He’s responsible for one-third of Mexico’s Michelin stars for sustainability and has a regular ole Michelin star, too. He’s a failed baseball umpire. His truck smells like Persian cucumbers and quail. He makes his own wine, his own olive oil, and shucks oysters like a robot. And now, Drew Deckman is finally opening his first restaurant in San Diego, with his son Sam cooking on the line with him and Padres pitcher Joe Musgrove, a partner.
Overhyping restaurants is as gross as it is predictable, puts too much pressure on what is ostensibly a dinner party with a permanent address. But, f*ck it. His arrival here, in this tiny New Yorkian fissure of a restaurant space, is the beginning of a new era for North Park.
31ThirtyOne opens Wednesday, August 14.
Deckman’s existence alone is imposing. He’s 6’6” or 6’13”. Sitting in his office, two days before opening night, he has to duck to not concuss himself on a low part of the ceiling.
“It’s an air duct, so we can’t move it,” he laughs.
On the white board behind him, the words “PRECISION” and “EXECUTION.” Below that, in wobblier script, “I love my dad,” written four or five times. His nine-year-old has been here for this whole process, watching her dad gut a failed restaurant, endure protracted delays, beg mercy from governing bodies that must sign-off before he can serve a single grain.
“I’ve had a shaman come in here twice to cleanse the place,” he says. “She’s coming again Friday.”
His hair, whitish-gray like the coals he cleaned out of his grill under that Baja tree for the last decade at Deckman’s en El Mogor, makes him look snow-topped. He is alpine. He has a constant, slight hunch, either the result of many years leaned over a cutting board in famous places run by famous food names (Paul Bocuse, Jacques Maximin, his mentor Madeleine Kamman) or because he’s trying to un-impose himself. Lower his altitude to relate.
Last night was his final “friends and family” dinner—dress rehearsals for his staff. Invite-only, free meals served to investors and friends and loved ones. Grateful guinea pigs who are told to expect everything to go wrong and be kind. Friends and families are an exorcism of last fatal mistakes by staff, before the doors fling open to the savage gen-pop of foodieland.
The food was incredible and imperfect. A 14-day, dry-aged ribeye with potato mousseline is steak and potatoes of your dreams, the crust of the steak so good it turns you feral. The Mindful mushrooms (from growers in El Cajon) with kale and smoked bacon are under-seasoned. At one point, the whole ordering system goes dark. The kitchen staff flies blind. A door handle to the restroom keeps falling off. I pass by the kitchen (everyone passes it, it’s wide open in the tiny middle of the place, a laying bare of the process) and he looks mad, ravenous for a little bit of control, a very seasoned and capable captain on a boat with an engine fire.
The next day, I walk in to see how he’s doing. His staff is gathered around him.
“Last night was terrible,” he says to them. “I was terrible. I never want us to get there again. But this is why we do this. If we did a test run and everyone said everything was great, that does us no good.” He makes six or seven metaphors. At one point he holds up a strainer and equates its perfect circle to the gaggle of humans that make up a restaurant organism.
He’s not chiding. He got his college degree in philosophy. He’s doing that.
It’s such a wild thing to see Deckman here, in a formal kitchen. For years, he’s stood under pine trees in the dry, open wild of Baja, goggles on, smoke billowing around him, giant tongs in hand. I ask him how it feels to be caged again.
“I love it,” he says. “I can handle it now. This was my life for so many years, that decade in Europe. It became my whole life back then, and not in a healthy way. It was 24 hours a day, no ability to have any relationship. I remember distinctly when Bernard Loiseau shot himself because he was afraid he was going to lose a Michelin star. That changed me. I stopped and said, ‘What the fuck are we doing?’”
And so he went free-range. He got work on fishing boats in Hawaii, then Mexico. When he saw how much biomass was being thrown back into the oceans, he got a bigger perspective on food. Deckman’s, and now 31ThirtyOne, is the reflection of that. All produce and greens are from San Diego farms. Oysters from Baja. Food of its place.
“At some point, you get so close to it all you can see is a single dot on the page,” he says of the unhealthy side of the chef obsession, The Bear–type kitchen life. “Then you back away and you see all these other dots that make up the bigger picture. When you’re only seeing that dot it’s all ego. In the beginning it was all about me. I thought I was the best thing since beer in a can. But you can only be a dick so long until people won’t answer your phone calls. As I moved away from the kitchen and found other things. I had to stand back from the fire. And then you realize it’s not about you. There are all these people holding up the ship. So stop trying to be the ship and be the water.”
That’s why there are no titles in his kitchen at 31ThirtyOne. No hierarchy. “We’re all just cooks, we’re all just bartenders and servers.”
At one point in opening 31ThirtyOne, he was so deep in blueprints and permitting applications and sheetrock contractors, he couldn’t see the vision of what the food would be. “My PR team kept saying, ‘What do you mean you don’t have a menu? Do you realize you open in a month?’”
So after construction crews had gone home, he sat alone in the kitchen in the dark and tried to see it. “I sat there for 45 minutes to an hour every night,” he says. “And it finally started to come.”
Wednesday, we’ll see what came.
