First of all, if you've eaten at Sea Rocket Bistro, it was a pleasure to have you stop by for dinner. Most of you may have been told that small business owners appreciate it when you are their customer, but I just wanted to say that it's not a theoretical thing. It's absolutely true. I think some businesses may loose sight of this occasionally, but trust me it's always there. If you're a small business owner, you know what I mean.

Events-A-Plenty Coming Up

On Wednesday the 25th of March, we're holding a San Diego Green Economy Mixer. I went to one of these mixer at Pizza Fusion in Hillcrest awhile back and it was a lot of fun. Special guests will be Recon Recycling and Phil Nobel (Sage Mountain Farm).

On March 26th, come meet Ted Gourvitz and winemaker Duncan Williams of Fallbrook Winery at our $45 5-course wine tasting dinner. rsvp asap. capish?

On March 28th from 10-11:30am you can meet your city council folks, and more specifically Todd Gloria, for a special meeting at the restaurant.

On Wednesday, April 1st (no joke!) we'll be hosting the monthly North Park Community Association Mixer again, as we did last August.

Chris is also in the throws of organizing what will surely be an amazing Belgian Beer Dinner- another one of our prix fixe, 5-course tasting events which take place at the communal table and feature his favorite local craft Belgian style ales. Be sure to check our website again soon for details (or even better, sign up for our more frequently-posted blogs!)

Later in April we'll be doing a Tuna and Beer pairing dinner with American Tuna and Ballast Point Brewing. With all of their fish-themed beer names it's amazing that we haven't coordinated something like this already. We're really excited about this event for various reasons which you'll also find on our blog in the coming weeks.

Some Things That Have Recently Happened

We started off with the Seafood Summit, a gathering of about 500 people that took place in San Diego to discuss sustainable seafood. A lot of it was about aquaculture. The discussion missed the wider point that agricultural products used as food have their own sustainability issues. Fish gardening at City Farmers Market, however, looks like a lot of fun!

Dennis just visited Megan's farm. She's one of a very small number of people in Southern California raising grass-fed lamb, goats, beef, and pastured chickens. Look for more things from Megan's farm on our menu over the coming months.

Paul Mashaka, the man behind the City College garden and heavily involved in Food Not Lawns and the San Diego Mycological Society, invited us to cater the recent fungus fair... shitaki and oyster mushroom soup with beech mushroom cornbread. No poisonous mushrooms!

On Thursday the 19th of March, we hosted a fundraiser for the New Roots community garden. We raised almost $2,000 for the garden project!

We're really excited about a new website (thanks Jay!) called 30th Street Dot Org. The website compiles from the restaurants on 30th and has links to their website. Just looking at the list of restaurants on the right sidebar of the site gives you some idea of how many places there are on this 3 mile stretch of road that have a passion for quality food.

We're selling local ingredients to-go and we do catering.

Menu Notes

If you came in a few months ago, you might remember a Seafood Paella that we were serving. It made sense, seeing as we are a seafood place, but as a local food place, we were trying hard to use a California-grown rice, and the brown rice was REALLY hard to work with in that dish. Since the local lobster season is now over until next fall, we've started using the chewy, short grain California arborio style rice for this same dish, and it's working much better! So next time you're in the mood for savory saffron-infused seafood, check this dish dish. It's a tasty twist away from the classic Spanish paella.

We've also got our Grilled Pork Chop with whole grain mustard sauce back on the menu after a short hiatus- this time the meat is from Megan, and the chops are thick and juicy at about 8-10 ounces each.

On the wine side, we've picked up a couple more items from the impressively long and varied repertoire of Thornton Winery, including a nice dry Nebbiolo, as well as one of their sparkling wines called Cuvee de Frontignan. If you haven't noticed, in order to expand the wine list a bit, we're starting to offer a few wines by the bottle only. For a small place, having 16-20 wines available by the glass is a lot, but we like giving people a good number of options. This way we'll be able to introduce a larger variety of great California wines while keeping the prices on our by-the-glass wines lower than many other restaurants.

One last addition for spring... I discontinued the delicious tropical Passionfruit Wine from San Pasqual Winery last fall, considering it a warm-weather wine, and had so many requests for it afterwards that I am pleased to announce it is back on the menu now! The passionfruits are purchased from Fallbrook, and Palomar Mountain Springs water is used in the making of this unique, naturally fermented fruit wine. You might be surprised that it's not quite as sweet as it sounds, and it's a great pairing for lots of our food. While the winery has recently changed hands, the same winemaker remains from before.

On the beer side of things, we've had some great Stone beers on our new cask system recently. Right now we've got Green Flash's Le Freak on cask. Look for our new cask picks on a more or less weekly basis from here on out. Also, Chris is not giving away our beer, but he is selling it at just a penny above cost each Monday to anyone who works in a restaurant (since you probably have that night off and need a drink to recover from the weekend).