First Look: Lucien in La Jolla

Opening a restaurant can feel a lot like having a baby. 

In some circumstances, it’s planned ahead of time. It’s usually pretty darn expensive. You pore over every detail with painstaking attention, carefully sketching out all contingencies and possibilities in a total Type-A haze. 

Sometimes, you wait. And wait. And wait. Until one day, years of wanting and hoping and working and crying and sweating and planning and throwing up finally result in what you’ve always dreamt of—bringing something new into the world. Something that, until you made it, didn’t exist. 

Lucien is one such restaurant and one such child. The restaurant, named for co-owner and chef Elijah Arizmendi’s son, shares a July birthday with its namesake two years apart. Dinner reservations open on July 18. 

Arizmendi has spent the past two years nurturing both his firstborn son and first restaurant as an owner, an endeavor he calls poetic, but nerve-wracking. 

“In the beginning, it’s like, ‘Oh my God… I’m so excited, I’m so scared, I’m ready to meet my son,” he explains. “[That] was the inspiration during the time of conceptualizing the restaurant, doing these two things—talking [and] thinking about my first child coming into this world, and then also, my other first child coming into this world.”

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Arizmendi’s two partners at the restaurant, Brian Hung and Melissa Lang, met while working at Thomas Keller’s three Michelin-starred Per Se restaurant in New York City. Hung and Arizmendi eventually moved to one Michelin-starred l’Abeille (Arizmendi as chef de cuisine, his biggest role yet), all the while talking about what would become Lucien on the completely different coast. 

The rest of the team have worked in Michelin kitchens as well—pastry chef Isabella Alicea was pastry sous chef at Per Se and beverage director James Meringer was head sommelier at l’Abeille. (If it takes a village, this is the crew you want by your side.)

Lucien’s service hours are Tuesday through Saturday for dinner only, with seatings from 5 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Guests can add a $195 beverage pairing to the $260 tasting menu and range from around 10 to 14 dishes per night. Lang says the full experience will last from two to three hours, depending on the menu and patron.

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“There is a little bit of contrast between the two spaces,” explains Arizmendi. Working with the interior design group Tecture and architecture firm Encinitas Design Group, the team built an outdoor space intended to feel “very light, very ethereal,” thanks to San Diego’s almost always predictably beautiful weather—something even the highest-end restaurants on the East Coast can’t always accommodate. It’s where every diner will start, with an opening bite and sip.

Once inside, the mood shifts. “The main dining room has kind of been designed as an opposite of that,” explains Hung. From the breezy, neutral California coastal courtyard, guests will have to walk through a speakeasy-esque tunnel, physically inviting them into a moodier, more contrasting dining room with wood, stone, and metal. That sense of tension reflects throughout the menu as well. 

“The restaurant is very much a study in contrast,” says Hung. “From the space that we’ve designed and type of cooking that we’re trying to do—the precision from Elijah’s experience, but also the unpredictability of fire cooking… those are definitely things that were on our mind when we were designing the space.”

In the kitchen, Arizmendi says he’ll mix his ultra-precision techniques honed over his career while also embracing the capricious nature of open-fire cooking. A handmade Molteni stove custom-made in France, which he calls “the Ferrari of the restaurant—the heart and soul,” will anchor the exacting side of the kitchen. The other side’s hearth is where science meets art. It’s a risky move, he admits, but by pairing the precise with the primitive, he hopes to tweak the definition of California cuisine. 

“I hope that down the line people, when they talk about the restaurant, they say that we’re pushing the envelope for what California cuisine is,” he says. Yes, they’ll lean on local and seasonal produce. Yes, he’ll incorporate his French and Japanese influences and ingredients. Yes, the wine list will be stacked with vintage chateaus from France and funky new school makers from the Central Coast. 

But there will also be potato mille-feuille, cooked slowly in clarified butter and topped with black garlic and the day’s fish selection. There will be a riff on chawanmushi, a Japanese egg custard, made with soy cream rather than the traditional dashi and using summer corn finished with a big ol’ dollop of caviar. Meals will finish with a custom beverage service, evolving throughout the year based on what’s in season—think a lemon verbena and thai basil tea in summer, or a mushroom-chocolate consomme in winter. 

Just when you get used to something, it’ll change. And anyone who’s raised a baby can tell you that’s the way it always goes. 

Lucien opens at 7863 Girard Avenue, Suite 308 in La Jolla on July 18. Reservations are available here.

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