It’s not uncommon to hear restaurant managers refer to their staff this way, but, unlike most of them, Sim has a necklace that I noticed when we sat down: a thin chain with “Callie” written in gold, like some people wear with the names of their actual kids. You get the sense Sim really means it. 

Sim is the general manager of Callie. She opened the East Village Mediterranean-style gem with chef Travis Swikard in the middle of 2021, and now they’re joining forces again for their second location, a to-be-named French restaurant in La Jolla Commons. Much has been made of Swikard’s experience, and rightfully so—more than a decade alongside Daniel Boulud in New York tends to draw eyes—but in terms of pure tonnage of resume fireworks, Sim might have him beat.

She’s worked at some of the most well-respected places in New York and Los Angeles, including a marquee stint as a captain at Eleven Madison Park, what was—at the time, by every metric available—the best restaurant in the world.

You wouldn’t know it to talk to her. The SoCal native is approachable with an easy laugh. But to watch her at the restaurant is to witness a pro at work. You see it in the way she adjusts a napkin or pushes in a chair, the way she glides between tables or opens a bottle of wine. But you also sense it in the warmth with which she greets guests, touches tables, and coaches her staff. 

The front of house at Callie is, like the cuisine, a union of world-class refinement and California vibes. The synthesis of these apparent contradictions is a big part of why Callie is such a local treasure—and why it has earned it national and international recognition (as well as this magazine’s award for Best Restaurant two years in a row). It’s an impressive CV for a woman whose main professional goal throughout college was to get out of restaurants for good.

The daughter of Korean immigrants-turned-restaurateurs, Sim was born and raised in Orange County. As a kid, Sim was “free child labor,” she quips—she worked the counter, grilled chicken, waited tables, whatever her parents’ business needed that day. She stayed in restaurants through college, serving and bartending, and graduated from UC Irvine sans debt. The tradeoff: They were bad places with toxic cultures. She had different ideas of success.

After college in 2011, she took her meager savings and moved to New York, something she had wanted to do since she was a kid. Though she had planned to change industries, she needed a job, so a friend got her an interview at Daniel Boulud’s celebrated Mediterranean restaurant, Boulud Sud, as a host.

For all her experience, she was completely unprepared. “I didn’t know who Daniel Boulud was,” she says. “I didn’t know what fine dining even meant. I never heard the phrase.” What she did know, however, was how to work hard and learn. She absorbed everything she could, bouncing from the host stand to the events team to management. 

It was there that she first met a young Swikard and other high-caliber restaurant pros, and it opened her eyes to what this life could be. “They were so good at what they did that I was like, ‘Oh, this is actually a career. This is a profession. This is actually something very respectable,’” she recalls.

Her next job was at Eleven Madison Park. The restaurant already had three Michelin stars, and, during her tenure, it earned an exuberant review from the New York Times, a James Beard Award for outstanding service, and the title of Best Restaurant in the World from the World’s 50 Best. 

When Eleven Madison Park closed for renovations, Sim took the opportunity to come back to California. She arrived in LA at the end of 2017 to open the area’s NoMad Hotel, and did a stint as the GM of Maude in Beverly Hills. After the start of the pandemic, she got a random text from Swikard, her old Boulud Sud colleague, who was trying to open a restaurant in San Diego and had just lost his GM. Did she know anyone who might want the job?

Callie is theirs. It is her and Swikard’s united vision of hospitality and what a restaurant should be. She’s not courting the 50 Best awards—she’s too “old and jaded,” she says, and those things come at too high a human cost (she still can’t watch The Bear, for example). To her, success comes from working hard, taking care of her people, and connecting with the community. Nearly two and a half years after she and Swikard opened the restaurant’s doors, the reservation list at Callie is still full pretty much every night.

“I genuinely care about the business as well as every single one of my employees,” she says. “So I don’t care if anyone’s like, ‘Oh, you wear a necklace with the name of your job?’ I don’t think it’s weird, because for me, it’s like, ‘I also pushed this baby out.’”

And with her and Swikard’s second culinary progeny incoming, she may have to add another charm.

The post Callie’s General Manager Has the Mother of All Resumes appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Tiffany Daniels

Wes Klein Photography

For Hollywood star Tiffany Daniels, coming back to her hometown of San Diego means a place of peace, joy, and hell.

“I love waking up in the morning and just sitting on my mom’s backyard with a cup of matcha and just taking in the quiet cool San Diego morning air,” says Daniels. “One of the things I always make sure I do is go on long, beautiful walks in Tierrasanta and the surrounding areas. And then I’ll finish it off with a really powerful series of runs up and down the Tierrasanta Stairs.”

Also known as the “Stairway to Hell” or “Stairs of Death,” the super steep incline, made up of 112 steps and located on Clairemont Mesa and Antigua Boulevards, is notorious for its challenging climb. It even has its own Yelp page and YouTube video.

But Daniels doesn’t shy away from a challenge, and this drive is exactly the kind of quality that has made her so successful in the world of show business.

Growing up in Paradise Hills and Tierrasanta, she attended the prestigious audition-only public arts magnet school, the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts (SCPA).

“My closest friends to this day came from SCPA. The school was just filled with like-minded individuals like myself,” recalls Daniels. “We had a very deep connection on a creative and spiritual level because we were all very determined to develop our art together. A bunch of us auditioned for Starlight Bowl to see if we could land jobs. I performed in four musicals in Balboa Park and Spreckels Theater.”

“One of my best friends from SCPA, Carleton Overstreet, Jr., is working diligently to get the Starlight Bowl back up and running,” continues Daniels. “It really was a magical place and it launched the professional musical theater careers of a lot of SCPA students.”

After high school, Daniels set out for New York—not to tear up the theater stages but to attend Cornell University where she eventually received a bachelor of science in Hotel and Restaurant Administration. After graduation, she had enough snow and ice and moved back to California and to Los Angeles.

Currently, she stars in the Nickelodeon hit show, That Girl Lay Lay, executive produced by Will Packer and the late comedian David A. Arnold. The show made Netflix’s Top 10 lists in 2021 and 2022, and she’s currently filming season two.

Daniels also appeared in La La Land in the opening scene with extras breaking from their vehicles and dancing on top of cars stuck in a traffic jam. The crew rehearsed that scene for three weeks, rearranging their cars in the studio parking lot so that they could practice in and on top of them, even the skateboarder and biker.

“The opening number took two whole days to film. It was all done in only two shots. So if anyone stepped out of line, we had to start over,” said Daniels. They started at 3 a.m. and filmed all day on an overpass when temperatures shot up to 97 degrees.

Daniels’ other accolades include roles on CSI-Cyber, The Mindy Project, Big Bang Theory, NCIS and Criminal Minds and toured with Oprah Winfrey’s production of The Color Purple.

“My first acting teacher said to me, very early on in my training, that discipline is freedom. So if you stay the course, what is meant for you will find you,” she says. “I’ve just worked extremely hard to pull myself back up from all of the rejection, knowing that all the rejection is temporary and the winners are the disciplined.”

Now that she’s closer to home, when she’s back in San Diego, she spends time with her mother, nephew, and two nieces, often at Donna Jean’s in Hillcrest for a gourmet vegan meal and around town to explore the city.

For Daniels, San Diego has been a place of healing and recovery. “So much rejection happens in this industry all the time. For every ‘yes,’ there are like a hundred ‘no’s.’ You can’t let a no derail you from your path and your journey. I’ve gotten really good at bouncing back. And that’s a lot due to the joy and peace that San Diego brings me,” said Daniels.

The post From the Stairwell to Hell to La La Land and Netflix appeared first on San Diego Magazine.