Sam the Cooking Guy at the San Diego Wine and Food Festival
Best Bites at the San Diego Wine and Food Festival 2022
Sam the Cooking Guy takes 1st place in the highly competitive battle for the best bite at the 2022 San Diego Wine and Food Festival with a deceptively simple yet ultimately delicious BRAISED OXTAIL ITALIAN BEEF SANDWICH.
In case you don’t know Sam the Cooking Guy, long time San Diegans might remember his start back on public access TV. He was picked up and dropped by Discovery Health Channel, then went on the Today show where he told Hota and Kathie Lee to be quiet, pretty gutsy for this little known chef (and appreciated by the audience). He now mainly cooks on his YouTube channel and recently opened two restaurants in San Diego’s Little Italy, Graze, a casual eatery and bottle shop, and Not Not Tacos, an eclectic take on creative tacos.
Sam calls his culinary approach the “every man approach to cooking”. He’s like your neighbor down the street who invites you to watch the game and then brings out food so good that people crowd around the BBQ instead of the TV. His accessible food is just f-ing delicious (he also drops a lot of F bombs on his channel, just warning you).
As for his winning dish, this Italian Beef Sandwich is a good example of his genius - I mean, it’s a freaking beef dip sandwich but it was so good it won the taste buds of hundreds of foodies who all agreed that this was the best thing to eat at the San Diego Wine and Food Festival. I liked it so much that I was hoping to find it on the menu at one of his restaurants. No such luck with that but I did find a recipe on his YouTube channel that looks surprisingly similar that I think I’ll try out this weekend.https://www.thecookingguy.com/cookbook/2022/10/6/italian-beef
The San Diego Wine and Food Festival
But wait, I’m getting so far ahead of myself. So Sam wins the festival, but what is the San Diego Wine and Food Festival? In a nutshell, it’s one of the best foodie events in the entire country. You know that grassy area behind Seaport Village on the San Diego Bay where people normally fly kites? Well for one Saturday every November it gets converted into booth after booth of wine, food, and cocktails with live music, live food, and that perfect San Diego Vibe.
In the days leading up the The Grand Tasting you’ll find restaurants hosting multi-course gourmet dinners, there’s typically a trip to Baja to discover their wine and food scene, and there’s plenty of wine, lots and lots of wine. And on Sunday, as if you have not had enough, there’s the Grand Fiesta which features a Taco Knock Out competition, more wine, more cocktails, more beer, and yes, live music.
If all of this sounds intriguing then mark your calendars for next year, perhaps sometime in October when they announce the dates and events, and GO!
OK, enough of this chit (chat), let’s get a close up of the winning bite from Sam the Cooking Guy at the 2022 San Diego Wine and Food Festival.
Yes, I took a bite before I remembered to take a photo, but hopefully you can imagine just how tender the oxtail beef was. Succulent, beefy, drippy, oh man it was good.
later that same weekend….
Sam the Cooking Guy making tacos at the San Diego Wine and Food Festival’s Grand Fiesta
The Grand Tasting Event was held on Saturday. The next day there was Sam again at The Grand Fiesta taco competition where his Korean taco killed it! You can get these at his Not Not Tacos restaurant and I suggest you do that. The flour tortilla has that homemade chew to it, the Korean flavors really worked here. Love it. More please. (Hey, does Sam look a bit like the Tin Man in the shot below?)
What Else was really, really good at the San Diego Wine and Food Festival?
I always go to the San Diego Wine and Food Festival with good intentions to take notes, chat with the chefs, you know, act like a real journalist (hey, I did go to journalism school after all). And I always fail as soon as the gates open and I see all this delicious wine and food laid out in front of me and I run like a third grader to be first in line (I used to get in big trouble for that sort of thing). Too hard to take notes, memory too poor to remember. So this year I decided that my top winners would go to the places I went back to two or more times. That says something - to get back into a long line instead of moving on shows that I really liked what I just ate.
So the winners are:
Second Plade: JRDN: Suzuki Nigiri with guajillo ponzu, drunken fingerlime, black aioli, and negi green onion.
MY TAKE: The perfect one bite, tangy and melt in your mouth texture, this one nearly took first place in my book. Go check out JRDN at Tower23, a Pacific Beach location known for their incredible seafood and sushi. Official Website for JRDN
Third Place: HIGH PIE: Flaky crispy hand pies with different fillings from the restaurant that’s housed in the Top Gun house!
MY TAKE: Trust me, these little hand pies are incredible. Can you blame me for going back again and again for these delightful hand pies, some filled with cherries, some with apples and ice cream(!), each one just out of the fryer and piping hot? Oh, and there’s blueberry and pumpkin at their shop. I like these so much they’re going to be on my Thanksgiving menu this year :-) Official Website for High Pie
Scenes from the San Diego Wine and Food Festival 2022
So those are my top picks, but there were more delicious bites everywhere, a festive crowd, you really need to go next year! Here’s their official website for event info but for now check out some of the highlights of my day.
