bank notes, and then the pandemic hit, and supply chains just sat off to the side smokin\u2019 a cig. It got pretty hairy.<\/p>\n

All of this explains why Stetina looks simultaneously tired, relieved, and ambitious standing in the middle of the room.<\/p>\n

\"Cocktails<\/p>\n

\"Cocktails<\/p>\n

\"Cocktails<\/p>\n

\"Cocktails<\/p>\n

\"Cocktails<\/p>\n

\"Cocktails<\/p>\n

Photo Credit: James Tran
Cocktail art from the team who made Esquire\u2019s \u201cBest Bars in America\u201d list.<\/p>\n

Every meal starts with a tiny glass of bubbles\u2014such as the cava, spiked with simple syrup and bitters, the dirty Spanish wine you didn\u2019t know you needed. Parker House rolls should hit the table first, with cultured \u201cbutter\u201d and fennel pollen. It\u2019s a very good but denser Parker (there many potential reasons why, but it\u2019s most likely because, while vegan replacements have come a long way, the fluffy-bread power of eggs is hard to beat). There are fantastic crab cakes made of hearts of palm, possibly the best thing on the menu<\/a> (\u201cI like these better than real crab cakes,\u201d Claire says). Rivaling the cake is the potato pav\u00e9: Whole potatoes are smoked overnight on the dwindling embers of the wood-fired grill, sliced dental dam\u2013thin and stacked, pressed with a giant weight until they form a brick, and deep-fried golden brown. It\u2019s all served with a Calabrian chile aioli that\u2019s made with Veganaise and hot stuff.<\/p>\n

Vulture (along with Dreamboat) is one of the few vegan restaurants to have a wood-fired oven, which adds a whole new flavor realm (burning wood has about 400 flavanols that you don\u2019t get with a gas stove). That may explain why the French onion soup has such a deep umami to the broth.<\/p>\n

\"CaesarPhoto Credit: James Tran
Grandpa Joe\u2019s Caesar salad. Pulverized capers mimic that anchovy saltiness.<\/p>\n

We gotta talk about the Caesar, done tableside. \u201cIt was a weird family tradition,\u201d Stetina says. \u201cGrandpa always made Caesar salad for the family on Sundays. And so, when I was growing up, my dad did the same thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

When a young Stetina started tinkering in his new plant-based life, he had to try to figure out how to carry on the family tradition without using eggs, parm, or anchovies. The solution was an amalgam of nutritional yeast and capers. The family didn\u2019t excommunicate him.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think Grandpa Joe got a little accidentally offended, you know, like, \u2018How do you know that lettuce does not have feelings?\u2019\u201d he remembers. \u201cI had no idea how to actually answer that question at that time. I was just, like, a 14-year-old punk-rock kid.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"PastaPhoto Credit: James Tran<\/p>\n

For Grandpa Joe\u2019s Caesar at Vulture, chef Pancho Castell\u00f3n (who formerly cooked at San Francisco\u2019s Michelin-starred steakhouse Niku<\/a>) mashes up capers for salinity, then makes a garbanzo-flour, fermented hard \u201ccheese\u201d that servers can actually grate atop.<\/p>\n

\"BartenderPhoto Credit: James Tran
The servers are bow-tie chic, while diners wear everything from t-shirts to Tom Ford.<\/p>\n

Kindred<\/a> and Mothership have always been known for world-beating cocktails<\/a>. At Vulture, that rabbit-holing is shown off in the martini. \u201cIt has to be the most fussed-over martini in the city,\u201d Stetina laughs. \u201cWe spent a year on it.\u201d It\u2019s three different gins (Suncliffe, Tanqueray No. 10, and Widges) and four vermouths (French, Spanish, and two Italians). The bar team makes it ahead and stores it in the freezer so that it\u2019s arctic in the glass. For the dirty martini, bar director Lucas Ryden tops the base blend in an olive oil float spiked with everything-bagel seasoning, which should be a standard in all self-respecting martini houses.<\/p>\n

\"BeyondPhoto Credit: Arlene Ibarra
The \u201csteak sampler\u201d\u2014 one a woodsmoked and seared lion\u2019s mane mushroom, the other a just- released Beyond Steak.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a steak sampler\u2014two massive filets. One is a lion\u2019s mane mushroom (the ribeye of the forest, though I\u2019ve never really cared for it) and the other a Beyond Steak filet. The latter is wild, and Vulture is among the first in California to serve the plant-based meat giant\u2019s latest creation<\/a>. The flavor is fairly great (there are billions of dollars and some of the country\u2019s best chefs working on this project, so that\u2019s not a surprise); the texture is far more steak-adjacent than any plant effort I\u2019ve ever seen, but chunkier. Eat it with the chimichurri.<\/p>\n

PARTNER CONTENT<\/p>\n


\n \"Joven
\n Joven Golden Hour Tour With Bebemos & Happy Half Hour
\n <\/a><\/p>\n


\n \"James
\n James Beard Finalist Tara Monsod Debuts \u201cDate Night…
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

\"BakedPhoto Credit: James Tran
The star dessert: a torched-at-the-table baked Alaska made with aquafaba (chickpea liquid that acts like egg whites for meringue).<\/p>\n

For dessert, it\u2019s all about the baked Alaska. It arrives looking like an elaborate floral corsage, with white tufts of \u201cmeringue\u201d made of aquafaba, the white starchy liquid left over after cooking chickpeas (like magic, it perfectly mimics egg whites and makes a hell of a meringue). It\u2019s torched tableside, and beneath the charred, fluffy sweetness is sponge cake and pistachio ice cream (pistachio is the flavor that translates near-perfect to vegan, because even the dairy version is using nuts as a fat).<\/p>\n

The \u201cwhoa\u201d of the room and drinks of Vulture were never in doubt. Those are sweet-spot, best-skills realms for CH and Stetina. The food would always be the wild card, and after the second visit, I gotta say\u2014it\u2019s pretty damn good, even for a guy with a glaring omnivore bias.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Perfect Order: Vulture Martini | Potato Pav\u00e9 | Crab Cake Kory Stetina is a long way from…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":427234,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5134],"tags":[1444,5229,1582,276,3095,8364,75526,3549,7264,27590,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-427233","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-1444","9":"tag-america","10":"tag-ca","11":"tag-california","12":"tag-features","13":"tag-food-drink","14":"tag-restaurant-review","15":"tag-san-diego","16":"tag-sandiego","17":"tag-south-park","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-united-states-of-america","20":"tag-unitedstates","21":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","22":"tag-us","23":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115668857733166309","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=427233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/427234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}